Wednesday, 5th April, 2006

Getting My Kit Off

css

This may — or may not — be a good idea. Through a drunken moment of browsing on Monday night, I came across this idea to spend one day without my CSS in an attempt to "promote Web Standards [including] proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and; well, a fun play on words."

In the past, I've been rather blasé about such things — in fact, I could probably cite a few clients who've insisted on me producing strict XHTML output — only to have me blow raspberries in their face.

(Why? Well, because I'm not a Pro. I do this as a hobby. If people want to pay me for it, then whoopeedo — but I like to set out just what I'm not going to give them early on in a brief. I like to think that sometimes I'm the epitamy of "style before content")

But I've been reassessing things recently. Realising that one of the things I lack more than anything else is some kind of conceptual basis to what the hell it is that I do online, was probably the driving force behind the recent redesign that I did.

Encapsulating the idea of a personal stream, and expressing it through a very 1970s-UNIXy-text-based medium is what I've been trying to achieve.

(And dresses. Of course. The expression of self through huge fuck-off skirts can never be underestimated)

But regardless of how much this is a little stunt, two things have popped into my head as a result:

1. The links, in the 'previous' column and the 'future' column need to be cleverly-styled lists. As they are, they don't make sense.

2. I have more than one <h1> on a page.

(1) is relatively easy to fix. And at some point over the next few days I'll try and do just that. A simple li { display: inline; } (with some other things) should do the trick.

But (2) is more complicated. I spent a lot of time last night reading through various arguments and examples of why you should only have one <h1> on a page ... and came to the conclusion that what I do is a Special Case™

Technically — you could argue — this page should start off with:

<h1>Tranniefesto: A Crossdressing Adventure</h1>

And then every new thing I try and shift the conversation towards should be a <h2>.

But I'd disagree. The title of this weblog is "Tranniefesto: A Crossdressing Adventure" — and I do, indeed have that in my <title> tag. But the individual <h1>s are me trying to hold court.

Semantically then, this page reads as this:

<preliminary stuff>

    <fanfare>This is Siobhan's Weblog</fanfare>

</preliminary stuff>

<start talking>

    <set the theme>And right this second, she's thinking about this
        </set the theme>

    ---STUFF---

    <change the subject>But wait — she's on to something else now
        </change the subject>

    ---ETC---

</end talking>

Am I boring everyone yet?

FFS

photo

Ula, You're absolutely right. The sooner we point this out to these delusional colonials the better. "2 minutes and three seconds past 1 on the Aprilth of 5, oh-6" is just ludicrous

Tiff, patience hon.

Natasha, indeed. And I'm still waiting for ParcelForce to deliver what I'm hoping will be the hugiest and fuckie-offiest dress EVER

Kath, that's been there at least a couple of days. Shows how much attention you pay

without the css your page becomes hard to use.

I guess that in some respects, this is the exact point. I spent a lot of time yesterday evening worrying about this — tweaking things left, right, and centre to see if I could make it less so — but in the end decided to just go ahead and expose some of the fundamental flaws in the way that I do things.

Call it an experimental exercise if you like — the only beneficiary of it being myself.

Whereas a lot of people who are doing this today are making the point that accessibility is important within web design, and that clean, understandable code is essential for (a) web users who (for whatever reason) aren't using a bells-and-whistles browser, and (b) non-human users — like Googlebot for example — to understand what a web page is about (thus making searching easier for all), for me, what I'm currently getting out of this is a chance to see just where and why my approach to all of this doesn't work.

"Debugging in public", perhaps.

I mean, you're absolutely right — without the CSS there's no way to differentiate between what I write, and what everyone else writes. And considering how much emphasis I put on that as being one of the core defining things about how 'conceptually' my weblog works, that's a pretty serious design flaw.

Without something like this, I suppose I could just coast along relying on hacks and workarounds to visually translate something into something meaningful — but (and I suppose I'm trying to answer the obvious "But why does it matter?" question here) I want it to make sense ... from the ground up.

So the big question that's racking my brain at the moment, is "What tag should I wrap around comments to indicate that's what they are?" <blockquote> doesn't feel right — because I'm not quoting someone.

Oh puh-lease

some people [blush] have been known to use this tag

Yes, *cough*. Not to mention the regex I have to do to make sure that those certain people don't screw up my XHTML by not putting <p>s inside their <blokequotes>s

After all, your page is quoting a comment someone has left.

This was the conclusion a friend and I came to earlier. Since there isn't a tag that I can use that says "this chunk was written by someone other than the author and is not a quote by her", we squirmed our wawy into thinking that (as you said) it was still me publishing it, so technically I'm quoting other people when they leave comments.

But never mind eh?

although the validity of usage is a bit borderline

Exactly hon. And although I've kinda caved into myself today (I'm using <cite>s) I think I really need to think this one through.

Typical

photo

You spend all afternoon taking pictures of yourself in big dresses, and the only half-decent one that comes out of the whole shebang is one you get just as you're loading the photographs off the camera onto your Mac

Apple — Boot Camp — Public Beta

link apple windows

Woah :-o Didn't see that one coming.

You will need:

"A printer for the included instructions (You'll want to print them before installing Windows, really.)"

(Becky, you're the only one I know with an Intel Mac — wanna try it out for me?)

No probs — and can you just double-check that I spelt "applause" properly. The more I look at it, the less it looks write

Some Thoughts

random

1. As interesting an experience as this is, I can't wait until midnight so I can have my stylesheets back.

2. As the dual-boot functionality is only available to Intel Macs, is this the first signs of the deprecation of my G5, G4 and G3s?

3. Lamenting that I was using my last cotton bud to clear the last transvestiges of eyeliner from my eyes, before going out to the shops, it suddenly dawned on me that going to the shops meant I could buy new cotton buds.

4. I took hundreds of photographs this afternoon — all from different angles. But the only ones I felt happy with were all from the 'slightly to the left' angle that I always seem to come back to.

5. Vest-tops are great Although I probably wouldn't need the heating on full blast if I didn't spend most of the day pottering around the house in just a vest-top and stockings.

6. And panties. I had panties on as well. Just to clear that up.

Yes, but (as die-hard non-switchers often point out) some things only run in Windows. There's lots of specialised software (and some non-specialised stuff) that'll only run on one platform. So being able to boot into both is a big plus.

Actually, just thinking about it, a Mac is now the first and only machine that can run MacOS, Linux and Windows natively. Or is that wrong?

Bootcamp on Macbook Pro — a photoset on Flickr

links bootcamp apple

Just while we're all in a XP-on-Mac frenzy...

no surprises under the bonnet when the lights went down

There's a tranny-based joke to be made there, I feel.

Fudge packer

Sorry — I was watching The Hunt For Red October