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Low-functioning pinhead...
April 30, 2003
Charming, Strange Exotic
BaBar is reporting the observation of a narrow resonance of mass 2.32 GeV/. I haven’t looked at the paper, but this sounds very strange. It decays into . But it’s well above the (combined) masses of the charm and strange quarks. So it can’t be an ordinary meson. They suggest the possibility of a exotic.
Objection Overruled!
My, but this blog has taken a techno-geeky tilt…
Anyway, Phil Ringnalda recently objected to serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml. He wants to serve XHTML because he uses XML-parsing tools in his back-end. But what, Phil asks, if someone posts a comment which is ill-formed XML? Mozilla won’t render it when served as application/xhtml+xml. So he wants the “safety net” that serving up text/html provides.
Never mind that ill-formed XML will cause his back-end XML parser to barf just as surely as it will Mozilla. No, the real answer to the problem of invalid XHTML in comments is, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan,
Trust, but validate!
So, with the help of a patched version of Alexei Kosut’s MTValidate plugin, we make sure that comments posted to this blog are valid XHTML before they get posted.
This won’t stop a malicious poster from sneaking invalid markup onto this blog (there are steps I could take to deal with that, but let’s just say I’d rather not go there), but it should deal pretty well with inadvertent breakage.
Next objection?
Update: Squashed a small bug, where the Validator would send invalid output (!).
April 29, 2003
Yummy, Yummy Tag Soup
A while back, Evan Goer said of this blog that
Jacques Distler may well be the only person on the planet who understands the XHTML 1 specification and uses it properly.
While flattering, this is surely hyperbole. There are plenty who understand XHTML much better than I. And I don’t believe that people can’t do XHTML properly. Most people simply don’t need XHTML. So there’s no incentive for them to do it right.
If they use it anyway, it’s probably a matter of Geek-chic. Slapping an XHTML DOCTYPE on your weblog is like wearing sunglasses at night. It looks cool! But isn’t necessarily very functional.
Anyway, true to his scientific training, Evan decided to test the quality of the XHTML “in the wild”. He decided to focus on the weblogs of the “Alpha Geeks” — the programmers, web-designers, and web-standards advocates — who are, surely, the most hip, Standards-savvy, knowledgeable folks around. If anyone can do XHTML right, they can.
The results of his survey of 119 Alpha Geek XHTML websites was pretty dismal. Only one site passed his 3 tests (he decided not to apply his 4th, somewhat subjective, “Why Are You Doing This?” test) and a startling 74% didn’t even have a main-page which validated.
So, what should we conclude? Wearing sunglasses at night is not only useless, it can be downright dangerous.
Survivor
Today is Yom haShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In honour of the day, I’m putting up a link to this page which I created in the summer of 2001. It was my first foray into QuickTime Streaming Video, and was done in honour of my father, who’d passed away the year before. Those who survived are aging and soon will be gone. Their voices will fade from our collective memory. And little tales of heroism, like this one, will be lost.
So here’s my small act of preservation. If you have some time (and hav