Caveat Lector

Via TheOneRing.net, I learned that the New York Times has been sneering at fandom again. This article, however, has a few bits worth noting:

The drive and discipline that leads 9-year-olds to school themselves in the institutional history of Hogwarts and college sophomores to analyze the diplomatic crises of the intergalactic empire might, it could be argued, be more profitably spent in learning something about the real world, but this criticism misses the point.

Yes, it does, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but two criticisms before I do. First, who is to say that we learn nothing from immersing ourselves in non-real worlds? Somebody kindly beat this reporter over the head with a LeGuin essay.

If ethics, sociology, politics, rhetoric, etc. aren’t enough, however, there’s always linguistics. Say what? Sure, linguistics. How many people come to the study of language through Tolkien? A lot. A lot a lot. I ran Elfling for a couple of years; I have some idea. The insidious thing about learning one language—“real” or not—is that it’s never enough. You always pick up more. And this is a bad thing how? An unreal thing how?

Second criticism: These dismissive types always believe they’re condemning the so-called obsession of fans. They aren’t. They are condemning the object of that obsession, since they consider it Weird and Unworthy of Serious Attention. Notice how these zeebs never ever go after sports fans. Now there, if you’ll forgive my saying so, is an obsession every bit as pointless, and frequently more so.

This particular zeeb redeems him/herself, however, with the final bit of the article:

These fans see themselves not only as consumers of popular culture, but as participants in its making, which may be why the exemplary form of fantasy culture is not reading or movie-going but gaming, in which each player can be the hero of his own saga.

Leaving aside that gaming is more complicated than that (Rat is not a hero, and no character can be the hero in a collective saga anyway), the point about participation in culture rather than consumption of culture is important. In these days of DRM-chips and force-fed stardom, in fact, it may be vital.

In my more subversive moments, I dream that the States will turn away from the Culture Machine that is Hollywood, the RIAA, the New York Big Pubs, and their ilk—and rediscover that culture is something to be made as well as beheld. I want more people writing, singing, acting, dancing, making music, building, painting, sculpting, weaving, gem-cutting, glass-blowing, taking pictures. I want everyone doing these things, and all the other things that we’ve gone and left to the “professionals.”

Gamers do. Gamers act, write, paint, sing, build—I even knew one gamer who did dance, when the in-game situation called for it. Bloggers do too. If you have a blog, the Establishment is coming after your subversive self; you’re robbing eyeballs from the Establishment, and the Establishment resents it.

Yeah, sure, we’re going to suck at this stuff. If nothing else, we’re bloody out of practice, since we’ve been passive so long. It doesn’t matter how bad we are, though. What matters is that we will be taking our culture back from those who would lock it away from us, and that merely by participating in it, however ineptly. Sounds like a deal to me.

Bad as my RPG fluff is, I’ll keep writing it. Graceless and bland as this blog page is, I’ll keep writing and redesigning it. If I ever get my wrists back from RSI and remember to send my instruments to Von Huene for revoicing, I’ll start playing recorder again.

I will suck at it, not having played seriously in over a decade. (I used to be worth listening to.) That’s still better than selling my soul to the Establishment.

MT 2.21 seems to be behaving itself. I can’t switch to MySQL without ponying up more dough to my host, so I’ll pass on that for now. I lost my Latin dates momentarily, but only because I (or MT?) inadvertently changed that preference.

After some thought, I am not going to enable TrackBack just yet. Yes, yes, I am a whinging coward—conceded without argument. Still, I have always been more comfortable on the other side of the fourth wall from a quiet audience than in the midst of a noisy crowd. Until I’m halfway convinced that using TrackBack won’t dump me into the same ugly round of flamewars that mailing lists and Usenet have succumbed to, I’ll pass.

(Incidentally, this is one difference between TrackBack and Needley that is important to me. Needley lets me get in on conversations at my discretion, but does not obligate me to follow them and does not force them upon my notice. TrackBack works like comments; its vestiges live on my blog. It’s hard to get away from that, should I wish to. This isn’t a slap at Ben and Mena; I know a lot of bloggers will love TrackBack. I’m just too society-phobic to be one of them.)

