Because browsers invariably crash, I occasionally Bookmark This Group of Tabs in Mozilla (can your browser do that? do you even have tabs?) and save the state of my workspace. Needless to say, Moz should do that for me (and Opera 8 apparently can and will – moreover, it’ll record every tab you close in case you make a mistake).

I reviewed these saved states over New Year’s and present a poorly-classified dump of links.

1. Choosing Paint Colors
2. Threadless T-Shirts
3. Web Design Practices
4. Razerzone: Razer Diamondback
5. Cocoatech: Revision History
6. HP SpeechBot
7. Upgrading Creative Commons Licenses
8. The Man in Blue: Mapping DTDs: Making validation usable
9. Pollenation Blog
10. Lord Pixel’s Unicode Font Info
11. Glacial Erratics: My Plans for Purple Numbers
12. Sylvester: Living Proof
13. Peter Korn’s Weblog
14. AbleTV.net – CSUN 2004 Keynote – Transcript
15. Flexible news list
16. ASCIIBABES.com
17. uControl
18. Rambling On: Color, more Color
19. Netscape Named Colors
20. PlusDeck 2 (digitize your cassettes)
21. Dish DVR-921 Review
22. Entry-Level Unicode for XML
23. Apple iTunes 2.0.4 (for your old OS 9 machines)
24. Who Was That Food Stylist? Film Credits Roll On
25. Google Search: "pretty big dig" Troake
26. Speech accent archive
27. Simeone & Miller – Movie Theater Settlement
28. liveSTORYBOARD [sic] CMS generates valid code
29. BurnX
30. More Bag Snagger Photos
31. Unicode Keyboards for Mac OS
32. DNS Stuff (do whois searches in many unusual ways)
33. Craig Newmark conversation
34. VeganChallenge.Org: Vegan Community, Recipes, Restaurants, Products and Literature
35. Geist: Columnists
36. Drew Curtis’ FARK.com rewritten in valid code
37. Blogs by Their Covers
38. pnhtoolbar
39. Opera7Wiki:WebDevToolbar
40. Icelandic National Team design agency
41. Recruiting and Working With Older Participants
42. Piepmatzel.de | collecting best practice web standards design examples
43. TypeWorks
44. Wired News: Changing the Face of Web Surfing
45. Headshift: smarter, simpler, social
46. BMW Education Programme website meets highest new internet access standards
47. The Great Custom 404 Page Adventure
48. Jobriath: the Mojo article
49. MozInfo701
50. “Leet”
51. “ASCII art”
52. When Christmas came early
53. Firefox extension Google preview plugin thumbnails
54. “The Big Apple” origin
55. IBM WAT
56. PC-Multilingual-850+euro
57. The Daily Flight: Body Blow
58. ChicagoL.org: Platform Signage
59. htAccess Generater Demo
60. James Boyle: The Apple of forbidden knowledge
61. Lobster tale lands writer in hot water
62. Photoshop what the classic Nintendo games would have been like had they been owned by Microsoft originally
63. Mount Saint Vincent University Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection
64. SMIL Europe 2003
65. Apple.com throughout the ages
66. IE look and feel for Firefox
67. HTMLoverlays
68. Yet another reason I will never give my money to Future Shop
69. Christine Jorgensen
70. Jobriath
71. graffiti_4 on Flickr
72. Phono Phunk
73. The Dutch “letter” IJ
74. Switcher
75. HistoryHound searches your browser history
76. MyTunes returns for iTunes song sharing
77. Warpspire: The finer points of design
78. Flickr: Photos from adamgreenfield
79. Cocoatech: Path Finder 3.2.2 now available!
80. Zooiblog
81. larsholst.info
82. Universal Design Principles At Work!
83. Hicksdesign theme for Omniweb 5
84. HTML 4.01 in Netscape and Explorer – WebReference.com
85. Norwegian Helvetica makes me unreasonably happy
86. Gay Porn Blog pour les intéressé(e)s
87. Mapping Between WCAG 1.0 and the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft
88. Visual vs Structural
89. Canadian fails drug test
90. Connor vows return in ’05
91. New Jersey movie captioning
92. Using Opera to read text/plain
93. Unicode: Look up Unicode characters here (worth a B-links in itself, that topic)
94. Eudora Scripts etc.
95. “So hard to beat” (John Peel)
96. John Peel homepage
97. Male Nudes by Dylan Ricci (2, 3)
98. Geekend 2
99. George Chavchanidze’s Homepage
100. Quark vs. InDesign
101. Multilingual Weblog glossary
102. Blue Rose Videos With a Voice (audio-described videos)
103. Mac.Ars(.technica)
104. FindForward: "closed captioning"
105. Phillip Toledano Photography (2)
106. World Wide Phone Guide
