Surfing While Drinking Beer

(Remind me to tell Nola I put her mail on my bedside table, which is completely the wrong place to leave it, which is why I'll forget it by the time she gets home.)

I've been cooking a stew most of the day, in the slow-cooker, it's leftover lamb shanks plus carrots and potatoes and some kind of veggie bouillon and Nameless Herbs. Tastes pretty good so far, so I guess I can put away the emergency pizza delivery phone number.

And, with my workday all donedonedone, I've poured a beer and started clicking almost randomly on links. I do this fairly often; I'm sure most everyone does. This time, though, I'm gonna keep track.

From a link off misbehaving.net, I found myself at Stopdesign, reading a post and comments about women web designers, location of. The first click off that led me to weblog wannabe, written by Firda Beka of Indonesia. It is both elegant and intelligent, provoking much jealousy on my part right off the bat. It also links to the Demon Balls game, among others, prompting me to expend many minutes in a pointless sorting game. Don't, for the love of god, Montressor, click on that link.

The next foray out from Stopdesign led me to i am makiko, i am not a nameless cat, with which I can identify readily, being an overly named cat, and who also has a site whose design causes my jaw to clench involuntarily. More beer!

The most recent entry from Makiko Itoh, of Japan and New York and Switzerland, and all points in between, highlights a recent Liz Smith column in the New York Post. Liz is writing about Elle magazine's recent interview with Tucker Carlson of Crossfire, illustrating what a fuckwit he is:

What do women want, Elle asks Tucker? "They want to be listened to, protected and amused. And they want to be spanked vigorously every once in a while."

One gets the feeling Elle asked because he'd already annoyed them and they wanted to make plain the reason why.

As if to rub it in, Maki's previous entry has to do with why it's important for web designers to properly notate charsets in their headers. I had a vague memory of dutifully working out which charset I should use, as opposed to just picking one at random, which was my first impulse, no, instead I looked the damn things up and settled on the closest match, you've no idea how anal I can be, this only scratches the surface, and when I saw this entry I quick like a bunny checked my own pages (just one, actually) to make sure what I thought right then was still right.

It is. I get geek points, redeemable for chocolate chip cookies at a thousand to one, I hear.

There's a pointer in the comments to an article at Joel on Software, in which charsets, care and feeding of, are pretty much laid bare. Here's a sample:

Most computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes, so not only could you store every possible ASCII character, but you had a whole bit to spare, which, if you were wicked, you could use for your own devious purposes: the dim bulbs at WordStar actually turned on the high bit to indicate the last letter in a word, condemning WordStar to English text only.

I tell you, it's been like reading Strunk and White, with brie and crackers and white grapes.

The link itself was supplied by coda, aka Damen du Toit of South Africa, yet another internet presence whose design sense and incisive commentary leave me with little else to say and a severely shrunken ego.

I don't think I've ever intentionally clicked on a Google AdSense ad. Like most banner ads, I've subconsciously trained myself to ignore them while scanning the content of a web page. They're distracting, and if relevant are not worth the click anyway since a Google search on the subject will yield better results. Yet they have public appeal so will probably be around for a while still.

Thank god for ad blocking.

coda's article on web standards clarified for me the disparity between independent and corporate web design, insofar as adherance to W3C standards goes. More and more, the sites one sees sporting such legends as "this site best viewed using..." followed by not just the browserFlavour but also its (usually outdated) version number, plus (in some truly hidebound cases) monitor resolution specs, are those of corporate sites. The bigger they are, it seems, the more sunk in yesteryear's half-assed workarounds for doing things that were frankly ugly then and haven't improved with age.

Look, ten years ago, maybe, that approach was necessary. Irritating, but necessary. It isn't now, not even a little bit, but between then and now the behemoths of the multinationals have already paid good money for website design and aren't in the mood to pay better money to fix their sites. The result is, well, cnet and amazon and the new york times. And IBM and Epson, and like it or not, Apple.

One of the underlying purposes behind much of the W3C standardization efforts has to do with creating web pages that are viewable, not just by the casual surfer running IE on Windows 9x, which dog knows will display anything and everything, no matter how fucked up, but by users who are running all manner of browsers, from those specializing in non-English characters to those whose purpose is to make sound audible to the deaf and colours viewable to the blind. This is not a trivial or cosmetic pursuit, yet from the careless use of flash, javascript, and impenetrable, site-specific tweaks and specs, one would think corporate web designers had never heard the words, "temporarily abled."

It's HTML, for heaven's sakes. How did this shit get so complicated?

(a quick reminder for those of you used to living on the edge: browsers crash. save your work already. had I not been saving like a squirrel on speed all evening, this entire entry would be toast as of right this minute.)

After that came a solid hour of duds. I began to think it was my fault for stopping to eat the nice stew and switch to water in place of beer, but then I ran into doing fine, the brainchild of Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast and so beautiful it hurts. In her latest entry, Andrea writes about past meeting present, when present is just walking down the street, head in the clouds, hands in pockets, whistling:

And now people start reappearing from those days, one after another in a series of emails. It feels unreal to communicate with people through a medium that barely existed when I knew them best. I deceive myself into believing that this is why we don't talk to each other in an age when communication is so easy it has become a commodity. Or maybe that is the reason— this medium is too cheap and can't convey the vitality of what I'm feeling.

I am so there for that.