Current Glamour: The Dot Com Chair
Current ALA: MSN, Opera & Web Standards
Recent Project: Standards–Compliant Style Guide
Recent Thinking: Redesign on a Shoestring
 
17 November 2001
[3 am]
My Glamorous Life No. 67: The Dot Com Chair. In which we sit and spin.

For your international pleasure, here’s a instant Japanese translation of this morning’s Glamour. (Geeks, View Source for more.) :::
 
15 November 2001
[5 pm | 3 pm]
My Glamorous Life No. 66: Room for Living. My Glamorous Life is an Instant Memoir, delivered on the installment plan. It’s personal, but it’s not a tell–all. (Would you tell all?)

After five years of artistic and literary collaboration, Born Magazine is throwing a party. With 200 creative projects to its credit, Born remains one of the web’s best and most important independent sites. :::
 
[2 pm]
This week’s issue of A List Apart has been updated to include a note about the unfortunate scrolling bug in MSIE6. First reported in ALA Issue 106, the scrolling bug randomly cuts off text on some XHTML and CSS–compliant pages. We hope Microsoft will be able to fix it soon. :::
 
[6 am]
A young Afghan woman shows her face in public for the first time in five years. :::
 
[1 am]
According to an Unofficial FAQ, AOL is not to blame for the Netscape 4.x “upgrades” still plaguing the web. A company called iPlanet churns out the “new” Netscape 4 browsers in response to corporate client requests. Those must be fun companies to work at. (Hat tip: Andrew Mutch.) :::
 
14 November 2001
[3 pm]
AOL/Netscape continues to poop out dry little “upgrades” to its moribund 4.0 browser. The latest is Communicator 4.79, released a mere seven days ago.
        We fail to understand how the troubled company can hope to build market share for its W3C–compliant Netscape 6.2 browser, let alone compete with Microsoft’s offerings, so long as it continues to moisturize the dry turd that is its ancient 4.0 model.
        As long as there is a “new” 4.x browser on the market, millions will use it. And the longer they use it, the longer clients will insist on “backward–compatible” (i.e., nonstandard, frequently inaccessible) markup and code. The engineers at Netscape realize this, even if the marketers at AOL do not.
        Like their colleagues at Opera and Microsoft, the engineers at Netscape have been sweating to produce a browser free of the sins of the past. It’s tragic to see their hard work undercut by suits who seem remarkably unaware of, well, frankly, everything. (Hat tip: Mark Howells.) :::
 
12 November 2001
[10 am]
NYC’s air space, bridges, and tunnels have been shut down, and a Level one emergency declared, following a plane crash in Queens at 9:17 a.m. :::
 
11 November 2001
[8 pm]
“The Future Independent Web: Visions of What’s To Come,” launches Monday 12 November at independentsday.org. Beginning at 7 am EST, new essays will appear every six hours. Event site designed by Afterchaos; project coordinated by Sooz and Carole. :::
 
10 November 2001
[noon]
The Way We Were: a snapshot of zeldman.com from 1998. :::
 
[10 am]
We’ve revised and updated ALA’s About the Buttons per reader feedback.

Thanks for all the mail. Sadly, we lack time to answer most of it. We sincerely regret this. (Why does “sincerely” seem like such an insincere word? We don’t know. We don’t have time to think about that, either.)

We didn’t even have time to catch yesterday’s Photoshop Tennis match, pitting Joshua Davis against Joseph Kral, with kibbitzing by Dean Allen. Time is not our friend. :::
 
9 November 2001
[1 am]
In Issue No. 127 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: MSN, Opera & Web Standards, by Håkon Wium Lie.
        In a special editorial for ALA, Håkon Lie, the father of Style Sheets and CTO of Opera, debunks Microsoft’s claim that web standards have anything to do with the blocking of Opera and Mozilla users from MSN.com.
        Though he is hardly an impartial observer, Lie’s argument is worth reading, because it is based on the time–honored method of comparing a product to the claims made for it. Included is a chart testing all 63 top–level pages at MSN.com for standards compliance. Interestingly, not one of the 63 pages complies.

In other ALA news, our beloved discussion forums are down for much–needed repairs and improvements. :::