107. World Power Differences Can Limit International Product Use
108. InDesign CS Bible Made In Quark (Cf. David Carson)
109. Shirtless AFL (that would be Australian footballers, like Voss)
110. All Washed Up: A Gay Powerlifter’s Story
111. Vegetarian Phrases In Other Languages
112. Why Adopt W3C Web Standards?
113. Charl van Niekerk’s Weblog: Validation Important?
114. Telnet to POP Servers@Everything2.com
115. Morrissey vs. Clay Aiken: Who’s Rock’s Greatest Celibate?
116. SuperDuper
117. iDisk Public Folder
118. Vara Software: Videocue
119. Dantz: Updates
120. Guidelines and standards manuals
121. PopChar
122. WindowShade X
123. Expanded multi-user controls, QuickTime sharing spotted in new Tiger builds
124. Gay Men and Lesbians in the U.S. Military
125. Changing Quotes=Lying
126. Gorilla Film Production Software
127. Mozilla Links Newsletter – Issue 23
128. Mozilla’s Section 508 Compliance
129. Mozilla Amazon Browser
130. mozbraille: index
131. Mozilla + Window-Eyes Compatibility Page
132. Web-standards-compliant Javascript Flash detect and embed
133. Star Wars: The Changes
134. Liquid Elastic Layouts
135. XHTML vs. HTML Redux
136. Turn off Microsoft Office Spying on OS X
137. Powerful Editor for Localisers and Translators – An Xliff Editor with AppleGlot WorkGlossary Support
138. Kurzweil Educational Systems Press Release (Mac compatibility)
139. Legal Developments: Upsetting the Apple cart
140. Collapse-to-Zoom: Viewing Web Pages on Small Screen Devices by Interactively Removing Irrelevant Content
141. Rixstep
142. A Detour Before Dying
143. Rewriting the Web Design Site with Web Standards
144. Flickr Mobile
145. The Right Trigger Words
146. mozilla.org Markup Reference
147. QuirksBlog: The state of QuirksMode.org
148. New Ezra | Rebuilding Design
149. bOing bOing’s Descent Into Uselessness
150. BloggForum Stockholm 2004
151. The Everywhere Displays Project
152. The Aural Text Class
153. Regret the Error (tracks corrections and errors in newspapers)
154. Discourse – The Forum For Gay Athletes
155. RFC 1855 (rfc1855) – Netiquette Guidelines
156. Audion 3
157. Extension patches of w3m
158. A Great Headline Goes Here
159. Cambridge Dictionaries Online
160. :target and conditional text display
161. The Perfect Summer Party
162. Audio-described films on DVD
163. Beachbog’s Audio Description Diary
164. Australian Swimming | Swimmer Profile
165. Foxtel
166. Browser experiments
167. Octiv – Hear the Difference – iTunes
168. ktunes downloads
169. Restaurant Industry Workers’ Stories
170. The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research Weblogs
171. Temporal Information in Collateral Texts for Indexing Movies
172. The Effect of Text in Storyboards for Video Navigation
173. Might manboobs ever become bodacious pecs?
174. Something OS X–native for recording live spoken word as an .mp3
175. Looking for a reliable power converter for international travel
176. International voltage adapters
177. When you think “middle class,” what does that mean to you?
178. Looking for recommendations for non-lame Celtic music. Well, Manau, obviously!
179. Former gay sex film star commits suicide
180. Perils of winter cycling
181. Advies Overheid.nl (also by Cinnamon or at least Thivessen)
182. Some relief for Ryanair, some clarity for disabled rights
183. Please Wait… buttons
184. A Detour Before Dying
185. The Pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English
186. Mighty Mouse allows you to customize your cursors with style
187. Study finds 65,000 gay men, women in the military
188. Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages
189. On A Long Piece Of String – Home
190. Nick D. and Garry Lee Show audio archives
191. Team Canada – Earle Conner
192. They’re Different From Us (British journos)
193. Kalitée.org (standards-compliant development)
194. Ask the Pilot
195. The VMAs, AKA the other blind black guy
196. Seriocomic (photoblog)
197. Using mathematical and statistical processes to write pop songs
198. Delta Tango Bravo (Silverorange Toronto Weblog)
199. Bad Spellers
200. Constrained writing
201. Not Fooling Anybody: A chronicle of bad conversions and storefronts past
202. Sigma Research Reports (invert demographics)
203. Justwatchthesky (Weblog)
204. Create a Listmania List

