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2004’s Posts.

  1. The year that was

    The Internet turned 35 this year yet somehow 2004 managed to create an air of excitement about the medium’s potential. The sense of possibility is almost as rich as it was a decade ago. In fact, some of this year’s trends harken back to then, too.

  2. Canadian relief sites clogged

    The Globe and Mail listed five sites accepting donations to help ease the horrors occuring as a result of the South Asian earthquake and tsunami, half are slow or not responding. Although it could be coincidental, I’d like to believe Canadians are flooding humanitarian aid sites.

  3. Installing Acrobat Reader 7

    Asa Dotzler explains how to best to install this speed-increasing upgrade.

  4. Chapters blocks validator

    Joe Clark discovers the book store’s Web site blocks any attempts to balidate its mangled code.

  5. eBay best Net stock

    The auction site was the only one of the big five to improve upon its price at the bubble’s height.

  6. PressThink’'s Top Ten Ideas for 2004

    From the legacy media to the Pajamahadeen and more.

  7. Opera betas version 8

    The browser was to 7.6, but the amount of enhancements boosted it a whole number.

  8. Kensington Market Festival of Lights

    Always a great way to celebrate the beginning of the end of winter darkness.

  9. More Toronto tabloids?

    Rumours abound that the National Post, and maybe one day the Toronto Star, may go tabloid.

  10. Slate sold to Washington Post

    The sale should be done by mid-January, and no major editorial changes are planned.

  11. Smart, wireless transit ads

    The TTC will carry location-specific digital ads served using a wireless network. Could true WiFi be next?

  12. New media timeline

    Despite the poor interface, this comprehensive timeline covers 35 years of American new media history.

  13. MP3 player levy quashed

    The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the copyright levvies applied to digital music players aren’t legal.

  14. The New York Times Firefox ad

    Somewhere in the blur you’ll find my name amongst the 10,000 or so donors.

  15. Canadian journalism a stagnant pool?

    John Miller argues the media here is could care less…

  16. CSS needs fixing

    Daniel Glazman weighs in with a mea culpa on the curent state of CSS.

  17. ICANN killing the domain name system

    I now believe ICANN is intentionally trying to destroy the domain name system. How else can you explain the ludicrous, opportunistic creation of the new “mobi” TLD? And why “mobi”? Is it supposed to be hip? What’s wrong with “mobile”? Web-Graphics outlines one of the largest problems with the “mobi” TLD (as did did Tim Berners-Lee earlier).

  18. Dude

    Clive Thompson on dude’s current usage.

  19. CBC does RSS

    CBC now has support for a variety of RSS feeds. Wonder who will be next…?

  20. Canadians are going digital

    We’re dropping analog media in favour of its digital equivalent at an increasing rate.

  21. Details on the AOL Browser

    It will use IE, but will included tabbed browsing. Why they don’t use the Netscape Browser still confounds me.

  22. Gary Webb is dead

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who tied the CIA to crack cocaine-trafficking in Los Angeles has committed suicide.

  23. Citytv news bests CBC, CTV

    Toronto’s own CityPulse at Six won a Gemini Award for best newscast beating out CBC’s The National and CTV News

  24. What to do about writer’s block

    The return of the (content as) king.

  25. Ontario stops censoring movies

    Next year, the Ontario Film Review Board will likely lose its powers to censor film in the province.

  26. Will citizen journalists hurt journalism?

    Bill Doskoch points voice to some concerns I have over the buzz around “citizen journalism.”

  27. Testing all copy editors

    The Toronto Star’s ombusman Nitpicker’s Quiz tests ones editing skills.

  28. Google Suggest

    Google dynamically tries to predict what you’re search will be. Amazingly effective.

  29. Google News en français

    The French edition of Google News Canada enables searches and browsing news items from more than 500 French news sources.

  30. Wireless in Montreal

    Île Sans Fil helps businesses and local institutions give Internet access away free.

  31. Supreme Court rules in favour of same-sex marriage

    Canada’s top court has ruled same-sex marriage is constitutional, now the Liberals have to make good on their promising to change the legal definition.

  32. Tog’s list of persistent design bugs

    The top ten list is only seven items right now, but expect more.

  33. Firefox’s effect on news sites

    Mark Glaser takes a look at the browser from an online news perspective (and quotes me in the process).

  34. Mozilla’s developer FAQ

    Mozilla answers some common questions about the Gecko rendering engine, including how to use XHTML.

  35. Coulter on Carlson elucidate on Canada

    The pundits of conservative America demonstarte their skills.

  36. Could humans fix Google?

    Greg Linden riffs on the notion that people are needed to improve search engine results.

  37. Time for a new Net?

    The Christian Science Monitor wonders if the 35-year-old Internet needs a facelift.

  38. XStandard supports Firefox

    The XHTML WYSIWYG is now Firefox-friendly.

  39. Advertising without hockey

    The New York Times, of all places explains how the lock-out has hurt the TV industry.

  40. As if it wasn’t conservative enough…

    Clear Channel Communications (who banned the Dixie Chicks) will use Fox News Radio to provide national news for most of its news and talk stations.

  41. The future of RSS advertising

    Jason Kottke surveys the users and developers of RSS aggregators to find out.

  42. Firefox users don’t click on ads

    Of course there’s a litany of reasons for this, savviness being just one.

  43. Marqui on a slippery slope

    Paying bloggers to create a buzz about a product could backfire.

  44. Thunderbird 1.0

    Mozilla’s excellent mail client is ready for its close up.

  45. Web design forecast for 2005

    Predictions for next year’s Web design trends.

  46. Editorial judgement by log analysis

    The Financial Times looks to its Web logs for tips on news trends.

  47. Eye blog

    Toronto’s alterna-weekly gets a blog.

  48. Why blogging as journalism is a pipe dream

    Jason Kottke posts scoops about a Jeporady whiz Ken Jennings, and Sony threatens to sue him — but not the Washington Post, which did the same thing.

  49. Park-by-phone

    Well, actually it’s pay-by-phone-to-park, but still…

  50. Editorial judgement by click

    A newspaper is tracking every click on a story and using that to help determine the content of the next day’s paper.

  51. ITunes Canada has finally arrived.

    After a lot of stumbles, Apple has launched a Canadian edition of it’s iTunes service. With 700,000 songs available for only 99¢ it maintains the less-than-a-buck/pound-a-song model here in Canada. The result means it’s cheaper to buy the same songs off of the Canadian iTunes than it is in U.S. or the U.K.

  52. Why Google News is still “beta”

    The WSJ’s Online Journal caught Google News link, as its top story, to a satirical article claiming Canada had arrested U.S. President Georg

  53. Joe Gillespie retires

    Joe Gillespie is retiring from his pioneering work as a Web designer and publisher of Web Page Design for Designers.

  54. The media company I want to work for

    Mark Glaser describes the ideal online journalism outfit. Sign me up.

  55. Firefox’s Monster: the Netscape Browser

    The Netscape browser has been resurrected and the limited beta was released today. The good news: it still uses the Gecko rendering engine and is based on Firefox 0.9.3 — the final will be based on Firefox 1.0. The bad news: its interface is horrible, and has mangled everything usable and friendly about Firefox.

  56. Supporting standards would break the Web

    So says Microsoft, although Tristan Nitot deflects that dose of FUD.

  57. Wikinews a go

    Wired News has an overview of the first steps of the open-source news site.

  58. ITunes Canada days away

    Apple plans on finally launching the service before the end of December.

  59. Eye readers pick Toronto’s best media

    Radio I agree with, and sadly I only know of two of the “blogs” cited.

  60. Blog Torrent

    BitTorrent for your blog

  61. New Opera resizes pages

    Opera 7.60 (a preview release right now) dynamically resizes wide pages to fit a narrow browser window.

  62. The life and times of Frank

    The Globe and Mail engages in some schadenfreude over the fate of Frank.

  63. News.com does TrackBack

    For the uninitiated, TrackBacks and pingbacks are MovableType-popularized technology that lets one site know another is linking to its content. The TrackBacks appear as an excerpt of the what the linking site says about the other’s content. Like commenting, TrackBacks provide quick feedback on a particular post and allows for an ongoing, open dialog. Until now, blogs have made the most use of it, but now News.com is doing it and I must admit, I admire their moxyie.

