Finance are saying that the last single of the infamous “local” artist Magnifico got downloaded 7.894 times in one month. The number would probably be even higher if the site was online – ooops, somebody forgot to pay.
Before:
After:
Update 1: It’s June 12 23:56 CET and Magnifico is back!
Update 2: It’s funny how history can change – Wikipedia shows at least one album more than the official homepage, two if you count the one with U’redu. Not the right record label? Or is he ashamed of them?
I often come across an ad that seems interesting enough to click it. When I do I’m usually disappointed, because I end up in a place I didn’t expect.
Dear advertisers!
When spending money on my click, if you’re advertising a product please take me to the product page, not your home page. I’m interested in the product, not you. Yes, this kind of teleportation is possible in the online world. The only thing you did is add a mental comment to your URL: “Can’t find what I’m looking for” that will probably make me go away even when I am buying something.
Learn from Victoria’s Secret…
It was probably more than a month ago that markos asked me about the semantics of less important items. We had a short discussion about it and found no relevant tags to mark up a part of text that was less important than the rest of it. An easy example would be a footnote, legal text or any other stuff you would usually make smaller in the world of looks over semantics.
A few days ago I was reminded that I forgot to write about it back then when I saw this issue resurface on the WSG mailing list.
When the semantics of HTML were on question a lot of the tags were ‘deprecated’. Not all marked deprecated in the standard itself, but rather marked as bad practice in the web standards community [1]. When trying to tell the client something is important you really should not be telling it to show it in bold typeface – you have CSS to do that [2].
The problem is that when all these presentational elements were ‘killed’ somebody wasn’t thinking. Let’s see:
You might have noticed the question marks in the list. The first one, the tag that is supposed to be a semantic for <big> isn’t really all that important. We have many ways to point out that something is important (if there was a semantic meaning – <h1>…<h6>, <strong>, <em>) or just use CSS to change it to big. The problem lies in the latter question mark. How do you mark something that used the small as some sort of semantic and not just a way of presenting the data visually?
In the standard these are actually specified in the Graphics part of it. The meaning of <small> is Renders text in a “small” font.
That’s great, but what if I want to tell the world that what I put in there is a legal text? Footnote? Something deemphasized? POSH patterns to the rescue.
As you might have noticed this post uses footnotes. I’ve marked them so that the text in the article links to the footnote bellow and the footnote links back. To show that this is a footnote relation I’ve added a forward relation rel=”footnote” to the link in the text and a reverse relation rev=”footnote” in the footnote itself. I’m also using these to set the styles (which makes them break in IE6 and other stinky browsers). The footnotes are marked up as an ordered list (<ol>) with a class name “footnotes” and each footnote is a list item (<li>) which has an id “footnote-footnoteid-postid” that enables me to link to it.
When marking up legal notices you might want to use rel=”license” and link it to the part of the content you’re specifying the legal text for with a rev=”license” if you don’t have a link to it; if you’re specifying it for the document just link to the page.
It seems that the core of the Microformats community finally realized that the Microformats hype grew over the small group of web developers that already produced semantic markup and wanted to add even more semantics to it. Now every Microformats fan thinks there should be a Microformat for everything instead of just asking themselves a more important question – “What’s the best semantic way to present this content?”
Created by factoryjoe, released under CC by-nc-sa license
That’s where POSH comes in. It stands for Plain Old Semantic HTML. POSHers promote the use of semantic use of HTML which means more than just not using tables for layout. I think that something wasn’t communicated clearly enough and that is the fact that Microformats are born out of a repeating pattern of content presentation which concerns many people and many websites. That’s one of the reasons I never pushed for any new Microformats and was more often than not annoyed by people doing just that. What good can come from a big number of formats that you can’t use because you can’t really know them all?
That said, go practice POSH, document techniques and your own solutions to problems. If some of these problems outgrow the POSH pond they might be turned into a Microformat that we can all follow. If not it’s still a great idea that you can check how other people are solving problems when you stumble upon them.
Quite quietly the first year has gone by. I’ve not been writing reguarly but still managed to write 100 posts, get 155 comments and more than 17000 spam comments. I supposedly have 25 subscribers (according to FeedBurner that I started using a few weeks ago).
Google Analytics say that the most popular post by far is This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, JS:SortedTable page trails at only 20% of hits of the ‘winner’.
On the technical side Firefox and Internet Explorer are about equal at aroung 47% with Safari at 3% and Opera with almost 2%. Most (~92%) of the visitors have Flash 8 installed (96% have 7 ). Only 2% have screen width 800px or less and 32% have 1024px or less.
They say the blogging age is over though. I think I’ve improved.