licentious radio

Tuesday, February 11, 2003
[10:57:32 PM]

Axle of Evil [tnr.com]. The full scoop on how bad SUVs are. You need the evidence that SUVs are more deadly for their drivers. Let's spread the word!

[10:51:53 PM]

It's already been a week since Doug and Tantek gathered us up for a web technology discussion. My how time flies.

One topic we touched on was Tantek's use of ordered lists for his weblog -- a month is a list of days, and each day has a list of posts. He goes one more step, and styles a lot of the tags based on their context, rather than putting a class attribute in every tag.

This is interesting ground to explore, and is probably very much the way things will go.

My reservation about contextual styling is that if you extract a small piece, you may not have enough context to be able to style it. Whereas, if you slap a class attribute into each tag, it would be easy to extract the styles that apply to that class.

Someone else -- I'll refrain from naming names -- said the list of lists for days and items sounds like something you would do because you *can* do it, rather than because there's any semantic or other benefit. Some thought weblog items as an ordered list is appropriate.

I think XML-like languages want to nest. In HTML, you might separate blog entries with an H4, but if you made an XML blog language, it would surely have an <item> tag with its matching </item>.

Tantek uses the semantically less-meaningful HTML list element, but gets some of the benefit of having a wrapper. Because his blog post is nested within the <li> tag, his first heading can be styled as *inline*, and still start a new line itself -- simulating the unsupported 'run in' style. That's the kind of benefit that I'd expect to see when you're "going with the flow".

On the other hand, it seems like most of us agreed that *humans* don't like creating extra hierarchies. I suspect this is a consequence of short-term memory limitations. (I suspect that of a lot of things.) As you work your way through heirarchies, keeping track of your context becomes more difficult. If each level takes one chunk of memory to remember the context, you lose your place pretty quickly, because we only have *four* chunks. If you have a pretty good visual rendering of the hierarchy, that helps. Thus Macintoshes open a new window for each folder (by default), and programmers indent code to indicate control structures. But somebody pointed out that very few people put (actual) file folders within other file folders.

See also: my original comments on Tantek's structure and styling.

[6:15:51 PM]
Silly zeldman.com hacking update.... For no *very* good reason, I want the secondarynav on the right. float: right, right? But the latest style tweaks switched to absolute positioning. position:absolute trumps float:right in Mozilla. (At a glance, that seems to be the way the spec is written, too.) To over-ride the absolute positioning, my userContent.css looks like this:

#primarycontent {margin-left: 0px !important;} #secondarynav {position: static !important;} #secondarynav {float: right !important}

In principle, this is a silly business. But it's maybe the way of the future, so I indulge. The only bad thing is that I usually have five or ten browser windows open, and every time I tweak the user stylesheet I have to close them all and restart Mozilla. But if I do that once a week, it doesn't seem too bad.

I was only driven to this stylesheet hacking back when Zeldman was justifying his text. At licentious radio, we brook no justification of html text.

[3:10:48 PM]
Greg Palast has updated and re-published his book. He'll be at Kepler's on February 27. Palast digs up dirt on the Bush people, which is published in newspapers in England, but black-holed by the Republican-owned media here.

Greg's interview with Buzzflash goes into some of the gory details: Bush is blackmailing Blair to support the war. Poppy Bush himself set up the Iraqi nuclear weapons program in the 80s, with $7 billion from the Saudis.

Greg is also the only known/suspected victim of licentious radio's campaign to stop justification of text on the web. We're not taking credit for it, but we *did* email a suggestion that it would be easier to read his articles if they weren't justified. And today, the articles aren't justified.

For now, we'll spare you the anti-justification manifestoing.

But mark your calendar for Greg at Kepler's.

[1:16:11 PM]
Weird Google-glitch yesterday. If you searched for various combinations of: "George W. Bush State of the Union address, 2003", licentious radio's (not very funny) satirical transcript was the *second* hit. Presumably because the title of the licentious page includes "2003". The page got forty or fifty hits yesterday, versus approximately none in the previous week. Today, it's gone from Google, altogether.

The most interesting thing is the question of why it suddenly got a high ranking.

But we're pleased and proud that even if *China* doesn't censor licentious radio, Google *does*. (This isn't the first case.)

There's also a rather interesting question as to how exactly Google chooses which pages to censor. Surely there's no one reporting our lame satire to a censor desk, but surely "boob job" isn't enough to get you whacked, either. Maybe there's a special "be polite to Mad King George" filter? That'd be some clever code.

Bottom line is what Ari said: people should watch what they say.

[10:09:27 AM]
From the SF Chronicle today: "About 108 venture funds raised $6.9 billion during 2002, compared with 331 funds that raised $40.7 billion in 2001.... Because 26 firms gave $5 billion in uninvested money back to their limited partners, the net amount of new capital was just $1.9 billion last year -- a 95 percent drop from 2001.... In 2000, nearly $107 billion was raised by 653 funds."