It appears that ESPN.com is in the final stages of rolling out a new site design. You heard it here first. Right this second I’m looking at the golf homepage, and it’s actually a little messed up. A story within the golf site doesn’t display the ESPN logo, and some code is visible. I read an article in the hockey section earlier today, and that’s what really tipped me off. For a couple months now, some articles on the site have featured a new horizontal navigation bar that looks a little bit like Apple.com‘s candy/transparent plastic look. You can see that in the NHL article. I say article because it appears that the rollout (and I noticed this in the last version of ESPN.com) affects articles first, before sport homepages or the main ESPN.com homepage itself. However, I expect that the main page will change before the lesser and offseason sports’ pages catch up.
Internet
Validation
The front page will now validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Eat that, Lewis. Insert better-late-than-never “your site is down” joke here.
You’ll find two entries below that I wrote a couple weeks ago but never got around to uploading.
Based on the appearance of this site on flat-panel monitors and the fact that I have started to use a 1280×1024 screen resolution, I will be making some cosmetic changes to the site soon. Look out for that.
Validation
The front page now validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I can’t quite get it to work as XHTML 1.0 strict.
Yahoo! Toolbar
Big news today.
Besides the fact that Prince Charles and Camilla are getting hitched. Big news today.
Besides the fact that Prince Charles and Camilla are getting hitched.
Yahoo put out an official toolbar for Firefox. It’s 0.2 beta, but it offers immediate improvement over the homebrew version. Notably, the alerts work.
Yahoo put out an official toolbar for Firefox. It’s 0.2 beta, but it offers immediate improvement over the homebrew version. Notably, the alerts work.
Site Stuff
If you’re viewing this site with Firefox, it should now display correctly. Well, there might be issues at 1280×1024. But don’t tell anybody.
I finally got this page to validate. Right now it validates under HTML 4.01 and CSS. I don’t know whether it’s worth my time to see if it would validate as anything different or perhaps “better.”
Here’s something that caught me by surprise: When I finally declared a doctype, it kept breaking the site, both in Firefox and IE. It appears that when either browser encounters an explicit doctype declaration, it holds the CSS to strict standards. Who knew? So I fixed all the CSS, and when I put the doctype declaration back in, everything worked. And my validation worked. So I’m in business. Scroll all the way down to see my validation buttons.
I got my Halo 2 Stats page to validate first, because there’s a lot less code there.
Firefox Gripes
Okay, I’ve got some gripes with Firefox.
First, the “new tab” shortcut. You double click to the right of the rightmost tab. I love that shortcut, until I have so many tabs open that the space between the rightmost tab and the “close tab” button is about four pixels wide. The “close tab” button is a red square with a white “x.” They should add a “new tab” button that is a green square with a white “*.”
Second. Firefox should force websites to take advantage of tabs. One of the great benefits of tabbed browsing is that there is only one browser window. It means I don’t have to move the mouse pointer to the task bar to change browsers. But a lot of websites incorporate links that open in new windows. A lot of times this makes sense with the IE model, but when my broswer supports tabs, I would much rather “new window” links open in a new tab.
CyberBleh
Is anyone else tired of the “cyber” prefix? I think I stopped using it in 1994. No, wait — I never used it.
I think if you were to graph the respect for the term on the y-axis and age on the x-axis, you’d find that people older than 25 or 30 think it’s the most appropriate word, and people younger than 25 or 30 realize that it’s cheesy and ambiguous.
Look at this URL: www.securecyberspace.gov. When you click on it, it redirects you to a page on the White House’s site: “The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.”
Can we all just agree to replace the word “cyberspace” with the word “Internet?” Please? I could see an argument that the Internet is public and “cyberspace” could encompass corporate intranets …. but most intranets are accessible through the Internet, so I think due to the definition of the word Internet, via connection to it they inherently become part of it.
So let’s retire the word “cyberspace.” And any word that contains “cyber.” It’s okay if we do this. People no longer say “motorcarriage” or “iron horse” or “dirigible” — oftentimes the first attempt to name something … isn’t the best attempt.
While we’re talking about cyberspace, why don’t we examine words used to describe parts of the Internet and their persistence in the vernacular. On second though, make that “vernacular of informed people from the ages of 13 to 38.”
