Most of the various tidbits of information in your life probably are digital by now. It starts with the cell phone number of your boyfriend that you didn’t memorize but only exists in your cell phone that is crashed when you have that little accident where that bystander offers to call him while you’re hauled into the trunk of the ambulance car. And it doesn’t end with 10 years worth of photographs that are only digital today.

When our kids will be grown up in 20 years or so and they will ask “Mommy, Daddy, why are there no pictures of you when you were young?”, do you want to tell them “because buying a second hard disk was too much hassle”?

If you’re a knowledge worker and don’t keep redundant backups you better be on your Creator’s favourable side. I had this conversation numerous times: “You need to help me, my thesis is due tomorrow and my computer doesn’t start/my USB-Stick can’t be read! This is important!” – “Do you have a copy?” – “No?” – “Then it wasn’t important.”

Every bit of digital information in your life quite simply does not exist if it does not exist in at least two physically different locations at the same time. If your laptop or its hard disk die, don’t expect  a warning.

“But I don’t know anything about Computers!” is not an excuse. It’s your tool, learn to handle it or else it will come around to bite you in the ass. If you don’t want to worry about the technical details of incremental backups and scripted automation at the very least go buy a Macintosh and an external hard drive which you use for TimeMachine backups (which has saved my butt on several occasions). Yes you pay a premium but failing a deadline for a prestigious client because you didn’t will cost you at least as much.

Read this. Listen to the guy. He’s smarter than both of us. And the act on it. Coz, hell yes, you do need it before it is too late.

Now having 200 blog posts on one html site might be possible, but, I guess we all agree, is kind of inconvenient. After all, we’re not talking about the endless click orgies of modern news papers’ websites. Thus:

Enter pagination.

What kind of brain-pygmies on pixie-dust would call the pagination link that sends you to an earlier point in time “next page” and the one that leads you back to the top of the stack towards the newest posting “previous page”

Previous and Next in a blog makes no sense at all!

This confuses me every. single. time.

Call it “newer” and “older” for cryin’ out loud, after all, we’re talking about a time bar, not a book of pages. This is completely contradictory to how a book works anyway: “Next” pages go forward in time. (Unless, of course you tell a story backwards, but then still you’re progressing the story forwards, so my point still stands.)

Your blog is not a book. If I progress to the next page, I expect the next posting and not the previous one!

It’s not that hard!

Mostly, this has been more of an emotional dispute. Whether you add trailing slashes on self-closing elements does not really matter, does it? But now that HTML5 is close to becoming actually used, it is time to take a look at it.

And oh boy, what a mess! HTML grew more or less organically. First being completely text-based and print-oriented, it had tags such as <b> to make text bold and <i> to make text italic. With time and the emergence of semantic web architectures, as it seems partly influenced by the „seperation of concerns“-philosophy of modern object oriented programming (see MVC), developers began to realize that „bold“ and „italic“ are just visual representations of concepts that go beyond reproduction of printed text on a screen. Screenreaders, that read text for the visually impaired, cannot read italic or bold text. The human voice does not have italic letters. What we can do, is alter the volume or pitch of our voice, to give words emphasis. XHTML was designed not only to introduce HTML-markup to the XML-realm (HTML is SGML and therefore a sister to XML) to increase its readability for machines, but also to clean up the language, and make it more semantic – in short to put meaning where there was only display. Something is <strong> and something has <em>-phasis – how you display it, is up to the client. Seems reasonable. Of course, in websites, <em> is typically printed in italic, but that’s because what we associate italicized text with that meaning, it’s not what the markup says how it should be printed. It’s in the CSS.

HTML5, which seems to have been designed by the Merkels of the W3C, completely ignores this approach and sinks back into the hole that is the print-centric HTML3. Yes, we have some nice new forms. But we also still have the iframe. But I want to concentrate on the text part here.

