Dylan Schiemann

In response to the recent Joe Clark article on A List Apart “Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement“, Peter-Paul Koch wrote an article about a possible JavaScript Image Replacement alternative. Somewhat independently, Christian Hellmann wrote an article also for JavaScript Image Replacement. Peter-Paul Koch had a pair of responses, basically saying to Christian: you took my idea, didn’t give me enough credit for it (i.e. link to my site), and your script contains several syntax errors and flaws. I give Peter-Paul credit for standing up for himself, even though he did alienate some people out there with the way he responded. I respect Peter-Paul for speaking his mind pubically and not being afraid of what others think about him, much as Dave Winer does, and much the way I took David Flanagan to task for his Netscape 6 petition. David’s article had several errors, and at a time when most comments agreed with David, I felt that his article and petition were doing a great disservice by miseducating the public and I told him so. David agreed in part and published a follow-up to his article. Because I spoke up about this, David also respected me enough to ask me to provide technical review for the DOM sections of the 4th edition of his JavaScript the Definitive Guide. Peter-Paul provides a great service to the JavaScript community, and does a much better job of writing tutorials than I do (mine tend to be quickly written and never finished or polished). I prefer to quickly learn about how something works, and provide technical feedback to those that write great tutorials.

Silicon Pines is an Assisting Computing Facility: ” Sadly, technology is advancing at such a dramatic rate that many millions, of all ages, will never truly be able to understand it, putting an undue burden on those friends and family members who must explain it to them. But unless the loved one is suffering from a truly deliberative affliction, such as Reinstallzheimers, the decision to commit is entirely personal.” A very funny site for those of us that are asked to solve any and every type of computer problem our friends and family have. The problem is only getting worse… today I was asked to stop what I was doing and explain how to extract a zip file. It seems that no matter how simple we make user interfaces, users fall to new lows in being able to accomplish even the easiest of tasks… even worse, they forget how to do things that they were more than capable of with older operating systems that actually expected them to think a little bit. Why do so many people have a tendency to want to think for themselves as infrequently as possible, and be as dependent on others for thought whenever convenient? When did people become afraid to learn?</rant>

Minor spoilers here. While the critics do have a good point of contention about how the time of the film may have been better devoted to certain portions of the story, any true Matrix fan will be satisfied with how the overall plot unfolds, as well as with the visuals and the special effects. Though they have said this will be the final Matrix movie, they have left things wide open for an additional movie. I think they might be better making movies out of some of the more interesting subplots that exist. For example, the Goliath short story found on the Matrix web site could make a very good movie, especially if people watching the movie had no idea in advance that it was related to the Matrix series.

quirksmode.org is the relaunch of ppk’s excellent resource on JavaScript, DOM, and CSS compatibility issues. The name is inspired by doctype switching in newer browsers to allow older quirky rendering behavior to work.

Interactive Microcontent is interesting as it is a discussion combining most of the client-side programming languages that interest me and some not so common uses for them, such as view selection source in mozilla, and calendaring. Speaking of calendaring, I’m still waiting impatiently to see the eventual direction of RSS/RDF and events/calendars. Calendaring is one of those topics that is very simple on the surface, but the more you work with it, the more features and ideas you think of, so much so that you never finish the discussion because it may not be possible for one spec. or syntax to do a good job with all of the different ideas. Take a look at the following links to see what I mean: rss calendar, rdf calendar, rdf calendar mailing list, rdf events and RSS, xhtml, and XSLT.

etechwarehouse.com, a once reputable online computer part store, has jumped the shark and is now accepting orders and money, but not delivering products, which I now know from experience. They have turned off their 800 number, and are under investigation by the Florida Attorney General. Avoid shopping with them. The owner of this fine scam operation also owns techsavings.com, and emscomputing.com, so I believe these operations should be avoided as well. I am not providing links to these operations as I see no reason to improve their search engine ranking.

a list apart, one of the better web developer web-zines, relaunches with three good articles: accessibility with css image replacement, expandable curved tabs in css, and a 4k php image roation script, as well as multiple rss feeds in multiple versions.

A good first attempt at generating css layouts.

The caps lock key has been a silent annoyance for me for many years. It is rare that I need this capability, yet it interferes with my typing at least once a day when I type that key instead of the letter a. After a quick read, I found that this is very easy to fix in Linux, adding remove lock = Caps_Lock to ~/.Xmodmap disables the caps lock key. Windows users have choices for doing this too, with the easiest solution being one of many shareware utilities.

Identifont helps you identify a font family by answering a series of questions. Their system currently includes over 5,000 font families.