Saturday, October 12, 2002

wired.com css Wired Goes Standad Wired, one of the most popular sites on the Web, was in its early days a real bellwether of leading-edge design. A major design rev every few months (or weeks) was the rule when Jeffrey Veen held down the top design spot there. It had been two years since Wired's last facelift, but the one that debuted this week was important for more than just its design quality (which remains excellent). Wired.com is now fully standards compliant. Its pages validate correctly. It uses XHTML and CSS throughout. I find this particularly interesting and exciting as I have returned to the world of computer book authoring with a new project, Build Your Own Table-Free Web Site With CSS for Australia-based SitePoint. 11:54:37 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Hey, Dave Winer Blogged the Giants Game! Dave Winer did a real-time blog on the Giants' 5-4 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series today. Very cool. I experimented with this form of blogging last week during game 5 of the National League Division Series in Atlanta. I'm glad to see other people trying the idea. 11:42:02 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

radio suggestions Some Radio Ideas on a Late Saturday Night I'm really hooked on blogging. I've updated this blog multiple times a day for the past 11 days. I know, that's not as long as most bloggers have been blogging, and I'm not claiming any special insight here. Just enthusing. In the process, I've come up with three ideas I'd like to see Dave and his excellent Radio team at UserLand consider adding or changing. Chronology Control. There are some kinds of materials (stories, real-time even blogs) that cry out for a chronology that goes start to finish instead of finish to start. It would be great if we who publish blogs could choose this alternative ordering as needed. Three-Part Posts. Right now we post everything in one chunk. If we want a headine, e.g., we have to code it deliberately into the post. And, as discussions I've had here with Robert Scoble indicate, post length can be deterrent to syndication. How about giving us three publishable fields instead of one: headline, intro/tease/summary, and body. Then RSS feeds could put out just the headline and the intro/tease/summary. This would encourage a tighter kind of writing, too, I think. Notification of Comment Posts. I like that we can provide an easy way for readers to dialog with us about our posts. Now if we could have email or on-site notification of new posts so we can stay current with them without having to scan all the contents of our sites, that would be great! 11:27:15 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Replacing the GUI with a SUI (Story User Interface)? Interesting piece. My friend and colleague Laurence Rozier is a big believer in using stories to do lots of knowledge transfer, but I don't know if even he has thought of narrative as an interface. Time to ditch the graphical user interface? [MacCentral] 11:20:20 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

javascript object-oriented I've Been Saying it for Years. Now There's More Proof: JavaScript is Object-Oriented Back in the early days of CNET Builder.com, I drew the ire of hundreds of Web developers by taking and firmly maintaining the position that JavaScript -- that lowly scripting language built into Web browsers -- was a fully object-oriented language. Because it used a non-class approach to object orientation in the form of prototypes, a lot of OO purists disagreed. Loudly. I maintained my position, wrote about it several times, defended my position with code samples and detailed discussions at Builder Buzz (the discussion board for Builder.com), and took a bit of a battering. Today, several years after the last discussion, I got an email from an old reader, Douglas Crockford. He has set up a Web page with more convincing proof of the object-oriented nature of JavaScript. I was touched anyone even remembered those old discussions and debates and my connection to them. JavaScript's inventor, Brendan Eich, assured me many times that the object-orientation was real and intentional. (He was also nice enough to say that I had done a lot to legitimize JavaScript with all my writing and analysis and books.) It's nice to be remembered after all these years. It's nice to know that I was right all along! 11:06:41 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.