7:00 UTC
Busy holidays, snow, cold weather and some minor website problems have prevented me from posting any updates for the past 15 days. I will attempt to catch up with today’s posts.
Our first Christmas Day at the house was most unusual and will certainly be memorable. Because we were still awaiting the refund from People to People from the canceled Australia trip, we had not bought any presents. Consequently there were no presents to open on Christmas morning! We slept until 10 a.m. then drank eggnog and ate Christmas goodies while watching four episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD (11:00–2:20). It was great fun but made the day seem more like Halloween than Christmas.
Finally I prepared the turkey and stuffing for the oven; it went in at 3 p.m. Dinner was served at 7:15. We had roast turkey, stuffing, potatoes with turkey gravy, jellied cranberries, fruit salad and croissants. Our beverage of choice was sparkling cherry cider. We listened to some holiday music. Later (about 10 p.m.) we had cake for dessert. It was a nice finish for a sweet but rather quiet holiday (our extended family gathering was held the Sunday before Christmas).
The refund check arrived the following day (Friday). We promptly refunded those who donated toward the trip (except for a few who explicitly told us to keep the money) and then went shopping the following Monday.
When we arrived back at the house after shopping, sometime around 2:30 p.m., one of the Christmas trees was lying on the floor. Ornaments were strewn everywhere. The kittens somehow managed to tip it over, despite the 20 pounds of weights on the stand!
To avoid further holiday disasters, I took down both Christmas trees with their ornaments, garlands and lights, and put them away for the season (4:40–6:10 p.m.). The rest of the decorations would be left up until the New Year.
Two teenage boys, friends of Joe, spent the night with us. Our dinner menu was strange; it included a bacon-and-mozzarella quiche plus a variety of frozen fried snacks. The boys spent most of the evening playing video games upstairs. We splurged and bought Ben & Jerry’s® Ice Cream, which we broke out 15 minutes before the New Year. We didn’t finish eating until after the New Year arrived. “I never tried Ben & Jerry’s before,” I noted, “but now I’ve eaten it two years in a row!” Everyone laughed. When the ball came down in New York City at the stroke of midnight, one of the boys blew a noisemaker he had brought. Now it was official: 2004 was upon us.
In the morning, I made French toast and bacon for the boys before they went home. Then I picked up some other guests—friends of the family—and another of Joe’s friends arrived while I was gone.
Lunch was served at about 2:15 p.m. We all ate baked ham, yams baked with marshmallows, mashed potatoes, vegetables with dip, fruit salad and crescent rolls. We had a great time with lots of laughs. Dessert was served at about 4 p.m.: pumpkin pie (with French Vanilla Cool Whip®) and chocolate pudding.
Worn out from the previous night, Joe fell asleep upstairs at about 7 p.m.
Friday, January 2 was a foggy, rainy day with mild temperatures (45° at midday, 52° at 9 p.m.). I took the opportunity to seal the air leak around the back door in the mud room, using plastic garbage bags and duct tape. It worked quite well. I also set up the two humidifiers we bought after Christmas.
Snow began to fall Sunday afternoon (January 4) at about 12:30. It ended shortly after 8 a.m. on Monday with a total of 2.7 inches at our house. Monday was the first day of school after the winter break, and Joe had trouble getting up in time for school despite his intention to help me shovel the sidewalks. So I did it myself after taking him to school, finishing by 9 a.m. The sun came out and glistened off of the newly fallen snow. It was beautiful.
Bitterly cold temperatures followed hard on the heels of the snowfall. It was 4° below zero at the house Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. and the high was 12° at 3 p.m.
Several people around the globe hot-linked our files over the holidays: that is, they embedded images and sound files directly from our site onto their own pages. Boy, was I surprised to find the Ummamum Santa Claus from our Christmas GIF page on a gay forum! The Ummamum Christmas Song from the same page, turned up on a Danish website (no kidding). Apparently they were not aware that “Ummamum” does not mean “Jingle Bells” in English! One of our Christmas MIDI files was used on a golfers’ page.
To avoid excessive bandwidth drain due to hot-linking in the
future, I have re-configured our .htaccess file so
that such linking is no longer possible. I have also banned several
annoying robots from the site (not those used by major search
engines).
Two pages that were promised before the holidays are still in the works along with a third page.
23:00 UTC
If you visited our Home page in the past day or so, you may have
noticed that the page was written in HTML 4.01 instead of
XHTML.
I have been experimenting with the site again—this time
trying to solve the problem that our ie.js script
is causing on Internet Explorer.
The script takes the Q tags used to enclose short
quotations, and replaces them with manual curly quotation marks
(like these: “ ”) for Internet Explorer. It also makes
ABBR and ACRONYM work properly on that
browser. The downside is that after reprocessing the source code,
the browser often reloads the images, causing a rather annoying
delay and flickering screen. Oddly, the effect is most noticeable
on IE 5 and 6, a bit
less on IE 5.5 and even less on IE 4.
I considered using a server-side PHP solution, but server-side scripting also delays loading, so this did not appeal to me. I tried delivering separate documents—XHTML to newer browsers and HTML to older ones—resulting in faster page loads (I only did this on the Home page). The downside of this would be creating and maintaining two complete sets of pages, which for The Oo Kingdom would mean about 1,400 separate documents! Last summer’s photo section entitled A New Home, a War and a Kitten, at 41 pages, would have been a major undertaking all by itself, if done in duplicate.