I am also testing Phil’s smart line-break hack, but to do so, I need a pithy quote in <blockquote> tags. So here’s one from Jonathon:

When Web pages malfunction, the cause can frequently be found between the chair and the keyboard.

He got that right, as the last week of tweaks to Caveat Lector prove. (Thanks to Dan for notifying me that the stylesheet was misbehaving again.)

So I went out and yard-saled this morning, came back and cleaned the gunk out of the fridge (and very gunky gunk it was, too—glad it’s gone), and sat down to start on my library-school application.

Argh. These things are awful. I had forgotten how awful they were. The nuts-and-bolts part is no big deal; in fact, the UW has put it online and I got most of it done in half an hour.

It’s the other bits. Recommendations, for instance. Oh, boy. I have one in the bag, and just sent out a humble request for another. How I will land the third—which according to their rules has to be an academic one—I am sure I do not know. College and professors who liked me were ten years ago. Nobody in my graduate department liked me, and even if they did they’ll have forgotten me by now; the Department from Hell is that gargantuan.

Perhaps I should just dig myself a hole in the sand and whimper quietly?

If that’s not enough, there’s the Personal Essay bit. “Describe concisely any employment, student, or life experiences that demonstrate independent thinking, self-motivation, flexibility, and maturity,” they say.

I don’t think I’m guilty of more than two of the above attributes. Will that do, do you think?

It could be worse. I don’t have to go back and take the bloody GRE again, at least.

Still, this is all wretchedly awful, designed to throw every mistake I’ve made in the last five years into sharpest relief. I am not giving up—I will get into that school if I have to storm it. I do find myself hoping that the interior is less forbidding than the gate, though.

New version of AKMA’s template and CSS up. Some stuff is probably wrong because it’s late and I’m wiped. Plus I have some accessibility things yet to do. But I was two days late with this, and wanted to get something up and running.

Does anyone know anything about a display bug in Mozilla regarding the left margins of lists? AKMA’s archive list entries look right weird in Mozilla, and I don’t think it’s me this time. If you know what it is or how to fix it without messing it up in other browsers, please tell me.

Mark, I’ve been a good little blogger and made all my links bold. I curse the individual who had the idea to underline links. Underlining is just plain ugly, and I’m just enough of a typography snob not to want to do it. Still, accessibility is accessibility, and bold is OK, so bold it is.

The accesskey stuff is right cool. I’ll give that a shot soon, both here and with AKMA.

Eyes… closing… must… go… bed… soon… after I download the next version of MT, though. And I just kicked in fifty bucks. Ben and Mena deserve it and more.

The furor over the Pledge of Allegiance is enough to send an honest agnostic into a fallout shelter.

AKMA and Burningbird have said everything I wanted to see said on the actual issue at hand.

What scares me is the waves of pure hatred and contempt I am seeing from people who probably do not even realize that I am one of their targets. The people who, implicitly or explicitly, say that I am wholly without ethics because I am wholly without religion.

It’s just bizarre. I don’t understand it. If I were to say, “I don’t get my dialup service from Earthlink,” the automatic reaction is not “You must not have dialup, then!” It’s “Oh. Where do you get it, then?”

Religion hasn’t got a monopoly on ethics (much less ethical behavior, and that is as far toward the cheap shots as I will go) that I’ve noticed. There are these dudes and dudettes calling themselves “philosophers,” of various religious stripes or none at all, who claim to have something to say on the matter, for one thing.

For another, implicit in this condemnation of me is the notion that the only way to absorb whatever ethical teachings religion may have to offer is to be a believer. What a repellently narrow notion.

My husband is Buddhist. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I have proven utterly incapable of osmosing and acting upon Buddhist precepts. In fact, I am quite enamored of the concept of mindfulness, and I work to become mindful. (I’m not very good at it. But I try.)

AKMA is Christian. I’m not. Neither he nor I would say that I can learn nothing from him, practice nothing that he practices, believe nothing that he believes, because I do not share his faith.

