Presentation, semantics and structure in markup

Posted on October 18, 2003 by Pace Arko

Smarter people than me have been thinking about the separation of presentation and structure in Web documents in the last week. Some of these arguments seem like angels dancing on pinheads. For me it’s simple. The goal should be to organize and assemble your Web documents with the least amount of markup and code possible. I think that elegance in markup and code is a goal we can all agree with. Layout tables are semantically meaningless bulk that can now be done without, thanks to the elegance of using a separate markup specifically designed for presentation, CSS. If this makes your documents semantically pure and more accessible to assistive technology, so much the sweeter.

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Installed the style switcher I promised.

Posted on October 10, 2003 by Pace Arko

There are still a few bugs to work out. For example, it’s not planting a cookie in my browsers. This needs to happen for the selected style to persist. I also have to install it for all the pages that are outside my web log script. Anyway, it works, sort of, Just invoke the link text, “Turn Off Style,” to see this site as Netscape 4 or Arachne sees it.

The whole point to this is to provide a way to make my site more accessible to people with mobile phones, screen readers or screen magnifiers. Turning off the style snaps my pages into a linear, content-first, navigation-second layout. Combined with keyboard shortcuts to quickly jump to navigation, if needed, this should make my site more accessible for people with motor impairments too. Once I get the bugs out here, I plan to transfer this code to the sites I maintain for others.

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Once again Hollywood fails to take a chance.

Posted on October 9, 2003 by Pace Arko

Okay. I just got wind that they are going to make a movie about a murder mystery in a future of ubiquitous robots. They’ve got the audacity to call it I, Robot. Now, I think it’s really cool that they’ve got Will Smith to play one of the lead characters in the movie. Hollywood’s portrayal of the future definitely needs more people of color in it–sometimes it seems like the future only takes place in Finland or something.

But here is my problem with them calling this movie I, Robot. Look who they have playing Susan Calvin. If you ever read any of Asimov’s robot stories that feature Calvin, you know she didn’t look anything like this. Lois Smith, the geneticist in Minority Report, seems infinitely more appropriate to me. Someone like Kate Reid, who played the microbiologist in The Andromeda Strain, is much closer to Asimov’s idea of Calvin. If we need someone younger, fine–how ’bout, Kathy Bates or Camryn Manhiem? Or someone thin, yet very plain looking. Calvin wasn’t a barbie doll. She was a devastatingly intelligent, tough, and yes unattractive, spinster of a gal who had no patience for idiocy. That’s how Asimov wrote her. That’s her appeal to me.

Now, I don’t have any problem with attractive actors or actresses in film, but what they’ve put together here for I, Robot isn’t what Asimov wrote. Why is Hollywood so afraid of putting older, or less attractive, women in stereotype-defying roles? Ah, never mind. I’ll probably go see the flick anyway and simply ignore any attempts to link it with Asimov’s work.

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US Automobile Companies Look Stupid Again

Posted on October 3, 2003 by Pace Arko

When California passed its low-emission vehicle laws, I made a prediction: US auto makers would whine and drag their feet and then look really stupid as European and Asian car companies roared ahead with the necessary technology at competitive prices. Japanese hybrid cars are selling like gangbusters.

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The BBC reverses the polarity of the neutron flow

Posted on September 30, 2003 by Pace Arko

This just in from the Wire of Insanely Cool News, after a forteen year hiatus, the Beeb decides to revive Dr. Who.

My aunt introduced this science fiction series to me, during an evening of watching KQED, way back in grade school in the early Seventies, during the reign of Jon Pertwee. I know I said that science fiction is dead only a few weeks ago, but I’ll be watching for this to syndicate on Public Television or the SciFi Network in the months to come!

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Verisign breaks the Internet

Posted on September 17, 2003 by Pace Arko

This news is a few days old but still important. Verisign, which owns Network Solutions, has added a wildcard record to the .COM and .NET top level domain DNS zones. What this means is that fighting spam is harder, e-mail address resolution is harder and Web domain typos give Verisign free advertising. This stinks, right?

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Science fiction is very nearly dead

Posted on September 15, 2003 by Pace Arko

This might be news to some people, but science fiction, one of the major literary forms of the XX century, is dead. I say this a former, rabid fan of hard SF. SF really has nowhere left to go. Why? Because the future is going to get very, very, very weird and there’s not really a lot we can do about it. I mean the future is going to get incomprehensibily weird, weird beyond the human ken, and this is hard to write stories about.

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I don't believe in American exceptionalism

Posted on September 4, 2003 by Pace Arko

What is American exceptionalism and how come I don’t believe in it? Well there are probably a lot of people who will argue with my definition, but here it is:

  • The United States is not merely unique, it is special, alone among the countries of the Earth.

I don’t buy this.

