Jonas Beckman

We’re relaxing at Aila’s place, after a nice dinner at a new restaurant called Beirut. We also drank some some Chateau Musar again, the famous lebanese red wine. This one was a nice vintage 1988. It was good, but not like the vintage 1972 we happened to find a few weeks ago. That was one of the great wine experiences of my life.
After dinner we went for a long walk through Humlegården, Östermalm and Djurgården. Finally we took the ferry home to Södermalm.

It’s late and I have slept badly for a few nights. The day passes – nighttime is rising and muted feelings become sharp again. I feel intense, sad, and just fine.

James Vornov, yesterday: “I own all of Patti Smith’s albums – except the latest one”. Me too. So I bought Gung Ho today – I am playing it now.

It’s good. Here is an interview with her, from last summer.

Hi Amit!

Interesting links – somehow computer scientists always keep reinventing ancient philosophical dilemmas. Wonder why?

If don’t have enough wild links and rantings of the metaphysical/philosphical kind, do check out aBuddhas memes.

By the way, did your friends (Eva and Tomas) put up any Manila sites of their own?

Jon Udell writes about documents, databases and XML:

“Listening to that discussion, I was again struck by the kind of particle/wave duality that governs discussions about documents and databases. Is a document a database of elements, or an element of a database, or both?”

Jon’s conclusion, not surprisingly, is all of the above – in whatever combination is right for your particular case.

I agree completely. Getting this right is a deceptively simple and very fascinating problem. But it also makes managers extremely nervous… once they understand how strategic these decisions can be.

Cafe con Leche links to a strange story:

MS sends in lawyers to stop ‘open’ SOAP info getting out.

Hitbox update: I just found and corrected a typo in my JavaScript – so I’ll have to wait another day or so for some stats.

Hitbox is a program that logs traffic to your website. I am trying to get it to work – if it works you will see an ugly animated logo at the bottom right of this page. And I get statistics that tell me more about my readers.

Webfeet has already figured out how to do this – I followed his instructions.

But so far all I get is page hits, not visitors referrer info (URL, domain, operating system, browser etc). Maybe some more tweaking tomorrow will do the trick.

Yesterday I downloaded Amaya. NotesFromTheCave did too. He saw what I saw: lots of butchered rendering – not much of a web browser.

But then I had second thoughts: Amaya is a research project and a testbed for really new standards. Why shouldn’t they butcher old pages written according to old standards? In fact, they may do so by design.

Reading the architectural overview I quickly realized that Amaya is not really a browser. Amaya is a structured document editor – the webbrowser is just one part of that.

Structured editors must have an internal representation of the document, usually a tree-structure (like the W3C DOM). And for a given kind of document, editors can check if the structure is valid – using a DTD or any variety of XML Schema.

Now, Amaya is a strict structured editor: nothing happens to the textbuffer unless the internal tree changes, too. In fact, the GUI always works with the internal tree first and then renders the result. This would make things very easy – if you always had perfect documents.

But try opening a bad XML-document in IE5 – one mistake and all you get is an error message. “Be our kind of document and you can play in our editor – and look good, too. Or we don’t play at all.”

Amaya tries harder: it always tries to open documents! It tries to tweak bad documents until they are technically correct (but probably look horrible). Then, if you edit new parts of the document, at least they will be OK.

Is this a good thing? Well, I think they chose the ability to edit existing but imperfect documents above perfect rendering of perfect documents. W3C may be one of the few places where this is a correct choice – but I am glad they are doing this.

Of course the actual rendering may need some work, too

I downloaded the source code and successfully built Amaya.exe (using MSVC++ 6.0). I think I’ll take a closer look at this, when I have the time.
I also realize how spoiled Delphi can make you – working on projects like these in C+++ feels slooow.

Looks like I will have to wait another year to fly my kite – yes, I have a nice kite now.
But it’s very grey outside… no wind, no sun, traces of rain. And Aila is coming over with a hangover.

I could tempt fate and say it probably only gets better from here – but I won’t.

I usually like liquid page layouts. But it’s hard on the eyes to scan very wide lines of text. Leatheregg thinks some popular weblogs are hard to read for exactly this reason. Camworld doesn’t agree – but his readers had better make their windows smaller.

I usually browse in 1600×1200, so I prefer weblogs where navigation elements are resizeable and user settings (including text size) are respected – but columns of text always have a readable width.

So during my own recent redesign I used fixed table width for the main text and let everything else flow. I know that optimal wiewing below 1024×768 takes some horizontal scrolling – if this really bothers you, .

Dave Winer wrote about Amaya today.

So I downloaded Amaya and tested my own page – the search form and the calendar break badly. Scripting News has the same kind of problems, only more so. It looks like we are not quite ready for the future .

Here is a screendump.

Today I’ve been so allergic I feel almost brain damaged. Maybe that’s why I keep messing around with silly HTML stuff?

Of course the HTML of this site sucks. The basic Manila template wasn’t really High Art to begin with – and a few rounds of clueless cutting & pasting broke most of the good design ideas it had.

Well, even Jeffery Zeldman recently got flamed on Slashdot for the way his websites look

Looking at this page with Opera 4.0 revealed weird things (having to do with tables, colspan and non-breaking spaces) that IE5 just ignores. Using Lynx is fun – but it made me realize that meaningful names and ALT-text for pictures really DO matter.

So I bought a good book by Danny Goodman, an old favorite from Hypercard days and refreshed my memory of all the boring cross-browser stuff. Then I stole some font-ideas from here, added a CSS site template and tried to clean up.

Incredible, the things you do instead of reverting to your last backup and go to bed. And incredible that this guy thought I would mind having him next to me in the webloggers webring. Who doesn’t need a good 404 now and then?

Incredible… and good night!

The great violin maker Antonio Stradivari is reputed to have said that perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things but in doing “ordinary things extraordinarily well”.

Few things are more ordinary than sitting. But done less than well it hurts – first a little, then a lot.

I have been sitting in a chair like this for years. It’s great for the back, but can become very hard on the knees. This hasn’t bothered me before, but it does now – for whatever reasons.

So I don’t sit as well as I used to – which means my keyboard and mouse are not perfectly positioned either. And we all know by now that hands that hurt are serious.

Lots of geeks (famous or not) apparently want to sit in this one. So I tried the Herman Miller Aeron today – it wasn’t love at first sitting, but definitely a very special feeling.

So maybe that’s it. Or maybe the solution is not a new chair but a better place for keyboard and mouse?

I tried a stand almost like this one today. It wasn’t wide enough for both my Natural Keyboard and my mousepad – but the model pictured here is… we’ll see if I can get my hands on one tomorrow.

This will be definitely be continued.

Mappa Mundi has a page with all kinds of Internet Maps – this is a very good way to lose some productive hours

If you are profesionally interested in XML protocols, reading about the Blocks protocol, and perhaps trying it, could be worthwhile or even more lost time.
Haven’t figured out myself, yet. BTW, Dave Winer referred to it in a positive way today.