Where do I get my ethics? Not from anything formal, or even from anything social. I don’t seem to be wired that way. Mostly I figure out what I think is right based on watching actions and their consequences, pondering things I read (mostly fiction!), and ruminating endlessly over my own mistakes. (Depressives. What can I tell you? We just do that kind of thing.)

Maybe that makes my ethics different from yours. Maybe they’re less consistent or less broad. I don’t know. But those who scream that I do not or cannot possess a sense of ethics—well, it makes me sad and scared and sorry, is all I can say.

I see that I didn’t explain myself very clearly yesterday with regard to the role of <div> and <span>. Let me give it another whack.

If you look at a web page or a newspaper or a book, you see that it is divided up into blocks. Paragraphs, headlines/headings, lists, captions, etc. What all these things have in common is that they are separated from each other vertically. They start on new lines. The <div> represents precisely that lowest-common-denominator aspect of block-ness. All you know about a <div> to start with is that it is a block.

(Why, you may be asking, didn’t they just call the darn thing a block? I suspect, but do not know for certain, that the HTML folks borrowed this notion and its name from the Text Encoding Initiative, for whom it is pretty fundamental.)

If you look closer at individual blocks, you see that not all the text in them is created equal. Some of it is emphasized, even strongly so. Some of it may be small caps or funny colors; on a web page, some of the text may represent a link to somewhere. These standout bits, however, are not blocks; they do not start new lines. They’re just chunks of blocks that happen to be a little different from the rest of the block. Again, the lowest-common-denominator representation of such a span of characters is <span>.

If you are an advanced Microsoft Word or Quark XPress user, you may be comfortable with the distinction between “paragraph styles” and “character styles.” The former are roughly analogous to <div>s; the latter are closely analogous to <span>s. I hesitate to bring it up, though, because there is one key difference between a <div> and a paragraph style: <div>s nest. You can put one <div> inside another inside another ad infinitum. Word and Quark don’t let you do that with paragraph styles.

Nesting <div>s is an important thing to be aware of, because it allows you to model your information much more intuitively, and style it more sensibly. The styling gyrations you have to go through to get space above and below, say, a multiple-stanza poem (which is a block that contains other blocks—stanzas—inside it) in Word or Quark are downright outrageous. In HTML it’s no sweat. You just put each of your stanzas in <div class="stanza"> … </div> tags, and put the whole poem in <div class="poem"> … </div> tags, and with a bit of CSS padding, there you are.

The annoying thing about nesting <div> tags is figuring out where to put the end-tags. Mistakes can be costly. The markup problem in my archives that I fixed this week was of precisely this variety: I left out an end-tag for a <div> in my template, and the result was one heck of a mess. This is one of the few situations in which a genuine XML editor can be useful. It will tell you precisely which <div> it is that is missing its end-tag.

(Yes, I have a generally low opinion of XML editors. They don’t have to be as obnoxious as they are, but the current generation of them is so obnoxious as to be unusable, for ordinary mortals and markup geeks alike. I have high hopes that the Topologi editor will be a large step in the right direction, however, at least for markup geeks.)

Another way to think of a <div> or a <span> is as a proxy for all the wild and wonderful text divisions that HTML simply didn’t think of. Take blogs, for example. HTML predates the blog by a lot. The folks who came up with HTML couldn’t possibly have known that blogs would almost universally contain blogrolls, so they didn’t put in a blogroll tag. So they created the <div> instead, so that bloggers could invent <div class="blogroll"> if they needed it.

But what do you need the <div> tag for? Why can’t you just invent a <blogroll> tag? Ah, grasshopper, now you begin to move beyond the playground of HTML, in which all tag names are fixed, into the wide and wonderful world of XML, in which you may invent all the tags you care to. :)

Clearer now, I hope?

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (going on hiatus, boo hoo!) cites this gem from an Aussie digital-library project: “Digital conversion is not the seamless, simple process often portrayed by some digital library proponents.”

Imagine that.

