I’ve been doing homework recently, hence the lack of activity. I have things I’m doing. Some of them remain secret. Maybe, before long, I’ll attempt to redesign this page just for the fun of it. Zeldman’s new design is inspiring, despite his (perhaps necessary) use of onload events to handle IE bugs. Using code to change the appearance of a page when it loads should always be a last resort, as the sudden change (or the lack of change, if it takes a while to load) can be confusing to users. Always strive to make your designs work without any scripting; scripting is only for extras. I trust Zeldman’s judgement that his usage of it is a last resort.

I just solved a really elusive bug. It’s cool to have solved it. But I can’t tell you what it was. It’s a secret. Provided that was the last bug, it shouldn’t be a secret much longer. Weeee.

Posted at 7 PM on January 31, 2003

I recently met this guy named Lycium, who happens to be the same age as me within about 24 hours. Interestingly, we’re both interested in raytracing, and we can both juggle (he’s better though). Interesting, isn’t it? Check out his web site, it’s got some really neat stuff on it. In fact, it’s so interesting that, while writing this paragraph, I followed the link myself and completely forgot that I was writing this. But I’m back now. Oh, but I’m finished. Alright bye.

Posted at 10 PM on January 22, 2003

This semester looks to be a lot better than last. All but one of my classes appear reasonably challenging, yet I’ll be learning things I’m interested in. At least, that’s what I hope; I just learned O-notation for the fourth time (literally) in my 4000 level Computer Algorithms class. I understood it in Comp Sci I, in Comp Sci II, and in Data Structures and Algorithms, and here it is again. Two two-hour lectures gone down the drain. Let’s hope that that class picks up a bit. It’s a 4000 level, so I don’t see how it couldn’t... but this school does tend to surprise me about things like that.

I’m running a test of my Secret JavaScript Project as we speak. I’m working towards release ASAP. And we all know what that means!

Posted at 10 PM on January 18, 2003

Now that the whole world has read and linked to Mark Pilgrim’s XHTML 2.0 rant, I feel obligated to share some of my own opinions on it.

Zeldman also made a few comments about this issue. I agree with him more.

The primary issue, it seems, is that XHTML 2.0 is not backwards compatible. The W3C threw away a lot of HTML 4.0 tags in favor of new ones. In my opinion, all of these decisions were good improvements. But the dropping of old tags means that XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 documents can’t be easily turned into XHTML 2.0 documents.

The dropping of img and applet tags in favor of the object tag is good. The object tag is more flexible and encompasses the first two, along with providing many other capabilities. The deprecation of br in favor of line is also good, since the latter is more in the spirit of XML. The h1 through h6 tags were always a little awkward, and I’m glad they’ve been deprecated in favor of the more flexible h and sections tags, although I would agree that perhaps a level attribute of some sort would be nice in order to specify the heading level. (Limiting the level to 6 was always sort of messy, I thought.) Finally, the removal of the style attribute is nice in theory (separation of markup from presentation), but sometimes it’s really necessary, so I don’t fully support that decision. I also disagree with the removal of some tags that Mark mentioned. Overall, though, I think the changes are great.

However, as I mentioned, the problem that most people have is this breaks the promised “forward compatability” of using standards. No one can take an XHTML 1.x document and change the doctype to make it a 2.0 document and have it work.

On the other hand, you can’t do that anyway. No browser supports this unfinished standard yet. Mark complained that many features were “Not deprecated slowly over time,” but let’s face it: it’s going to be a long time before the language will actually be in use, even after it becomes a complete recommendation. And no one said that you have to update every page you’ve ever created to match these new standards. An XHTML 1.x page will continue to function as an XHTML 1.x page if you leave its doctype alone. I have HTML 4.0 pages on this website, and they still work fine. There’s nothing wrong with using an old standard.

I’m going to wait and see what happens with this proposed standard. A few changes, and I think it will be a step in the right direction.

Posted at 5 PM on January 14, 2003

I came back yesterday. I forgot my alarm clock (and the little mini one that I had brought home), so I had to rely on my roomate to wake me up this morning, and I keep habitually checking the empty space on my desk to see what time it is.

I just now got back from my Computer Organization class, where I’ll probably learn to use Linux along with some low level programming stuff (we’re starting with C but we’ll be doing assembly later on). The only thing that worries me is the Linux part.

In my free time, I’ll continue to work on that thing I’m working on and practice my Warcraft III skills. =)

Posted at 10 AM on January 13, 2003

After working halfway through Gannon’s tower in A Link to the Past and making significant progress on my latest JavaScript project (which is actually sort of old), I am now sitting at my desk eating crackers with cheese. And it just tastes so good that I had to open up slimeupdate.xml to let you all know.

My site statistics haven’t been working correctly since New Years, but I think they might have been fixed this morning. Something messed up on the server. Not that it matters to you =)

I’ll be going back to school on Sunday. Ironically, you can probably expect more frequent updates then. Unless my classes (which are now generally more computer science based) end up being difficult. I might become a tutor this semester.

There goes the last of the cheese. Bye now.

Posted at 4 AM on January 7, 2003

As a result of my ongoing efforts to create content for this web site, I have created a page displaying a few favelets. Only five for now. I use these myself from time to time, and I hope you also find them useful.

In addition, I also stayed up until 6 AM last night (eek! I know.) working on a particularly cool peice of JavaScript. It shouldn’t be much longer.

Posted at 3 PM on January 4, 2003