Status-Q

A bit more hacking, and the comments are now handled on my server by a PHP script and stored in a MySQL database. Congrats to Userland for coming up with such a simple scheme.

There’s a new Comments feature for Radio Userland. This is basic, but very cute and very easy to use. I’ve enabled it as an experiment. Now, if you should so desire, you can leave comments on Status-Q!

I don’t think, in this incarnation, that it’s obvious when people have done so. That’s not quite so easy to implement especially when, as on this site, the main pages live on one server (mine) and the comments on another (Userland’s). Fixing that could be a real test of Web Services!

Here’s how to do the CSS thing whole-heartedly:”This is the official accessibility statement for diveintomark.org“. Well done, Mark – that takes some dedication.

Mmm. So much for pushing the envelope. Two late nights of hacking and I’m still fiddling with my experimental CSS layout. Not only have I failed to get it exactly how I want it, but I’ve also failed to get it even close enough to this to replace what I’ve got at present. Getting a reliable sidebar on the right margin is most of the problem.

Now, I could certainly change my formatting to make it easier to do in CSS, but that seems to defeat the object. CSS is supposed to give you more flexibility, not less. And it does so, but I can’t make it do so reliably across more than one browser.

So I’ll keep playing, but for now, the basic formatting here is CSS but the layout stays as tables. There’s lots of tasteful CSS layout here to divert your attention…

testing 3

and four

and five

testing2

OK, in the great CSS debate that’s going on in the blogging world at the moment, I’m definitely on the pro-CSS side. I’ve used it in a half-hearted way for some time, but as Mark Pilgrim says,

“…weblogs are the perfect breeding ground for CSS. Here we’re working in our free time, free of all the usual commercial pressures…. We can afford to draw a line in the sand, push the envelope a little, move the web forward. It’s time.”

I agree. After all, it’s nearly 4 years now since CSS2 became a W3 recommendation. 4 years! And that’s the second version. When CSS1 was approved the web was only half its current age.

I converted this site to be largely CSS-based a few days back, but it’s still heavily reliant on tables. The finer points of CSS layout are something I haven’t played with much yet, but I’m about to try, so if the site looks a little weird for the next couple of days, please be patient. I’m just drawing a line in the sand (from 0,0 to 10px, 100px), pushing the envelope (to the right margin) and moving the web forward by a pixel or two..

Henry Jenkins: Blog This. Just in case you thought this site was mere trivia.

A concise summary of the foolishness of the BT Patent claim in John’s Observer column.

On BBC Radio 4’s comedy programme ‘The Now Show’, the Winter Olympics was described as “38 different kinds of sliding”.

The Patent system is completely out of control. We all know this, but the frequency of foolishness is increasing. The current BT case does seem particularly silly. Is nothing sacred when it might be patentable?

On a related note Dave Winer has been very upset by the pressure on him to use Cascading Style Sheets, a technology which is a W3C web standard, and which I think he would agree is a good technology, but which he is worried is too closely tied to a Microsoft patent. (For Dave, who is normally a great standards-promoter, this is notable, but I think he went too far here. I, like many others, had almost forgotten about this patent issue. See Mark Pilgrim’s more reasonable summary).

The more fundamental our reliance on anything (like the axiom that the W3C should be looked to for web standards), the more it is a target for patent-hunters and hence the less we can rely on anything. The situation is very neatly commented on by this article in The Onion.

At some point, one hopes, the whole system must collapse and be laughed out of court. It’s not widely known that I actually own a patent which covers the whole patenting process, and so every patent really belongs to me…

John Casey defends Princess Margaret:

“In some ways, she was like Diana, Princess of Wales before her time. She had a weakness for some fairly trashy society – but much less than Diana had.

Her private life was conducted with much more discretion than Diana’s; and she remained absolutely loyal to the Monarchy. What she lacked was Diana’s mass appeal and brilliant gifts of manipulation – especially of the press.”