I am as close to speechless as I get. The only people I know who have ever claimed that this stuff was seamless or simple were trying to sell something. Usually but not always conversion services. Who is “often” saying this is easy, and how can I shut them up?

Honestly, people, it doesn’t do anyone any good to trivialize the difficulty here! I had far rather see an honest admission of the problems—along with the excitement the challenge of solving them presents.

Leigh points out on eclectic that a lot of what purports to be XHTML on the Web isn’t well-formed XML.

Guilty. I tested several of my archive pages a couple of days ago (had a markup problem in one of my templates; fixed now), and even after fixing all the markup most of my pages weren’t well-formed.

The culprit, however, is neither my markup nor faulty authoring tools. The culprit is these bloody annoying URLs with ampersands in them. Phil? When you’ve got a minute, would you mind coding a MT hack to find and escape ampersands in URLs?

I will go back and fix my pages; one of MT’s rather nice features is a regex-enabled search of your blog, so I should be able to find the offending posts without much difficulty. Still, it’s annoying to have good intentions mauled by bad web-server code.

By the way, Leigh, I for one will miss XML-Deviant.

The hands are doing very well lately, I am glad to say. No miracle cure here, but some solid improvement, thanks to my new Kinesis keyboard. I haven’t had to type nine-fingered since I got it. This week I quit wearing a reminder brace on my left hand, and I don’t miss it. I still get twinges of pain here and there, but they are no more than twinges. My fingers don’t spasm any more, and I haven’t had any weird tingling either. This is all very good. I am grateful.

I haven’t sacrificed any work efficiency, either. My daily data-entry records show I’m faster than ever. This has a lot to do with the keyboard’s slick macro-programming capability, I admit, but I’ll take it. (Rural Puerto Rico in 1910 was not big on street names, so every bloody page of the census forms in such areas has some monstrosity like “Camino vecinal de Naranjito al barrio Cedro Abajo. Carretera de Toa Alta a Corozal”. It be real nice to program this stuff into a macro or two and not have to type it umpteen times.)

E-text geek that I am, I should note a bias toward paper I discovered today and shall attempt to eradicate. I took a look at Kalilily’s new site and had an immediate mildly negative reaction to the static background against which the text scrolls.

Now, what’s wrong with that? I asked myself. Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. The trouble is I’m plain not used to it, because you can’t do it on paper. It’s actually quite a cool design trick, and the Spartaneity project is to be commended for its work with Kalilily.

Goes to show how deep the pro-paper bias runs, though. Even in me.

I doubt I will be trying anything of the sort here. I am not a text geek solely because I like text. I am a text geek because I am a thoroughly hopeless visual artist/designer, no eye at all. The Spartan design of Caveat Lector reflects that. I didn’t try anything new, ambitious, or non-text-based because I would unquestionably make a terrible hash of it. I don’t dare even mess with color; I don’t have any color-vision deficiencies, but neither do I have any solid sense of what colors work together and what don’t.

When I bought this domain, I intended it for a one-woman markup business. It still may end up used for that, who knows? (No for-pay markup projects now, however. I am still under previous employer’s non-compete, and I fully intend to keep my nose clean. Whatever I think of the agreement, I signed it, and it’s my duty to honor it.) The name of the business would have been Text Artisan Guild, which wholly aside from the precious (in whatever sense you like) acronym expresses something important about who I am and what I do.

I am not a text artist. That’s somebody who writes art, which I don’t do. (Kindly refrain from disagreeing with me on this, or I shall have no choice but to inflict choice samples of my RPG fluff upon you. Fate worse than death, believe me. Awful stuff. Awful.) A text artisan works with other people’s texts, does one or more of the important text-related jobs that surround writing but are not themselves writing. An editor is a text artisan. A markup geek is (though database markup geeks are usually not). A typesetter is. An indexer is. A translator might be, though literary translation verges on text artistry. A book designer might be, though that also is closer to artistry in my view.

The various sorts of text artisanry have their own sets of rules and practices, their own jargons, their own tools. One thing they have in common, I think, is people like me: people with an abiding love of and need for text who nevertheless have no particular need to be text artists. Not all text artisans are like this, admittedly, but so very many are.