  64. Why newspapers should worry

    And trust me, they are, and some are even trying to change.

  65. Browser bug report

    A database dedicated to dedicated to finding, mending and publishing CSS and JavaScript browser bugs

  66. Mind your cites and Qs

    Roger Johansson covers almost everything you know about the q, blockquote, and cite.

  67. Rather resigning

    CBS’s only post-Cronkite anchor is resigning with the taste of scandal to remember him by.

  68. The computer as novelist

    A New York Times essay wonders whether computers will ever be able to write novels as good as we can.

  69. Typography tips

    Online companion to Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

  70. Style sheets for handheld devices

    A css-discuss Wiki entry discussing the latest trends in handheld support for CSS.

  71. Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

    Kevin Sites explains to the marines how his story of the mosque shooting happened

  72. The future of online news is EPIC

    Robert Sloan’s prediction of EPIC in 2014.

  73. Findory personalizes search results

    Findory will now make recommendations in your search results based on past searches.

  74. Semantic and XHTML validator

    Want to make sure your XHTML is really really valid, try this.

  75. Keeping it simple

    Adam Bosworth’s transcript of his ISCOC04 Talk on accommodating really simple user and programmer models.

  76. XUL file manager

    A Windows-like file manager for a remote computer using XUL.

  77. Four million daily emails for Bill Gates

    Famous email addresses and their spam count.

  78. TV over the phone

    Bell Canada finally gets the rights to send television over its phone lines.

  79. Handy Web project guides

    Goto Guides offer a number of helpful and downloadable resources for Web development projects.

  80. People read online!

    The Christian Science Monitor explains what that means.

  81. Torontoist songs for a Wednesday

    Every mecredi the city blog will be offering Toronto-inspired downloads.

  82. Overture’s RSS ads

    Interstitails could be the way to make RSS ads more effective.

  83. Top news sites for October 2004

    Though no Canadian sites are listed, per captia many would few handily beat their American competitors.

  84. More AOL using Mozilla rumours

    This time, the company that killed Netscape is looking for testers.

  85. Stanford marches with madness

    Can a marching band be composed of anarchists?

  86. Crawley’s crusade

    My ultimate boss, Philip Crawley, has lead the Globe’s possibly unwinnable fight against the Post.

  87. Blogging Toronto

    (The following are all via Carl Wilson’s “The Empire Strikes Blog.”) Toronto blogging goes big-time with the arrival of the franchised “metro” blog, Torontoist. Too bad they didn’t call it TOist. So far nothing wild; but nothing too sad, either. In the logo is, from left to right:

  88. Videogame to debut Snoop Dogg/Doors “Riders on the Storm” cover

    Proof that Jim Morrison’s dead, because if he was alive, he’d smash a bottle of Jack over all their heads.

  89. “Music is not a loaf of bread”

    Wilco proves that online music-sharing can be a good thing.

  90. Acrobat Reader 7 coming

    The new version will allow you to edit PDF files.

  91. Two IT sites launch standards-based sites

    Softchoice and EDS.com both launched valid, CSS-based redeigns on the weekend.

  92. Dow Jones buys MarketWatch

    One of the sites I work on was heavily modelled on MarketWatch; in part because the former site’s editor worked on the latter, but also because the latter’s approach to covering the markets works.

  93. Dow Jones buys MarketWatch

    The New York Times reports the site was sold for almost half-a-billion dollars.

  94. Yahoo hires WSJ.com founding editor

    Rumours are it's looking at CBS Marketwatch, too.

  95. Masthead putting up a wall

    The trade magazine for Canada’s magazine industry will be closing its site to non-subscribers come December.

  96. Internet tax for Canada

    Unlike the, albeit misguided, blank CD levy, we’d pay an tax but get no rights in return.

  97. MSN search launches

    And John Battelle’s analysis the beat product in his Searchblog.

  98. Saerch results on the fly

    A dynymaic search using xmlhttprequest and inspired by Apple’s upcoming Spotlight feature.

  99. Military(.com) buys blog

    Is this the next big cash-in trend?

  100. Gmail POPs

    Google’s Web-based email now supports POP just as Hotmail begins charging for it.

  101. Microsoft searches for dominance

    Will develop “Google-killing” service, then leave it dormant with new features only available to those who buy the latest version of Windows.

  102. Spinning-off online journalism

    Mark Glaser tries to explain why the newly profitable news sites are being sold.

  103. Future of digital media

    Jeff Jarvis prognosticates on the changes in store for media

  104. Open source newspapers

    The Northwest Voice prints articles from submitted online from the community and published on the Web.

  105. Beautiful browser…

    Molly sings Firefox’s praises to the tune of “Beautiful dreamer.”

  106. November 25: RRJ fund raiser

    The first magazine I brought online, the Ryerson Review of Journalism is hosting a fund raiser at DNA Lounge.

  107. Dynamic image notation

    Seen Flicker? Well, this adds notes to images in a similar same way.

  108. Firefox 1.0

    Mozilla is a marvel. Six years ago it was born. Eighteen months ago its browser suite roared across the Web. Today, Mozilla released its “tiny, perfect browser,” Firefox.

  109. Clark on Indigo

    Joe rips into the latest Indigo redesign and includes a “Saila reference”.

  110. Another petition for Internet users’s rights

    A printable petition urging Canada not to adopt the WIPO’s Internet Treaties.

  111. Petition against WIPO Copyright Treaty

    A virtual petition urging Canada not to ratify the treaty.

  112. Keep Canada’s Internet free

    Boing Boing explains the dangers of the WIPO “Internet Treaties”

  113. Some stability for the CBC

    Robert Rabinovitch gets to stay on as CBC president for another three years.

  114. The homepage is obsolete, part II

    Joshua Porter’s follow-up to his Digital Web Magazine article on content aggregation.

  115. CSS property compatibility chart

    The chart shows all CSS1, CSS2 and Internet Explorer CSS extensions and grades the level of support each recieves in a given browser.

  116. The homepage is obsolete

    Joshua Porter, in Digital Web Magazine, explains how content aggregators are changing navigation styles.

  117. Uncollapsing margins

    Eric A. Meyer explains how to reverse the margin collapse.

  118. Best of luck today, neighbours

    May your vote for president (cough, not Bush, cough) be easier than depicted in this video.

  119. Speeding up browser evolution

    Mike Davidson compares Flash to browsers and comes up with some thought provoking ideas.

  120. A pleasant Findory redesign

    The news site spiffs-up the look, and enhances its offerings

  121. A horrendous chapters.indigo.ca redesign

    An inaccessible, standards-unfriendly, Amazon.ca rip-off that I date not even link to directly.

  122. The Internet at 35 (or so)

    Today is the 35th anniversary of the first Internet message was sent from Len Kleinrock’s laboratory at UCLA

  123. MarketWatch for sale

    The Web-based finance news behemoth might go to Dow Jones or even Yahoo.

  124. Reviving on the tables

    Roger Johansson explains how to build data tables.

  125. Best of (Now’s) Toronto

    Reader’s picks are typically typical, but the critique’s picks hit the mark.

  126. Re-imagining democratic elections

    B.C. asked its citizens to come up with a better election process, and they’ve chosen wisely.

  127. Indigo relaunch coming

    Might the also ran online bookstore actually abadon fonts and tables in favour of CSS (which as far as I can, it doesn’t use at all)?

  128. Dot-post? Dot-travel?

    I don’t think I’ll ever get ICANN’s thinking.

  129. Scrollable tables

    Works even in browser that don’t support fixed positioning

  130. Speed tweaks

    Andy King’s collection of tips for speeding up your site’s performance.

  131. A yeat in J-School

    Why isn’t every journalism school encouaging its students to blog?

  132. Wikinews could be coming

    A proposed project from the Wikipedia folk is running about 3:1 in favour of getting underway

  133. Memories mapped to music

    Didier Hilhorst and Marcos Weskamp are collecting feelings, images, and memories related to songs.

  134. Wikipedia as journalism

    The Tyee follows the trend of loving the Wiki-powered encyclopedia as a model for journalism.

  135. Online news opening up

    Mark Glaser, in the OJR, writes about mainstream news sites opening up to the rest of the Web.

  136. Toronto to welcome Firefox

    There's going to be a launch party (likely November 20) for the browser here in Toronto after the browser officially hits 1.0.