BigMuscleBlogs

1. “Colby” (photo) or “Brian”?
2. : Wraparound tattoo (profile)

Typography

1. Serif or Sans serif for body copy in online media?
2. Magtypo.CZ
3. Pseudo-Graphic Typeface: Design and Evaluation
4. Vertikale Anpassung des Anti-Aliasing
5. The quality of Linotype Palatino
6. Gaultney Research: “Balancing typeface legibility and economy: Practical techniques for the type designer”; “Multitudinous Alphabets: The design of extended latin typefaces”; “The influence of pen-based letterforms on Devanagari typefaces”; most importantly, “Problems of diacritic design for Latin-script text faces”
7. A Berg type film
8. Lego, the Type Designer’s Friend
9. Choosing the Right Typeface
10. Type for TV
11. Cachet font family
12. Zemestro Volume Font
13. ClearviewOne Complete Family

CSS

1. Undo Default HTML Styles
2. You want Styles with That?
3. :link, :visited, :active, :hover
4. CSS 1.2 alphabetical index
5. Pure CSS Scrollable Table with Fixed Header
6. CSS: border-color: transparent
7. We’re All in This (CSS) Boat Together
8. CSS Editor Preview Page
9. Relatively Absolute: Cross-Browser CSS Tabs With Rollover
10. Stu Nicholls | Cutting Edge CSS | What’s on TV
11. CSS-only Filters Summary
12. Hover Behavior for IE5+
13. CSS Fisheye
14. Online CSS Optimiser/Optimizer
15. CSS Centering 101
16. CSS Design: Taming Lists: A List Apart
17. CSS Comment Bugs

Accessibility

1. Access points for shopping on the web: Tesco gets a four-star rating in the supermarket league
2. Jaws Screenreader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox
3. Three Things I Learned About Screen Reader Users
4. HCI research & interactive television: A beautiful friendship?
5. PDF documents: Rreadable for all (translated version of /pdf_barrierefrei/)
6. Manchester United: top of the web accessibility league?
7. Standards et accessibilité – Librairie Éyrolles
8. Accessibility tests
9. Accessible Information Solutions – Web Accessibility Toolbar
10. Mobile accessibility product
11. WAT makes websites accessible
12. Universal Access: Computers That Everyone Can Use
13. Safari, accessibility, and planning for the future
14. TechDis Accessibility & Usability Resource
15. aDesigner for accessibility simulation
16. Service Pack 2 Accessibility pop-up problem
17. Accessibility Features in Mozilla
18. Accessibility: dot-dot-com.com
19. Accessible iTV
20. PLCs hit back at complaints on web accessibility
21. Seven precepts of Usability and Accessibility

Odeon cinema Web-site accessibility

1. Message to Odeon – fire your marketing director
2. Accessible Odeon
3. Inaccessible, trademark infringing and on the Web (Odeon)
4. Spend money on accessibility, not lawyers (Odeon)
5. The battle to make Odeon.co.uk accessible gets serious
6. Odeon rolls credits on copycat website | The Register
7. My polite letter to the Odeon’s marketing director
8. The Digerati Peninsula: The Odeon Web Site
9. Accessible Od*on (Odeon)
10. Inaccessible Odeon (Phil Gyford: Writing)
11. Odious Cinemas get it (sort of) (Odeon)
12. Some marketing departments prefer inaccessibility to uncontrolled experience (Odeon)

Still got Oz photos to run.

(Yes, that’s the only non-leather Doc Marten in Sydney.)

Editing

…like David Haskell: “I think the best superficial thing I’ve got going for me is my youth. I think it’s like: Look, he’s nice, this is cool, and he’s only 25. But that’s fleeting, and if you don’t become impressive in your own right soon, then it’s over.”

(By the way, Haskell’s magazine Topic runs banner ads for Gawker. Logrolling in our time?)

Porn, then escorting

…like Dick Wolf (no relation), who retires from porn after putting on a little weight and posting a BigMuscleBlog: “My preferences are for beefy, hairy, handsome guys with facial hair and big dicks. You don’t have to be all of those things, but that’s what I like…. I’m still only 25 and I got a whole lot of lovin’ to do in my time before I settle down.”

Pour les intéressé(e)s, I’ve got a sample of the pornographic artistry of Dick Wolf if you want to look at it. Self-evidently not safe for work or for the majority of heterosexualist men. (Lesbians I can’t say I care about here.) Don’t hit the link unless you know what you’re doing.

