New Rule
“When you find yourself in a hole… Stop digging”
— Legacy defeats consistency in IE 8’s Web 2.0 accessibility effort
Every cloud…
Large portions Microsoft’s website are in the middle of a redesign that will feature a fully Silverlight-powered interface - doing away with HTML and everything else.
…It’s a desperate move, there’s no doubt about it. While Microsoft will no doubt be making an alternative HTML interface available for a mixture of legal and practical purposes, switching Microsoft.com over to Silverlight is a sure-fire way to get that attention…. and depending on how it’s both marketed and carried out, it could be what it takes to make developers start taking Silverlight seriously.
<groan />
Not so much
…some folk - of which I am one - are coming to the opinion that XHTML
*in the web browser* is looking more like an evolutionary dead-end, not
‘leading the web to it’s full potential’. Seemed like a good idea at one
time, but on further examination, not so much.
The WaSP is Borked
So I’m wondering which implementation of the Acid 2 Test Microsoft used to test IE 8 — this one or this one?
Seeing how the IE blog points to the WaSP, I’m guessing the broken one… woops.
I’d hate to be the standanista from WaSP who gets to tell Microsoft that their version of the test is borked. That is going to be one interesting conversation.
Hey! nobody’s perfect…
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear - Part 3
Earlier this month there was an intriguing article in the Sydney Morning Herald — intriguing mainly because of its lack of detail. Today we find out a little more about it…
In the NSW Supreme Court today, Justice Michael Adams said one ASIO officer had committed “the crime of false imprisonment and kidnap at common law'’.
He also referred to the unjustified and unlawful interference with Mr ul-Haque’s personal liberty and the unlawful trespass of officers at his family home.
Both this and the recent Haneef case highlight the disturbing fact that neither the AFP, ASIO, The DPP nor The Government (yes I’m looking at you Kevin Andrews) can be trusted to apply their new, unprecedented powers to spy on and detain us in a restrained and ethical manner. They simply cannot be trusted with the new powers, this should now be an obvious fact. (Those of us who can remember the 60’s and 70’s probably already knew that ’cause they couldn’t be trusted then either.)
Update:
Justice Adams said the ASIO agents had only a search warrant and had no power to detain him. He described the interviews and the actions of the ASIO agents as reminiscent of Kafka.
Outrageous!
Crushing opposition
Under the 2003 CCC Act, the penalty for a person disclosing they have been served with a summons is three years’ imprisonment and a $60,000 fine. […]
Sinclair-Jones said the hearing had the characteristics of a star chamber, with interrogations and investigations held in secret and people who were unwilling to testify threatened with severe penalties. “These journalists could not tell their families, their boss, their union … It’s police-state stuff,” he said.
“The blanket suppression of free speech at secret hearings that nobody is allowed to know even occurred is deeply troubling. But we are even more concerned that journalists are being secretly threatened with long jail sentences and massive fines for protecting confidential sources.”
“Such inquisitorial powers would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Press freedom and democracy will inevitably suffer if the secret state powers are used to intimidate journalists and crush leaks.”
Well I declare!
Holly declarative animation!… you’ll definitely want to install the nightly build and check this out.
The Character Test
I’m no lawyer, but the phrase – Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – springs to mind.
“What you are seeing here is the politicisation of an investigation and the AFP working hand-in-glove to formulate that.
“It shows there was a pre-judgment by Minister Andrews and the Government, prior to the magistrate’s decision being taken, and this decision was politically stage-managed rather than being done according to law.”
The Australian
Cycle wasting
Matt Neuburg of Tidbits has written Doing the Leopard Moan, a review of the new Mac OS X interface. While I mostly agree with his comments, I think he should have prefaced the article with the line… “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”.
The title bar of a window is big and grey. The title bar of a window that isn’t frontmost is a lighter grey, which is backwards: surely it’s the frontmost window which should light up, not all the background windows?
Emphasis his. Matt it is you, surely, who has it arse-about. That is if you think the interface should emulate the real world. It’s called Aerial Perspective and man has been conveying the idea of distance to each other this way for about 5 hundred years or so.
