The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket? It sure is getting warm...
Updated: 5/19/03; 12:58:46 AM.

 

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Monday, May 6, 2002

And now, the bad news. Despite good news about the economy last week, President Bush's economic plan is putting the country in long-term economic danger. [Salon.com]
11:00:50 PM    

Court Is Told Microsoft Kept Strategy Even After Ruling. States challenging Microsoft's proposed settlement of the government's antitrust case suggested that Microsoft had not dropped efforts to squash competition. By Bloomberg News. [New York Times: Technology]
10:55:01 PM    

Business Week: Lawrence Lessig: The "Dinosaurs" Are Taking Over. They've succeeded in making Washington believe this is a binary choice -- between perfect protection or no protection. No one is seriously arguing for no protection. They are arguing for a balance that avoids the phenomenon we are seeing now -- one where the last generation of technology controls the next generation of industry. [Tomalak's Realm]
8:22:42 PM    

O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. O'Reilly: "One thing that's been overwhelmingly clear this year is that the alpha geeks are choosing Mac OS X. Why? Mac OS X is one of the most exciting things happening in the industry today. It's the confluence of three great traditions - Unix/open source, Java, and the Mac - and the best of all worlds."
8:11:49 PM    

Salon.com Technology | Playing games with free speech [Daypop Top 40]
8:06:51 PM    

Mercury News | 05/04/2002 | Paranoia, stupidity and greed ganging up on the public [Daypop Top 40]
9:58:14 AM    

'It's Possible' Expert Hurts MS. A computer scientist testifying on behalf of Microsoft doesn't do the software company any favors when he concedes that a stripped-down version of Windows may be feasible. Robert Zarate reports from Washington. [Wired News]
12:44:51 AM    

The risks of Shared Source.

Richard Stallman @ ZDNet: What Gates' attacks on the GPL really mean.

The Microsoft "shared source" programme is not about sharing at all -- it is just another name for a nondisclosure agreement. Think twice before you sign, because it is not just antisocial, it is risky too. Around 1990, students who had seen the secret AT&T Unix source code at school found their employment prospects narrowed, because AT&T had threatened to sue when some students used ideas reminiscent of Unix.

[diveintomark]
12:41:35 AM    

The Q tag.

I'm experimenting with less well-known structural elements in HTML, including the Q tag, which is supposed to be used for inline quotations. I already use the BLOCKQUOTE tag for longer quotations, and it would seem that the Q tag would be perfectly suited for a weblog, since so many weblog entries involve quoting short snippets of linked external articles.

The Q tag was added in the original version of HTML 4, and has therefore been around for over 4 years. The specification mandates that browsers must ensure that the content of the Q element is rendered with delimiting quotation marks. I did a little testing, and all modern browsers do this... except Internet Explorer on Windows. Yeah, the one with 70% market share. Even IE 6 doesn't display quotation marks; content in a Q tag just looks like everything else. Shit.

But never mind that. I have a partial solution to IE's stupidity, which I'll get to in a minute.

One of the things you're supposed to be able to do with the Q tag is use CSS to specify curly quotes around your quoted text, instead of the default straight quotes. (The other thing is language-specific quote marks; most native English readers don't realize that other languages use different symbols around quotations.) Most people who care about curly quotes (Dean Allen, Michael Barrish, Jeffrey Zeldman, and so forth) do it by inserting the Unicode representation of the curly quote characters into their HTML directly. You can read how to do this on A List Apart: The Trouble With EM 'n EN.

If you are an absolute purist and are willing to thumb your nose at 70% of your readership, here's how to do it in CSS instead:

q {
  quotes: '“' '”' "‘" "’";
}

q:before { content: open-quote; }

q:after { content: close-quote; }

The "quotes" property defines the characters to use around quotations marked up with the Q tag; the first pair of characters is for quotations, the second pair for nested quotations within quotations. The q:before and q:after declarations tell your browser to use those characters we just defined. Your browsers also keeps track of nested quotations automatically, and uses the appropriate quote character. You can learn more about the "quotes" property in Generated content, automatic numbering, and lists, part of the W3C's CSS2 specification.

Now then, if you're an absolute purist but are not willing to thumb your nose at the millions of IE/Win users out there, you can do what I'm doing now: put curly quotes around quotations in browsers that support the Q tag properly, and put quotations in italics for IE 5 and 6 on Windows. You can combine the above example with these two additional CSS declarations:

q {
  font-style: italic;
}

p>q, li>q { font-style: normal; }

The first half puts quotations in italics, and the second half puts them back to normal text. The trick is that IE/Win doesn't understand the second half, because its CSS parser is almost as buggy as its HTML renderer. You can take advantage of this and other browser bugs to Hide CSS from Browsers.

IE sees the italics declaration, ignores the normal text declaration because it's buggy, and ignores the quotes declaration because it's stupid, then renders quotations in italics. Standards-compliant browsers like Opera, Mozilla, and IE/Mac see the italics declaration and the normal text declaration, which cancel each other out, then see the quotes declaration and surround quotations with curly quotes. Text browsers like Lynx ignore all stylesheets, but Lynx still sees the Q tag and correctly surrounds quotations with straight quotes. (And remember, having this site look good in Lynx is one of my design goals.)

Here are the results, and a quick test to see if your browser supports the Q tag and my associated stylesheets:

  • This sentence has no quotes.
  • This sentence has "manual quotes" that should appear straight.
  • This sentence has marked up quotes. If that phrase has curly quotes around it, your browser passes, congratulations. If it has straight quotes around it, your browser supports the Q tag but not the associated CSS declarations that make the quotes curly. If it appears in italics, you're using IE or a similar non-compliant browser that doesn't support the Q tag. Bad browser, no biscuit.

Tomorrow: aural stylesheets for voice browsers. No, really.

[diveintomark]
12:18:32 AM    

"Top Ten New Copyright Crimes" [Daypop Top 40]
12:13:29 AM    

© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.



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