tales from the immortal fey.
MyLifeBits Project: "[gordon bell] is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, television, and radio".
paperless... except money, cheques and stocks (what a coward). and most likely bumf – or is that the secret of microsoft's internet loo, the really paperless office?*
and well, yes, certainly: vannevar bush's 1945 memex vision will be fulfilled then. babap! take this lifelong bet from me: it will never happen.
* credits go out to the trashqueen for this one :)
"iamcal publishing empire – This is the place to find articles written by Cal Henderson" (e.g. about javascript programming or blog hacks).
related: colon d, the internet smiley database.
"BoYshiT – la serie la plus merdique du web".
le sofa blogger: "Mirko Driller hat einen hervorragenden FAQ über Hörspiele geschrieben".
hektor, the world's biggest spray printer (print sprayer?), is mentioned in der standard.
Google News Deutschland – where are the rss feeds?
Converting HTML documents to XHTML – An essential XHTML tutorial.
liquid radio is better than ~ design.
mark pilgrim: "history of the tilde".
coïncidentally, the word karass appears again.
on friday yonderboi is in the house.
just as bela butono is, same day, different location. all i need is a decision maker.
suddenly something becomes net art.
...and other amusing stories and beautiful pictures.
the- rapists who pre- ached on wee- knights.
whoever thinks that browser development has stalled, that there are no new features to be developed and all to be done is bug fixing should hold on for a minute – or at least take another look at what donald knuth has achieved with tex.
no kidding intended, what browsers still can learn from knuth's typesetting software is what a readable and well-formed text layout can and should look like.
one key to this is hyphenation.
there's still the challenge to implement a meaningful (semi-automatic) hyphenation mechanism in the browsers. instead of slowly ignoring tags like <wbr/> we should think about how html could support hyphenation by providing even more advanced features.
soft hyphens, ­ or &173; already defined in html 3.2, could be a good start. why not make them working as defined in html 4?
further developments involve advanced text flow control, exact letter positioning and a more meaningful way to apply typesetting styles (the current css features work, but still are ridiculously ponderous).
btw. what about mathematical equations? i wonder why there hasn't been an academic riot against this ugly way of publishing scientific symbols and formulas as images on the web, yet... the above html+ document dates back to 1993 and tex can do this very well since the 1980s, too.
one could also consider the curse of overdosed, flashy "blinkenlights" features in web design as a result of the designers' exodus to multimedi(ev)al exile because they are frustrated by html's lack of typographic support (and i am not thinking of fontmania at all).
maybe such typophile browser capabilities would tempt designers at least a little bit to turn their backs on artificial, user-unfriendly interfaces and face the old challenge of creating excellence in information design again.
ceterum censeo: the web is a text-based medium.