  137. Directory tree styling

    Sfeve Clay demos a simple way to style multiple lists to look like a directory tree.

  138. “display:inline-block” a panacea for IE 5/Mac

    Mark Hadley finds a way to fix a nasty float bug that has plagued IE 5 on the Macintosh

  139. Back in the day’

    As clunky as the mark-up looks today, it’s impressive how much of Siegel’s wishes came to be.

  140. S5 version 1.0

    Eric Meyer’s dHTML slide show tool is presntation ready.

  141. Ben Goodger interview

    Firefox creator shares some insight with News.com

  142. Compiling corrections

    A blog commenting on corrections appearing in North American newspaper

  143. Inside the mind behind Findory

    An interview with ex-Amazoner Greg Linden about his personalized news site.

  144. Google and you

    Google unveils the next front in its advance to ubiquity: the desktop search.

  145. Google’s desktop search

    Did a quick hit about this in my blogmark feed this morning, but I thought it deserved a bit more room, so read my latest rant on Google’s desktop search tool

  146. The end of Moore’s Law?

    Probably not, the house that Moore built has killed planes to release 4GHz Pentium 4 processor.

  147. Implanting identity chips

    The New York Times discusses the ramifications surrounding the approval of a RFID-like chip for storing a 16-digit number used to retreive medical records.

  148. Mathew Ingram’s second blog at globeandmail.com

    Ingram has always been willing to produce Web-exclusive content as he previously illustrated with globetechnology’s Geek Watch.

  149. Google can now search your computer

    Although it doesn’t search Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla history/email you can “vote” for the feature.

  150. PPK finds a XP SP2 CSS bug

    Great. Internet Explorer 6 is different between Windows XP and Windows XP SP2. Let the fun begin.

  151. Offline versions of DevEdge’s sidebars

    Until the Mozilla Foundation can get the the rights to DevEdge material, you can download these from TnTLuoma.com.

  152. Netscape browser at 10

    News.com looks back at the browser’s storied life, and reports of a possible resurrection.

  153. WTF: an AOL IE?

    AOL plans to release a browser based on IE, despite the company’s ties with Netscape and Mozilla.

  154. Online newspaper index

    A listing of all (?) the Web versions of world⁏ newspapers

  155. New CAR site

    A very rough looking site for computer-assisted reporting in Canada, with links to database material.

  156. BBC unveils open-source video tool

    Targetting Windows Media Player, this is another demonstration of BBC’s excellent foresight.

  157. Skinning Gmail

    Redesign the Gmail interface with a custom stylesheet. Just the beginning of what will be a quick trend.

  158. sIFR 2.0 RC 1

    Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben unveil what could be the final version of a pretty impressive image replacement technique.

  159. Using patterns in Web design

    Ryan Singer, from 37signals, offers a simple introduction to patterns.

  160. Kapica on Firefox

    He doesn’t like it, because it won’t work with the Globe and Mail’s publishing tools. Let’s see if I can fix that…(subscription only link).

  161. CRTC: Voicemail spam A-OK

    Apparently, it’s not enough of a nuisance…

  162. Remaking BBC News with Wikipedia links

    Stef Magdalinski has built a proxy to turn proper nouns into links.

  163. Online news design winners

    The winners from 2004—s Society for News Design multimedia awards, the SNDies.

  164. “Web standards” near “Toronto, ON”

    The WaSP’s message can be found all across T-dot (thanks for the tip Rudy).

  165. The perfect news story

    The hed, the lede, all brilliant.

  166. Introducing CreativeCommons.ca

    Creative Commons licences for use under Canadian law.

  167. In a state of flux

    To repeat what once uttered to a confused hostess for a chain restaurant in some suburban mall: “Ummm, just a minute; we’re in a state of flux right now.”

  168. Browser wars reignited

    News.com assembles a huge package on the limping IE and its energized competitors in the browser business

  169. Styled form elements

    Roger Johansson demonstrates how eight of today’s browsers render styled from elements.

  170. Yahoo does CSS…

    The new Yahoo and My Yahoo homepages use semantic mark-up and styles. Come on Google.

  171. Yahoo does RSS…

    The new My Yahoo will use RSS and Atom

  172. Managing CSS hacks

    Molly writes a comprehensive article on how to work with and manage CSS hacks and filters in real style sheets.

  173. BBC News launches aggregation service

    Brilliant move by the public broadcaster, but don’t expect traditional news sites to do this any time soon…

  174. Eric’s slideshow tool

    Mr. Meyer builds an dHTML-based slideshow tool.

  175. Coulda been blogmarks

    The project consuming most of my time got a one-week extension, meaning I had a long weekend to enjoy a few days ago, but also meaning my focus is still concentrated elsewhere. So, once again, is a list of worthy links (in my mythical next design I’ll have blogmarks to deal with this):

  176. Offshoring hits journalism

    Offshoring hits journalism, with Reuters moving analysis-based editorial positions to India from the U.S. and Europe. For some comparison, creating three Indian positions was cheaper than keeping one of the original ones

  177. Checklist for the ideal news Web sites

    Need a checklist, part II: last month, Steve Outing dreamt of the ideal news Web site

  178. Checklist for standard-based Web development

    Need a checklist? Get a one for standard-based Web development; it’s good to use when producing quality CSS in a team environment. Meanwhile, Signal vs. Noise offers some rock-solid suggestions on what to do for every new feature added

  179. Capitalization quandary: Internet and Web

    Tony Long may be a fine copy editor — no doubt he’s better than me — but his style decisions confound. As you may have heard, Wired News now sets in lowercase Internet, Net, and Web because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. David Akin aptly explains why Tony is wrong

  180. Bye-bye BugMeNot

    Well, it was bound to happen: BugMeNot has vanished from the Web, apparently ending the first big public attempt to circumvent online registration walls. MetaFilter has some eulogies and speculation.

  181. Mozilla’s multi-columns, and an IE7 update

    There’s been a lot of news during the past week or so that has almost tempted me to break the posting silence, but only one managed to break the floodgates: the release of Mozilla 1.8 Alpha3. Forget the awkward name, this is, for me, the most important release since 1.0.

  182. Links, links, and more links

    Since I’m getting a bit hammered at work by projects whose deadlines conflict with my planned escape paddling the near north, posting will be of sporadic frequency, and like this entry, quality.

  183. Two tutorials

    There are many self-styled tutorials on Web building on the Web — probably more tutorials than developers. That being said, occassionally one emerges worth a bookmark from even the most cynical “seen-it-all” crowd. Rarely do two appear, but that’s what has happened.

  184. Participatory journalism in T.O.

    David Akin is blogging (and moderating) a Toronto conference on participatory journalism that is going on all day today. Although I missed the registration deadline, some of my co-workers are attending; it should be interesting to see how views of Dan Gillmour, Warren Kinsella, and Jay Rosen will affect them

  185. Forbes’ dumb contextual ads

    So Forbes.com, thanks to Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT system, is going where even Microsoft feared to tread. Like the software company’s ill-fated SmartTags, Forbes.com highlights individual keywords in a story. These words are then sold to advertisers.

  186. Condensed Glossary of Internet Terminology

    A glossary of words, phrases, and jargon related to the the Internet as a whole.

  187. The value of a protest

    Responding to another writer’s complaints against public protests.

  188. Willingness to get personalized

    A “personalization technology platform provider” recently surveyed some Americans and found that a large majority wanted personalized content online. Not surprisingly, their desire dropped when asked if they’d be willing to supply information about their preferences. When asked about supplying demographic data, interest dropped even more.

  189. Resurrection

    Webmonkey, like the Netscape browser, looks to be back from the dead. I happened to hit the site today and noticed it was on the “wired.com” domain instead of a directory of “hotwired.lycos.com”. Plus there’s this note: “We’re totally back! Webmonkey is alive and kicking, serving up new articles all hot-n-fresh like a stack of banana pancakes. With syrup.” The site will has been publishing new articles every other Friday since the beginning of July:

  190. No consensus on design survey

    François Briatte did a survey. What he discovered is that key [W]eb sites agree on implicit, internalized layout and design norms. In a flurry of coincidental posts, the staff at webgraphics post three different views. The survey, variously:

  191. Registration pro: FT; registration con: Newsbot

    Registration is a buzzworthy topic these days, and I’ve just written a longer piece offering evidence for and against it.