HTML5 has an <em>-phasis tag as well as an <i>-talic tag. Both have the same standard style sheet associated (font-style: italic). Both seem to convey exactly the same meaning, just that <em> actually is about meaning, while <i> is about visual representation.

I would like to repeat that, because it sounds vaguely important: HTML5 (re-)reintroduces the <i> tag with the expressed intent of marking text that should be printed in italic. How is that in any way semantic and what on earth does this have to do with markup?

The HTML5 Definition says:

The em element represents a span of text with emphatic stress.

This is good. It carries meaning. Whether this should be displayed as italic or pronounced in a squeaky voice is a matter of the client. And of the designer – after all, you might be inclined to design a site in which emphasis is to be displayed in big, red, visually screaming letters. It’s up to you as a designer: Use Markup for the meaning, use CSS for the visual representation.

But then the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group,  kind of shows us the finger by also defining an <i> tag:

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose (content whose typical typographic presentation is italicized).

[…]

Some examples of spans that might use the i element include a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized.

„Typical typographic presentation“ – really? So, what if I have <em>-phasized in my markup? Isn’t that (deducted from the default style sheet of said element) typically italicized? Please, WHATWG, explain to me, how this carries any significance:

<p>This is <em><i>Spartaaaa!</i></em></p>

Are we really supposed to be writing markup like that? Why would we care about how something is typically printed? Yes, we care about it in our style sheets, but does the markup really need to know that? „Well, this part, it has some sort of significance, but, not really, coz it doesn’t deserve its own tag, like, you know, a definition or an abbreviation.“

The definition of the <b> tag that marks text that is typically bold goes even one step further in its confusion:

The b element represents a span of text offset from its surrounding content without conveying any extra importance; for example, keywords in a document abstract, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical typographic presentation is bold text.

So, it’s bold. I put a visual clue on it, people shall recognize it. But it’s not important, nope, nope. Not important at all. Carries no meaning. I just wanted to put your attention to it for no reason at all. What are automated information aggregators and multimedia databases supposed to do with this information?

Well – if it’s important, use <strong>, if it’s not important, it does not need bold text. (Which context writes product names in bold anyway? I have ever only seen italicized text or having names put in „quotation marks“. But that is besides the point.)

Not only that the existence of the <i> and <b> tag makes no sense at all from a semantic point of view, the fact that they are closely linked to the semantic equivalents to <em> and <strong> will lead to an <strong><strong><b>epic</b></strong></strong> case of confusion among web monkeys: I am willing to bet a significant amount of money (let’s say a keg of beer) that more than half of all websites will confuse the two tag philosophies.

If people didn’t get the the difference between strict and transitional document declarations (look it up, if you have to) and still create new transitional websites (come on! it’s in the fucking DTD!), do you honestly believe they will get the difference? Do you really think this makes anything easier or better? If so, please explain the reasoning to me.

The HTML5 definition is completely botched – keeping the print-centric tags is backwards and plain stupid. I am surprised that we didn’t reintroduce the <u>-nderline-tag, for, you know, text that is typically underlined.

The new forms are nice and the <header> and <section>-tags are a smart addition. But don’t get me started on headlines. <h1> to <h6>? Are you serious? XHTML2 really had a smart, well-conceived and reasonable approach to nested sections and headlines. Yes, let the DOM and CSS figure the nesting out! This way I can use the same markup in my single entry page as well as in the archive listing (you know, blogs)! It’s smart, versatile and it works!

But no, for sake of backward-compatibility (really, guys, this is why Vista sucked!) we keep the old six-level-headline format.

HTML5 should not care about backwards compatibility: Make the browsers support two rendering options. Making HTML5 so that the old HTML4-crap validates totally misses the point of creating a new version in the first place. The popularity of the transitional document type shows that people won’t change their bad habits in web-design.

HTML5 was supposed to be clean and forward oriented, ready to support a semantic web architecture. It is not.

