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030425 14:58 Web development : accessibility

Latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, dated 24 April 2003. Haven't had time to look at it closely yet. Allegedly changed priorities, but more on structure and navigation. The issues of standards, usability and accessibility are melting into one - as it should be. It's all accessibility.

030423 23:58 Web development : accessibility

Joe Clark: Accessibility implications of digital rights management.

DRM masquerades as a method of protecting authors' copyrights but, in practice and according to published proposals, actually limits the copyright freedoms of the general public, a group that includes people with disabilities and others who rely on accessibility features like captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.

030423 22:57

Today Germany was the hottest country in Europe.
Today I killed the first two mosquitos.

030423 22:21 Internet

People have given up their anonymity online, argues Matt Haughey in 'Growing old online'. (via sylloge)

It's true. I've been wondering about that too recently. People never used to use their real names online. But now our cool aliases are forgotten. We own domain names made up of our real names and think that "If everyone has a long history in Google, it's not that bad for any single person to have their life indexed". In fact, this is probably the reason we make it possible for others to identify and find us. It's not an insider club anymore. Now it's mainstream. Advertising.

And while we might be feeling a bit soppy about the loss of the old school, nerdy and - let's face it - elitist privacy, here's a somewhat related thought by Danny O'Brien:

While I manage to fend off pop-up windows with Mozilla, and spam with Spamassassin, most people don't know about those programs. They live in the "hinternet", that shanty-town of X10 pop-ups and porn adware, and endless, endless Hotmail and Yahoo spam. They're tourists in the world of the Net, and like any tourist, they rarely get a good guide. They're just taken down the back streets by disreputable but flashy showmen, and robbed for everything they're worth. And it's true, we don't do as much as we should for them, because we're okay in our little burbclaves.

030423 21:38 Animals versus humans

It's been a long time since I posted a 'animals versus humans' story. As usual it about resources: Thirsty baboons attack girls in Kenya for water. (via Anthropology in the News)

"This problem is not only confined to the area where the attack took place, but is in most parts of the district which is experiencing severe shortage of water and pasture that threatens both the lives of human beings and wild animals"...

030423 14:51 Browsers

News.com celebrates Mosaic's 10th birthday: How the Mosaic browser triggered a digital revolution. It takes a look at some new and alternative browsers (Safari, Mozilla, Opera, browsers for small devices...) and of course there's the obligatory nostalgia, mention of the great browser wars of the turning millennium and a look at the future:

Have you hugged your Web browser today?

Probably not. It's been years since the browser was new and exciting for the average Web surfer. Browsers have become a bland commodity, dominated by Microsoft's sturdy but stodgy Internet Explorer. Internet innovation, meanwhile, is increasingly shoved off to specialized, new applications such as instant messaging clients, media players and Weblog viewers.

Well, I have. I hug my browser every day. I love my browser and there's always something new to add.

030419 13:02 US world domination

Syria can relax, looks like Cuba might be next: Cuba rejects call for UN envoy.

It argues that the resolution passed by 24 votes to 20 in Geneva on Wednesday was nothing more than the result of US pressure.

030418 23:37 War

Robert Fisk, who I've been reading since I had to go to the UK at the beginning of the war, who, in my opinion, represents the most honest and outspoken voice from the inside of Baghdad, is currently Number 11 on blogdex. I'm glad to know that there are more people interested in the real story.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I.

Fisk has even got a fan site.

030418 22:34 Web development

Been busy moving all my websites to a new host: Gradwell.com in the UK, which offers an excellent developer account for only a quarter of the cost of my previous reseller account. Everything went smoothly although it took me all week and I'm a bit geeked out right now.

In the meantime I almost missed the winner of the W3C redesign contest that was announced a few days ago. It's totally obvious why it was chosen. It's the only one that doesn't even remotely look like the W3C website that we are all so bored with. An excellent design, even if the colour choice makes it look a bit 'heavy', but that's just my personal opinion. Definitely worth taking a deeper look at if you're into CSS design. Good print stylesheet too.

030413 00:13 Society

Just when you thought we live in more enlightened times... In North Dakota unmarried couples are not allowed to live together.

Cohabitation in North Dakota is listed as a sex crime, along with rape and incest. Violations of the cohabitation law carry a maximum 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

030412 22:02 Environment

Water privatisation not profitable. Too bad.

...multinational after multinational stepped up to report problems of water privatisation and cast doubt on its inclusion in GATS. Thames Water got the ball rolling by dissociating itself from GATS, while Vivendi rubbished World Bank projections and Suez said it had tried everything to turn the poor into profitable customers but to no avail.

030411 22:05 Science Fiction

I'm pretty much finished with Enterprise. I watched The Crossing last night and just couldn't believe the ending. What happened to 'Let's find a mutually satisfying solution', to 'Is there a way we can help you?' No, they just blow'em up. Have they met a single species yet that they made friends with? Maybe to keep the timeline clean they just make a big mess so that Picard can later come along and clean it up with his diplomacy, ethics and compassion. (Think about it - he didn't even destroy the Borg when he had the chance.) Or, considering the theory that SciFi represents the current frame of thinking, is this really the frame of mind the Americans are in at the moment?

030408 18:37 Freedom of information / Privacy

Librarians versus the Patriot Act Part 2. First some libraries started to post signs warning visitors that librarians might be required to hand over data about library users to the FBI, now they are shredding this data daily (NYT, free reg.req.). Go librarians, defenders of our privacy and our right to information!

030402 21:45 Democracy

I grew up believing that if people made their opinion clear that governments (our representatives, I like to point out) would not start a war. Recent events forced me to accept reality. James Moore, the writer of this article doesn't share my dissolution. He sees the global social movement as a developing second superpower.

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the "will of the people" in a global social movement.

Weird too that he seems to be calling for new institutions to represent the second superpower. Isn't that what governments were supposed to be? Here's how it would be different from the current system:

Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of "emergent democracy" that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual-making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.

Well, this superpower failed to prevent this war, will it prevent the next one?

On the other hand, this thing already seems to be gaining momentum. Too late to be an April Fools joke, someone suggest nominating John Perry Barlow as candidate for President of the United States who is supported by the worldwide community of web-enabled activists.

030402 19:52 Web development / Browsers

Best April Fools (thank heavens!) this year: Safari to Drop Table Support.

For all sites that attempt to nest tables more than four levels deep, Safari will play a loud flushing sound, and it will remove itself from the dock and erase itself from your system in order to protect itself from your bad taste.

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