  192. Get off the table

    Doug Bowman, after learning how many Web designers don’t use tables for layout, urges people to throw tables out the proverbial window. To bolster his case, he use the microsoft.com homepage to demonstrate the savings that can be achieved.

  193. WAT the?

    Just as the buts had begin to settle after Matthew Somerville–Odeon conflict, IBM releases a tool that converts normal Web sites automagically into accessible ones. The Web Adaptation Technology is a non-specific-site extension that is currently available only to a select audience, but it may inspire others to release a similar tool via open source

  194. Making space

    The latest issue of Usability News has two studies on the use of white space.

  195. Selling Slate

    Is Microsoft retrenching? Rumour has it that the company wants to sell Slate, possibly to the New York Times or the Washington Post

  196. Ironically, it bugs me not

    In a delicious blend of irony and self-protection, BugMeNot requires registration for people who “are an employee, partner, affiliate or legal representative of any site which enforces compulsory user registration.” The form itself is model registration form

  197. It’s a “GOOG” thing

    Well I was wrong, Google will be “GOOG” on the Nasdaq, after its IPO — pegged at between between US$2.65-billion and US$3.3-billion based on a proposed price US$108 and US$135 a share

  198. Blogging success may endanger the indie Web

    Thanks to the American political conventions’ decision to accredit some bloggers (which in turn was helped by a leadership campaign by Dean Edwards), the mainstream media (and the Internet Explorer development team) has finally accepted the format. (The media also seem to recognize blogging will force them to improve the online efforts.) Although pundits might herald CNN’s partnership with Technorati, the network’s founder offers a warning. Ted Turner wrote a lengthy article in Washington Monthly decrying how big media. The article argues the consideration has crushed independent voices in the broadcast world, and although the online world still seems free, we’d be wise to watch for similar indicators.

  199. Securing registration

    Another note on registration: DeWayne Lehman mentioned on online-news, in a detailed post, the extreme weakness of most registration systems. Few newspaper sites do the following:

  200. The W3C’s XHTML FAQ

    Ever wonder: what’s the deal with XHTML? Now you can find out thanks to the W3C’s YABA-compatiable HTML and XHTML FAQ. Once you’ve digested, that enjoy the brand new draft for XHTML 2.0

  201. Viola not prior art for Eolas patent

    One of the big arguments against the Eolas patent (the one potentially costing Microsoft US$560 bmillion and Web developers a lot of headaches) was the existence of prior art in the form of the pre-Mosaic Viola browser (ironically developed at UC Berkeley)

  202. Fixing the All Music Guide

    The buzz around the Web standards community last week was the awful All Music Guide redesign which exclusively targetted IE 5.5 and higher on Windows and used a mess of JavaScript. To help fix things, Adrian Holovaty has built a AMG-specific Firefox extension that brilliantly undoes much of the damage; his colleague, Simon Willison riffs on the idea of such site-specific extensions.

  203. Clark on the Star on Firefox

    Joe Clark dissects Richard Morochove’s Toronto Star column on alternatives to IE (which was teased with the Firefox logo on the @Biz front page). Joe’s piece is an erudite example of Firefox’ latest “grassroots” marketing initiative: talking back to the press.

  204. Browser support for the saila layout

    A chart detailing browser support for the saila.com tableless, CSS-based, liquid, three-column layout.

  205. Redesigns on a theme

    Two new redesigns showcase some interesting features, and point to a larger trend.

  206. Registering your voice

    As more and more new sites move toward registration, who really benefits?

  207. Adding value to registration

    A passionate thread within the online-news list has encouraged two co-workers to post their well-informed responses on their personal sites. Adrian Holovaty talks about how registration isn’t adding value and Simon Willison explains why BugMeNot is not the bad guy. (I’ve also thrown my somewhat restricted thoughts on this inevitable trend online.)

  208. Browser Wars II: an overview

    The Guardian has published an extremely well-written overview of the new browser wars. Although the piece is targetted at a mainstream audience, but is comprehensive enough to provide a summary to those Web designers not up on the latest shenanigans (Firefox, Longhorn, Dashboard, WHATWG, etc.)

  209. The new Web design gurus

    What did I say about lists? Anyway, here are two visions of the top minds in the Web design world right now. The first, selected by Eric Meyer’s readers, are those CSS experts whose writings people would most like to read in a book. The second is actually two “top Web-design blogger for 2004 (so far)” lists (one from Digital Web Magazine and one from Scrivs).

  210. WebStandards.TO July meeting

    WebStandards.TO meets tonight at Spring Rolls at the Atrium on Bay around 7 p.m

  211. Mutli-columns with Mozilla

    One of my most desired CSS features is coming to a browser near you — Robert O’Callahan has checked a patch into Mozilla that implements the three-year-old CSS3 multi-columns working draft.

  212. Google on Nasdaq

    Google chooses the Nasdaq, meaning “GOGL” might be the biggest ticker symbol since “NSCP.”

  213. More on Dashboard

    The Dashboard fallout continues across the Web. Mike Davidson nicely echoes my own initial feelings (“get further by getting along”), but Ian Hickson forced me to do a rethink (“a new DTD does not magically make you standards compliant”)

  214. Time-sharing and terminals back in vogue

    HP steps into Apple territory (again) by offering computers to schools. The difference is these computers are for African schools and are designed to save the schools up to 60 percent of their computer costs. It manages this by harkening back to the early days of computing: one CPU can be used by four people. There are no plans — for now — to make the HP Multi-user 441, though

  215. Mozilla not perfect!

    So, Mozilla had a security flaw — the browser’s not perfect after all. However, unlike some browsers, the patch was made within four-and-a-half hours. Eleven hours later, the vulnerability was reported and the codebase was fixed. Less than 24 hours later, updated versions of (or patches for) Mozilla’s software was available. (The timeline is summarized from sacarny’s own work.)

  216. Lists for Web geeks (and some Dashboard, too)

    Lists, like questionnaires, seem destined to be perfect blog food, so here’s a double dose for those Web designers out there:

  217. Saving BBC Online

    Although some British Internet companies are happy about reducing BBC Online’s presence, many in that country’s online media industry are not as pieces in the Guardian and Digital Media Europe indicate. I wonder if the BBC is still a bit timid after the suicide of Dr. David Kelly.

  218. Comments re-enabled

    With this entry I give thee comments… (Which are still in beta, bugs can be sent via the feedback form.)

  219. New IE5/Mac filter

    Doug Bowman tapped Tantek Çelik’s brain and out emerged the IE5/Mac Band Pass Filter. The result causes the former to eulogize the browser the latter helped build

  220. Big BBC Online cuts

    A few weeks ago, when talking with someone who worked at the BBC Online, I was stunned to learn the massive scale of its operation. Now the government is ordering the broadcaster to shut down some of those reported 20,000 Web sites. The BBC is shutting five down, and is promising to limit its online budget to about �21-million-a-year, down from a �73 million this year. A cut that size will have a dramatic affect on the services offered by BBC Online, but still leaves them with an budget many Canadian sites would envy.

  221. Registering the Star

    As promised, the Toronto Star is encouraging its users to register — in method sadly reminiscent of another paper’s attempts

  222. Freeing the GIF in Canada

    Finally, the GIF is patent-free in Canada

  223. Comments on a summer vacation

    Comments have been greatly improved for the new site.

  224. ISPs freed

    Just in time for Canada Day, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against ISPs paying royalties for music their users download. The move, pushed by SOCAN, was deemed impractical, unfair, and unconventional. One of the judges, Justice Ian Binnie, wrote:

  225. Redesign watch

  226. Comments a’comin’

    For those that care, comments are returning soon. But before they do, I’m taking some time off

  227. Two more seats

    Two more seats, two more seats would have made things much better. Stupid FPTP

  228. Obsolescence and W3C

    On the heels of the of the first call for comments on Web Forms 2.0, comes a News.com story touches on the issues behind that specifications development. Although the article focuses on Office documents, PDFs, Flash, and RSS the so-called Web standards face a similar problem. With XHTML, SVG, and XForms still born, and real progress being made by WHATWG, the W3C is risking obsolescence. (Ian Hickson writes a bit more about this in his latest posting, too.)

