Dispatches From The Internets

I finally got around to reading Chris Wilson’s post about standards support in IE7 and I have to admit I am more than a little giddy. Working for an ad agency, most clients (and the majority of my coworkers) have not gotten the whole Web Standards thing, mostly because they only use IE. I can’t express how much relief I feel that IE7 is going to fall in line with most of the other browsers out there with regard to standards support.

Sad news, friends… Design In-Flight is closing shop. This very young, yet stellar PDF-based magazine was off to a fantastic start, but, as Andy put it, changes in his personal and professional life have conspired to make DiF’s continued publication an impossibility.

I agree with Richard: peoples’ eyes do glaze over when you say “semantic,” but they don’t have to. When Molly & I co-teach or when I am on my own, I always try to strike a balance by alternating “meaningful” and “semantic.” I feel it is important that “semantic” does not go away because it does have value. That said, it is necessary to relate to your audience, no matter what their level or experience, so I think alternating the terms and showing the interchangability of the two is beneficial for everyone.

I’ve been doing a little research lately into new laptops and I am finally starting to understand a little more about processors, etc., so I am dumbfounded to hear that Apple is dumping IBM’s PowerPC chips for Intel’s Pentium line. From my experience, Intel chips a) run really hot and b) suffer from a severe processing bottleneck (3.2 Gigahertz with a 533 Megahertz Front-Side Bus? WTF?). It seems to me that it would have made more sense for Apple to go with AMD, they’ve got incredibly powerful chips which I understand do not suffer from these problems. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, after all, I’m not a chip guy (or a Hollywood mogul).

I opened the latest issue of Baseline to find a giant 2-page spread for 1&1 (a hosting company), touting their “Dynamic Content Catalog” and it’s ability to give you “website content like the big players.” Basically, they are offering to syndicate content (news, sports, games, etc.) onto your site, so you no longer have to worry about keeping your site fresh or interesting.

I feel like this is an attempt to reintroduce the idea that every site needs to be a portal (why that concept is still floating about I’ll never know). I also see this as as flying in the face of one of the most important business objectives: establishing a brand, voice, etc. through copywriting. If all you have to offer your clients is data with no distillation, why bother?

I was browsing the popular links on del.icio.us today and stumbled onto Nifty Corners and (via that page) More Nifty Corners. I have to say that I am incredibly impressed with the scripting, but I fear there is something wrong with this picture.

While doing some DNS modifications (for this site, in fact) on AIT Domains, I received the following error message when trying to update the nameservers: