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.

Can’t keep a good entrepreneur down

I confess: I’ve been playing on Orkut. So far there appear to be three differences between this latest social networking app and its predecessors, Friendster, Ryze, etc.:

  1. Lots more blogerati are on Orkut.
  2. Slightly faster and easier to use.
  3. Did I mention it was backed by Google?

But I have been inviting friends on anyway, and in the process reopened communications with Paul Colton, whom I continue to touch base with about every other year. For those of you just tuning in, Paul was my high school friend who spent so much time in the high school computer graphics lab and at his afterschool job that we feared he wouldn’t graduate. He went on to found Live Software and write its flagship product, JRun, and to sell the company to Allaire, about a year and a half before its acquisition by Macromedia.

It turns out that he’s been working on not one but two new products. PhotoPeer is a photo-sharing peer to peer application, which is either the best way ever to get grandparents to use their computers or the best porn application ever. The other, Xamlon, is a runtime that will allow creating XAML-like applications that will run on the current .NET Runtime under Windows XP. (Jeremy Allaire pointed to this a while back but I missed it.)

I wonder if Scoble has seen this?

A singer once more

After last year’s time with the Cascadian Chorale, I took the fall off from singing. I had started to realize during my therapy last year that part of the reason I kept looking to singing groups was to feel needed, and I had to break myself of that cycle.

But this fall I really missed being in a choir. And I realized I also wanted to explore my faith more, and to be in a position where my singing meant more than just applause.

So I’ve joined the Cathedral Choir at University Presbyterian Church. It looks like it will be a good group, both vocally and spiritually.

Just got my copy of the Guardian

True to their word, the folks at the Guardian sent me the paper copy of the story they did about the mobile phone art exhibition. To my delight, not only did they use the picture from the Tacoma art museum exhibit, but it was the keynote graphic for the article. It’s too bad they didn’t use the picture in the online version, but it looks great in print.

Getting the newspaper in the mail made a bad day much better. Good timing.

Update: Here’s the news item where I published the original photo album containing the photo that the Guardian used. The thumbnail photo to the right of this news item is the one they published.

Keeping yourself informed about viruses

A quick follow up to yesterday’s report about the Mydoom virus: You can stay informed of security updates from Microsoft via the security mailing lists available on the Microsoft Security web site. There are two lists, one for general users and one for technical folks, so you can choose the level of information you want to get about security issues. These are good resources if you want to make sure your machine is secure against viruses that exploit Microsoft vulnerabilities—though it doesn’t look like they will help much in the case of Mydoom.

Incidentally, why does Microsoft.com offer email alerts and not RSS feeds for advisories? Good question. As Scoble has said, it will take a lot of effort before Microsoft.com is fully RSS-enabled. Also, there are some users, like my dad, for whom an RSS feed isn’t the right answer for notification, at least not now. There are still a lot of problems to be solved in RSS before we can assume that everyone understands and uses the technology.

In the meantime, for those who do use RSS, there are scraped RSS feeds of security bulletins, hotfix announcements, and patches available from NewsIsFree, PatchDayReview (with evaluations of each patch), and KBAlertz (by product).

Minor stylesheet fix

Anita was kind enough to point out that I hadn’t bothered to set background or text colors in my new lean mean stylesheet, which makes the page look kind of funny in Netscape 4 or in any browser where you can set your own background color.

This is an easy mistake to make when you’re moving away from deprecated HTML attributes. In my case, I changed my style sheet to use a plain old <body> tag instead of Manila’s [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "body" hasn't been defined.]
 macro, which automatically inserts deprecated attributes for background color, text color, link color, and so forth. The way to handle it is either to set the attributes background (for the background color) and color (for the default text color), or else not to use any colored elements in your design at all and make the user responsible for his or her own bad taste.

At any rate, I’ve made the fix; shift-reload to get the change (very minor).

The IE Factor?

Interesting article at StopDesign describing real work experience in getting CSS layouts to work across platforms. As those who have been reading the Web Design department through my last redesign will attest, this is a non-trivial challenge; some apparently easy CSS styles will work well in one browser while not working at all in another.

But why is it the IE Factor? That is, why does IE get the blame for non-conformant behavior? That’s the question some of my coworkers might ask. After all, it has CSS support; after all, it’s the minority browser. And after all, other browsers have their own quirks. Why single out IE?

Based on my experience and StopDesign’s article (and Bryan Bell’s Designers Against Stagnant Internet Explorer (DASIE) manifesto), I think IE is getting heat for the following reasons:

  1. IE 6 was released in 2001. The most recent major revisions of the competing browsers, Mozilla/Firebird and Opera (as well as other significant browsers like Safari and OmniWeb) were all released in the last six months. That’s two solid years of designers actually using CSS and documenting their problems.
  2. Mozilla is open source; Safari is developed by a guy with a weblog where he responds to customer comments. The IE team has so far kept a very low profile about the future of their products; in fact, they’ve committed publicly to infrequent releases of new features, in line with the Windows software development cycle.
  3. Adding insult to injury, not only does IE not incorporate two-plus years of real world customer feedback, it’s the dominant platform. So it’s held to a higher standard—any flaw gets dramatically magnified.

Why are we in this boat? I think, after Netscape imploded, a lot of people thought that innovation and change was gone from the HTML space and attention shifted to the web services space, where presentation isn’t as important as XML, namespaces, and actual programming languages.

But I think IE has competition again. More importantly, I think the various campaigns to get people to upgrade to modern browsers have led more designers to push the envelope of what can be done with (X)HTML+CSS. And I think that’s a good thing.

Mod +1 obvious: Judge rules part of Patriot Act unconstitutional

Caught yesterday, but not posted as I couldn’t see over the creeping crud in my system: Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional. US District Judge Audrey Collins ruled that a portion of the act, which criminalized providing “expert advice or assistance” to terrorist groups, was “impermissibly vague.”

(I’m not clear what part of the Constitution that violates, other than the part about our not acting like Winston Smith’s boss, but I’m sure someone can fill me in.)

Anyway: all who were surprised that any part of the Patriot Act was ruled unconstitutional, raise your hands. Higher. I can’t see you. Oh, put your hand down, Mr. Cheney; you know better.

Viruses (mine and others’)

Ironic timing… As I’m working from home today between vigorous attempts to clear the sinus infection from my head, I get a new virus alert in my mail about Mydoom.

Microsoft Consumer Virus Alert

Why We Are Issuing This Alert

W32/Mydoom@MM spreads through e-mail. This worm can disguise the sender’s address, a tactic known as spoofing, and may generate e-mails that appear to have been sent by Microsoft. Many of the addresses Mydoom uses are valid addresses that are being spoofed for malicious purposes.

Mydoom Virus Alert: What to Do

Treat all e-mail attachments with caution, particularly .zip files in the case of this virus, even if they appear to be from a trusted source. Learn what to do about virus infections. http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

Complete Information: http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

To which I can only add: be careful out there.