hermiene.net

Tesseracts are cool.

The HTML tags <blink> and <marquee>, as you probably know, should never be used.

"Note. If blinking content (e.g., a headline that appears and disappears at regular intervals) is used, provide a mechanism for stopping the blinking. In CSS, 'text-decoration: blink' will cause content to blink and will allow users to stop the effect by turning off style sheets or overriding the rule in a user style sheet. Do not use the BLINK and MARQUEE elements. These elements are not part of any W3C specification for HTML (i.e., they are non-standard elements)."

Source: www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WD-WCAG10-TECHS-20000615/css-techniques.html

CSS1, CSS2 and CSS2.1 currently have blink included as a value for the text-decoration property. CSS3 will probably include this as well. This is what CSS1 says about text-decoration: blink;:

"UAs must recognize the keyword 'blink', but are not required to support the blink effect."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#text-decoration

CSS2:

"Conforming user agents are not required to support this value."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#lining-striking-props

CSS2.1:

Conforming user agents may simply not blink the text. Note that not blinking the text is one technique to satisfy checkpoint 3.3 of WAI-UAAG."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#lining-striking-props

CSS3:

"Conforming user agents MAY simply not blink the text."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#text-decoration

So far, I like CSS2.1's statement best. I've not really made up my mind about whether or not CSS3 should include blink; on one hand, it follows the philosophy of separating style from content; on the other hand, it's a usability issue. Blinking text is simply annoying. On the gripping hand, people can enable their user style sheets and override it by doing text-decoration: none;. So I'm honestly not sure.

In addition to this, CSS3 currently has a marquee property. Whether this is a good thing is also debatable. At least it seems to be well thought out.

Fixed my Links page some and added a new section under Web. You might find it Useful.

I figured since everybody else has their own CSS playground, I had to make my own too. So here you go: Welcome to the CSS Alacrity page.

I'm kind of proud of myself when it comes to web design. I've never fallen victim to the common mistakes of making web pages. I've never used frames. Frames are evil; I've never used the <font> tag (it should go without saying that <font> sucks big time); I've never used tables for layout. My navigation bar is in fact a <table>, but I like to call it a table of links. I mean to make this into a list of links with the upcoming redesign, though. Done. I've never tried to hide my source code. Hiding your source is stupid. I forgot to mention that I actually used to abuse <blockquote> just for its left margin on the news items. Not anymore, of course.

In addition to not doing the stuff above, I write clean and structured code which is (in theory) highly accessible. But you already know that.

Changed the font from Verdana to Trebuchet MS. This, and my recent dive into CSS Zen Garden, has inspired me to redesign the site. The great thing about having a personal web site, as opposed to working on a project for someone else (maybe a corporate web site), is that you don't have to worry about deadlines for your projects or the shortcomings of browsers.

Incidentally, I'm now using outline and <q> for the tagline; IE handles neither. So to hell with you, IE. And for you poor saps still using the wretched thing: Upgrade. I suggest Opera or Mozilla. It'll really make your lives a whole lot easier (for reasons already explained).

The density of people yelling "Harry Potter!" at me has increased. I made a graph:

The x-axis is the number of months since my last haircut. The y-axis is the number of people per day yelling "Harry Potter!" at me. I guess this means I have to get a haircut soon.

The Matrix Revolutions was excellent. I thought the movie was going to tie up all the loose ends, but in fact it just posed more questions than it answered. This is ingenious, though. Smith is even cooler than before. Seraph is an ass-kicker. The special effects are better (if it really matters). This movie is (once again) mind-blowing.

I seriously want to strangle IE. My reasons for wanting that are listed here, in no particular order:

1. It doesn't do tabbed browsing.
2. The support for 24- and 32-bit alpha transparent PNG images is non-existent without the PNG hack for IE.
3. It doesn't support <link> very well. It understands linking of style sheets using <link>, but not common relationships like next, previous, contents, help, first, last, glossary, author etc.
4. It doesn't add quotation marks before and after <q>, rendering, among other things, the tagline incomplete. Some people are pragmatic, and would work around this by manually placing quotation marks around quotations. I won't. A quote is a quote, and belongs in a <q> element. IE is the only browser I've found that doesn't support this.
5. It silently ignores <abbr>, the tag for marking up abbreviations. Thankfully we've got <acronym>; bless verbosity.
6. Not a very big deal really, but it interprets dotted as dashed.
7. It supports the illegal CSS properties scroll-bar-*. They are illegal because they're not prefixed with -vendor-. (Refer to the W3C scroll-bar page.) I also don't believe they ever should be legal; it should be up to the end user to style his own scrollbars using something like Style XP or Windows Blinds.
8. It misinterprets alt on images as title and thus displays a tool tip when you hover your mouse over an image with alternate text.
9. It doesn't do :before or :after. (Id est, generated content.)
10. outline doesn't work.
11. The only values for list-style-type it understands are square, circle, disc, decimal, lower-roman, upper-roman, lower-alpha and upper-alpha.

Please think of our children. Don't use IE. Use Opera or Mozilla or something else that's relatively standards compliant.

Yes. I'm a geek. Get over it.

Mark Pilgrim has convinced me to switch to HTML 4.01 Strict. Should I later decide to go back to XHTML, it should only take about 30 minutes or so to redo the thing to make it valid.

Guess who's got tickets to Matrix Revolutions this Wednesday? Correct; yours truly. Expect some sort of pseudo review.