One of the most melancholy aspects of the ebook world as I lived it was its total ignorance of and disregard for text artisans. I don’t know how much that contributed to the current sad state of things. I cannot believe it helped, however. I can’t. How do you create a flourishing universe of texts without text artisans?

Some text artists will try to do their own artisanry. The results will be mixed. A fair number of ebook successes fall into this category. Some publishers, neither text artists nor text artisans, will pretend that they don’t need text artisans, or turn over their texts to charlatans. I need not say how many ebook failures have come of this.

But I have wandered, and my blog posts are long enough as it is.

Right. Now it’s time to talk about AKMA’s sidebar.

Like most blog sidebars, it is a bit of a grab bag. Contact info, blogroll, blogstickers, odds and ends. That makes it a good exemplar as we try to answer the question “How do I decide how to tag stuff?”

Here’s how I decide, faced with something new. Your mileage may vary.

1. What is this thing? Oh, it’s my email address. Oh, it’s the University of Blogaria listings. Oh, it’s a blogsticker. This question may seem silly, but it helps you clarify the answers to the next questions.

2. What existing HTML construct is this thing like? Well, the email address is on its own line, so it’s kind of like a <p> or a <div>. The UBlog listings have a head, which we will naturally cover with a heading tag. Mostly, though, they are a list with two parts to each list item (the title and the individual holding the title). Hm. <ul> and <ol> only contain a single kind of list item, <li>. There is, however, the <dl> or “definition list” tag, which consists of <dt> (“definition term”) and <dd> (“definition definition”) tags. That’s more like it. We’ll use that.

   What if there’s nothing appropriate? This happens frequently with boxy-like things that include other things. AKMA’s archive links, for example, belong with their heading inside a visual box. HTML has no <box> or <archives> tag. It also happens with spans of text inside a paragraph; a common typographic example (and the semantic markup wonks will kill me for this, but so be it) is putting the first few words of the first paragraph of a new page in small caps or whathaveyou.

   The all-purpose fallback tags in HTML are <div> and <span>. The difference between them is that the former acts like a box or a paragraph, starting on its own line, while the latter acts like emphasis tags, intended for short spans of characters inside larger blocks. If nothing else makes sense, use <div> or <span>.

3. Is there only one of this thing, or more than one? This governs the oft-confused choice between id and class attributes. If there is only one of this thing, like an email address on a single-person blog, slap an id on it. If there is or may be more than one of it, as with a blogsticker, you want to use class.

   Now, neither id nor class is required. If what you’ve got is a straight unordered list with nothing particularly special about it, don’t bother classing it; just use the ordinary <ul> tag. If you think you might link to something, put an id on it even if you might not otherwise do so.

4. Does this thing fit inside another thing, and/or have things that fit inside it? You can think about this visually if you like. Might you put a border around this thing? If so, and it doesn’t already have a container tag you can apply the border property to, you need to put a <div> around it. Might you put borders around the things inside? If so, and they don’t have container tags, they need them.

   I detest the <br /> tag and use it as little as possible. It does not provide any information about the items before and after the line break. Nine times out of ten, it is a vastly better idea to use a class on a set of <p> or <div> tag, and then set the top and bottom margins to zero with CSS. (The tenth time is poetry. I do use <br /> tags for line breaks in poetry, and I rather hate myself for it.)

   In AKMA’s case, all of the UBlog faculty were delimited with linebreak tags, making it impossible to distinguish titles from names. I changed that; the result should prove easier to maintain and style.

And there you are—the nickel introduction to data analysis. (I am only half kidding. Figuring out how to put together a SGML or XML DTD involves essentially the same thought process.)

I have some edits to do to the archive-link part of AKMA’s template, because it is no longer alone in its column. What I will likely do is add a larger <div> around the archives <div>.

I also have an updated CSS, but I haven’t loaded it up yet. I’m expecting a phone call this evening, so I may not get to it, but I’ll try to have a new template up by sometime tomorrow.