Author: Peter

Writing, Hand: see Penmanship

My writer friend* and I were recently discussing our personal writing styles, particularly in the context of e-mail, and we discovered that we share the same quirk; as she puts it, my fingers… can’t keep up with my brain. This is odd, because we perform the process of writing quite differently: she writes in a very stream-of-consciousness method–quickly, thoughtfully and precisely–whereas I plod along editing and re-editing in what I call stream-of-unconsciousness. (Not unsurprisingly, she’s a better writer than I am.) When we write, though, whether it’s in a continuous maelstrom or in a short burst of inspiration, we’re both limited by the bottleneck of the act of putting fingers to keys.

I’ve always used this as an excuse for my illegible handwriting–either that or that it’s genetic (my father’s handwriting is also difficult to read). Coincidentally, today Jeanne Thelwell pointed out an article in Education Week that suggests that the effort of the physical act of forming letters can interfere with the writer’s thought process. The article is more about helping grade school students to learn language skills, but it struck a chord nevertheless–I find that if I don’t write quickly, and hence illegibly, my mind will dash ahead to other thoughts before I’m done.

* Writer friend doesn’t come close to describing her or the odd relationship we’ve formed, any more than skater friend, almost-married friends, runner friend, or magician friend describe the various levels of bond I share with other people, but it’s germane to the topic at hand.

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.)

Message

I’ve been puzzling over a line in a piece of e-mail I received recently. It was in response to something I wrote (somewhat) in jest, and I don’t know whether it was also meant humourously or whether it was serious… and if it was serious, I don’t know how to interpret it.

There be dragons here. I like dragons.

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.]

Baby steps

Mark Pilgrim has updated his site based on recommendations from Ian Hickson on building a perfect Web log. Following some of their lead, I’ve added the first bit of browser checking to my site using Apache’s mod_rewrite. The module has always scared me, but using what amounts to an identity rewrite I’ve managed to dynamically change the MIME type returned for my weblog pages. Here’s how it works.

RewriteEngine on

This line turns on the rewriting engine for the current directory and all subdirectories below it.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[5-9].* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Amaya/[5-9].*

These two lines define the conditions where the following rule will apply. They look at the HTTP_USER_AGENT variable (i.e. the User-Agent: field in the HTTP request) and check that it begins with Mozilla/ or Amaya/ followed by a major revision that is known or presumed to support the correct MIME type for XHTML files. (I’m working under the assumption that if it’s supported in an earlier version it will continue to be supported in a later one.)

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ - [T=application/xhtml+xml]

Finally, I add the rule itself: any file that has the extension .html gets mapped to exactly the same name. By itself that’s useless and just wastes cycles on each request… except for the T= field that resets the MIME type, which was the original goal.

Easy peasy.

Right now, all of these lines are in a .htaccess file in the weblog directory. If/when I update the rest of the site to a version of XHTML (most of it has been, but I’m not confident enough to switch completely yet), these rules will migrate to my global httpd.conf.