After making her way out of the jungle (with a machete even) and riding rickshaw back to the western hemisphere, Debbie asks how the spectrum of wine relates to taste.
The short answer (and the only one I have at this time) is that I don't know if wine color has any relationship to taste.
All wines (well, maybe not Retsina) taste alright, but there is a huge range of flavors associated with wine. Wine color is often quoted by wine tasters as an indication of it's age and intensity. The conventional wisdom is that as wine ages, it developes a more golden hue than it began with. And since aged wine is generaly considered superior to new wine, it follows that the yellowing ingredients may affect taste favorably.
Spectrography gives my deuteranopic eyes an accurate way of assessing wine color, and may even yeild further insight into the secrets of wine's taste.
Css whoop-de-doo:
Ol' Prof. Winer sure stirred up a hornet's nest with this posting on scripting.com wherein he appears to prefer to continue to use 'twentieth-century' style html markup instead of the newfangled all-css style markup.
Problem is, all-css dosen't work very well - 'yet' or whatever, based on my experience with hundreds of internet users and dozens computer/os/browser combinations. In some case, the pages look great, but often blink in and out of view first. Or the text and pictures will wiggle around for a while: ya click on a link, only to have another link squirm into the click at the last instant, requiring a 'back' then a reclick on the correct link. Or worse, everything's in a long column, or text is superimposed on other text or graphics, or is just plain missing. For a few, all-css looks and works flawlessly, but...
Most internet uses are just trying to get things done, and don't keep everything up to date. For these people, all-css fails.
For example, the 5000 plus employee, public sector organization that I work for, only supports Netscape 4.7 for email - so most of my coworkers rely on 5 year old technology for their internet! This is at a college - most other government and school locations are worse off, and many small businesses are not much better. Most people use MSIE otherwise, because it's already on their computer. Most people wouldn't think of using Opera, Safari or any other browser they needed to install or configure. Even if they did switch, they might not be satisfied because of an unfamiliar interface*.
I try to support a minimal configuration with basic readability of my content (which, for this site, includes a lot of graphic and layout type of content - what we used to call look and feel.) Some css works just fine, but over-reliance on generalized, load-time code causes a lot of problems for less upgraded users trying to see your site. Coincidentally these folks are also less likely to let you know there's a problem, often because 1) they're incredibly impatient - they'll wait 5 3 seconds then go elsewhere for similar information or 2) they don't know/care much about the problem so they don't seek a solution.
Limited use of css improves my layout, but I only want to use it where obsolescence caused degradation is not ugly (lacking skill with css, I'm not very successful though.) But that is a big challenge of the medium - our lack of control over the condition that our work arrives in. Most, maybe all, art is shaped by it's boundries.
* I don't like Safari because there is not an indicator of where a link goes at the bottom of the page, like you get when you hover over a link in Internet Explorer.
