Ted Nelson doesn’t buy in: “Instead, today’s nightmarish new world is controlled by “webmasters”, tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web’s exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats. XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the “semantic web” means that tekkie committees will decide the world’s true concepts for once and for all. Enforcement is going to be another problem :) It is a very strange way of thinking, but all too many people are buying in because they think that’s how it must be.

There is an alternative. Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files must not be part of the mental structure of documents. Links must go both ways. All these fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible. We fight on.”

Ted also has his own Wired archive. I mostly enjoy the fact that his own bio lists his birth year/age as open-ended (1937 – ), as if he’s going to update it later.

My web site is standard! And yours? Painless techniques and ideas to improve your Web site quality and make your Web site valid, as well as comments and rebuttals for the usual suspects who may dismiss the need for accessibility.

Innovation in the Heartland: Topeka’s CJOnline invents a tasty news formula. The site draws attention by combining beer bargains and cheesecake with excellent multimedia coverage of government and politics. But critics label it bad taste.

Why Usability Matters: According to the Readership Institute, “Making a newspaper ‘easy to read’ is the single highest potential area for growing readership.” How can we make news content look easier, more scannable, less a part of the numbing cacophony of the daily media barrage?

Fonts for Flash: Pixel fonts are designed so that every part of every character falls exactly on the monitor’s pixels, preventing the text from appearing blurry. Why limit to having them just for Flash?

Why Web Builders Must Move to XHTML: The World Wide Web Consortium has issued a series of standards for XHTML, a new version of HTML as a version of XML. Does this mean every Web designer and developer must learn XHTML? What are the benefits? What happens if you don’t?

Reading Online News: A Comparison of Three Presentation Formats: The traditional newspaper presents information within the confines of evenly-spaced, gridded columns. This has worked quite well in the past, and readers have become very accustomed to this style of information presentation. However, on the Web, you may only need to present links that provide enough information to give the reader a general idea pertaining to that article. This study addresses the question of how information should be presented within a news-style web page.

Using XML: The reason that we use XML instead of a specific application is that XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, I decided to create a new XML-based markup language from scratch, and show what you can do with a document written in that language, using off-the-shelf tools.

Amazon Web Services API: An article by Tim O’Reilly about why Amazon released its API, talking about how “web sites” like Amazon and Google are/should be more like “applications”, how giving access to outside developers creates new ideas, and (of course) getting more money and web traffic.

NAA Digital Edge Awards: The Newspaper Association of America’s big winners for 2002 include CJOnline, SavannahNOW.com, and washingtonpost.com.