To my amazement, no, I didn’t put the actual link in. Yes, Stavros, the one you found.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:41 PM on July 24, 2008

Back when Metatalk...still sent stuff straight out of the db on delete, I accidentally clicked [x] instead of [+] on a comment I really liked, and, yeah. Man. That was not a great moment for me.

A user-interface problem. Separating the targets (delete at far left, bang on far right), making the X very wide (or everything else very wide and the X very narrow), requiring confirmation (no Ajax) – any of these would help.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:13 PM on July 4, 2008

I think the HTML of those pages is quite awful. Headings and lists, and no inline styles, please?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 8:31 PM on June 19, 2008

Why the hell aren’t you going to the parade? Nobody said you had to “march.”
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 7:28 AM on June 18, 2008

Oh.

So is there a consensus on location, time, &c?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 8:14 PM on June 19, 2008

Not along the Bathurst–Gladstone axis, please. It’s a big city.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:33 PM on April 30, 2008

I didn’t know this was going to start at 9:00. I’ll try to swing by later.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 9:39 AM on June 6, 2008

Also, for the love of God make sure to tell everyone who looks remotely like a host(ess) or a manager the phrase “MetaFilter meetup.” I have had disastrous experiences spending half an hour searching a small restaurant for a group, half of whom knew me, that remained invisible, in part because they never told the hostess they existed.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 9:53 AM on June 6, 2008

Two photos.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 12:33 PM on June 11, 2008

Print stylesheets should never use colour for text, to avoid depleting people’s inkjets.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 12:31 PM on May 6, 2008

Well, if you want no margin on blockquote, CSS of

blockquote { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; }
will do. But you don’t really want that unless you know for sure that p has a margin-top, which I don’t feel like looking up. blockquote blockquote always needs specification.

I’m the person who asked for this a year and a half ago, only to be dismissed. But I (italics) ≠ blockquote. There is no reason not to enable good semantics in... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 1:45 PM on April 4, 2008

Your device is supposed to handle copying and pasting. Curled quotation marks are merely Unicode characters; Unicode should be as novel in 2008 as the Web is.

You aren’t supposed to have to rewrite your content, mathowie, to suit broken devices.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 8:33 PM on March 13, 2008

I really find Queen and Bathurst oppressively awful, and Gandhi Roti is just as bad. Must every single outing be west of Yonge St.?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:06 PM on December 5, 2007

I disagree, and not just because print versions have been obsolete since print CSS was invented.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:24 PM on September 25, 2007

I think there will be relatively few lexical correlations of this sort, most of them rule-governed, like -or/-our, -l-/-ll-, -ize&-yze/-ise&yse. There will be completely different spellings here and there, like curb/kerb and tyre/tire (not predictable from the morphemes). This may not be too difficult to program. It may also not be very important.

Still, when it's ready to roll out, I would caution against labelling it as a feature that normalizes “U.S. and U.K.”... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 2:43 PM on September 8, 2007

BTW, my post here was written in paragraphs, which then shrunk into one graf. Excessive whitespace collapse?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 9:47 PM on August 4, 2007

Aptly-named arse{underscore}hat: So funny I forgot to laugh. But your smiley – it took care of everything!
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 9:54 PM on August 4, 2007

Pardon?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 10:12 PM on August 4, 2007

It just gets better and better, {underscore}. You’re so good now you don’t even need a smiley.

Anyone want to answer the fucking question?

I’m going to bed.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 10:16 PM on August 4, 2007

I was actually going to bed pretty late, at well beyond 1:30 in the morning. And I posited that low-userID members should “automatically” be better at posting than high-number members – or at least such was the expectation, leading to my displeasure with my own performance on the site.

I suppose it is cause for modest optimism that a bare majority of respondents in this thread haven’t been complete dicks, intentionally misread the question, or made... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 2:04 PM on August 5, 2007

I don’t want every site on the planet cooking up its own methods to view “non-Web content.” The site I least want to do that kind of cooking up is MetaFilter.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 1:54 PM on June 30, 2007

I would only ever use numerical entities in an XML file, unless of course you were simply using Unicode, in which case only markup has to be encoded. I’d still stick with numeric.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 1:45 PM on June 30, 2007

Pronunciation note for Jessamyn: “Desi” is pronounced like “Pacey,” not as in Arnaz.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 7:23 PM on May 12, 2007

Indeed, who cares?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 3:55 PM on April 26, 2007

Verdana’s quotation marks are a perfectly acceptable form. If you want a comparison to a “print font,” an increasingly nebulous distinction in the first place, check Mrs Eaves (and the old Emigre articles about how flipped-99/99 double quotes are preferred by that house).

I flatly deny that any font in common or even uncommon use has ill-designed quotation marks or dashes. Those are only krazy, weird, exceptional, edge-case characters to oldskool programmers who haven’t... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 10:42 PM on April 14, 2007

If you want to use this, which is of debatable benefit, use span, not abbr or acronym (unless you really are marking up abbreviations or acronyms).

The title attribute can be added to nearly anything in HTML; it is not a “tag” and it is not tied to abbr or acronym.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 2:04 PM on August 8, 2006

I have no idea what demand is like for such a feature though.

Nonexistent.


If it were nonexistent it wouldn’t have come up. This is hardly a narcissistic request: Even crappy BBS software gives you a QUOTE button that, in many implementations, simply uses a styled blockquote.

I presume many denizens of the Grey Zone here are aware that blockquote is proper semantics and italics... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 1:56 PM on April 22, 2006

Firas, I do indeed seek improved semantics. But we already have those here. We can already use blockquote. It’s the appearance that is in question.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 2:02 PM on April 22, 2006

"I'm not sure we usually acknowledge such a thing in a public way": You make it sound like there's a de facto policy and the RIP in this posting is somehow gauche.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 6:56 AM on April 15, 2005

And who here couldn't afford 10 bucks a year or whatever?

The issue is not dollar cost but convenience of payment. It may surprise the middle class, but not everyone with a computer and a net connection has a credit card. Sending away international postal money orders is quite simply not worth it.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 6:42 PM on October 28, 2001

Matt may not realize he is turning himself into a newspaper editor. Despite what you may have read in Brill's Content, posting to Metafilter is not unhindered; people are banned from time to time and postings disappear. Matt has the power to suppress writing on Metafilter and uses it.

Now he wants us to endorse a new power: The power to invite favoured Metafiltrons to write extended essays. We will have the honour of adding our comments at the end.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark at 8:26 PM on May 5, 2001