Who cares about accessibility? It has small caps

Safari 1.2 is out. Along with all the new features touted on Apple’s site and revealed on ThinkSecret, including enhanced navigational options, resumable downloads, and support for LiveConnect between JavaScript and Java applets, it has what is, for me, the most important feature of all.

It supports font-variant: small-caps.

Let me repeat that: it supports font-variant: small-caps.

Finally. All my carefully designed small caps, in full living typographical color on Safari. I’m thrilled to pieces. Of course, I’m also noting that Georgia in small caps kind of washes out at that point size. Sigh.

Metadata, secrets, and user education

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing does everyone a favor by pointing to the new “Remove Hidden Data” tool for Office XP and Office 2003. Few people know (or care) how much information is revealed by the standard metadata and revision information that is tracked inside Office files, including name of original author, template, editing time, and the ability to peel back revisions to understand the evolution of a document.

From a textual standpoint, this stuff is fascinating; there’s never been an opportunity to so quickly and simply lay bare the mechanics of the creation of texts before. I expect to see Jerome McGann doing a book on this sometime soon. 🙂 But of course from a business and politics standpoint the fact that so many people don’t know about this feature and what it exposes is a little scary.

Which raises a question: why is there no permanent way to disable tracking author name, editing time and the other core metadata? It’s easy to understand how documents get sent out with this information on them since the data is always there whether you ask for it or not. It’s harder to understand why people don’t always accept all changes when they’s sending out a final version document that was created in revision tracking mode. The first exposure is done from ignorance, but someone has to go in and turn on revision tracking…

Amici Forever, your fifteen minutes are calling

From late night infomercials to the New York Times: the pretty kids of opera, Amici Forever. It’s only because classical music is so badly marketed in general that these guys are getting any sort of props for “popularizing” opera. With a name like Amici Forever (destined to become a boat anchor as soon as the group breaks up), and with collars like those the guys are wearing in the photos, this group would be an also ran if it weren’t for the classical angle.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy this morning because none of the groups I was in ever got that kind of press. Sniff.

Oh well. At least they don’t have to go topless to get attention from the music press.