January 2003
Writing semantic markup: Robots to the rescue!
Posted by on Sunday, January 26, 2003 in - 13 comments
Some very smart people think that the next big leap in web technology will be on the foundation of the Semantic Web. However, some other very smart people are raising concerns that this semantic utopia may be unattainable. • Matthew Thomas is an interface designer from New Zealand. Yesterday on …
I know what you're thinking
Posted by on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 10 comments
In dealing with the emergence of artificial intelligence, Steven Berlin Johnson's book Emergence points out that self-awareness - consciousness - may be secondary to our awareness of others. An animal, for example, is at a great evolutionary advantage if it can understand what other animals are …
Stylish prose in the public domain
Posted by on Saturday, January 18, 2003 - 4 comments
Having read the BoingBoing.net weblog for a while, I first discovered Cory Doctorow's fiction when Salon published his dystopian digital-rights-management-inspired sci-fi short story, 0wnz0red. • Doctorow has recently published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The novel is …
The Neglected Page Website Design Test
Posted by on Friday, January 17, 2003 - 5 comments
Something I like to do when evaluating the design of a new website I've come across is look for a neglected page – I often use the contact page, because they tend to be easy to find. Privacy policy pages are also good for this purpose. • The idea is that these pages are often neglected during …
Browser of Babel
Posted by on Tuesday, January 7, 2003 in - 3 comments
Today, Apple introduced a new browser, called Safari. Also today, every web designer and developer in the world let out a big sigh and said a big collective: Crap! • As you can see from my last post, the differences between browser rendering engines give us indigestion. That said, my first …
Taking our struggle with CSS font sizes public
Posted by on Monday, January 6, 2003 in - 12 comments
Those readers not interested in web design issues, please pardon this post. For the rest of you, the following is a series of posts I made on the corporate intranet at work. We've been struggling with CSS font-size issues. It's nothing original, but it is my hope that posting the explanation of …
Acts of Volition in 2002: A statistical review
Posted by on Saturday, January 4, 2003 in - 2 comments
2002 saw Acts of Volition slip from being a multi-author weblog to a paltry 1-1/2 author weblog. While this may have cut the volume of posts, the participation of readers has been great. Writing for AoV has started to feel less like traditional writing and more like having a conversation with the …