Do it!

Like many other people I know, once a song gets stuck in my head it’s there for a good long time. My sister came up with a method to get rid of those songs, though: sing The Hustle (clip from the Seventies Dance Music Page) to yourself until the other music is gone. (The most important part of those instructions is to yourself!) Of course, then you’ve got The Hustle going through your head, but that’s a small price to pay.

Tonight, thanks to Mark Pilgrim, I get to see if it actually works. I really really really hope it does.

Driven

Having just travelled for an hour and a half through blowing snow on slippery and snow-covered highways, it would be too easy right now to complain about stupid drivers, be they Canadian, American or truck, so I won’t.

Joke

The anthropologist had arrived in a jungle village the day before, and had gotten no sleep the previous night because of the drumming. Hoping it was a unique cultural event, he asked one of the children about it, but the only explanation he could get was Is very bad when drums stop.

The next day, more tired from the noise of the previous night, he asked one of the adults when the drumming would stop so he could get some rest, but again was met with Is very bad when drums stop.

Another night passed, and again the researcher had gotten no sleep. Exhausted and frustrated, he went to the village council and implored them to make the ceaseless pounding stop. Is very bad when drums stop, they told him.

But why‽ he pleaded. They go on all day and all night, and I can’t take it any more!

Is very bad when drums stop, the council’s most learned elder explained. When drums stop, bass solo begins.

Apologies to Emm, Andrew and all the rest of you. Basses (and bassists) are cool. I love the bass. But I love the joke more.

Sweet compulsion

’Cause it’s so clear to me that you dearly deserve to be
The highest brightest peal in the church bells
Well you’re singing aren’t you
Yeah I think I saw you
And it’s the sweetest nicest thing I think I’ve ever seen

Lenni Jabour is a real sweetheart, and grand things are in the offing for her, events and developments I wish I could share here. All will become clear in the fullness of time, but until then I’m bound by the friendship of a kindred spirit to say nothing further.

Who owns the digits?

Gervase Markham asks Who owns the alphabet?. Being more of a numbers guy myself, I was curious about digits. Similar disclaimers apply.

First Hit Description Comment Honourable Mentions (top 10)
0 The W3C Validator A free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. An appropriate start, perhaps due to XHTML 1.0? Netscape, Microsoft, Business 2.0, an AOL error page (!)
1 The W3C Validator A free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. Hmm. XHTML 1.0 and 1.1? VH1, Bobby, Mozilla.org, BBC 1
2 The W3C Validator A free service…. The W3 again. Weird coincidence? (Top10) Many others have found that having a 2 in your name doubles your fun (and PageRank, apparently). Learn2.com, Internet2, Playstation.com
3 The W3C Validator A free service and so forth. And again the W3. Conspiracy, anyone? 3Com, QuickTime, id.
4 The W3C Validator Yadda yadda yadda. This just isn’t funny any more. What, does the World Wide Web Consortium own Google? (Top10) Finally, some new contenders. Macromedia, Microsoft, PHP, United States Postal Service
5 Macromedia Servlet/JSP engines. Description from their site. Oh, and a little thing called Flash, too. (Top10) All the old regulars. Microsoft, Apple, Opera
6 Macromedia Servlet/JSP engines. Does anyone else sense a pattern? Netscape, Microsoft, Motel 6, Adobe
7 Netscape All NEW Netscape 7.0 – Netscape’s FASTEST browser! (Top 10) Finally some new sites again. Real, Jasc, 7-Eleven
8 Real One easy way to play every major media format in one amazing Player. (Top10) Wow. A Your browser sucks! page. I thought those were dead. Super 8 Motels, ISC BIND, WinZip, SPring-8 (synchrotron), entropy8zuper.org
9 Number Nine Number Nine Visual Technology has ceased operation. The company has been out of business for years and it’s still number one. (Top10) Finally a category not dominated by corporations. Too bad it’s the last. 9-11peace.org, The Nine Planets, Plan 9 OS

Punctuation

I have a question on punctuation (actually element nesting order) based on a recent post by Jonathan Delacour. (I re-discovered his weblog through Mark Pilgrim’s cool New Door tool.) It’s along the lines of Fowler’s question of the right order as between quotation marks and stops which is why the term punctuation came to mind.

Jonathan quotes Joe Clark’s explanation of the correct use of the <cite></cite> element: it’s meant to mark up titles and words and phrases, as I’ve done above with the word punctuation and the title New Door. (Until now I’ve been in the habit of using <q></q> for titles, or sometimes just <a></a> if they’re links, but I’m now a believer in the One True Citing Style.) Looking at his source, though, I see he puts the <cite></cite> element around his <a></a> element: <cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571150X/">Building Accessible Websites</a></cite>. Perhaps I’m in a pedantic mood from reading Ian Hickson’s Markup Challenge posts, or maybe I’m just proving that none are so fervent as the recent convert (I wish wish wish I could remember where I read that line not two days ago—note to self: blog early and often), but I think <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571150X/"><cite>Building Accessible Websites</cite></a> is more correct—it’s the title that is being cited, not the link to the title.

On a related note, should citations such as Fowler’s above be <cite>Fowler's</cite> or <cite>Fowler</cite>'s? I use the former; I suspect the latter is correct, but what will a layout engine do?

(Congratulations, Jonathan, you’re the random target of the day. Feel free to disparage my weblog as necessary—there’s lots to pick on here, not least my obsession with the trivial and mundane.)

Walking

Wait a minute. I remember asking about this. Ian actually advocates against using application/xhtml+xml for XHTML pages; instead, he supports the use of text/xml. And, as he points out in the appendix and Mark Pilgrim does in his article, UAs (browsers to the rest of us) that support XHTML sent as application/xhtml+xml all support XHTML sent as text/xml too. As an added bonus, this means that TrackBack code can now be validly inserted into the file instead of hacked in inside comments.

Off to update my templates and CSS, and track down those nasty character entity references.

[Later: D’oh! First post in valid-XHTML-land and it gets screwed up by a macro expansion inside an attribute. Worked around in anticipation of a fix.]

[Even later: Following Ian’s comment, I’m back to the original application/xhtml+xml. My thoughts on text/xml allowing TrackBack inline actually still apply. And I’m still trying to figure out Pingback for Movable Type, based on Stuart Langridge’s code. Perhaps Stumbling would have been a better title.]