  229. Go vote

    Election day in Canada, so stop reading this Canadians, and go vote. (Find your local polling station.) One more thing, if you’re thinking of voting Conservative in protest against the Liberals, make sure you understand the ideas of the Calgary School.

  230. Internet Explorer evangelist

    Apparently, Microsoft has quietly appointed an evangelist to the Internet Explorer development team. Dave Massy worked with IE prior to getting transferred over to Longhorn work. Although he claims it’s not big news he does say he’ll be fielding user requests to the Internet Explorer development team.

  231. Post out

    As promised, the National Post will be pulling out of CP June 30 because the paper can’t afford its dues. Since its establishment 1917, the news service has grown to include more than 600 Canadian newsrooms and news agencies from around the world and its style guide and spelling guide is the standard for Canadian writers, journalists, and editors

  232. 50 top (foreign) magazines

    Unfortunately, Canadian magazine stands are crammed with American titles, forcing out quality domesitc books. But, if you have to buy foreign titles, the Chicago Tribune has compiled a list of its favourite fifty magazines. Wired top’s the list, no doubt helped by its surging ad revenue.

  233. Bloomsday

    “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.…”

  234. Redesigns for BoingBoing, FOXNews, and the Mozilla Store

    When planets collide: BoingBoing and FOXNews both redesign. Neither is stellar, and one is downright awful (hint, it’s the one done to look more like a TV channel). Both sites should have talked to Steven Garrity (he of the excellent post “How Websites Learn”) and his co-workers at silverorange; that crew’s work on the Mozilla Store is terrific

  235. Lessons from Weblogs.com

    The brouhaha over Dave Winer’s decision to pull the plug on weblogs.com-hosted blogs offers three axioms about the Web in specific, and life in general:

  236. Love-ing new media journalism

    Mr. Holovaty points to a days-old site from Gary Love on new media journalism. The site looks to be the kind I was first hoping to create with this one; that is a content-rich resource on the unrealized potential in online journalism. Love has a lot of experience in the field, but has decided not to tie his name to the project (depsite using his personal’s site design). The result is a site whose pseudo-anonymity weakens the integrity of the well-thought out articles. Still worth a bookmark, though

  237. Rewarding openess

    Today Tim Berners-Lee receives €1 million from the world’s largest technology prize, the Millennium Technology Prize, for — in part — not patenting his most spectacular invention, the Web itself.

  238. “Standards-friendly” ads

    The company behind XStandard, the WYSIWYG XHTML editor, has cleverly used some stock photography to create some “standards-friendly” ads

  239. Registration doubts

    As the wave of registration-only Web sites roll forward, questions about registration’s benefits are seeping into the mainstream

  240. New Mozilla releases

    Two new release candidates from the Mozilla Foundation: Mozilla Suite 1.7 RC3 and Firebird 0.9 RC1 (the latter features a controversial new theme).

  241. Meet Sympatico/MSN, register at the Globe

    The Canadian Web is changing: Sympatico is MSN and get ready to register at the Globe and Mail’s sites

  242. JavaScript scrap

    Bert Bos really dislikes JavaScript and Brendan Eich reacts by questioning the W3C’s relevance

  243. Stopdesign restarts

    When Friday Mr. Bowman said there was another redesign underway at Stopdesign, few suspected the entire foundation would be replaced.

  244. Do’s and don’ts for online newspapers

    MediaSavvy continues its survey on why a newspaper can’t be more like a blog, this time discussing why so few of online newspapers have ability to track stories and add comments. Barry Parr also mentions Jonathan Dube’s list of 101 things to improve a news site. “We” have done at least nine on the list

  245. Stick the stinger on the WaSP

    The Web Standards Project wants to know what effect it and Web standards in general have in your working life. For most of the Web-developing readers of this little site, standards are a way of life, and it’s easy to forget we are in the vast minority. Filling it out the WaSP’s brief survey will help the organization reach out to the majority.

  246. Man knows news (from blogs)

    One Steve recently went on a news diet and restricted himself to the blogosphere. Later, another Steve tested the first’s news knowledge of that period. The results indicated you can get the news from just blogs. Of course, the same positive results would likely be obtained if the diet was restricted to discussions with friends at bars and cafes, too

  247. A Royal pain in the…

    The man behind the RBC crash and Eric Reguly on how the bank reacted

  248. TodaysPapers: a new news aggregator

    TodaysPaper merges GoogleNews with a community-blog-like interface. Though it’s still in its infancy (tracking only 100 feeds), TodaysPapers is the second project from BlogLabs — Cam Barrett’s personal business incubator. Barrett knows the medium, and it should be very interesting to see if how the users editorializing (via comments) will effect how readers digest the news as the site grows.

  249. Introducing WHATWG

    Some frustration, perhaps, has lead to the creation of the YABA-friendly WHATWG. The idea is, in essence, to create new technologies to extend the core Web standards (HTML, CSS, DOM and ECMA Script) and allow developers to created Web-based applications. (MozillaZine offers a good overview.)

  250. mono redesigns

    Another notable redesign: the subtly-changed mono. Mr. Holst describes in detail both the influences and hurdles in this design

  251. RSS and newspapers

    RSS’s relationship with online newspapers is on my brain, and the topic seems to be appearing everywhere:

  252. Firefox 0.9 release date

    Firefox 0.9 will be released in about ten days, a release candidate should be available next week. This version will essentially be 1.0; in other words, no new features will be added to 0.9 and only bug fixes will be applied to create 1.0. The more that use and test these versions, the better the final product

  253. Normandy at 60

    Sixty years ago this weekend, thousands of soliders (including my grandfather) prepared for a massive invasion on the beaches of Normandy. The CBC’s online team imagines what its coverage would have been like had they been there. The clever project is not only a unique way to present a well-known story, but also a brillant way to tap into its archives (including a long-lost CBC recording of a broadcast by the late Katharine Hepburn)

  254. Tiananmen at 15

    Fifteen-years ago today a pro-democracy protest was brutally suppressed as the world watched in horror. Hundreds or thousands died demanding reforms that China is finally, but slowly, making

  255. Will it ever launch?

    Laying out the plan to launch this new design.

  256. Elections sites fail validity test

    As I mentioned yesterday, Canada’s in the midst of a federal election so Joe Clark and I (along with some other members of WebStandards.TO) thought it’d be a good idea to see how accessible and valid the five major parties’ sites were.

  257. Redesign update

    For those wondering about the redesign of this site, I’ve posted an update

  258. New IE will be the same as the old

    Ian Hickson is at the W3C’s Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents where he learned the version of Internet Explorer to be included with Longhorn — a.k.a, the next version of Windows — apparently still won’t support XHTML with a MIME type of “application/xhtml+xml” nor will it natively support SVG. As well, the Microsoft representatives said, according to Hickson, “significantly more comprehensive test suites” are needed before Microsoft will work on standards compliance again

  259. Widgetopia relaunches

    Widgetopia has relaunched as collaborative site in which anyone can post examples of user-interface elements; the site also has its own domain: “widgetopia.net”

  260. New IE7 better than the old

    Dean Edwards continues his admirable work on IE7, and has released version 0.6. Though still an alpha, he’s added support for fixed positioning and IE 5.0. One big change is IE7 can now respect CSS precedence and specificity. Any questions can be posted in the support forums

  261. Rare political rant

    I’ve also posted a rare (for this site, at least) political rant about a disturbing trend emerging in the current (Canadian) federal election

  262. Catching-up with the news

    In the weeks since I’ve posted anything substantial here, it seems almost every notable blog has redesigned. (Where’s this one’s? Still sitting, unfinished on a test server.) There’s also been an election called in Canada, and a number of interesting developments in the news world. With my dad’s recovery progressing quite nicely, it’s about time to kick this blog back into gear and start covering these events.

  263. Purple numbers

    Joe Clark famously did it when moving his incredible book, Building Accessible Websites online, and Eugene Eric Kim made them visible with “Purple.” Chris Dent turned Tim Bray onto them, and, in turn, Simon Willison made the technique dynamic while improving it visually. The purple numbers idea makes Joe’s work usable and will most likely be seen on the new version of this site

  264. Wha’ happened?

    Although part of the reason for the extended quiet here was due to the Digital Web Magazine redesign I was involved in, it mostly had to do with my dad’s unexpected, but much welcomed, transplant surgery. As he recovers — which he is doing quite nicely — we’re keep a blog-record of it to keep people informed (to visit, enter www.saila.com/ and then his first name, in lowercase). Ironically that blog will be pushing this blog to finally repair it’s comment system.

