Languages:
Languages:
Probably the best thing that happened to the Web since its creation is the fact that HTML has been so stable. It's 13 years since HTML 4 became a standard (1998). That has enabled us to learn the language. The things we, in the HTML working group, intuitively thought possible actually took many years to realize. And no doubt we're still learning.
Take the CLASS attribute. It took six years, until 2005, for microformats to be invented (by Tantek Çelik).
HTML 4 is now in all kinds of software, from translation memory systems to libraries for the Python programming language. Will HTML 5 have the same chance of remaining stable for ten years or more? Or will it turn out to be like HTML 3.2, which was a step towards HTML 4, but only lasted for a year and was only implemented by browsers?
Zazie gave a concert in Vence (south of France), for the festival of the Nuit du Sud. She writes lyrics (in French) that merit being listened to, with sometimes quite catchy melodies. A pity that the sound in Vence was so bad, due to her own roadies. When the music is so loud that it hurts the ears, it is rather difficult to concentrate on the songs.
Incidentally, although she plays her role of performer well, I have the impression that she prefers to play with words rather than with her public. 2011-07-16
The Panopticlick demo site itself is easy enough to game, but the EFF's article “How unique is your Web browser?” has a lot of good insights about how a browser/user can be assigned a (relatively) unique “fingerprint” and how a user can make that fingerprint less unique. The methods go far beyond cookies.
(About the demo: the EFF should have asked contributors to identify themselves, e.g., with an e-mail address, so that a second visit by a unique browser could have been distinguished from a visit by a different browser which happened to have the same fingerprint.) 2010-05-18
The French government, like some other European governments, considers forbidding clothes that cover the face (veil, balaclava, etc.). OK, but then let's make a deal: a ban on face masks vs a ban on surveillance cameras. 2010-04-28
A historical day for aviation, today. De biggest airplane ever, the Airbus A380 has succeeded its first test flight in Toulouse. But a black day for travellers. A plane with 800 passengers, that means: longer queues at check-in, longer queues for boarding, longer waits at disembarking, longer waits for luggage. Moreover, an airplane of that size can only be filled on busy lines and therefore everybody will from now on have to travel via the big airports (“hubs”).
My ideal? More small planes, without stopovers in Paris, Frankfurt or Amsterdam. I want to arrive at the airport no earlier than 20 minutes before departure, fly direct to my destination, and leave the airport 10 minutes after landing. (Oh yeah, I also want Internet and power for my laptop in every plane, but that has nothing to do with the A380.) 2005-04-27
Since a few weeks, the French supermarket Carrefour sells a new product: Couques Amandes. In fact, they are the well-known Dutch “gevulde koeken” (almond cookies). In itself not surprising that you can now buy them in France as well, but what struck me was the name: “couque” is not a normal French word. There are apparently a few Belgian cookies that are called that. But it looks very much as if “couque” is simply the Dutch “koek” in French spelling... 2003-09-05
The mark-up in XML-based documents is often so verbose (relative to the other content), that some people have described XML documents as “self-describing.” A somewhat weaker claim is that such documents contain both content and structure. Neither is true. The structure is in the document format's definition (often summarized in a DTD), the mark-up only serves to tell a parser how the document maps into that structure. For example, the document doesn't tell which optional parts are omitted.
It is interesting that the claim of being “self-describing” seems to be only made of XML, not of other languages (Java, RTF, CSS, etc.), not even of relatively verbose ones (MIME, iCal, etc.). Or maybe people once claimed that Cobol was self-describing? 2003-02-12
The “semantic web” is a crusade against the practice of hiding the useful information of a Web page inside tons of advertisements, navigation links and other clutter.
The crusade will probably have some effect, but it is unlikely that information will ever be completely in the format that the reader wants, if only because it is hard for a reader to ask the right question (recall and precision). 2002-06-20
Do you always push the button of the pedestrian traffic light twice, too? For security?
If there had been a light or audible signal to indicate that the button press had been registered, people wouldn't push twice. Somewhere (in Japan?) I've seen such a traffic light. Another Japanese discovery: a pedestrian traffic light that indicates how long it takes before the light turns green. 2002-02-17
Bert Bos