:::

Designer Handcuffs

“You see, the CSS in question tripped over enough unspecified and ambiguous layout behavior to make a grown man cry.”

This true geek's blog entry in Surfin' Safari underscores some of the reasons I have avoided making heavy use of CSS, and especially CSS-P in my layouts.

While on the topic of CSS, I recently visited the offices of a well-known design school, and found out that they're standardized on Netscape 4.5 because of its integrated mail client!

I went looking for some recent browser trends, and found that an estimated 1.1% of all people surfing the web are using Netscape 4 these days. ['Course, you should take that with a grain of salt, because there are some serious issues with the mechanisms used to tabulate those stats. Still, there are very few people, probably mostly concentrated in organizations with standards like these, who are using Netscape anything anymore.]

At the bottom of the page, I spotted this fascinating bit of advice:

“The bottom line is that, although the number of those with 8-bit displays is small and shrinking, design for 256 colours will remain a serious issue so long as AOL continues to compress (mutilate) images.”

It's an interesting point. I've even seen sites where they offer specific instructions on how to disable AOL's default image compression behavior.

The statistics page at W3Schools.com turned up another interesting metric: as of July '03, 13% of web users have their JavaScript switched off. The statistic fluctuated significantly over the previous year. My hunch is that the main reason people are disabling JavaScript, is to block popups. At this point, anybody that's running JavaScript is running 1.2 or higher. Both of these are good to know. If you're running a JavaScript based flash detector, for example, one tenth of your visitors may not execute your detection script. If your site's shopping cart depends on JavaScript, it might be worth considering how to coax visitors to turn on JavaScript, or provide an alternative.

:::

I've always wondered why they blow nitrogen into the sewers. You can find big nitrogen tanks around many parts of the city. My hunch is that it's for the same reason that wine lovers blow nitrogen into their bottles when there's wine left: to reduce the amount of oxygen available. If that's the reason, I wonder if they're trying to halt oxidation, or to keep something from growing...

:::

:::

Bill Barol's written a review of Warren Zevon's “The Wind” for Slate, and a funny piece about The Golden State of Politics.

:::

:::

I have to laugh
at the hot air coming from many of the right-wingers on the topic of lying. In response to the dust-up between Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly, they've organized a campaign to insinuate that Franken's prank letter to John Ashcroft and twenty-odd others was also a lie, trying to leverage the old saw of “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

But let's take a closer look. First, the right-wingers spin the story as if Franken only wrote to Ashcroft – essentially a lie of omission. Next, Franken's "lie" didn't get anywhere – no one responded to his letter. Finally, this is really about Franken's book, which addresses a much broader pattern of lying – like the story that is emerging about the true nature of the air quality downtown after September 11, 2001, for example. O'Reilly and friends filed a completely meritless suit against Franken, claiming that his use of the phrase "Fair and Balanced" on the cover of his book violated a Fox News trademark.

Many of the lies addressed in the book are being sourced out of the White House. There is a huge difference between lying about whether you had consensual sex with a woman your daughter's age – which affects your immediate family, and arguably your personal credibility – and lying about a nuclear threat – which has resulted in the deaths of thousands.

:::

Oh, by the way, I caught a little piece on NBC this morning, about how it looks like the bogus British Intelligence report that washed up in the State of the Union Address might have been the creation of someone in Tony Blair's immediate circle. Blair's group was busy pressuring the UK intelligence community the way Bush's folks were hammering on ours. Blair and Dubya must be from the same school.

I doubt that Bush will try to resurrect one of the slogans of his old hero: “Ask yourself if you're not better off today than you were four years ago...”

:::