waffle

So now it’s the CSS working group’s turn to start perspiring under the heat of the spotlight, and they’re acting upset because of it.

I’m a registered member of the Pirate Party, and I recognize that personal integrity and a personal life are both basic human rights. But a CSS working group isn’t personal - it’s work. I’m not asking anyone to breach contracts set in motion by the W3C’s policies. I am however asking them to consider that as a public standard for the greater good (even, say, if implemented by companies that have trade secrets), maybe the development of that standard should be made in public.

As for CSS itself, CSS could use a swift kick in the ass at this stage. There’s been pushes for solutions, but around seven years ago, we started abandoning layouts based on tables in favor of layouts defined entirely by HTML tag semantics and CSS, and there’s been no sizable effort to reclaim the sliver of the Venn diagram of possible layouts that we lost. We’ve had to resort to hacks to make it all work cross-browser, and even though a change made today will not be seen tomorrow or even maybe in two years, we have to at some point drive a stake in the ground.

We may have to drop backwards compatibility from the specification itself (resting of course assured that the current browser crop’s support for today’s CSS won’t go anywhere with the flick of that switch), but basically, we have to start building for the future. To me, that means a real way to specify a layout, not by vaguely hinting how text flows into desktop publishing-like columns. That means inheritance of rules and variables. That means a strong message from everyone to every vendor that half-assed support is not tolerable. And it definitely means complementing old fogeys used to bureaucratic in-fighting and producing, relatively speaking, nothing over several years with some level of fresh blood and idealism, even if not everything translates well into specification copy.

Let a hundred CSS Zen Gardens bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

You know which xkcd comic best describes Python? It’s not this one.

It’s this one.

Matt Gemmell writes about “Cylon”, some black hat (read: morally corrupt and unscrupulous) “SEOs”. I say “SEO” in quotes because SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and applying that label to this kind of stuff is kind of like swapping out the chicken in a chicken sandwich for feces, and then calling it a “slight condiment-related reconfiguration”. Real, honest SEO with sustainable and predictable results consists in its entirety of writing good content and not hiding it inside crap designed to fool search engine indexers into giving you credit you don’t deserve that will be shortly revoked.

Cylon buys domains off of people and store ads on them. The domains they want to buy have a high PageRank (a lot of Google Juice), no doubt pent-up through steady delivery of actual useful or at least honest content. Then they put links on them. If you imagine a company that would buy out any shop whatsoever in a mall (with, I must press, the consent of the shopkeeper), retain the same entrance and replace the interior with a busy place full of the worst kind of pushy, seedy salesmen, that’s roughly equivalent to what Cylon does on the web.

Cylon and their ilk are the worst kind of companies doing business that could be classified as legal on the web. They are completely killing the utility of the web in order to push ads so that they don’t actually have to get a real job, doing real and constructive things. They are the worst kind of immoral.

Yesterday (or today, depending on how you count), Cylon, in what must amount to a mass mailing, contacted me and wanted to buy wafflesoftware.net. Below is the mail I received:

From: Robert Brown bbrown@cyl0n.com
Subject: I will pay 1000 USD for wafflesoftware.net website right now, payable today.

Hi,

We are looking to potentially immediately buy your website. It must meet the following criteria:

Minimum Google PR: 3

Be in one of the following categories:
- Canadian focus
- finance
- cars
- telecommunications
- travel

Provable earnings history of some sort, even if its not a lot.
Provable traffic record for the past 12 months.

If you have one or more websites that meet this criteria, please email me and let me know the website address, the $ amount of earnings over the past 12 months, the average monthly unique visitors for the past 12 months, and your prefered payment method (generally paypal, check, or escrow.com), and I will get back to you later today to confirm whether or not we can purchase your site for $1000. We have some amount of flexibility in our criteria, and if you are close we may be able to buy your site, but perhaps for less $. Feel free to email me with any questions you have.

Thanks!

Robert Brown
(480) 368-2585

Also, I apologize if you receive this email more than once. Due to some data complications, I may have sent it out to you multiple times on accident. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The email it was sent to was the WHOIS contact. The “data complications” and “criteria” are Cylon not only shitting all over the internet but also scraping the WHOIS database and spamming me in order to make this offer, and asking me to please not be upset if I’m spammed twice.

Dear Cylon: I’d appeal to your sense of decency if I didn’t know you’ve arranged to have it surgically removed. Since I know it’s not there, my answer is “no”. Stop beating the useful parts of the web to death so you can make a few dollars without contributing anything useful to society.

958 days after introducing it officially in Tiger, Apple finally introduced documentation for NSTokenField (what they had before was a class reference, which is well and good, but when you have guides for almost every control, that becomes the actual documentation threshold).

Good news for those who want to implement one of the most unexpectedly finicky controls in Cocoa. No good answers about the actual issues (like problems with the binding not firing when dragging and dropping in some circumstances), but most of that has workarounds.

And hey, that “Token Fields at a Glance” portion. More of that.