TUAW had this presumably funny little Video of the MS zunePhone featured in their newsfeed. And commentors go nuts on how MS will steal anything that is Apple and copy it. Just … badly. As if the iPhone (as cool as it may be) was something innovative.

Did anyone see the latest Apple Keynote where Steve showed us how he makes money with the most basic feature any cell phone has? Yeah, custom ring tones. Which you have to buy, choosing from a limited selection of songs.

They even showed one of their new ads:

• Hi, I am iPhone!
• Hi, I am Windows Mobile enabled Smartphone!
• So, Windows Mobile enabled Smartphone, what are you doing?
• I am installing this really cool, free, custom ring tone!
• Oh, do you? Which one?
• Any.

Dem kann aber abgeholfen werden. Zunächst schmeißt man den Synaptic packet-manager an und unter Einstellungen / Paketquellen / Software von Drittanbietern klicke der geneigte Nerd auf “Add…”. Er füge nun folgende Zeile ein und bestätige:

deb http://ntfs-3g.sitesweetsite.info/ubuntu/ edgy main main-all

Das Gleiche nochmal mit:

deb http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/ edgy main main-all

Jetzt wechsele man zu dem Reiter “Authentifizierung” und klicke auf “Schlüsseldatei importieren” und wähle die Datei aus, welche man sich zuvor heruntergeladen hat. Das Einstellungsfenster kann nun geschlossen werden. Das Repository muß nun neu geladen werden, was der entsprechend benannte Button ganz links beursacht. Sucht man nun nach ntfs-config sollte das gleichnamige Paket gefunden werden und die Installation kann beginnen.

Anwendungen / Systemwerkzeuge legt nach gethaner Arbeit das “NTFS-Konfigurationstool” frei, mit welchem man dem Herrn Eft nahezulegen vermag, doch bitte den Schreibzugriff auf die NTFS-Partitionen zu aktivieren.

(Geht nur leider nicht, wenn man Windows selbst nur per Hibernation runtergefahren hat, weil die Platte dann als “unter Benutzung” markiert ist. :()

Worum geht’s? Darum.

Mike Woodring bietet nämlich bereits seit 1999 ein Tool an, das die mit der Win-2000er Version von NTFS5 eingeführten Hard Links in die Windows Explorer-Shell integriert. So lassen sich schnell und bequem symbolische Links zu einzelnen Dateien irgenwo anders auf der Festplatte anlegen. Diese Hard Links verhalten sich in beinahe jeder Hinsicht wie the real thing – auch der Apache erkennt es als die Datei, die es eigentlich sein soll. Der Hard-Link läßt sich kopieren, verschieben und umbenennen, wie eine normale Datei – und zeigt doch immer noch auf die gleiche Datei. Löscht man den Hard Link, passiert mit der ursprünglichen Datei nichts. Löscht man die Quelldatei, dann wird der Hard Link zur Quelldatei. Das sollte man beachten.

Hard Links funktionieren nur mit Dateien. Anders als Unix-Symlinks unterscheidet NTFS hier zwischen Dateien und Verzeichnissen. Wer also Verzeichnisse auf ähnliche Weise verlinken möchte, muß Junction Points bemühen, am Besten über ein Tool von Sysinternals mit dem passenden Namen Junction.

Zum Glück gibt es Talk. All diejeingen, die verkrüppeltes MSN (Nur eine Datei auf einmal verschicken? Keine Status Messages? Keine Offline Messages?) oder ICQ (Wir speichern alle Nachrichten und werten sie aus) nutzen werden gesagt bekommen, man möge doch bitte auf Jabber wechseln oder halt Talk verwenden, wenn das mit dem Einrichten zu Aufwändig ist. Zumindest, sobald Talk Offline-Messages kann. Dann nämlich ist das Talk/Jabber-Netz quasi genauso mächtig und usability-freundlich wie derzeit ICQ. Noch ist es zwar nicht soweit.

Aber immerhin: Dem Jabber einen Schritt näher gekommen, von AOL ein Schritt fort. Bald.