RANT STARTS HERE

CSS-Discuss is probably the most prolific mailing list when it comes to Web design and cascading style sheets (CSS) in particular. It is a broad group with high traffic of messages circulation. I subscribed to it earlier this year due to admiration for Eric Meyer — possibly the man behind this mailing list and the man to provide us with a Web-based presentation tool better known as S5.

[CSSD] avoids off -topic discussions like general (X)HTML, accessibility and particular Web-related applications. However, I am put back by the dull, useless, non-reusable discussions in that group. Much of the conversation traffic gets ‘wasted’ on cross-platform site checks and dealing with known browser bugs (rather than CSS as a standard). Almost every single day one would see entire threads about rendering of pages in different browsers — something along the lines of this fictitious paragraph:

In IE, the border is drawn one pixel above that which I see in FF so if I look closely enough I can see some small speckles in my menu. Having said that, it only becomes visible if I use this particular arcane browser.

To sum up, my final advice is to avoid this mailing list unless it resides on a separate E-mail account. It might be relevant if you wish to discuss bugs attributed to browser developers or if you want to wind up opening various Web sites in different computers and occasionally giving a nod to the OP, which acknowledges acceptable page rendering.

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oone can deny that blogs are dwindling. This doesn’t mean to say that popular blogs no longer exist. This does not imply that blogs stopped emerging either. Nevertheless, let us ponder the following contentions:

• Lost interest and enthusiasm among blog authors is apparent
• Many blogs ceased to be maintained or are rarely modified in an attempt to show signs of life
• rel="nofollow" discourages feedback via comments
• Traffic becomes illusionary: no visitors, only crawlers
• Free blogs can be set up everywhere. With plenty of dormant blogs, there is excess bandwidth and server power that begs to be used, even for free
• Blogs are no longer an implication of being technology-savvy; they used to be though. If celebrities and baseball players that blog are no evidence, I fail to grasp what would make better evidence.

Here are a couple of ‘dead’ blogs that are worth pointing out:

• The Bill Gates blog (fake, amusing, but discontinued)
• A ‘twin brother’ which I discovered months ago

Have a quick look at the blogs above. Statistics say that they are well over 10 million blogs and that a blog is created every second. But does a one-entry blog count? What about spam blogs (splogs), which were recently reported to account for a crushing majority of the total number?

Also see: Blogs Recession — and item that received enough attention to be cited by Om Malik.

xcessively small fonts have become a problem that too few keep in the back of their minds. To a friend of mine who is 76-years-young, one of the greatest features in Firefox is that fonts are easily scalable. Having taken a look at the The Rogue Librarian, I think the administrator must have excellent eyesight. The small fonts will pose problem for the generation that still cares for books. With the buggy IE, I hard to tell if scaling/zooming would even have an effect.

Conversely, taking as an example A List Apart, which is a Web design authority, several forums criticised the recent re-design, although many loved it too. As Els correctly pointed out, “on a 1024×768 window, font size only one notch up already gets the ‘feed’ menu item off screen (no second row). People with bad eyesight can’t get to the feed, nor are allowed to contribute”.

Google Talk

s Google release an instant messaging and voice application, as well as a re-loaded desktop search application, one cannot help but wonder if they now target the desktop at full force. Google are even rumoured to have interest in Skype

To balance this discussion, let us mention those who say that Google might become the next Microsoft, honouring all operating systems, but putting a barrier at the front of competing companies all over the Internet. Instant messaging, voice, maps, conversion tools and of course — above all — the search engine seem to be drifting Google’s ways. An article just released in The New York Times agrees with such accusations:

For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

The shift towards the desktop does not contradict a shift towards on-line operating systems. A more recent article by Kottke supports my views as well. Will ten years of being enslaved to Microsoft ¹ come to an end sooner than anyone dared to predict?

¹ Windows 95 is one milestone among several, but today we mark the 10^th anniversary of that milestone (placebo rather).

uto-responders, also referred to as “vacation messages”, are a valuable feature of E-mail accounts. These are not only helpful when an account gets checked irregularly, but also when it becomes deprecated.

