I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and started updating the theme (it was so old it pre-dated widgets and so kludged together that it has three different ways of producing the same rendering). Things may be a little rough around the edges for a while.
I’ve also defined the first post on the homepage (actually, come to think of it, on any page) as an IE8-ready Web Slice - I’m not sure that this is really a good idea and I have some misgivings about Web Slices in general.
This blog now has a theme tune courtesy of Brother Typewriter of the Burning Lodge.
Very True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve’s blog of the same name. The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)
Thank you Howie, I think…
Today ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pink_weasel has been visiting her brother in his new flat. As said flat is in Bracknell, I declined. 
Though mostly I was just too knackered from a frustrating week at work and a lack of sleep. So I stayed at home and cleared out a cupboard, played some computer games (the final cut scene in Unreal Tournament 3 reminds me of the end of Blake’s 7) and chilled out.
The farmers’ market in West Norwood seems to be struggling. Only six stalls this week - two meat, one veg, one bread, two pointless.
My computer runs a lot better with the case open. This probably isn’t a good sign. Still, soon I’ll have a Wii to play with so the damn PC will be relegated to email checking only.
A puzzle: I got a £50 cheque from YouGov. I thought I only had half that amount on my account there and as I haven’t been able to log in for a few months (I’ve requested password resets but the email never arrives) I really don’t know what’s going on.
Hmph.
melancholy85% 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.
rushedYour Score: The Cat
You scored 67% domestic, 21% gregarious, 25% trickster, and 76% intellect!
( Waffle )
The Animal Archetype Test written by crumpetsfortea
coldVia miss_newham
My band is called Administrative Template and our album is List of QI episodes.
confusedYour Punk Band Name Is…
The Drunk Dinosaur
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?
