…I’ve ever read:
There’s a reason that man’s in my blogroll, after all.
Speaking Too Soon
Just a few weeks after Time magazine writes about Exposing the “Jesus’ Brother” Hoax we get treated to this: the trial judge in the alleged forgery case recommended the prosecution, um, “reassess its position.”
(Jerusalem Post / San Francisco Chronicle)
What both of these stories omit is that one of the “experts” who claimed “the inscription on the ossuary cut through the ancient limestone box’s patina, a thin coating acquired with age, proving the writing was not ancient.” (quote from JP story) had to admit under oath that indeed there was original patina in the inscription after all. (Hat Tip: Ben Witherington)
A Tale of Two Cities
OK, the election is upon us. It’s the only time our government is required by law to listen to us, yet so few of us take advantage of it. One reason may be the success of negative campaign ads. According to the latest numbers from the University of Wisconsin’s Advertising Project (and injecting my own reasonable assumption that negative ads cost the same amount of money to make and broadcast as positive ads) in the last full week of the campaign, John McCain spent just under $6M just to convince me not to vote for Barack Obama. During the same time period, Mr Obama spent about $13M (a little over twice what Mr McCain spent) just to convince me not to vote for Mr McCain. (Based on 63% negative ads for Mr Obama and 79% negative ads for Mr McCain – Story Source – Advertising Project Home Page)
The process reminds me of a story from Wisconsin’s history, a story about two frontier towns: Sauk City and Prairie du Sac.
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Lessons Learned
Sorry about the delay. I’ve been working, and learning. I think as much or more of the latter as the former.
What’s going on? In no particular order:
Andy Clarke tipped me to a huge improvement over opacity, RGBa. He got it from Dan Cederholm (who, BTW, quotes Wilson Miner on a “crafty” use for it, that I found nothing short of spectacular. Remember, children, God is in the details.) Unlike opacity, RGBa only affects the transparency of the color, not the text or images inside the box. It’s only CSS3, but that will soon mean all the current levels of the browsers, so no, it’s not too soon to start thinking about using it. And I am. (For the record, both messrs Clarke and Cederholm are on my list of Voices To Listen To. I may not always agree, but I have to think carefully when I don’t. But more often than not I say “Wow!” as the continents in my world re-align.)
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On CSS Resets
I’ve been using CSS reset code for quite a while. My “weapon of choice” in that category has been Eric Meyer’s version. But lately I’ve been rethinking the proposition, mainly because of some “interesting” issues that crop up repetitively.
Most of my clients don’t accept arguments in favor of letting the user’s default font size stand, for example. And maybe I’m just too old of a code monkey but setting properties on, for example, an h1 tag that I know for a fact I’m going to change before I ever use the tag just makes my skin crawl.
So I’m leaning towards replacing the CSS Reset tool in my toolbox with something else; a CSS Defaults tool.
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