Category: Uncategorized

Economic use of precious time, or AOL style "me too"? You decide. Stephen opened his brand spanking new site with a lamenation of Coca Cola and Sinn Féin. He’s mad at Coke for giving $15,000 to Sinn Féin; and at Sinn Féin for supporting the ban on Coke, funding terrorism in Ireland and Columbia, and just being not-very-nice people overall.

I’m mad at Coke for stealing my colour scheme for Vanilla Coke.

How do we refer to original Coke now? It used to be ‘Coke’, but now that name is ambiguous. Ordinarily I’d refer to the original version as vanilla, in a geeky ice-cream related way. A conundrum, eh? I propose ‘vanilla Coke’ for the original and ‘Vanilla Coke’ for the new flavour. That should end any confusion.

The oldest still registred domain that hosts a website is that of BBN.com, acording to a list of the 100 oldest domains. BBN is actually the second oldest domain, but Symbolics.com doesn’t appear to have a website.

BBN essentially built the internet, but chances are you haven’t heard of them. Now you can find out all the neat little facts for which I shelled out for a history of the internet book. And think of Ray Tomlinson next time you send an email.

What the hell is Wil Wheaton doing? He’s proud of the fact that his headings aren’t marked up with <h2> tags. They’re second level headings for Pete’s sake! What the hell? You think <span class="title"> is more appropriate? Where the hell did you learn HTML? This is exactly what <h2> is for! This and nothing else. Why get rid of it? I mean I’ve seen people proudly proclaim that they’ve removed unnecessary or inappropriate markup from their sites, hopefully making them leaner and more accessible, but Wil has replaced a fundamental HTML tag with a horrible kludge! It’s sickening. So here’s what else is wrong:

• The page layout is done with <table>s. I don’t see any tabular data. Use CSS.
• His main title ("WIL WHEATON DOT NET, 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 typewriters can’t be wrong") is marked with <font> tags. These are clear candidates for <hn>. Surely “WIL WHEATON DOT NET” is a first level heading?
• The navigation links are marked as paragraphs. This is clearly an unordered list.
• Every article is has an empty anchor preceding it. While this isn’t incorrect it certainly isn’t necessary. Why not change <a name="001227"></a><span class="title">Neverland</span> to <h3 id="001227">Neverland</h3>? That’s almost half the size.
• Every text size specified in the stylesheet is in pts. This is a print measurement, entirely inappropriate for screen display. em or % would be much better.

That list took longer to type than it did to compile. Surely anyone interested in having their own website should want to get it right?

It seems (according to www.humanforsale.com) that I’m worth a respectable $2,320,314.00, which translates to €2,216,366.25. That’s as much as 11 L39 Jets, 7,760 Windows XP Pro licenses or 1/153^rd of Apollo 11. Try the test yourself. And if you’re interested, send me an e-mail with an offer! I’ll start the bidding at a bargain €2M.