Other new things I tried with the 21st Anniversary
Edition—serving XHTML as two MIME types
and cleaning up URIs—worked
beautifully, but this ie.js thing has to go. Since
server-side scripting or serving two separate pages are also poor
solutions, I believe that my best solution is to mark all of the
quotations up with manual curly quotes, and to avoid using
ABBR tags, which do not work on Internet Explorer
without the ie.js script.
ABBR and ACRONYM tags serve two purposes:
the first is to let readers know what the term in question stands for
(example: HTML is HyperText Markup Language), and the
second is so that screen readers know how to pronounce them
(abbreviations should be spelled out, acronyms spoken as words).
The catch here is that the leading screen reader, JAWS for Windows,
does not recognize either tag but does a fair job of sorting this out
on its own.
(I have since learned that this is not the case; see the January 15 entry.)
That leaves giving the term’s expansion as the only
valid purpose for the tags. For that, ACRONYM works for
all of them; even though this is technically incorrect, it appears to
be the most accessible solution, given that IE does not
support ABBR.
Expect a modified version of this site to appear over the next several days or weeks. It should look much like (if not identical to) the current version, but IE users will enjoy faster page loading.
22:40 UTC
I have been trying to get rid of the flickering that occurs when
IE runs the ie.js
script and then reloads some or all of the images. I was
ready to mark up all quotations with manual curly quotation marks,
and mark up all abbreviations as acronyms (and then
only if a title attribute was needed), but after
reading much material in weblogs that strongly discouraged such
practices (at least with abbreviations), I decided against it.
The “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when removing
the Q tag replacement code from the ie.js
script, failed to prevent the double loading and page flickering.
The fact is that the script has to run “onload” which means
after the page has finished loading. Then, after
reprocessing the HTML,
it may decide to reload images in order to display the page correctly
(we know this isn’t truly the case, but a non-human piece of
Microsoft programming cannot determine that).
ABBR and ACRONYM are important for
accessibility, so modern web developers say we should be using them.
This means I am stuck with the script. The Q element
probably is less critical, since manual quotation marks are
semantically identical to the use of Q tags. But
since using Q tags makes for cleaner markup than using
“ and ” for curly quotes
(which I strongly prefer to straight ones, for better readability),
and since the script is going to do its thing anyway, it seems
smartest to use the full script. Anyway, I managed to learn a
trick, during all of my reading, that allowed me to shorten the
script literally by half, and reduce the number of times Internet
Explorer must re-parse the page source from nine to four!
Oh, and I made one more improvement: the underlining of expanded abbreviations and acronyms is blocked for print media; its only purpose is for the screen, to alert visitors that the expansion of the term is available as a mouse-over tooltip. Once again, all is well in the Oo Kingdom.
(NOTE, 2/4/2022: I no longer use the entity codes, since the
character encoding in now UTF-8, which allows me to type the curly
quotes and stuff directly into the page source. And I haven’t used
q in many years; there are too many issues with it.)
02:00 UTC
A new Categories section* has been added to our News Archive, so you can find posts by subject. A few tags have been revised across the site also, and a few scripts and style sheets have been updated. The browser compatibility notice near the bottom of the Home page was added as well.
(*NOTE, 2/4/2022: Categories is gone.)
18:15 UTC
On January 8, I said that JAWS for Windows does not recognize
the ABBR or ACRONYM tags. I stand corrected:
it does recognize them but only for the purpose of expanding their
meaning via the title attribute. One has to go to
Utilities, then Configuration Manager, then Options, then
HTML Options Dialog, then check the boxes labeled
“Expand Abbreviations” and “Expand Acronyms”. JAWS will
then read the text of the title attribute instead of
the on screen text.
By default, JAWS reads the on screen text, and since it cannot understand style sheets, it pronounces abbreviations and acronyms as it sees fit, making which tag is used a moot point. And, as I stated before, it does a pretty good job of getting the right pronunciation on its own.
22:12 UTC
For those who don’t know, ubiquitous means “existing everywhere: present everywhere at once, or seeming to be” (definition courtesy of Encarta® World English Dictionary). Selecting our Ubiquitous Ummamums theme will leave your screen filled with little Ummamum faces in four colors! Don’t worry about being able to read the text; a white background is provided with most text elements.
“OK… So What’s an Ummamum?” you may ask. Learn from the link! ’Nuff said.
22:30 UTC
Mary’s Creations, the official web site of quilter Mary Edwards of Janesville, Wisconsin, has just been designed and published by yours truly. The markup is all valid HTML 4.01 Transitional except for the contact page, which must contain one invalid attribute in order to work with the FrontPage extensions on that server.
Other sites I am presently managing include the following:
NOTE, 2/4/2022: Joe’s site is no longer online. The domain was sold to a reseller in October, 2007. The other sites have since disappeared except Steve Ackerman’s, which is now hosted on our subdomain. Steve passed away on January 20, 2013.
22:35 UTC
I discovered Dead Rabbit and the Blonde in my archived email and just posted it today.
22:52 UTC
This site will undergo another metamorphosis very soon. The
flickering caused by the ie.js script on Internet
Explorer is unacceptable to me, and the script also causes files
to load twice, resulting in unnecessary double traffic on the server.
Also, I have learned how to redirect traffic from .htm
and .html extensions, to directories by the same name
(example: oksowhats.htm can be redirected to
oksowhats/), so I will be revising directory structure
on the site as well. In addition, styling and scripting are in dire
need of revision.
At this time, it looks like the markup will remain in XHTML 1.0
Strict, using all of the phrase elements currently in use except
for Q and ABBR. Full explanation for the
changes will appear in our Web Design section when
the new edition is completed, probably sometime in February. Due to
the directory structure changes, the entire domain will be republished
at one time.