Auto-responders can be invoked by the E-mail client (e.g. recent versions of Outlook), but they require the computer to remain switched on. This, in fact, is the big con: the method unnecessarily consumes electricity in cases of an actual vacation. The computer needs to stay on for days or weeks at a time. Messages can be checked upon return, assuming the computer has not crash beforehand.

Alternatively, autoresponders can be handled at server level. It is worth noting that this will not always be a supported feature, especially when you do not have ownership of your E-mail address’ domain. The exception are Web-based mailing systems that support the feature fully, e.g. Yahoo Mail and CommuniGate Pro.

There is an ad-hoc alternative to autoresponders, which I adopted since I was able to set up a mail forwarder, but not an autoresponder.

• Set up a forwarder to a meaningful but non-existent E-mail address, e.g. I_am_away_at_the_moment@no.domain or This_account_has_been_intentionally_terminated@no.domain.
• Since the account you forward mail to resides on an address that does not exist, the message will bounce, though often not immediately.
• Subsequently, a delivery error will reach the original sender. Budging by the odd E-mail address that triggered an error, the message sender will receive information regarding the situation rather than assume that the recipient stayed silent.

To sum things up, forwarders to made-up addresses can guarantee that in the absence of auto-responders, all correspondents will receive meaningful feedback.

Scrapers: where is the original content? Left or right?

everal companies including Google have devised mechanisms so as to avoid becoming the hosts to spammers. It is broadly agreed that spam blogs (also referred to as “splogs”) and spam-generating E-mail accounts can easily damage the reputation of the ISP or the on-line service which provides the bandwidth. Consequently, Google have reacted to spam blogs in a variety of ways and required Google Mail subscribers to be invited by another existing member (“friend brings a friend”), thus establishing trust. Moreover on the issue of spam, content spam can finally be reported and feedback acted upon.

The brand-new WordPress.com, a service similar to that of TypePad and Blogger, takes the same approach as GMail and distributes “invites”. A limit on the number of invites helps the battle against spam over HTTP. While their mechanism appears similar to that GMail invites, it serves a different puspose and has different implications. With spam blogs being endemic, one needs to gain control over who creates blogs, as well as how many. The requirement for a referral from a friend is a novel idea, which can result in a highly-reputed network of blogs. It would attract the best bloggers from ‘junk networks’ characterised by plagiarism, hotlinked (sometimes stolen) graphics or content that provokes hatred and intolerance.

Where else can this idea of invites be used? Virtually in any domain which involves public account instantiation, e.g.:

• E-mail accounts
• Blogs
• Webspaces
• On-line bookmarks such as del.icio.us

Many other services are moving online (possibly reaching out for on-line operating systems), so we shall see spam hitting many other types of services in the future. Not so long ago I wondered if there would be a place for invites trading on eBay. I guessed it was only a matter of time. Links and PageRank likewise. It was a few days that a WordPress invite ended up in an eBay auction, much as I had predicted. That means that people earn money for subscription to services they do not own! So, under certain circumstances, spamming appears to be substituted by scalping.

Only months after the release of Google Desktop, the much richer Google Desktop 2 has been announced. This native desktop software, as well as indexing and searching one’s hard-drive, incorporates a controversial sidebar. This sidebar contains RSS feeds, a virtual Gmail inbox, news headlines and more utilities and plug-ins like a scheduling toolset.

Will this truly provide the infrastructure to what might become a Google homebred Web browser? This kind of browser would make the Google-centric application everything that you will ever need. Would such strategy move all the users’ data on-line, namely mail, schedule and settings? Will this make our lives even more portable? Surely there is potential for this vision, which is not baseless. Google have strong ties with the Mozilla Foundation and they may have pondered the possibility of a Google browser in the past. Some sources claim they have.

Related items: Google OS – What if?, Towards On-Line Operating Systems