This is the monthly archive for August 2007.
Alastair Campbell believes that frameworks cannot be applied to CSS almost by definition. He makes a few interesting points, most importantly that using CSS frameworks requires you to change your HTML, even though the point of using CSS is not changing your HTML for design purposes (see, however, here for a contrary opinion).
In any case, I'm wondering if this problem is fundamental to any CSS framework that will ever be written, or incidental to the current crop of CSS frameworks. If the latter, the situation can improve markedly as soon as a really good CSS framework is released.
I'm undecided.
CSS
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Interesting meta-survey of blogging.
Quoted quote (2004):
Indeed, a survey of taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers ("often seen as barometers of popular trends" according to Reuters, though God alone knows when hairdressers became barometers of anything), by ad outfit DDB London showed that 90 per cent of barometers have not the foggiest idea what a podcast is, and an impressive 70 per cent live in blissful ignorance of blogging.
(Via Paul Boag.)
Blogging
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Andy Budd on SxSW.
With a lot of people you can tell that the only reason they’re on a panel is to get a free ticket and add Southby to their list of speaking engagements.
Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. I didn't really prepare my 2007 session too well, either. (And yes, I'm planning to do a better job for the 2008 edition.)
On the other hand, is this entirely the speakers' fault? SxSW just is like that. If you're drowning in a lineup of 128 speakers, you'll start to take your session less seriously, especially when the organisation changes your room twice so that nobody can find you.
All in all I tend to split the blame between the speakers and the organisation.
Conferences
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As it says (Kestrel being the code engine of the upcoming Opera 9.5)
CSS, Opera
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According to Håkon Wium Lie, Web fonts that can be downloaded and used in your pages, are the next big thing. I agree they would be nice to have, but I'm wondering if they are quite that important.
CSS
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Paul Boag gets hit by some subtle internationalisation issues. If the difference between Brits and Americans is already that large, what about the difference between either of them and the rest of the world?
The problem is that Paul made some mild jokes about Americans, which apparently didn't sit well with part of his US audience. According to him part of the problem is that Americans take their national identity more seriously than Europeans. The old-fashioned name for this problem is nationalism; and I agree that this is one major difference between the US and (Western) Europe.
Here in Europe, nationalism has lead to a string of gigantic wars, of which WW II was the latest and greatest, but far from the only one. Since 1945, some Western European countries (notably Germany and Holland) have become more subdued in their nationalism, since they know what it can lead to.
I regularly poke fun at the "national characteristics" of the Brits when I'm in England, and they sometimes return the favour; and I do the same when I'm in Greece. Both the English and Greek understand that this is all meant in good spirits, and nobody is particularly offended.
As far as I'm concerned we can make fun of each other in an EU context, as long as we can take it as well as dish it out. To me, that's one of the advantages of the EU.
Unfortunately the Americans don't (yet) fit into this fun-poking system (neither do the Arabs, BTW, not even those who live in Europe). I don't know the solution to this problem (I'm not even 100% sure it is a problem), but it's something to keep in mind when making jokes, I suppose.
Internationalisation
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Roger explains why he first left and then rejoined the HTML WG. This relates to the previous two entries, since HTML 5 is one of the hot issues of the moment.
So I’m giving this a second chance. The other day I rejoined the W3C HTML Working Group. This time around, however, I will be taking the opinions of people who seem to lack experience of real-world Web development and apparently are uninterested in actually improving the Web with a truckload or two of salt. Hopefully that will help me keep my temper.
That's exactly the problem right now; too many semi-professionals who can read specs but don't have any real-world experience.
Standards/W3C
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Zeldman reacts to Molly's post and points out there is no actual crisis. Besides, he'd like the critics to be more clear in what they don´t like about the current standardisation process.
Standards/W3C
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Molly is concerned that W3C and WaSP aren't paying sufficient attention to what she considers the main problems of Web standards right now.
Standards/W3C
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Spurred on by my Guild post the WSG seems to have taken a stab at defining a front-end programmer. The mail thread contains a few interesting thoughts.
Skillset
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