When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”
I had another birthday and will save you the bother of asking the question with the simple response "pretty darned old". Turtle is always hard pressed to come up with gift ideas for me, and this year was no exception. However, she knows how much trouble I have with my back and remembered how she had to pry me out of the demo chair when I tried out one of those Shiatsu massage pads at the mall a couple years ago. She also knows that I'm kind of picky about this sort of thing, so on my birthday she took me out for lunch and then to the store to pick out just the model of massager that I wanted. The store was having some sort of sale, and Turtle had a coupon, so we ended up getting this delightful contraption for about 40% off its usual price.My first attempts at contributing to The Dictionary of Image (pool) on Flickr.
The inner workings of my great-grandfather's Seth Thomas black mantel clock. It was given to him and my grandmother on the occasion of their wedding and again, to Turtle and me, on the occasion of ours.
Discovery News : Discovery Channel: "[R]ather than conspiracy theories, the new code points to a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice."The first I'd heard of this theory was this morning, while I was watching ABC's Good Morning America. Although they did play a bit of the composition in the clip, they apparently felt that the reporter's running line of chatter was more important than the music, which was relegated to background noise. However, there's a video on their site that will allow you to hear a bit, if you're interested. I can't link directly to the clip, as it's obfuscated by JavaScript; however, you can find it by going here and looking for the Nov. 9 video in the search results.
| Minus | Plus |
|---|---|
| My legs don't feel nearly as strong as they did earlier in the season. | I'd still rather ride than jog. |
| I had to come to a full stop twice for the same school bus (in accordance with my status as a vehicle), which had its flashers on and its stop sign out. | I grinned and rolled my eyes at the driver, and he cracked up. And the kids cheered me on as they disembarked. |
| Some of the cheering sounded like "Get a car, old man." | At least they weren't confused by my "mannaries" and got my gender right. |
| One woman pulling out of her driveway looked right at me and kept creeping forward, seemingly intent on making me stop for her. | Because she was looking right at me, I was able to convey, by adept employment of pantomime, that I was fit'n ta go all Texas Chainring Massacre on her driver-side door. She stopped. |
| The seam of the cheap-ass chamois in my new Bellwether shorts chafed the heck out of my right thigh. | Fortunately, it was worst when I was walking, and at least it wasn't The Boys that got rubbed the wrong way. And I now know what kind of shorts not to buy in the future. |
| At 17.9 miles and an average speed of 16.8 mph, it wasn't the memorable sort of ride to which I'd typically devote blog space. | This posting should reassure Slow Joe Recumbo, who was starting to wonder if I would ever post anything about cycling again. |
The man commented "I'm Jim Brossert and I took this flag down in honor of my country with a knife from the United States army. I'm a veteran, I am not going to see this done to my country. if they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us, but I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back."Link (Infowars.net)
body element, which contains a centered div with the id content.<body>My CSS code sets a static width of 500px for this block, gives it a white background, and centers it horizontally in
<div id="wrap">
<div id="content">
<div id="timestamp">Updated 09.25.2007!</div>
<div id="copyright">Copyright © 2007</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
body. The body has a 1008px x 3px background image that repeats on the y-axis and is centered horizontally. The content div's left and right edges align with the left and right edges of the background's gold "box".divs: timestamp and copyright. I want timestamp to appear in italics and line up to the right, so I apply font-style:italic and float:right to it. The complete CSS looks like this:body {
background: #000 url("bg-test.gif") repeat-y center top;
font:normal normal x-small "Trebuchet MS",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
margin:0; padding:0;
/* IE hacks follow */
text-align:center;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size/**/:small;
}
#wrap {
width:500px;
margin:1em auto;
background-color:#fff;
text-align:left;
}
#content {
margin:0;
}
#copyright {
background-color:skyblue;
}
#timestamp {
background-color:pink;
font-style:italic;
float:right;
}In most browsers (yes, even IE 6), this renders like the following screenshot:
content div remains centered, but body's background image position has shifted toward the right.
timestamp div. Unfortunately, none of the usual tricks for correcting IE's float bugs had any effect.timestamp text, in an attempt to reduce the code to the bare minimum required to reproduce the problem. Which went away. I put italics back, and it returned. This reminded me of an article I'd seen on PIE, which described a bug in the way that IE handles widths for italicized text. It didn't seem to directly address the background image problem, but it led me to experiment with setting an explicit width for the floated timestamp div.width:10em, which is large enough to accomodate the timestamp text and, because it's in em-units, will expand if the viewer increases the browser's default text size. Then, to make the date text align as far to the right as possible, I set text-align:right.
In previous postings, I've mentioned that I've become the caretaker of various family treasures, sometimes under mild protest. At an early age, I had it drilled into me that "It's impolite to beg" and, as a result, I've always been reticent about accepting my aging relatives' possessions. At least, that's part of it. Another reason is that I feel that I'm somehow hastening their departure from this world by allowing them to give away their stuff. I know: illogical.
Through The Simpsons' eighteen-year history, we've seen lots of guest celebrities reduced to two dimensions. I've always wondered how I'd look with yellow skin and googly eyes... and now I know.
As part of the non-stop hype for the recently-released Simpsons movie, Burger King has put together a web site where you can upload a picture of yourself, answer a few non-personal questions, and see what the analyzer thinks you'd look like as a cartoon character from the Simpsons. I was frankly surprised by how well this worked.
You can try too. www.simpsonizeme.com