I was a little torn over which term to explore first, but I had to go with email. It’s what people use the Internet for more than anything else. It’s how individuals connect with other individuals. This expands the scope of my discussion slightly, but I find it worth pointing out that the inconsistency with the term “email” is how to spell it. e-mail? E-Mail? Email? email? courriel? There’s also the term for an individual email message. I often start emails with something like, “I’m writing you this message because …” So the possibilities are: message, email, letter … maybe those are the only possibilities.
I was going to write more … maybe I’ll pick this up later.
Old Days
I found this and felt like sharing.
ASP
This page is ASP.
Eventually I’m going to switch the whole site over to ASP. I’m kind of pissed, actually. The big thing — the only thing — that has always bothered me about 1&1 is the fact that Server Side Includes (SSI) don’t work. Well, turns out ASP has an analogous method. WTF!
The night I downloaded everything from Tripod and uploaded it to my 1&1 servers, I called 1&1 tech support because my SSIs weren’t working. The person I talked to told me that SSIs weren’t included in my package. So I consolidated all pages … it hurt. Fortunately, when I pasted the code together, I left the includes in and copy-pasted them so I could see exactly what got Frankensteined.
The whole reason I’ve been looking at ASP so closely (besides the fact that I purchased the Microsoft Server plan through 1&1) is because I have my Halo 2 stats, which come from an RSS feed provided by Bungie, and I wanted to take control of how they are displayed. So I’ve been reading ASP web sites like it’s my job.
At least something good came of it.
Multiple Topics
So I just looked at some real old Historical Context entries that are sitting at the really old site. I can’t get over how … good … they are. They’re short and there are multiple entries per day. I talk about drinking coffee, waking up early, and studying for exams.
Nowadays my entries seem more like articles. Well, they are more like articles. I plan them at least a few minutes in advance, sometimes a few days in advance. They’re longer. They’re … less personal? Is that possible?
The Olympics are on. I’d say the best web site to read about the Olympics is NBC’s page. It’s so strange … the Internet allows us to take in information as it occurs; Yet I personally avoid pages like ESPN.com and CNN.com because I don’t want to read the results of Olympic events before I see them on TV. During the next Olympics or even the 2012 games, Americans may be allowed to view on-demand clips of event finals before they are shown on NBC. But when you’re at work, you might not want to spend two hours or even five minutes streaming that race to your computer.
This really brings up several interesting conflagrations: Sports as both news and entertainment, and the damned frustration that no matter where on earth the Olympics are held, the time of day is inconvenient for somebody.
First, sports. When it’s news, we want to find out about it immediately. Whether it’s a political election or a major event in a war or the latest on a hurricane, we don’t want to wait to see it on TV; we want the results right now, even if it means that we have to read them.
On the other hand, when it’s entertainment, we want to see it with our own eyes. If your friend tells you how The Village ends, you’ll poke their eyes out. You’ll record tonight’s episode of 24, but again, you don’t want to know the surprise ending in advance. The same applies to books, whatever.
And then you’ve got sports, which are mostly entertainment, but are covered more or less as news. Some people will record their alma mater’s bowl game and refuse to read or hear anything about it until they sit down and watch the tape themselves. But then some people will get on the Internet and watch the box score numbers update live. Here there is a distinction based on the importance of that day’s match. But I think a lot ties into personal preference. Personally, I would rather watch a gamecast of the numbers of the Yankees in the playoffs than record the game and watch it later.
The importance of the event relates directly to the Olympics. Also, the Olympics serve as the ultimate example of why you might want to watch an event later than read about it live. If it’s a baseball game, you might miss the broadcast of the game that is played while you’re at work, but hey — you can catch a game this weekend or next weekend or even Wednesday night. You might not see another World Series game until next year. Or another bowl game. And the Olympics … you won’t see them for another four years.
So Olympics seem to be more like entertainment than other sports, but in a kind of backwards way. Just like you wouldn’t want to read ahead of time that Rachel and Ross got back together, you might not want to read ahead that Paul Hamm won the individual all-around gymnastics gold medal. One is weekly fiction, the other is quadrennial nonfiction. Well, sports, anyway.
Oh … was I going to say something about how someone, somewhere is screwed because the Olympics are held just far enough away from their timezone? I don’t think any additional commentary is needed on that one.