A Musical Baton

A “musical baton” has been passed to me by Glenda the Goodwitch. Wow, this site’s first meme! Edit: I felt compelled to write more after I got home from work (ahem). Pacific time has its disadvantages. Total volume of music files on my computer: 3.88 GB (holy crap! That’s a lot for someone in a music rut.) The last CD I bought was: A Ghost is Born by Wilco Song playing right now: The Milkman of Human Kindness by Billy Bragg Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: The Ghost in You by Psychedelic Furs

Inside you the time moves and she don’t fade / The ghost in you, she don’t fade.

How does one learn standards-based scripting?

I am a little late to this conversation, but there has been some discussion lately about browser elitism, and how CSS may be dipping its toes into waters best reserved for DOM-based scripting. I can agree with some of these arguments, and I have been trying to find a good way to go about learning DOM-based scripting for several months now. I have to say that it’s very hard to figure out where to start. There are a wealth of great CSS books out there for folks at every level of expertise, as well as more articles and demonstrations than you can shake a stick at, but there is comparatively little good information to be found about scripting. Just look at ALA– there are 62 CSS articles, as opposed to 26 DOM | Scripting articles. I’m sure this is reflective of a current bias in the web design industry, resulting from the “javascript is evil” days of yore. On Amazon, I can find only a couple of books that mention the DOM, and they are from several years ago, except for one by Jeremy Keith that is not yet released. I can find some great tools and snippets of code that use it, but it’s unclear how to get started in the right direction. There is a lot of bad information about javascript out there, just like there is a lot of non-standards-based web design information. But there is not as much guidance as to how to use DOM scripting responsibly, best practices, common pitfalls, etc. So my question to the DOM-scripting gurus is: can you point us newbies to a good way to learn the basics so that we don’t have to learn responsible DOM-scripting by trial and error?

What’s your greatest fear?

First, a note: I have recently created three RSS feeds so that those of you interested my professional articles but not my personal musings can subscribe just to the articles, and vice versa. The feed that combines all the content is still in place for those of you who want to get the whole picture. You don’t need to change anything to stay subscribed to the combined feed. More details are available here. Now onto the good stuff.

( Blush )

Must. Resist. Redesign.

Just when I’m feeling a little bit stable here, Andy comes out with this and makes me want to start all over.
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Today I’m Famous

I spent this morning speaking on a panel at a local technology forum, and achieving a slightly unsettling expert status among local high school students. It actually turned out to be great fun, with lots of interesting questions and perspectives. I was a good 10 years younger than the others on the panel, which gave me a kind of street cred with the audience. That, and I didn’t wear a suit. I made my way back into work to find that my interview with Karine from collegeweditor.com had been published. So now I am experiencing high blog traffic (for me, anyway). Welcome, new readers! An update on the status of Part 3 of Why Most University Web Sites Suck: it is in the works. Some turmoil at work and my dog getting surgery has set me back a bit. I was hoping to get it out before the interview, but sometimes life just happens. Things are moving forward now. Expect it in a week or two.

Where’s Malarkey?

Or, flag this photo as may offend. (I have too much time on my hands…)
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