Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

Love The W3C [en]

The article “How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the W3C” by Erika Meyer prompts me to go for a little trip down A List Apart memory lane, to point you to some of the first articles I read there.

Here is a little gem extracted from the ALA Back Issues:

Dr. Strangeglobe: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The W3C.

For those interested in my personal history, it was through one of Erika Meyer‘s sites (Mombomb) that I discovered Jeffrey Zeldman. In Defense of Web Diaries is the first ALA article I ever read (followed closely by The Day the Browser Died).

Editors and Standards [en]

I know the article has been out for a while, but it’s worth reading through: To Hell With Bad Editors.
A well-felt article on the damage done to the web by (particularly) WYSIWYG editors. Read it even if you use a WYSIWYG editor and you’re convinced you’re doing the right thing.

Oh, and if you are so inclined, CodeBitch has written a few lines about the aptitude of human beings to learn HTML. Yes, I have what you need: HTML Express tutorial.

Happy coding!

Chat and Standards [en]

Do you ever get caught up on heated discussions in chatrooms? It happens to me all the time – well, when I do chat. I don’t chat half as much as I used to.

I usually feel strongly for what I believe in, and I have the (annoying) habit of trying to dissect my opponent’s arguments into little bits and pieces, turn them around and counter-check them until I reach the lowest common premisse from which I can rebuild my point of view, dragging my discussion partner with me through each step until we finally agree. So I guess I’m a real pain in the neck to argue with ; )…

Well, yesterday I had a fiery discussion about web standards in one of my favourite chatrooms. The person I was talking with saw web standards not as a common base on which greater freedom, creativity, accessibility, and efficiency can be achieved, but as a quasi-totalitarian attempt to dumb down the web to a set of arbitrary regulations.

It was very frustrating. I don’t know if he didn’t understand me, if I didn’t understand him, if my fierceness in discussion put him off, or if I simply didn’t have the right arguments, but we ended up in a dead end.

I have a strong belief that even if it is not possible for everybody to agree on everything, two people with different opinions should be able to come to a point where the discussion allows them to understand why and how the other thinks like s/he does. And it usually comes down to diverging premisses – or “hypotheses” on the world, if you prefer.

After all this, if you understand French and would like to see how irritating I can be, view the log …awaiting comments!

Brainstorm [en]

Waferbaby is now taking user-submitted brainstorms. So of course…

Is just friendship possible between a man and a woman, or does romance always get in the way?

Faire-part [fr]

[en] 25.02.2006: Following the publication of To Hell With Bad Browsers and the WaSP Browser Upgrade campaign, I translated Jeffrey's article and launched Pompage.net in the process.

Nous avons la grande joie de vous annoncer la naissance de pompage.net.

Pour commencer dans l’allégresse, nous vous proposons la traduction très attendue de l’article To Hell With Bad Browsers de Jeffrey Zeldman, paru il y a quelques semaines sur A List Apart. Pour en savoir plus, allez directement voir sur place!