  265. Thomson eyes the Globe while Shafer eyes e-editions

    I was going to blog about the Thomson’s renewed interest in The Globe and Mail yesterday along with the other newspaper stories, but rumours of the sale of the paper have been swirling since Mr. Monty left the scene. However, combined with the announcement the sale of BCE’s e-commerce company and the improved financial performance of Bell Globemedia, maybe the Globe really will have a new owner.

  266. New designs for the Walrus and the W3C validator

    The Walrus almost managed to turn an oops into a marketing ploy when one of its newsletters yesterday pointed readers to the development site. After realizing what happened the magazine quickly sent out an explanation (in fact, it was sent twice):

  267. Wire evolution

    Newspapers and portals have traditionally swallowed the wire copy whole, allow design to overwhelm the origin of content. Increasingly though, those stories are becoming commodities, and that threatens the wires’ business model. Mark Glaser explains how the industry is reacting to these changes

  268. Blogging the CAJ national conference

    David Akin is blogging the CAJ national conference in Vancouver this weekend, covering sessions he’s leading and attending. There are already posts on Kirk Lapointe and obligatory blogging and journalism session

  269. Labour woes at Toronto’s newspapers

  270. RSS review

    Push is back, and I don’t know what to make of it this time around. As it begins to reach mainstream penetration, I can’t help wondering whether it will suffer the same bandwidth waste that killed it the first time around (although solutions are being sought). Nevertheless, the kids like it, and J.D. Lasica reviews some of the popular aggregator. For what it’s worth, I just installed the RSS Reader Panel extension for Firefox encourages me to read the updated posts on the original Web site

  271. WebStandards.TO May meet

    WebStandards.TO meets tonight at the Rhino in a symbolic effort to embrace Flash (the Rhino is home to Toronto’s Flash developers group); come by after 7 p.m

  272. Newsworld Gore’d

    As speculated, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has bought Newsworld, the international network once owned by the CBC. Although the Mother Corp. will continue to provide the content, the purchase continues the politicalization of the American broadcast media. Like the country itself, it seems the U.S. media is splitting along so-called left and right lines (or liberal-conservative, or Democratic-Republican) with the common ground held, surprisingly, by the Big Three plus CNN

  273. Nielsen’s visited links

    Guru Nielsen has already received well-argued flak over his latest column on visited-link colours, but don’t dismiss it outright; there’s a kernel of truth to be found there. Normal users do rely on links changing state once visited, especially in non-navigational elements (such as the content of a page) — I’ve seen the email to prove it

  274. Nonsensical note

    Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; either way, let it go

  275. World Press Freedom Day

    Today is World Press Freedom Day, and there’s no doubt why this is needed

  276. National Magazine Award finalists

    The National Magazine Award finalists have been announced, and once again, Toronto Life leads the pack with 25 nominations. The Walrus is seventh, with 11 nominations, well behind Toro (17), and just ahead of Maclean’s with its meagre eight nominations (as a point of comparison, its French sister, L’actualité is second with 23 nominations)

  277. Geeks anniversaries

    A couple of anniversaries that helped shape a generation or two of geeks: BASIC is 40, and Space Invaders is 25

  278. Three-hundred images from 1,800 sites

    What icons do nearly two-thousand sites use to represent seven common elements? Find out at 300 Images From 1800 Sites

  279. Zeldman’s spring

    Zeldman urges everyone to feel the “spring” in their step with his all-green redesign

  280. Mozilla and GNOME

    UserFriendly tries to poke fun at the Mozilla browser. (The Mozilla Foundation recently met with the GNOME Foundation … I wonder what about?)

  281. A public Google

    Google’s mantra is to not to be evil, but might that also mean not going public? A cleverly illustrated New York Times piece speculates the company’s co-founders want to keep Google eccentric, and by necessity, private, for as long as possible. That article, and two related pieces, provides a timely reminder both of why the dot-com bust and why the market might not always know best.

  282. Toronto 1, f--k

    One of the knocks against Toronto 1 is that it is trying to be Citytv; and now its seems to be copying City’s delicate sensibilities. We all remember the blooper reel from Gord Martineau and crew, and now Toronto 1 has one of its very own

  283. Bleeding, but not leading

    Did you know about the massize train disaster that occured in Norh Korea this morning? Given the treatment of the story online, it wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t

  284. It bleeds, but doesn’t lead

    A North Korean disaster gets buried by online news sites.

  285. Off-shoring may benefit Canada

    Unlike the U.S., off-shoring hasn’t notuceably affected the Canadian economy. A recent PriceWaterHouseCoopers study suggests there will be about 75,000 Canadian IT jobs sent to places like India during the next six years.The net gain in jobs, though, may be double that figure. Ironically, the effects will be tempered by American companies “near-shoring” jobs in Canada

  286. The Webbys struggle on

    The collective yawn heard across the Web was the announcement of the latest Webby nominations (why do they force you to re-register every year?). Admittedly, given how far this medium has come over the past decade (need proof: look at the state of the medium circa December 1994), this blasé attitude is kind of bizarre.

  287. Mozilla offering page-specific CSS hooks

    Asa points to a great soon-to-be feature for Gecko based browsers: a means to apply custom CSS based on the URL of the page loaded in the browser (vote for it). This has been bandied about on the www-style list, and there have been a number of suggested workarounds, including CSS signatures. Until this gets implemented, try Chris Neale’s extension, URIid

  288. TCP flaw

    The myth goes that the Internet could survive a nuclear attack. Though it was never true, the network has proven surprisingly robust. But the British government has disclosed flaw affecting the transmission control protocol that was discovered late last year by terrorist.net owner, Paul “Tony” Watson. The result is someone could trick, within seconds, computers and routers into severing connections by restarting. The hack will revealed in detail by Watson on Thursday at the cansecwest conference

  289. Netscape back? Or is it the Net ninjas?

    In other news, AOL is trying to resurrect Netscape and a UofT prof is training “net ninjas” to get around government censorship on the Web

  290. A reading list

    A quasi-annotated list of some of the articles that caught my eye over the past few days:

  291. Define Web standards

    Signal vs. Noise is challenging people to define Web standards in 10 words or less. (Speaking of which, WebStandards.TO has its first anniversary get together tonight at Fresh on Queen at Crawford.)

  292. Quoting and adjusting font sizes

    The latest version of Firefox now supports nested quoting via q, meaning this renders correctly: There was a pause. This won’t work in IE, he said. That being said, I do have a script for rendering quotes in Internet Explorer — it’s not really production quality yet, though.

  293. The good and bad of Craig and CHUM

    Eric Reguly has some very strong words about both the CRTC and Craig Media in terms of the Toronto 1 deal

  294. Mr. Walrus

    MediaBistro profiles Mr. Walrus, Ken Alexander. Not a lot of new news for Canadian magazine junkies, but it is interesting to read an American publication parsing the idea of a Canadian magazine

  295. IE7 update

    Dean Edwards has a released a major update to the still alpha IE7, including a way to make it, theoretically, future compatible. Dean’s also released the heart of the IE7, its CSS query engine, as a separate JavaScript file.

  296. Developing with Web standards

    Roger Johansson has produced a nicely-presented document on Web standards aimed at both clients and anyone learning Web design (via Webgraphics)

  297. Searching with Amazon

    Hmm…searching with Amazon’s A9; interesting dHTML interface (possibly built in part by Scott Andew), too. The John Battelle’s Searchblog broke the news, and there you can find more details. There is also a complete analysis underway at Signal vs. Noise and a Firefox plugin from Steven Garrity

  298. Bought by CHUM

    Get one redesign done, and dive into work on another. Difference is this time, I like the design. More details to in the coming months (and, no, it still is not this site)…

  299. EPpys and eyes

    The finalists for Editor & Publisher’s annual EPpy Awards have been announced. There’s nothing too surprising in the list of all-American nominees (except maybe Google’s nod).

