16 March 2001
[5 am]
In Issue 101 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: SMIL WHEN YOU PLAY THAT—a gentle introduction to emerging web technologies SVG and SMIL. Plus HOW TO BE SOOPAFAMOUS—a blast from ALA's past. :::
 
15 March 2001
[2 pm]
Sweet friends at SXSW, adieu. Steaming pile of work, bonjour. ::: If you've written to us in the past week, please be patient. There are 9237 unopened messages in our Eudora folder, and it may take a while to go through them all. :::
 
9-14 March 2001
[4 am]
In a few hours, we'll be leaving for the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin Texas. Here's a schedule:

Site updates and what passes for email correspondence will resume when we return. A complete SXSW Panel Grid is available for your pleasure. More information on personal appearances is available on the World Tour page.

::: Newly discovered at Web Techniques: Browser Upgrade Initiative Sparks Controversy, by Yvonne L. Lee. One of the earliest news articles written about the WaSP Browser Upgrade campaign, this one focuses on the campaign's "forced upgrade" aspect and associated negative reactions to it. Though the article is only a few weeks old, the campaign has come a long way since then.
        We would have mentioned the article when it came out, but we spoke to so many journalists in the first few days, we could not keep track of them all—and reporters (even good ones like Yvonne L. Lee) almost never tell you when a story goes live. :::
 
8 March 2001
[7 pm]
If we could win any award on the web, we'd want to win the 5k. You can't win the 5k by outspending your competitors. Traffic plays no part. Commercial potential plays no part. Celebrity involvement won't help a bit.
        The 5k honors creative excellence in design and production, and the only requirement is that your site weigh 5k or less (that's 5120 bytes). Sounds impossible, considering that on the average corporate site, the front page alone is typically 32K and higher. But last year's 5k competition produced some of the most remarkable sites we've ever seen on the web.
        The 2001 5k competition ends Sunday, 8 April—one month from today. Don't miss out. :::
 
[4 am]
My Glamorous Life Number. 35: A Special Snowflake.

Updated Amazon book link. Updated meager book mini-site. The Amazon book cover image is no longer up to date, but what is? The cover on the mini-site is closer in tone, but it too is not the actual cover. More will be revealed.

A List Apart is significantly faster now, following a major bandwidth upgrade courtesy of Webcore Labs.

Gold from the referrer logs: this timely, well-written, and very pretty weblog. :::
 
7 March 2001
[4 am]
The MacSlash Zeldman interview.

Is it something we said? Amazon has decided that our book is out of print. Actually, it's not out of print. Actually, it's about to be published. There is a difference. Not only that, they've listed the publication date as 1901.

On a happier note, the A List Apart forums are working again—post early and post often. Meanwhile, the alternative invisible object has been crash-tested on every conceivable browser and platform, and will shortly show up in the Source at ALA, and on the Developer Tips page at webstandards.org.

So here it is, 4 a.m. We're responding to client RFPs, updating webstandards.org and ALA, and trying to correct absurdities in the Amazon database. We've updated the WaSP developer tips page, but you can't see it yet, due to a sudden FTP access problem. Sometimes we long for a simpler life. :::
 
6 March 2001
[8 pm]
New W3C working draft: Syntax of CSS rules in HTML's "style" attribute. "We expect that CSS3 will recommend double colons for pseudo-elements." We love it when they talk that way.

Speaking of double colons, A List Apart is currently experiencing Cold Fusion and standards-related blockages.
        A Cold Fusion programming error prevents you from posting messages in the forum. Whose purpose is to allow you to post messages. Basically, at this moment, we're providing Network Solutions-like service (oh!), but unlike them, we're aware of the problem and working to fix it (oh!).
        Meanwhile, earlier this week, we discovered that IE5/Win crashed when encountering a valid, optional OBJECT tag attribute. So we removed the optional attribute, causing IE5/Mac to go haywire. Removing another optional attribute fixed both IEs, but caused Netscape 6 and Mozilla to display error messages. Then Opera launched into a rendition of "I Wanna Know What Love Is," and all hell broke loose.
        A new, standards-compliant solution is still being tested but seems to work well. Meanwhile, the site itself works fine. Except for the forums.

Between these crises and occasional bits of actual paying work, we're beginning to experience social vertigo over the upcoming SXSW conference. Put simply, we want to hang with everybody and see everything and it's already making us dizzy. :::
 
[2 am]
Mockup: 3-panel layout in CSS, after Porter Glendinning. For demo purposes only. Kids, get your parents' permission before calling. :::