This places the responsibility on theme authors to support the new classes. They are:

• alignleft
• alignright
• aligncenter

I'm not convinced of the need for the align prefix, but it's great progress nonetheless. If your theme doesn't support those classes, here's the code you can insert at the end to handle them:

.alignleft,.left {
	float:left;
	margin: 0.5em;
}
.alignright,.right {
	float:right;
	margin: 0.5em;
}
.aligncenter, .center {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin: 0 auto;
}

dunstin's site has a new web2.0 looking logo this year. so that your site isn't as ugly as last year. it's not really important, though. the whole concept is still

self serving, confusing and disenfranchising to users

so no, i'm still not doing it.

standards are nothing if they're not also best practices.

oh, hell yeah. from the FAQ, no doubt in response to this idea. this is one step closer to making it feasable for me to only allow comments on archgfx that are openID authenticated. neither livejournal, technorati, or wp.com are the be all end all of providers (that wouldn't be the point), but it's getting close to a quorum.

In October, both Microsoft and The Mozilla Foundation updated their (free) web browsers. On the 18th, Microsoft released IE7. On The 24th, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0. Since then, 51% of the visitors to archGFX have used firefox, and 39% have used internet explorer. (not surprising, given the nature of my site, although certainly not typical).

The most disturbing difference between the two types of visitors is the version of the browser they are using.

Firefox Stats

56% of firefox users upgraded to the new version. Firefox didn't make the update automatic, so the people who updated had to find their way to the download site on their own, and choose to upgrade. Note that 1.5.0.8 was released after 2.0, so those people recieved automatic updates. the 14% who didn't are disturbing. not as disturbing as:

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer was pushed out via automatic updates in the first week of november. That means that 81% of the people who use internet explorer either don't have automatic updates turned on, or opted out of the license agreement.

Since I've already insulted IE users in the title, i'll refrain from drawing any more conclusions, except to say this:

Bookmark This!

:: :: :: :: ::

i've been working on my redesign (yes, my aspirations are loftier than just this header). i checked in on matt brett's feedicons.com to see if it had rebooted (to see if anyone else had made a minimal version), and found out that Frank Hecker had only just now come to a decision on the licensing of the feed icon. first, he wrote this:

"the feed icon is closer in spirit to a "community mark" than a traditional trademark. Our goal is that the icon be adopted universally by the entire community of people producing and using innovative products and services based on open web syndication formats, and be conceived of as belonging to that community rather than to any one organization."

Sounds good, right? The goal is just to assist the icon in transformation to something as genericized as a stop sign. Except not:

The guidelines state that you can't use the icon with a proprietary format, or change the colors of the icon, or any of a bunch of other nefarious deeds. Like orange is some sort of holy manna handed down from Dave Winer, and I'm already an apostate deviant for using an aqua feed icon. So Mozilla are now the guardians of this semi-proprietary mark, and they're going to protect us all from those evil closed source bastards? I guess that's why they had to go and write their own license, this free beer stuff is still kind of confusing.

Let's talk semiology and color theory for a second. Orange is a color for alerts and notifications. It never blends in. That's one of the reasons i like it so much. and I admit: it's absolutely perfect for browsers and auto-detection. It signifies an available action. On a web-page, that action is tertiary. The primary action of the feed icon is a link. Thusly, i've colored my feed icon to match my links (and removed the mime type so clickers have access to the web service buttons in feedburner's excellent XSL Template.

My punishment? they'll be "boycotting the violator's products and services, and so on". I certainly fucking hope so. Anyone who misunderstands roland barthes so badly that they think it's possible to give an icon real meaning, without absolutely surrendering control of the icon, shouldn't be reading my blog anyway.