If you think about it honestly, there really isn’t anything that exists in the United States that doesn’t exist in some form elsewhere in the world or in history. We didn’t invent democracy. We didn’t invent human rights. We didn’t invent capitalism. We didn’t invent religious tolerance. Arguably the only things we invented are pop music forms like bluegrass, the blues, jazz and rock, and even those rapidly spread into the world and then came back to us greatly transformed.

Think what world would have been like if the United States never existed. Yes, history would be totally different, but I think there would be some trends that would have emerged anyway. The Industrial Revolution would have happened anyway. European powers would have still been struggling for dominance and this would have eventually lead to global war. The world would have been colonized and then decolonized. Technical progress would still have occurred, perhaps more slowly, perhaps even more rapidly, but it would have occurred. In other words the world wouldn’t have been better or worse, it would have just been different. That’s all.

We are not God’s chosen people. We are not the only best and brightest in the world. We are not exceptional. Yes, we have the greatest concentration of economic, military and therefore political and cultural power in the world currently, but this is by no means permanent. One only has to look at the rapid advances of China and India to realize that. The United States may not last forever, and the world isn’t doomed simply because we cease to exist. We are not always right. And sometimes we need to listen to the rest of the world. We can be arrogant and hypocritical in our ideals. But to be fair, every country on the face of the Earth and in the depths of history has been guilty of arrogance and hypocrisy. We are not exceptional in that either. We are unique, but then so is everybody else.

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The hard road towards semantic purity

Posted on August 28, 2003 by Pace Arko

There were two articles on Web today that inspired a long story in me. One was about the implications of semantic Web design and the other was about Web accessibility and standards. For me, the tone of the articles was positive; they seemed to say that persistence pays. Anyway, here’s my story.

Back in 1997, after dabbling with designing my own Web pages off and on for over a year, I was hired by a friend to design Web document that were accessible to people with disabilities. Specifically, he wanted my help to redesign a corporate site to be a model of accessible design. I didn’t yet know how to design Web documents accessibly, but he gave me the chance to learn. This started a learning process that still hasn’t left me today.

Writing hypertext markup is easy, comparatively speaking. That’s why the Web expanded so fast. Writing hypertext markup properly is hard if you have to unlearn a lot of bad habits. This was where I was in late 1997. In the process of removing my bad habits, I read of a group of smart designers who were striving to design the Web properly. In early 1998, after reading about these smart designers, I discovered a group dedicated to the shocking idea that following markup standards might be a good idea. I learned about XML and Tim Berners-Lee’s ideal of semantic documents and Web data. I learned that accessible Web design and standards compliance were, and are, deeply linked. I learned of and came to accept a world view that was at odds with the realities of the day.

Let me give you more context. This was 1998 and Microsoft had just scattered the dirt on the fresh grave of Netscape. Navigator 4 had lost the technology race to Internet Explorer 4. Netscape lost the technology race in at least two key ways: support for both cascading style sheets and the new accessibility features of HTML 4. If I wanted to an expert in accessible Web design, I had to focus on and appreciate and condemn the ways in which Internet Explorer support or failed to support CSS and HTML 4’s accessibility features.

To quickly summarize the last 5 years, I had to wait for things to catch up. I was very happy when Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh came out. I was very happy when Internet Explorer 6 for Windows finally corrected many of the lingering bugs the persisted since Internet Explorer 4 for Windows. I was happy that Opera 3 and then all the later versions of Opera served as persistent though minor itch in the side of Microsoft’s Web development. I was happy the Mozilla project was launched; I expected big things from it. By the year 2001, when Mozilla 1 was released, we lonely idealists were vindicated for our support in the dark years.

So I am unafraid that Microsoft has halted further development of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. I am unafraid that Microsoft has halted further development on stand-alone versions of Internet Explorer for Windows. We have alternatives now. The fight for standards is nearly won. As long as I and growing numbers of other designers keep building stuff to follow the standards of XHTML and CSS 2, the browser makers and the assistive technology builders will have something to focus on and support.

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The opposite of solipsism

Posted on August 23, 2003 by Pace Arko

A solipsist, to oversimplify, is the ultimate skeptic. To a solipsist, empiricism is bogus. An independent reality cannot be logically proved to exist, and even the past could be an illusion that merely accounts for the present state of mind of the observer. The only thing a solipsist is certain of is personal subjective experience–I think, therefore I am and everything else is hearsay.

So what is the opposite of this position? Well, to admit the idea that everything that is logically consistent, empirically exists–sort of a super-platonism.

I think both of these positions have problems. Solipsists have to explain why the illusion that is reality is being perpetrated. And the super-platonists (If I find a better word for this position, I’ll revise this post. And by the way, I pointed to something like this before.) have to explain why we are experiencing this particular reality an not some other–a sort of generalization of the “why this particular subjective experience and not some other,” question.

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