  300. Rwanda, ten years on

    We need look no further than our own backyard to see why it’s so important to remember what happened in Rwanda ten years ago.

  301. Getting them to register and pay

    With so many sites considering registrations and subscriptions (Reuters business news is the latest), it’s worth heeding some tips for getting users to pay and remember why they would even want to. I wished CBS MarketWatch followed some that advice as I was forced to register in an error-inducing process just to read a piece on MSNBC

  302. Rating the news

    Newsknife claims to rate news sites, but the interesting thing is how it does just that: it partly relies on Google’s relevance ranking

  303. Final Disclosure

    Ironically, The Eleventh Hour has been renewed, but one of its real-life inspirations, Disclosure, has been cancelled. What’s more, there’s speculation a hockey strike could affect the CBC’s other news programs. Antonia Zerbisias has a bit more on this and the Toronto Sun’s surprising redesign

  304. Telcos revolution

    The telecommunications industry, especially in

  305. Standards: to follow or not

    Microsoft really likes what the Mozllia Foundation is doing. First it releases XAML to compete with XUL, now it looks like it’s taking on XPInstall with its open-source (!) WiX. Combined with its support of InfoPath over XForms, it seems Microsoft is trying, again, to create a new de facto standard at the expense of those already in existence.

  306. “Real” bad design

    Wired News explains how bad Web design can potentially destroy a dominant product.

  307. Digital librarians

    Online journalists as we once imagined them may never appear, but Robin Good imagines an alternative: the digital librarian

  308. Microsoft pays-off competitor

    In the “It Worked for Apple” Department, Microsoft pays Sun US$1.95 billion in damages over antitrust and patent related issues. In return, Sun begins a “new phase of legal and technical cooperation with longtime foe Microsoft.”

  309. Online-news evolution

    Although I know it’s true, I still find it hard to believe I’ve playing with this medium for ten years. Steve Yelvington, though, has been working in it for that same period (for me, it’s only eight). His look back is also a call to arms, challenging online journalism to live up to the potential we once saw in this “new media.”

  310. CTV’s big intranet

    The Globe and Mail profiles (in a convergence-friendly story) another way the Internet has changed the way news has gathered. CTV, Canada’s big private network, relies on, essentially, an intranet to shunt videos between bureaus. By not relying on the technology revolution of the sixties — satellites — the network is saving phenomenal amounts of money and time

  311. Music industry fails to prove infringement

    Canada’s Federal Court has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association didn’t prove there was copyright infringement by the uploaders it was trying to sue. The judge, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein, also said that downloading isn’t illegal under the Canadian copyright law. The ruling, and its ramifications, will likely have a tremendous effect on Canadian cyberlaw.

  312. Print, past; future…?

    David Akin points out that the latest newspaper readership numbers show the papers are actually losing younger readers (or perhaps more accurately, they aren’t attracting new younger readers). So where are those people going for their news? Maybe the Web sites of said newspapers — I know I have for the past eight years or so.

  313. Netscape resurrected?

    Seems like Netscape as a browser may not be so dead after all. Rumours are swirling that sometime this summer will see a new version (likely dubbed 7.2 or 7.5) of the stalwart browser. The news has sparked some high-level in-fighting in the very public forums at MozillaZine about which version of Mozilla should be considered the stable, or gold-standard, for the next year or so.

  314. Black on TV

    Lord Conrad Black will now have to suffer the ignominy of a TV movie of his life; CTV has confirmed that it will be adapting the biography, Shades of Black. Of course, Black could do worse than have the Churchillian Albert Finney portray him

  315. Toronto’s subway at 50

    Toronto’s — and Canada’s — first subway system (which is now in desperate need of much more than the expected $1-billion funding boost) turns 50 today. The first line ran up and down 7.6 km of Yonge St. and even had its own song. Although the TTC site has a photo album of its major line openings, a much better picture can be found in the comprehensive Toronto Transit blog

  316. Magazines in Canada

    Wondering how Canada’s magazines are doing? The Montreal Gazette has nice overview of the magazine industry (thanks again, Steph).

  317. Watching the CBC lurch left

    It may be “Comedy Day in Canada,” but apparently Michael Connell isn’t laughing. He’s launched a new site to keep an eye on the creeping bias of the Mother Corp. Called CBC Watch, the site is designed to look like a community blog. Technically, it could be a community blog, but the only posts are by two anonymous users — “user2” and “Guest” — who share the same right-wing views.

  318. Singing with Opera

    You can talk to your browser…or, at least, the next version of Opera. The Norwegian browser will use IBM’s Embedded ViaVoice to let users navigate and fill-in forms just by speaking. Using the proposed XHTML+Voice (X+V) specification, the voice-enabled — or multimodal — browser neatly hits three markets:

  319. Microsoft AOL?

    From Friday, a New York Post article speculating Microsoft might be offered AOL. Slashdot digests the news, which provoked little coverage elsewhere.

  320. National Newspaper Awards nominees; CP goes wireless

    The 2003 National Newspaper Awards nominees were announced last Friday, with my employer taking 13 of 60, and the Toronto Star a close second at 12. The National Post got three nods.

  321. A defence of spam

    Over the weekend, Doug Saunders demonstrated, once again, his flair for writing in his defence of spam

  322. Two “me toos”

    Normally, I refrain from “me too” posts, but today Zeldman echoed my experiences over the past few weeks

  323. Out-sourcing writing

    Wired made a big deal of out-sourcing of programming work to India a couple of issues ago; now it seems India is also taking on editorial work. Although journalism shouldn’t be “at risk,” almost any other type of wrtiting — especially technical and marketing — could be

  324. Interviewing Bowman

    My pre-SXSW interview with Doug Bowman has been published over at Digital Web Magazine. He has also just published the details and slide shows for the two talks he mentions in the interview, “Hi-Fi Design With CSS” and “CSS: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” Continuing the SXSW presentation updates, Dan Cederholm has also posted his slide show for the former panel (incidentally, and quite coincidentally, Dan is only member of that panel I haven’t interviewed for Digital Web — perhaps we should remedy that…)

  325. Pre-rot link dump

    I’ve been burning the candles at both ends trying to persuade Web servers to behave and tame Netscape 4. The resulting production is a bit less valid and accessible than I’d like, but is a big step forward for the sites in question. Any way, there’s been a lot of good pieces online lately, and before the links rot, I’ll dump them here. (Things should return to normal in April.)

  326. Working for Asper

    An email landed in my inbox today pointing to a wonderfully ironic story: not only does Leonard Asper love convergence, he’d also like to own the newspaper I work for

  327. Webmonkey’s last hurrah and other goodies

    The last hurrah of Webmonkey is a good one. The cheekily named “The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev” covers the history and the technology behind small-screen devices, while still managing to offer pages of design and development tips.

  328. Stevie’s “big bad”

    Stevie Cameron rose to fame by exposing the skeletons lurking in the closets of people like our former prime minister, Brian Mulroney. Since November her former employer, and my current one, has been doing the same to her. The Globe and Mail claimed she was a confidential informant for the RCMP. At first Cameron denied it, and then when more evidence became available, she conceded she might have been considered a source. Antonia Zerbisias’ recent column explains why this is “big bad” (thanks Steph)

  329. Oops, we did it again

    No paper likes running corrections once, let alone twice, but that’s what the L.A. Times had to do when an overzealous editor altered a story to suggest an opera was against abortion

  330. The press gallery blog

    A former student of mine, Elaine O’Connor, has just launched a new journalism-related blog promising journalism students (and non-students) everything they “ever wanted to find on-line in j-school but were afraid to waste time looking for,” including “a little sass, a lot of links, non-fiction book reviews, headline media news, job and reporting resources, discussion boards and opinion pieces.”

  331. Netscape for IE!

    Now, for all those who love Netscape, but use Microsoft’s browser, get the new Netscape Toolbar for Internet Explorer! (thanks MikeyC)

  332. IE7

    I’ve been sitting on Dean Edwards’ incredible set of enhancements for Internet Explorer since last Wednesday. As you may be aware, word of his IE7 development is sweeping across the community, and it’s not surprising why. With a few lines of script, Edwards has found a way for Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 to support complex CSS selectors.

