January 2003
As noted last year, my
friends have reached the age when babies appear at their New
Year’s parties. This year Jo hosted two: Nathaniel is now a
Methuselah of fourteen months compared to Penny and Jason’s
Eleanor’s four.
The Festival of the New Calendar is a great antidote to the
religious winter holidays. Debriefing one another about their
Christmas encounters with family acts as a fine ice-breaker.
When that palls we can also compare notes about The Two
Towers. Is it just me, or has this winter had more
summer blockbuster films than summer had?
Pictures
by Jenni! Quick off the mark!
We thought we would go visit Habitat, which is down
Botley
Road. On the way we popped in to the Oxford Botanical
Garden, only to discover it half-flooded and frozen over!
Trundling through town and over the bridges we eventually
discovered that Botley Road itself was impassable on foot
without wellington boots, being more than ankle deep even on the
pavements. We turned back and had tea at Mark’s and
he showed us a reprehensible video game with a very impressive
simulation of real London locations in it. As we left to go
home we noticed the waters had risen another couple of
centimetres...
Much to my surprise, Scott Adams has published three
Dilbert
strips
on Extreme
Programming (main site)
of all things. (I fear the above Dilbert links will not work
beyond this month, since they only keep a subset of the Dilbert
corpus on their site). This is kind of bizarre—are
mainstream readers really expected to have any understanding of
the XP methodology? If humour often depends on confounding our
expectations, doesn’t the audience need some expectations
that may be confounded? Hmmm?
Mr Steve announced two new PowerBooks, one large
(more a portfolio than a notebook) and one dinky
(smaller than a PowerBook Duo, apparently). The new 12″ model has a lot of similarities with
the 12″ iBook, not least the
screen (1024×768 with a 12·1″ diagonal),
maximum memory (640 MB), and
network (10/100 base-T). So it is kind of an ‘iBook
G4’ with
the following
differences from the iBook Combo
Feel Mark
Pilgrim’s distress at the excision of
cite from XHTML
2.0’s Text module. The irony is that
cite is one of the ‘semantic’ tags
(‘logical’ tags, as they used to be called) that is
actually used and supported by web browsers. Meanwhile fossils
like dfn, kbd and samp
are retained.
The case for cite
I once visited a real printing house, and discovered that the
keyboards actually have two quotation-mark keys: one for the
apostrophe (’) and one for the inverted comma
(‘). Alas! That such simplicity was denied to us by, well,
by Apple.
A tragicomic tale of the lost
punctuation
We have a client who decided that a shared ‘document
library’ was the way to collaborate on a bug list. They
gave me a URL and said to log in with my full name.
So what went wrong?
Apparently cite
was not intentionally deleted from the XHTML draft. Mark
Pilgrim has decided to spend some time being a ‘late
adopter’ for a while anyway. He probably deserves the
holiday, and a change
is as good as a rest...
Mark uses cite differently from me: I follow
the semantics of @cite in Texinfo, where it is used
for titles of publications you are citing, where it might be
translated as italic text or as a quoted title. Mark also uses
it for author’s names; I suppose you could
rationalize that by saying that personal weblogs have the
author’s name as their alternative title. It’s
necessary if his automatic list of citations is to work.
There is a general problem with (X)HTML text styles: their
meaning is not well specified. That’s why I fall back on
the Texinfo definitions.
People who know him may be interested to hear Jamie
Lokier has (a) fresh internet access,
(b) clippers, and, consequently (c) almost no hair.
Responding to my quotation-marks
rant, an anonymous
poster points out some browsers do support
q elements. Well, they sort of do.
Here is a silly proposal for a solution
to the problem of English
punctuation and conventional keyboards: define a new
character encoding that blesses the Knuthian convention used on
Unix systems. Obviously this would need support in web browsers
(they would have to allow charset=Latin-1p and add
an extra table to their built in character maps). But a few web
sites already use the `...' convention, and Latin-1p pages would
work no worse than they do.
One objection to sorting out the
problem of computer keyboards’ lack of English
punctuation (or rather restriction to typewriter-style
punctuation) is that typewriter punctuation is OK, so why
bother?
On with the slipperty slope
argument...