Apart from writing in at least once a week to fix an egregious copy error of theirs (I have to triage – there are so many I can focus only on egregious errors), I occasionally drop Gawker a line to explain that their incredible scoops are positively old hat.

I’ve now had enough, since our dear Jewish and/or gay friends at Gawker are now at the stage of scanning in old Spy copy that I had already entered – using the kind of valid, accessible HTML that Denton still cannot manage – two full years ago.

“NYT: Pitch Away!”

Also, wasn’t the whole cease-fire-leads-to-soccer thing the premise of Paul McCartney’s 1983 “Pipes of Peace” video?

And an entire movie, A Midnight Clear, starring Chelsea dad and Gawker mainstay Ethan Hawke. (More like Christmas spirit than soccer, but the theme is the same.)

“The New Yorker Before and After Tina Brown”

Tina Brown likes to remind people she put the New Yorker on the path to profitability before she left…with the widespread use of four-letter words. [But when has she reminded us of that lately? Where’s the news hook?] […] We dip into the retro-media files and produce a scan of Spy magazine from November ’93 that illustrates this point more clearly.

Why not just read the whole thing yourself instead of squinting at a tiny scan?

See also: Ask Choire; “Great” Artists Steal, Allegedly.

The worst redesign of the year was that of Chapters.ca, which cost Heather Reisman and her underlings millions ($20 million on a SAP implementation alone) and produces inaccessible tag soup. Millions of personal hobbyist Weblogs produce tighter code than their site does, and someday somebody’s gonna file a complaint that will, I presume, prevail. Apart from many other accessibility deficits, invalid code violates WCAG Priority 2.

What will scarcely work in Chapters’s favour is their apparent decision to block the W3C validator from their site. Give it a whirl: Try validating any of the following Chapters URLs.

1. Chapters.ca (or with www. hostname)
2. Chapters.Indigo.CA (www.+)
3. The URL to which any of those redirects, www.chapters.indigo.ca/Default.asp
4. The lengthy French URL

Each of those URLs produces the very same result:

I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve [the URL]

504 Gateway Time-out

Please make sure you have entered the URL correctly.

Oh, but I had.

Seeing as how the site responds immediately in all my browsers and comes up fine when the referrer is my previous Weblog posting, well, what else is there to conclude?

I’ve sent a question for attribution to Jonathan Ehrlich and Sorya Ingrid Gaulin of Chapters. Ball’s in their court.

But the kicker?

The kicker is that when you run their HTML through the validator anyway, the homepage produces 1,520 errors and has an incorrect character encoding.

Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (Hyperion, 1997), p. 192 (citations elided):

Even today, [sadomasochists] continue to insist that “true S/M is not cruel; it is a loving fulfillment of a partner’s needs”; that “the giving and taking of abuse” is not an act of violence, “it is an act of love”; that “fascism is in no way implicit in sadomasochism”…. Nothing dramatizes more clearly the wholesale emasculation of everything the leather community once stood for than a simple change in terminology: The shift from the word leathermen, which was used in the 1970s, to the word leatherfolk, which… conjures up images, not of the Marquis de Sade flogging French milkmaids and deflowering innocent children, but of a quaint tribe of macrobiotic vegetarians in tie-dye caftans singing protest songs at peace rallies. […] [L]eather was paradoxically feminized, becoming a defanged movement of starry-eyed soul-searchers who, while beating their lovers black and blue, delivered “every stroke [as] an act of love” that left them “warm with the feeling of having created this ecstasy in another man’s life.”

All I can say is: No way I’m showing up at a flogging in a caftan.

Oui, très amusant, Bruce. Indeed, valid HTML and CSS and other forms of adherence to Web standards are no guarantee that your site will look nice. Worse yet, in unusual edge cases like this one, it will be demonstrably inaccessible to some people. (Love the flashing and strobing! And the rainbow colour scheme – why, it’s gonna make you some friends you never thought you wanted!)

Anyway, I gave the same thing a whirl a couple of years ago when I rewrote Ray Glasser’s Beta Info Guide in valid code. Why?

1. The original page kept going offline.
2. I wanted it for my own reference, as I am something of a Betamax aficionado.
3. I wanted to see if perfect code could still end up with an unbeautiful page.

I have of course offered the code to Ray, which he hasn’t used. The recoded version, with cosmetic differences compared to the original, is still online for reference.

Paging Evan Goer!