85% Dennis Kucinich
82% Chris Dodd
82% Barack Obama
81% Mike Gravel
80% Joe Biden
79% Hillary Clinton
79% Bill Richardson
78% John Edwards
38% Rudy Giuliani
29% John McCain
25% Ron Paul
25% Mitt Romney
21% Mike Huckabee
16% Tom Tancredo
11% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

The past couple of columns extolling the virtues of Firefox were enough to tell that he was ‘one of us’, but this week Stephen Fry is blogging about the W3C and WHATWG. In fact, this makes a lot of sense, if the W3C’s efforts were to be compared to a gameshow then one, like Mr Fry’s QI, where the contestants regularly end up with a negative points total would be an appropriate analogy.

Recently: Opera takes Microsoft to court, which leads to calls for the CSS Working Group to be disbanded, which is, unsurprisingly, shrugged off by the working group itself, and then Microsoft announces that IE8 passes Acid2.

And as you’d expect there’s been a lot of froth and nonsense across the interested blogs.

My thoughts are that progress is being made, both by people like the the IE team (the current versions of Opera and Safari already pass Acid2 and Firefox 3 will pass it as well) and by the W3C which has made some good efforts this year to be more open and transparent.

It’s good to question the way things are, and Andy Clarke’s post about the working group has certainly made people take a good look at the status quo. But I feel that his proposed alternative would take us back to the time where the W3C created specifications that bore no relation at all to what the browsers were actually doing or planning to do.

As far as Opera and Microsoft goes, this is more about commerical advantage and business models than it is about web standards per se. Opera’s current business model aligns itself with web standards. Microsoft’s business model is so large and complex that it can be both for and against web standards and as the Acid2 result shows the team building IE8 are for them. I think the lawsuit is a sideshow and shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the standards discussion.

For many of us the shenanigans of the CSS working group hold a strange fascination, but I think that Mr Fry is right to point out that it’s in the areas of video and audio that the next big battle will be fought. As such Microsoft aren’t the main bad guys, Apple and Adobe probably are. Going back to business models, these companies are both secretive and fond of closed proprietary solutions. I’m not saying that either of them are evil through and through, but I’d love to see a lot more openness and cooperation from them in 2008.

Anyway, Stephen Fry is blogging about W3C working groups and open source video formats. He’s so one of us.

Very True Mood:  rushed

Your Score: The Cat

You scored 67% domestic, 21% gregarious, 25% trickster, and 76% intellect!

( Waffle )

The Animal Archetype Test written by crumpetsfortea

Very True Mood:  cold

Via miss_newham

1. Go to the Wikipedia home page and click random article. That is your band’s name.
2. Click random article again; that is your album name.
3. Click random article 15 more times; those are the tracks on your album.

My band is called Administrative Template and our album is List of QI episodes.

• Zoe Newman
• La Parra de las Vegas
• Steroid Maximus
• List of schools in Wales
• Your Possible Pasts
• USS Boston (1799)
• Canton of Excideuil
• Follow Me
• De Tomaso Mangusta
• Dimissorial Letters
• Jennifer Jayne
• Maintal
• Hermann Haken
• Thameslink (train operating company)
• Parc Abbey Bible

Very True Mood:  confused

Your Punk Band Name Is…

The Drunk Dinosaur

What’s Your Punk Band Name?

Actually, that’s a rubbish name for a punk band but I like it anyway.

Hi [ContactFirstName],

I have a web designer role based in Surrey.

My client is looking for somebody who can work self-sufficient and turn projects round quickly, while maintaining high standards both visually and technically.

…

If you have any of the following this will be useful.
AJAX, BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE AND Action script.

What is a “BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE”? And does “[ContactFirstName]” know how to build one?

Oh, and of course they can’t tell the difference between a designer and a developer (nor the difference between an adjective and an adverb).

Any XSLT/XPath experts out there? I’m a little bit stuck. I have a stylesheet that is effectively transforming XHTML into XHTML (best not to ask) and is matching any element with select = "xhtml:*". However, sometimes empty a elements creep into the original XHTML and get copied across to the output. These can play havoc with the CSS and JavaScript used on the final web page so I’d like to supress them.

How do I modify the select statement above to select all XHTML elements except for a elements that have either no text node children or have text node children composed solely of white space?

In other words if the input contains <a></a> or <a /> or <a> </a> then it should be skipped (assume for now that any attributes are irrelevant and that we’ll deal with the case where it contains another element node but no text nodes later).

I tried select = "xhtml:*[not(self::a[not(text())])][not(self::a[not(text() = ' ')])]” as a first stab but as well as being very ugly it doesn’t seem to be working. Any ideas?

Via just about everyone. The 106 books most often tagged as unread on LibraryThing. Bold the ones you’ve read. Add an asterisk to the ones you’ve read more than once. Italicise the ones you’ve started but not finished. Strikethrough the ones you hated. Underline the ones on your “to read” list.

( The list... )

Conclusions? I’m way behind on my Neal Stephenson reading, and I haven’t read many ‘classics’ but nor have a lot of other people.

Very True Mood:  okay

I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.

Total Number of Books Owned

According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.

Last Book Bought

A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.

Last Book Read

I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.

Five books that mean a lot to me

In reverse chronological order in my life:

1. Life by Richard Fortey

   I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting gleet and littlebun so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.

2. Ships of the Star Fleet, Volume One

   Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.

3. Thieves’ World

   I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence - The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.

4. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

   I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.

5. 

   Read About Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster

   A childhood treat - a book with me and my family and my friends in it.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

• Chris at The Virtual Stoa
• gleet
• pink_weasel
• Tony and his Random Thoughts

السعودية تبني سوراً بمليار دولار على الحدود العراقية; الخل يساعد في الكشف المبكر عن سرطان عنق الرحم

I love getting spam in random languages. I also love cutting and pasting rtl into an editor. You never know what DEL, BACKSPACE or the cursor keys will do.

Oh, and I love seeing how well people’s RSS readers cope…

Very True Mood:  mischievous