Things of no small relevancy
Just some musings on things I've encountered online. What's written here is an opinion, and an opinion, by definition, can neither be right nor wrong.
• P3P - Ulujain.org will never have an "official" XML policy as "required" by this site. Like a lot of things the W3C have dreamt up, it's great in theory and poor in execution. Why do I need to create a directory here called /w3c just for them? On a previous iteration of this site, I did have a policy, and it kept becoming obsolete as the W3C kept monkeying with the P3P standards. It was a bugger to create as well, as it uses arcane (to me) XML. I ended up using an IBM online tool to make one. Hardly anyone uses one and no wonder. Plain HTML policies are just fine, thank you very much.
• Content Ratings - I used to maintain a PICS rating for this site but then I thought: who am I to censor you? Sure, there's some stuff on this site that's not kid-friendly. Not pornography or anything, just some of my stories have "language" and "sexual content" in them. Still, it isn't my job or responsibility to tell you what your kids can surf to; it's yours. So, the PICS <META> tags have gone.
• Or Netscape x.x... - Lots of sites out there recommending you use the latest version of Internet Explorer or Netscape to take advantage of whatever it is. Who uses Netscape any more? Hello? It'd make more sense to say Firefox or Mozilla. Seriously. Hardly anyone uses Netscape any more. From my own server logs, I'd seriously put Firefox users at 50 to 55 times more common than Netscape and users of the Mozilla suite about 4-5 times as common. Firefox is the "Netscape" of today, people, get with it. If you want to get technical, then say, use Mozilla rev 1.75 or higher, since all three mentioned are built from a common base.
• Standards or die! - I'm all for standards, in the sense of HTML and CSS. This site is compliant in both, but geez people, there are more vital things in this world than HTML compliance militancy. The amount of people who declare war on sites that use tables for layout, <FONT> tags, etc, is small but they are incredibly noisy. It's funny to read, for the most part, these folk who cannot think of anything more egregious out there than sites made for Internet Explorer 6.0 with coloured scroll-bars and text filters. Really? I can, and I'll write two words to help folks on their way down the path to wisdom: child pornography. You want to go on a crusade online to "clean up"? Clean that shit up.
• Alternate? - The word is not a synonym for alternative. They have a different meaning. It's amazing watching all the HTML military police out there dot their i's and cross their t's over the merest minutiae, yet they've let a fundamental error like that slip. Don't give me this shit about how it's an accepted synonym. It's not. It is still considered non-standard by most dictionaries and I'll never accept it. And who let REFERER out in the world? The word is referrer. So, whoever it was that made that particular variable up, why didn't you run it through a spell checker?
Can you see the picture of Bastila? If you're using MSIE, you can't, not without me adding HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes to the markup anyway. Then, it'd render the picture with scrollbars and padding, which looks daft. I originally had this example on my Site Map, but moved it due to inappropriateness there. Who is Bastila anyway? This page may help.
The Konqueror browser renders Bastila as a thumbnail, which I think is odd. Update: Well, Konqueror 3.1 did, Konqueror 3.4 doesn't display anything. 3.5 displays it, but it's inside scroll bars.
For more information on the <OBJECT> tag, have a look here.