afongen

I’m not all that fond of accesskeys in web pages. It’s a great idea that I feel pretty much falls down on implementation: the possibility of clobbering the user’s own access key preferences is just too great, and the idea of every web site having its own set of accesskeys just makes my teeth hurt.

Still, if you’re going to use them, you might be interested in using style sheets to reveal accesskeys, as described by Stuart Robertson, author of the recent ALA accesskeys article that garnered so much buzz. Rather clever, really, but unfortunately doesn’t work in IE. You could go the route of Stuart Langridge’s nice titles if that matters to you.

In a tightly-written essay in the Washington Post, historian Alexander Keyssar takes issue with Bush’s dismissing as “revision historians” those who question the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq. That’s what historians do, he argues: revise accounts of the past based on new evidence.

The first histories of war and of major political conflicts are almost always told by the winners; the first sources of information tend to be men (and occasionally women) who hold the reins of power. But those official histories are always flawed and incomplete, precisely because the sources are partial and self-serving. Sooner or later, revisionist challenges emerge, provoking debates that are uncomfortable for political leaders, although salutary for the society those leaders are supposed to serve.

I’m on my way to my wife’s family reunion today. I don’t expect that it will be much fun, but I’m not dreading it, either. For some reason my family doesn’t really go in for these events so much, although there was one a number of years back. I’m glad for that.

Back later…

Craig Saila interviews Mark Newhouse about CSS in design and layout. Mark has such a sane approach that I don’t want to lose track of that link.

More things that I don’t want to lose track of because I might refer to them soon:

• Project Seven has expanded its tutorial offerings since I last checked, including the wonderful and much-praised Uberlink CSS Rollovers.
• Eric Meyer’s talks, and as long as we’re talking about styling lists, you might enjoy his “Minimal Markup, Surprising Style”.

I’m sure that my brother Chris would be proud to know that his birthday is the day that the Unisys LZW algorithm patent expires in the US. GIF is almost free.

OK. He probably doesn’t care a whit, except that reading it here will make him chuckle.

As great a movie as it is, I don’t know that watching Office Space every couple days is such a hot idea.

Heh. Earlier this spring, our IT department did an internal employee satisfaction survey. Since I wrote the apps that ran the survey and produced the summaries, I had occasion to glance through the results. Office Space was mentioned in employee comments, but since the managers interpreting the comments had never seen the movie, they couldn’t understand, classify, or relate to the comments. So those comments are basically not reflected in any summary; they’re available only if people read the raw data.

Not that it matters, since the results have been released only to senior IT management anyway. Hopefully that’s just an oversight.

Ooh, here’s a reason to miss next week’s open source conference: the WWDC keynote on a large screen at the University of Minnesota.

Update: Oh, damn. There’s no conflict with the conference. And I can’t go anyway, because I have a meeting. Aaargh!

A number of our colleges and universities have been redesigning their web sites lately, and there’s some very impressive, beautiful work. Two in particular grabbed my interest: Minnesota State University, Mankato and Normandale Community College have implemented table-less layouts, using valid XHTML and CSS.

Now, I’m not a fanatic about this. I don’t strongly object to using tables for layout, as long as they remain simple. You can get a lot of mileage with basic tables (i.e. not nested in several layers) and CSS. But I do have a general preference for CSS-P and still get excited when I see something as marvelous as Normandale’s site pulled off with style sheets. Gives me hope that we might be able to do this on one of the redesigns that I’m working on this summer. Pointing to the CSS Zen Garden can only get me so far. Highlighting a few of our own colleges and universities who are doing this will carry some weight.

Cool-looking conference next week: Open Source – Open Standards. The Business, Legal, and Technical Challenges Ahead.

This one-and-a-half day standards conference for senior executives, comprising four panels, will feature an introduction of the issues and follow-up with an interactive discussion between the speakers and the audience. The aim is to capture and publish the issues that are discussed in order to raise the industry awareness of the benefits of Open Source.

It was suggested today that I go to this, and I probably should. I mean, hell, it’s in town! If I can still register, I just might. Thing is, I’m not sure that I want to spend two days at an event geared toward “senior business executives.” After a bizarre night several years ago in which I found myself at a cocktail party with CEOs of huge international corporations, followed by a late-night dinner with lawyers planning a trip to a week-long opera festival (I’ll save that story for another day), I don’t know that I’m ready for another schmooze-fest quite yet.

Then again, could be fun. At the very least, I have requested the proceedings, which may be all that I care about. We’ll see.

The squeamish might not want to read this. It’s nothing explicit, but if you’re squeamish, you’re squeamish.

Last weekend, I picked up my mother-in-law at the airport. She’d spent a few weeks in Moldova with several of her colleagues. (Don’t ask me where it is, my sense of geography is seriously lacking. Somewhere near Romania, I think.) While in Moldova, one by one each of them got sick with flu-like symptoms that they could never trace to food poisoning or anything. She got affected just as she left for the long international flight home. Fun.

This past Friday, Kiara succumbed to what we assumed was food poisoning. It passed after a day or so, but she’s still recovering. Then last night (all night), I fell victim to the same unpleasantness. And late last night, Owen threw up a couple times and was clearly uncomfortable. Poor little guy.

I’m not sure what would have affected us all. We blame Moldova. :-)