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Index DOT Css and Index DOT Html: "These sites attempt to collect as much information as possible in one location about the HTML and CSS languages, the popular browsers that support them, and the histories behind each. The site evolves along with the specifications and browsers that it documents - it began as a simple reference on the HTML language, but its purpose has grown as the languages and browsers it covers have evolved in popularity and complexity."
The use and abuse of Flash part 92: I have been meaning to hype the hell out of clock din, my old amigo Gord High's amazing make-your-own-beats place.
tranquileye.radio.1 is now all ambient and wild at Live365.
I have a long-standing desire to switch over to Blogger for the Web log thing, as much to hang with the "in crowd" as anything, and those who know me understand. But I want to add six years of old blogs to the thing and darn it but they have no feature that does that, yet.
Zope.org: "Zope is the leading Open Source web application server. Zope enables teams to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic web-based business applications such as intranets and portals. Zope makes it easy to build features such as site search, news, personalization, and e-commerce into your web applications."
I like WAP and WML. I like the notion of organizing sites into "stacks" of small pages that are all downloaded at once. But somehow, in a North American context, I'm not all that sure what we'll end up using it for. I have done my own WML project for tranquileye, and it felt like trying things out, not actually communicating. Perhaps WML/WAP will have some applications in low bandwidth environments, maybe in the South.
"PyWeb.com provides Wireless Services on ASP model. Targeted for Webmasters and Wireless users, the services are free on our Web site."
PHP Resource Index: complete scripts, functions and classes, documentation, tutorials, and message boards concerning PHP.
In the other important election still to be decided:
The Canadian Alliance Party and their charming creationist leader, Stockwell Day, is proposing that if 3% of the Canadian electorate request it, the government should be obliged to hold a referendum on just about any issue. Up until now, many Canadians had been concerned that under a Alliance regime they would be facing endless referenda on limiting abortion rights, immigration, banning gay marriage, native rights, and so on. It was a sad, depressing prospect, as anyone living in Quebec knows.
Last week, however, the CBC television program This Hour Has 22 Minutes found a "hidden issue" I and many other "silent Canadians" can support: changing Mr. Day's first name from Stockwell to Doris.
If you are a Canadian citizen, add your name at the 22 Minutes Web site. - Discuss at Metafilter
hillmancurtis :: book: Web site for Hillman Curtis' book on Flash, Flash Web Design.
While Bush may squeak out a victory in the current Florida recount, some people in Palm Beach are rumbling about the way their ballot was set up. Take a look yourself, and see how the South Florida Sun Sentinel.com illustrated the ballot confusion.
Even describing the problem is a bit of a challenge: The second hole on the right does not correspond to the second candidate on the left (Gore), but rather to the first candidate on the right (Buchanan). Glancing at the ballot, one is not sure which circle corresponds to which candidate; do you follow the line, the arrow, or does one choose the circle closest to the name?
AskTog has another analysis of the ballot. Voters "were interested in one candidate, the one they wanted to vote for. Their entire focus was on finding that candidate and punching the hole next to his or her name. In the case of Gore, that required scanning only two names down in the first column. There was never any reason at all for Gore voters to ever even see the right hand column."
Usability fundementalist Jakob Nielsen, the author of Designing Web Usability, writes on his home page: "The Florida ballot clearly had usability problems, caused by the attempt to map a two-column set of labels onto a one-column action area... A direct mapping between two single-column areas would have been much less error-prone."
The result: many Palm Beach voters claim that they voted for Buchanan when they thought they had voted for Gore. A statistical analysis seems to back this up. Till Rosenband at MIT determined that the "probability that Buchanan would get so many votes in Palm Beach by pure chance is less than 1 in 3,000,000,000,000,000." And if you look at the graph, you can see that Palm Beach is outside the expected bell curve.
Even Pat Buchanan is saying that the votes in Palm Beach aren't his. About 20% of Buchanan's votes in Florida came from Palm Beach county. In yesterday's discussion about this on Metafilter, some suggested that if people were confused by the ballot, it was their own fault, that they should have read the ballot more carefully. But the only test of whether something is confusing or not is whether or not people find it confusing. There were over 19,000 double-punched ballots.
I can read the ballot. But I have to say that the Palm Beach ballot seems typical of a lot of American ballot design I have seen: The form is designed for the machine to read, not for people to use intuitively.
My partner is a US citizen who voted by absentee ballot in Oklahoma. Different ballot, similar problems, including a layout that placed the marking circles in different places depending on the page, switching from columns to rows. It didn't take us long at all to figure it out, but the same might not be the case for a senior with poor vision.
Dan Bricklin, the creator of Visicalc and Trellix, agrees. His site offers a detailed analysis of the ballot's flaws, and asks, "I wonder what the usability testing for this was like, or even if there was any such testing."
An interesting question remains: how did other usability issues involving other ballots effect voting outcomes not just in other parts of Florida, but other states as well? What will be the result of legal challenges to ballots in those states that Al Gore has won? - Discuss at Metafilter
Andres Salomon talks about having his computer siezed: "You are not being paranoid enough. The FBI managed to get a search warrant based on logs from a firewall, that showed my IP only connecting, not even logging in, hours after news of the cracking had appeared on news sites. If they can get a search warrant this easily, your data is not safe, sitting on your hard drive. For the past two months I've been living in this dorm, I locked my doors, securified my boxes, and backed up my essential things. I never even imagined the federal government would just let themselves in and take it."
Michelle Delio at Wired - Sex That's Out of This World: "Getting amorous while in orbit is a fantasy for some, and a serious question for those with a scientific thirst to know if having sex in zero-gravity conditions would be fabulous or fraught with technical difficulties... Both desires are fed in the upcoming issue of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, which features an article that explores the history of sex in the United States and Russian space programs."
ZDNet eWEEK looks at four scripting languages: Allaire Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP, PHP, and JSP under Apache Tomcat.
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