Month: October 2003

Table design vs CSS – easy decision surely?

Caught this in my feeds today. Credit to accessify.com for the link. Its basicly a presentation about why table based design is stupid and why we should be using css. Yes nothing new, but well presentated none the less. Will be useful for my students and maybe management.

Oh I spied this in Zeldman's blog today too. And I'm just fumming with rage! Good on Zeldman with a leveled response, I wouldnt be so leveled with my response to it.

Seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this article….Well, I guess, if you been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with one little web page article, I guess you would be upset as well. Not to mention that they spent all that time redesigning their website without tables only to figure out that in order to get any of that neat stuff like, catalogs, forums, search results, product lists, address books, etc. you got to have tabular data…i.e. TABLES……

Oh please no one was saying tables are completly banshed, but for design layout yes they are! Dont even get me started on the rest of the points!

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Multi channel publishing

Oh my life, this is where i want to be. I cant believe some of the ideas coming out HP's research labs in Bristol. It really makes me want to return to bristol when I hear such forward thinking ideas. Why am I not part of this, I will never know.

So yes it all started with this feed. I started reading it and thought yeah tell us something we dont know. And I actually prefered Adobe's Network publishing term as it was slicker and seemed alot more ubiquous than multi channel publishing. But then I got near the end and realised that not only have HP labs outlined the statergy but also created a opensource tool which works on the same ideaology. Formatting Objects Authoring Tool, or FOA for short.

Written by researcher Fabio Giannetti, FOA is a Java-based authoring tool that allows you to create document templates and styling information without having to write them in the XSLT or XSL-FO programming languages. (XSLT, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, is used to convert XML to other formats, most commonly, to HTML for screen display. XSL-FO, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects, is one component of the XSL language used to describe a format for XML documents.)

This comes at the same time as OpenOffice.org 1.1 final, Microsoft release Office 2003 and the W3C.org finalise XForms.
I'm going to give FOA the full run through while on holiday in germany on the tablet to see how good it is. One thing I did notice while browsing the FOA site is, FOA can only open XSL files created by WH2FO or by itself? Humm, doesnt sound good, but I shall see if that will be a problem or not. Oh I've added myself as a tester for good measure.

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Blojsom Imap fetcher and more blojsom

Bill McCoy wrote a fetcher to drive blojsom from an IMAP server
Sounds like a great idea, but I still need to figure out abstract authentication for blojsom otherwise things like this mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. That also reminds me I need to check out blauth at some point, maybe I'll give it a going over while I'm waiting for my plane to berlin Friday – Saturday morning.

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Custom t-shirts

Because I'm a geek at heart, I've always fancied making my own tshirts with dodgy things which only a few will understand on it. Now I know there are places like think geek and others which do tshirts for geeks already, but there crap in quality. Unfortually the Nike, Adidias and even diadoria tshirts I routinely wear actually have a quality beyond the typical cotton tshirts you get from think geek. If I could only print on top of my nike tshirts i would be very happy.

Anyhow, saying all that, I found this today too. Maybe I'll setup cubicgarden.com tshirts store one day – hehe

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Time travel

I have always been interested in the time. But something kinda of shocked me yesterday at the party I had at my house. Miles didnt believe time travel was at all possible. Hummm i thought, thats odd… All the things I have read of the years of my life have pointed in me in a direction that were not far off. David seemed very interested in why I was a believer and Miles not. Not obvioulsy it was a party and not everyone wanted to hear a ramble about time travel at 1am, but I started thinking of ways to prove certain theorys right.

The one which came up alot was is there anything faster than light? Now I would say no, based on all i know but black hole theroy is still along way from being solved. Anyway, I started thinking again about a quick way to sum up all what I had learned over the years. Then I remembered the documentary from channel4 which pretty much covers the major areas including quantium theory in a simple way. I need to make a handy version available for others one day soon. Maybe Mpeg4 and stick it online?

Interesting enough however, Miles thought I was romancing the idea of time travel than really believing in it.
Could it be true than back to the future, William sleator and others like it have spelled out theorys which convently fit into the frame? I believe not but hey what do i know? maybe little but theres no douht that people are taking Prof Ronald L. Mallett seriously. His paper on the ringed laser system that he has built in fantastic. I highly recommend listening to Prof Mallett here in real audio. Also found the old link about the reality of a time machine. Oh and I know this is old but worth listening to also.

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Nico macdonald uncovered

I came across Nico Macdonald's website the other day. If you dont know who he is, I know him through his AIGA design talks he hosts every month which I usually attend.

Anyway it would seem he doesnt have a blog but some very interesting articles to do with social aspects of technology.
Started to read The future of weblogging which seems to be either inspired or otherway around by the event I attended a while back gone to the blogs. Where I do remember Nico also being too. The dangers of social engineering in design. also was a good read. I also got seduced away by some very tasty links in Nicos communication section, which your'll see more of in later blogs.

Oh yeah, I also noted something interesting in the facilitation section. Its basicly a small events-ish calendar almost in the same form of Louise Fergusons. Except it seems to be written in a more structured way. Just by looking at the code quickly I think I could write a xsl to transform the events out of that page into icals. But I'll have to check it some other time. Too busy reading Guardian arcticles.

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