hermiene.net

Violent movies and video games don't turn rebellious adolescent youths into vicious killers. Articles like these do. It spews a whole lot of nonsense, and completely fails to support its claims. For instance:

"Same conformist thinking, same lousy outcome."

Uh-huh. Take a look at, oh, say, the CSS Zen Garden. This is of course the obvious example. Now, take a look at diveintomark, SimpleBits, stopdesign, Meyerweb, Musings, Brainstorms & Raves, mezzoblue, Andy Budd's site, Photo Matt, The Daily Report, and the obligatory CSS examples. Need I go on?

In other news, and unlike David Emberton, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is awesome. You should watch it.

I have changed from using the European date format (dd.mm.yyyy) to using the ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD), on recommendation from Michael Wilcox. ISO 8601 is an international date format used by several companies worldwide, with still more people starting to use it. It has several advantages over the European style, which I will not go into here (you know how to google, don't you?). Incidentally, the fragment identifier for the news items now use #YYYY-MM-DD #nYYYY-MM-DD instead of the old #ddmmyyyy.

Downloaded and tested Opera 7.50 beta 1. It claims to accept application/xhtml+xml, so it gets application/xhtml+xml, which is awesome. However, because of this, it chokes on some MathML character entities, spewing out the offensive code when it encounters the first one, then stops processing the rest of the document. This is, in fact, the way XML parsers should behave when they encounter errors. But it shouldn't choke on those character entities in the first place. Since my navigation bar is at the bottom of the source, it doesn't display on pages with the MathML character entities. That sucks. I've informed Opera about this, and I really hope it gets fixed before the final release.

Woohoo! I made the X-Philes! :-D

Busy, busy, busy.

Completed XHTMLizing and MathMLizing everything, in addition to figuring out how to properly serve application/xhtml+xml to every UA that can handle it. Posts and pages containing MathML have proper notices about it, with a link which directs you to the MathML section of the Colophon page where instructions on how to get MathML working reside. And now, for your viewing pleasure, a random mathematical equation:

$$f'(x) = \lim_{{\Delta}x\to0} \frac{f(x + {\Delta}x) - f(x)}{{\Delta}x}$$

Of course, this change means IE fucks something up. I mean, of course! It's beginning to feel more and more like a natural law. Now, the aforementioned annoyance doesn't really matter much, it's just dead ugly. At the very top, it displays the following characters: ]>. I know how to fix it, but I won't. Why? Because that means more code. Those characters are part of an entity I've defined, namely &m;. I can use this entity in the xmlns attribute which has to appear in every single <math> start tag instead of the inferior (and long) URL http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML.

Ok, I've made the decision: As soon as I finish converting everything from HTML to XHTML, my documents will be sent as application/xhtml+xml, with no content type rewriting magic done server side. This means, as you probably already know, that IE users will be "blocked" out of my site. Incidentally, I've changed my philosophy somewhat. I no longer see it as me blocking users from my site; the content is out there, and it's viewable. It's your software that sucks. Get, something, better.

Actually... no. That was done in a blind rage. Never mind. I'm not going to do it. I'll use server side magic to serve application/xhtml+xml to Mozilla and text/html to the rest. The nice people in #web reminded me that people using text-only browsers will also be prompted to download it, which just isn't nice.

Added access keys to my site. Details on the Colophon page.

Removed the XHTML commandments page. It was really just silly.

I made a new design. Like it? I do. I was very inspired by Even. He really knows how to properly design web pages! April fool! The April fool style sheet is linked to as an alternate style sheet, so if your browser has that feature, you can select it.