Working with new standards on the web sometimes requires some tools to make transition easier. The web started off on the Mac with early HTML editors like Claris HomePage and Adobe PageMill and later Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Increasingly, these tools are adopting CSS support but they are not made for primarily focussing on CSS.

An exception is CSSEdit. It can load CSS directly from the web and of course you can use it to directly edit CSS files on your local disk as well. While I still prefer to hand-code my CSS and use BBEdit for it, it might be a helper for those who are still fighting with the basic rules of CSS. With $14.99, it is pretty cheap and is good add-on for your personal web toolbox.

By the way, the CSSEdit Home Page shows some pretty nifty use of CSS to learn from. Look at the page with a modern web browser like Mozilla or Safari to get the scoop.

Well, different countries, different traditions, different laws. If you have ever wondered on the specific rules on when you are allowed to fuck who without getting fucked yourself, you might want to check this extensive chart on AgeOfConsent.com.

As the chart contains information on all three possible gender combinations (country notes include information on sodomy laws as well) it is also quite illuminative on where gay people are still having a bad time. It is mostly islamic countries where the trouble is but even countries like Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago are less relaxed than you might expect: gay sex is just illegal (if the chart is right) in these places.

There is longer explanation on the situation in Germany in english and german.

Get your war on is an excellent comic series that started one month after one of these boeings missed its target and reflects on all kinds of war on something.

Seems to be a regular series in the Rolling Stone now.

Max is our co-moderator for our Chaosradio project which fills the Blue Moon slot on Radio Fritz once a month. He called me today and asked me to do an short interview on web standards in tonight‘s Blue Moon radio broadcast.

The talk radio show focuses on web design and how-to-build-your-home-page and addresses the non-technical crowd. So I guess I will join in at around midnight (CET/DST) and ramble a bit about the importance of web standards. Fritz broadcasts on FM and there is a RealAudio stream as well.

There is an american soldier in Iraq, he shares his daily life on the net:

i sit here all night trying to change the world from my lap top…and it‘s beginning to weigh on me…there is a story here that deserves to be told…there are other sides to this multi faceted goliath… i forgot to tell you what i feel…i feel like atlas…with the weight of the world as my burden…simply because i have waken up to it… please… someone else wake up and help me…

He is reporting almost daily on talks about both what happens around and inside him. Interesting read. As he links to Michael Moore I guess he has some distance to what is going on. He also maintains a photo page.


[via peerfear.org]

There is no reasonable doubt that electronic mail is one of the killer applications of the Internet. And it‘s widespread use is a strong indicator. The „e-mail address“ is becoming more and more the single identification scheme that has long been the telephone number and this is no surprise.

But there are three things that are really making e-mail less and less useful every day. One is of course the spiced meat and porn we are all suffering from. The other are inherent in the system itself: the missing privacy and the lack of adherence to standards.

Have you ever got mail from this friendly little guy called „mailer daemon“? It just stroke again. I got mail from somebody whose mail address is registered with the german mail provider web.de. The problem is, that the mail address she has registered is actually an illegal mail address if you look at the corresponding RFCs. But web.de doesn‘t care, they just hand out these addresses. So when I tried to reply, my mail subsystem rejected my message. So I have no chance of replying at all. It is a mess.

Another catastrophic thing is that the replies of these „mailer daemons“ are so cryptic, usually english only and stuffed with techie terms that even techies have problem to understand. And there seems to be no solution to this problem because providers don‘t care. It is a mess.

I guess this will one day be the big chance for instant messaging. If you look at new emerging protocols like Jabber, you see that instant messaging seems to be ready to take up on where mail seems to be stuck: well defined flow, well defined message structure, well defined error messages. This is where mail must go to. I have just no clue who will be the hero that saves us all.

UPDATE: The comments below document that web.de seems to have removed the problem of giving out non-conforming mail addresses. At least this is true for names ending in „.“

The other problem, names starting with a dash („-„), seems to be related to UNIX in general. As mail addresses are usually passed to various command line tools, a dash in front of a word is a potential security hazard. Wietse Venema, author of the popular postfix mail system, has commented on this issue and provides an option within the software which is switched off by default.

So my whole posting was somehow born out of confusion, but it also supports my point that the whole Internet mail subsystem is far too complicated to be able to work flawlessly by default.

The Daring Fireball (aka John Gruber) comments on Avie Tevanian‘s Mac OS X design decisions in the recent years in his piece called The Good, The Bad, and the Avie in the light of Tevanian‘s move to a new job at Apple.

He is repeating some critique that has been expressed by other people in the recent months (most notably John Siracusa in his excellent essays on Mac OS X at Ars Technica). There is some truth to it. While Mac OS X has succeeded in many ways by adopting UNIX as its core OS, some features of classic Mac OS were axed without any good replacement (like file IDs instead of fixed path names, file system meta data and so on).

I am also waiting for a new version of Mac OS X that gives an answer to the Metadata question. Now that so many old BeOS engineers are working for Apple I have still hope that Apple might one day come close to what BeOS has shown to us so many years ago: a super-fast GUI with a super-fast metadata driven filesystem. Today, every dual PowerPC G4 running Mac OS X still lags behind the good old BeBox (a dual PowerPC 603 system) in UI snappyness und file find performance. It‘s a shame.

Joy Of Tech posts a comic that at first sight might remind you of our project but a second look reveals that this might be in reminiscence of the „La Bastille“ installation running at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in April 2000.

The Blinkenlights Links page provides even more pointers to other similar installations. Among them you find the first tetris game on a building at TU Delft in 1995 and the first VU meter on a building in Boston in 1993. These two can be considered being the real pioneers of this idea. We brought Tetris to life as well in our Arcade installation in Paris last year and there was also a real-time visualization of sound as you can see in our documentation video.

Project Blinkenlights however was the first to combine interactivity with mobile phones and the first to provide an open-sourced control software with well-defined file formats (BLM and BML) and a plug-in API for interactive games.

The Blinkenlights software will be enhanced over time and you are invited to write new modules for it. Sven provides the most recent updates on his page and has also started writing the documentation for the Blinkenlights Library.

Got a couple of thousand dollars left? Why don‘t you go hunting naked women with paintball guns? Eyewitness News tells you everything about it.

Hear ye!

The European Commission‘s Press Office in London monitors the British press‘s highly distorted coverage of the European Union. Euromyths are scare stories based on hearsay, rumours and half-truths, many of which have been repeated so often that they have become accepted truths within the public and media consciousness.

In order to put things in order this site clears up the mess from A to Z. [via Ben]