  333. Saving online newspapers

    Another community — the online news one — is buzzing about an article written by Vin Crosbie about “what newspapers and their Web sites must do to survive.” Most who know the industry say Crosbie has nailed it, and I’d generally agree

  334. Canadian copyright ruling brings hope

    A quick legal update, from Michael Geist, on Canadian copyright law

  335. Eolas invalid

    Missed this over the weekend, but the infamous Eolas patent — the one claiming ownership over plug-in technology — has been invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This should mean the expected service pack for Internet Explorer 6 won’t include the “fixes” Microsoft released five months ago, which in turn, revealed how to install multiple versions of said browser

  336. CBC’s online gambit

    Following-up on Wednesday’s item on the CBC archives, there’s speculation that the music may be partly to blame. Although the CBC has an agreement with SOCAN for its radio broadcast, it allegedly has none for its Web content. Nor does the broadcaster have online rights to some of the content produced by freelancers. All this may help explain the clips canishing from the Web site.

  337. The Globe at 160

    Canada’s self-proclaimed national newspaper (and my national paper) is also older than the country itself; the Globe and Mail celebrates its 160th anniversary today

  338. Big redesigns

    The infrequent posts here are a result of the work I’ve been doing on the biggest CSS redesign I’ve been involved in. Though not a radical design, the underlying HTML has been completely re-worked to be both more semantic, more accessible, and less invalid. Look for it soon

  339. Public broadcasting a “monster”

    News on the CBC…

  340. Journalists who blog

    Journalist are paid to write their opinions, so how do media outlets deal with staff members who blog? Rudy reminded me of a recent column where Steve Outing tried to find out

  341. February 26, 2004

    Updated the Creative Commons information to include rel="license" and the RDF content

  342. February 6, 2004

    Removed the small ads and hit counter found under the navigation menu

  343. New and revised CSS proposals

    The W3C released a bunch of CSS documents this week:

  344. Abbreviations and poetry

    Finally, some clarity from the W3C on the use of abbr as summarized by Jesper Tverskov (via Anne van Kesteren.)

  345. Grey Tuesday

    Can art be illegal?

  346. Remember “Generation X”?

    I wonder what would have happened to those of us in “Generation X” had the Web not taken off? Looking back at CBC’s early coverage of us starting more than ten years ago, things did look pretty bleak. But around that time, the Web emerged. Many of us found work in the dot-com sector, and the shake-up created by the “new economy” leveled the playing field a bit. We shaped this medium, like the the baby boomers did with television, and in many ways the values of the Web are a reflection of our own ideals

  347. Shutting the gates

    Online newspapers are rushing to set-up registration systems, but at what cost?

  348. Who’s the manager? Semantic Web pushes ahead; additional beautiful blogs

    From a Bulgarian software outsourcing company’s spam sitting in my inbox today:

  349. Webmonkey’s gone to heaven

    Admittedly, I only occasionally visited Webmonkey in recent years, but there was a time when I read every word. Today, Webmonkey’s staff has been laid-off, effectively shuttering the place that first taught me the values of good Web design.

  350. Introducing Firefox; Pixies back; validator fixed

    At what point does it just become silly?

  351. Two-in-one

    Web services vanish into thin air and pages not found.

  352. Fixing the CSS validator; CSS footers and JavaScript galleries

    Following yesterday’s minor kerfuffle over the CSS validator and CSS hacks, Zeldman is asking people to request the W3C update its validator. In reply, the W3C’s Olivier Thereaux is asking the community to help fix the open-source validator.

  353. Problems with hacks

    Due to changes with the W3C’s CSS Validator (as detailed by Dave Shea and Jeffrey Zeldman), a very popular hack doesn’t validate. Though frustrating, the situation perfectly illustrates why, if it all possible, CSS hacks should be avoided. Ideally, one should use what I refer to as CSS filters — those tricks that exploit holes in a browser’s support (like the langauge pseudo-class selector), not bugs in its rendering engine.

  354. meyerweb,com redesigns; standard-based Scrabble; Martin’s throne speech

    Mr. Meyer has redesigned his site, and is using a neat little trick I built into my new design (who knows when anyone but me will see it).

  355. Cleaning the desktop: journalism-related links

    My desktop is getting overwhelmed by bloggable (and primarily journalism-related) links, so it’s time to clean it up:

  356. Citytv’s true colours?

    Citytv’s CityPulse journalists making goofs on themselves on tape: a prominent Toronto anchor makes some questionable jokes (he’s apologized), a crime reporter steals some of an interviewee’s Grand Marnier, and the Leafs’ former captain tells off a cocky sports reporter.

  357. Dayparting

    The Seattle Post-Intelligencer divides the day up just right.

  358. Honderich resigns; CSS tooltips

    And so ends a dynasty: John Honderich, and his trademark bow-tie, won’t be seen around the offices of the Toronto Star for much longer. The paper’s publisher is leaving his post “with regret” due to a “corporate desire for change.”

  359. Wearing sheep’s clothing

    Groups are starting to exploit journalists as both a means and an end for accomplishing their goals.

  360. Recognizing abbr; are newspapers the last mass medium?

    The aforementioned rant on the RCMP raid of a journalist’s home, and the precedent it may establish, has now been posted.

  361. Interviewing Shea; RCMP raid

    Digital Web has published my interview with Dave Shea. His thougtful answers touch on his past and future, as well as offer insight into his own works.

  362. Conservative Web sites; Roots looking to sweatshops?

    David Akin has written an article in The Globe and Mail that reviews the Conservative Party leadership candidates’ Web sites. But how do they do on the standards count?

  363. Nielsen says patent; maybe CanCon rules are needed

    Stupidest advice yet: Jakob Nielsen actually advocates that companies “patent usability innovations.” Great, just great.

  364. Black’s tragedy

    Wow…even if you aren’t a business and media buff, this is one engaging, and tragic story: the mighty Lord Conrad Black has lost his media empire after (among other things) being fired from, and sued by, his own company, Hollinger International.

  365. Better 404s and CSS illustrations

    Help the lost and confused at your site by following the advice at A List Apart. (Yes, I know this site doesn’t have a proper 404 page — long story — but if it did, the page would look something like the one suggested in the article).

  366. Mozilla 1.6 released; mitigating media concentration

    Mozilla 1.6 is out, and features the ability to refresh the source code window (great for debugging) as well as numerous bug fixes (including one that prevented me from using an experimental new design for this site).

  367. Challenging the tarrif; VeriSign wants RFIDs; cross-browser DHTML Behaviors

    Not like it was unexpected: Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and a bunch of retailers are challenging the tarrif to be placed on MP3 players. A successful suit could lead to the end of legal downloading in Canada, though.

  368. CSS layout tutorial; CBC archives flooded

    Russ Weakley has produced a well-written, step-by-step tutorial for creating CSS layouts. Great for beginners and veterans alike.

  369. Bell Globemedia break-up; Rebus Symbols;Nott’s hacks and filters

    Earlier reports about the break-up of Bell Globemedia (my employer) are looking truer by the day. Over the weekend, the National Post reported that the company’s board has been dissolved. Could be another interesting Janaury/February here…

  370. Web award deadlines; Elm Street falls

    Looks like another tough year for the Webby’s. Last year, as you may recall, they cancelled the gala awards party; this year they’re extending the deadline for entries.

  371. CSS supports limit semantic mark-up; Internet as coffee-house

    Dave Shea has a detailed breakdown of a stumbling block I’ve been climbing over while rebuilding this site. Strip-down mark-up to its semantically pure form, and it becomes almost impossible to access the needed elements with today’s CSS. As a result, the mark-up needs additional hooks.

  372. Google IPO

    Boom! Google’s going public, although the search engine is dismissing the idea it will have an IPO in April. Estimates suggest the offering could be the largest yet, valued at US$4-billion with a third of the stock going public. That would value the company at US$12-billion.

  373. CBC (r)evolution; whatever:hover; hand-writing fonts

    Could the CBC be in for some changes, too? CanWest reported at the end of 2003 that two internal studies found the public broadcaster too stuffy, and suggested a new anchor was needed to attract younger viewers, like, say, me.

  374. Media rumours and trends; printing the Web; the Daily Standards

    Recently, when talking with a co-worker about the possible sale of our employer, I said there was no big media companies left who would want the Globe — I had forgotten about Transcontinental, best known as the publisher of the TV Guide.