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IBM and the Linux desktop
Found at the Web Standards Project, the tale of the well intentioned IBM Linux desktop challenge.
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Changes
If you’re nerdy enough to check the source code of this site you will have noticed some changes in the last few days. This warrants proper explanation, and I’ll provide that over the next few days. In the meantime, if you notice any ‘funny stuff’ on the site, let me know .
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Amazon job notice, circa 1994
Found via kottke, a post from Jeff Bezos looking for developers for Amazon …!!
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HTML element madness
After a quick brush up on my html element attributes by having a look at the W3 Schools html element list, I made a few discoveries. There are several areas that I need to revisit, mostly related to forms.
I also found an alternative to W3 Schools html reference at www.htmlref.com.
Some things I learnt:
There are elements that have only a subtle difference from one another. For instance, abbr and acronym. One is for abbreviations (say wgtn instead of Wellington), the other for acronyms (WCC instead of Wellington City Council). I couldn’t help wondering if it was really necessary to have both.
Likewise, q is similar to blockquote, but more straight-forward in that the former is a short quote and the latter is a long quote.
The head element has an attribute ‘profile’. Profile points to a URL containing a meta data profile. I could not find a concise explanation of this – although the best description is in the HTML spec itself. If you have a practical example, let me know.
And I discovered the joys of the dir attribute. Freaking great!
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New Zealand – archipelago or continent?
While trying to remember how the hell to spell archipelago I came across an article that states:
though one usually thinks of New Zealand as an island or archipelago, it is one of the world’s smallest continents, defined biogeographically as a land mass within which birds and mammals can achieve completed speciation
A quick Google reveals that NZ is referred to as a small continent in a couple of places .
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Wellington Earthquakes
Wellington has been hit by a number of small earthquakes over the last few days. This morning there was a 5.5 which got me out of bed (at 8am I might add). I listened to a seismologist on the radio talking about the quake. He was asked about a theory that we cling to in Wellington, that small quakes are good because they release pressure and delay the inevitable ‘big one’. He was not exactly reassuring. He said that this can be the case, but that when a fault line ‘fails’, it can upset surrounding fault lines and contribute towards triggering them.
Yes, there is a downside to living on a archipelago that borders two tectonic plates.
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blockquote and cite
Noticed a comment from Henrick on 456bereastreet.com about using the “cite” attribute in the blockquote element. Sounds like a good idea to me. Don’t think I’d ever heard of it before – so I guess I should really have a look through the html element list and brush up on my attributes….
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World’s land mass unfolded on a map
Found this wicked map of the land mass of the planet laid out without the oceans.
