An expose of non-vegan ingredients in pancakes at LA Vegan Thai inspired the QuarryGirl.Com writers to conduct their own extremely thorough investigation of LA vegan restaurants, testing their meals for traces of casein, egg, and shellfish. Over $1000 and a chain of interviews up to Taiwan later, they find that half the restaurants aren't as vegan as they claim, with half registering Positive or High and one registering Overload. Some restaurants vowed to conduct their own tests or requested further assistance; one banned them from the establishment.
posted by divabat on Jul 5, 2009 - 258 comments

Car companies were facing a variety of efficiency and emission standards throughout the United States, from the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, On May 19th, and then an even stricter emission standard from California and 13 other states (plus DC). On May 19th, President Obama announced nation-wide new vehicle fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks through 2016. The goal is to rapidly increase fuel efficiency,without compromising safety, by an average of 5, culminating in 39 MPG for cars and 30 MPG for light trucks. Currently, no auto makers are meet the final standards, though some are closer than others. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on May 28, 2009 - 85 comments

The State of the Web 2008 is a report from Web Directions that includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. The survey was open for just under 3 weeks, from December 1st to 20th 2008. In total, over 1200 designers and developers from around the world responded to the survey. Respondents were likely to be self-educating, “early adopters” who keep abreast of developments in their field. Here are the tabular results. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Jan 12, 2009 - 7 comments

The Free Site Validator is for all y'all web designers who are tired of putting each and every page through the W3C Markup Validation Service. Enter the URL you'd like checked, start the report and you'll soon have every page of the site examined for valid markup and link rot. It also uses OpenID so you might already have an account! [via 456 Berea Street] [more inside]
posted by sciurus on Oct 30, 2008 - 13 comments

Only 4.3% of the web validates. Opera have finished a scan and validation check of the net using their new MAMA spider and have got an extremely interesting dataset. Did you check your website today?
posted by jaduncan on Oct 16, 2008 - 81 comments

Nazis in the military is dedicated to the investigative project undertaken by journalist Matthew Kennard while studying for a MS in Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in New York. It was completed over six months and explores the increasingly liberal attitude of the U.S. military to neo-Nazis and white supremacists serving in the armed forces. via [more inside]
posted by hortense on Sep 6, 2008 - 81 comments

The new video, "Run", from R&B group Gnarls Barkley (best known for their ultra-popular and painfully ubitquitous 2006 hit song "Crazy") has been banned from MTV for failing the Harding Test, a set of criteria determining the likelihood of video material triggering seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy (PSE), approximately 1 in 6000 people^*. The video is now circulating online. [Watch at your own risk. May cause seizures.] [more inside]
posted by loiseau on Mar 8, 2008 - 88 comments

It slipped through the cracks on my radar, but apparently the IE8 team has met with some web standards gurus and decided that in order to move forward with full standards compliance (and support the known quirks of IE6/7 for corporate intranets), a new "version targeting" system should be put in place. Other browser vendors are not amused. Should IE just give up? [more inside]
posted by revmitcz on Feb 1, 2008 - 107 comments

Essential Video Resources - primers, guides and links for the video editor and technician [more inside]
posted by Gyan on Dec 14, 2007 - 6 comments

The Web Is Agreement: a poster (large, huge) designed by Paul Downey.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Oct 31, 2007 - 22 comments

Traditionally, media doesn't print names/photos of people only accused, but not yet convicted, but not always. Lots of towns have a police blotter section where arrests are listed. Here in Seattle, the FBI recently asked the public for help in identifying two men seen acting suspicious on the ferry system. The Seattle PI has decided not to publish the photos. Other local media have. The commentary on if the PI made the right choice follows predictable paths...
posted by nomisxid on Aug 21, 2007 - 33 comments

He's a computer tutor for seniors, who also seems to have a giant collection of music that's rare these days. Shortly before leaving to fight in Korea, he was kissed by Celia Cruz in 1951, among other adventures.
posted by StrikeTheViol on Jul 19, 2007 - 12 comments

The Days They Changed the Gauge. Early in the development of railroads in the American South, the builders departed from the standard 4' 8 1/2" gauge and built their railroads with the rails 5 feet apart. As part of a trend of increased government standardization, between May 30 and June 1 1886, workers moved over 11,000 miles of track 3 inches to the new standard gauge of 4' 9". [more inside]
posted by marxchivist on May 31, 2007 - 29 comments

What's attractive? Averaged female faces from Hot or Not "These women do not exist.They are a composite of about 30 faces that I created to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet." also by age and origin
posted by petsounds on Feb 12, 2007 - 103 comments

24 Ways - 2006 Edition This year's possibly useful 24 articles containing 24 tips and tutorials for those of us who love CSS and other related web development techniques. Last year's links are included too.
posted by juiceCake on Dec 30, 2006 - 4 comments

Usability Exchange -- a testing service determining site accessibility for disabled users. They're only in the UK now, but it seems like a great idea. Organisations set up their tests online and submit them directly to disabled testers in our database. Testers are then free to complete these tests in their own time, earning money for each test they complete. As tests are completed by users, organisations can view test results, web page logs and other information in real time. More here at BBC, including some concerns.
posted by amberglow on Mar 17, 2006 - 17 comments

SOS or Safegaurd Organic Standards is what the Organic Consumers Association is calling their effort to protect the USDA's National Organic Program's organic food standards adopted in 2002. A rider attached to the 2006 agriculture appropriations bill and sponsored by the Organic Trade Association contains changes to the standards that in their view will make "technical corrections" to the national organic standards. This became necessary in their view after a 73-year-old organic blueberry farmer from Maine named Arthur Harvey won a court appeal against the USDA, arguing that federal regulations guiding organic food standards were less stringent than the original legislation had intended. This issue is splitting the organic standards lobbying community. Or perhaps this has been in the works for sometime as large corporate food producers have moved to take advantage of the rapid growth of the organics market. (more inside)
posted by flummox on Oct 9, 2005 - 14 comments

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder*
*Statement suspect for museum curators, "critics", "experts" and "connosieurs".
posted by daksya on Mar 13, 2005 - 56 comments

Dropping an F-bomb on the radio, and in Canada you apologize. In the States, having this happen on your station would cost you many dollars.
posted by evilcolonel on Feb 18, 2005 - 36 comments

Internet Explorer 7. Dean Edwards does what a team of developers with billions behind them apparently can't -- update IE to work with modern standards. Almost, anyway... as he says, it's still in alpha, and has its quirks, but check out the Pure CSS Menus demo, for example.
posted by weston on Jul 29, 2004 - 19 comments

Defining Deviancy Down In 1993, one of our greatest statesmen, Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D- N.Y.) published one of the most important pieces of social theory entitled "Defining Deviancy Down." Moynihan started from Emile Durkheim's proposition that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can "afford to recognize" (called the "Durkheim Constant"). As the amount of deviancy increases, the community has to adjust its standards so that conduct once thought deviant is no longer deemed so. Consequently, if we are not vigilant about enforcing them, our standards would be constantly devolving in order to normalize rampant deviancy. Shortly after Moynihan's article, Charles Krauthammer offered his now-famous response to Moynihan's article in which he argued that the corollary is that society can also "define deviancy up."

Moynihan's theory has been applied to movies, courage, dress codes, sexual indiscretions, corporate behavior, and possibly even to webpages. One might feel compelled to ask, "Do standards even mean anything?" Today, the debate still rages about where we ought to be defeatist about the devolution of standards, or whether we can right the boat by establishing base principles and fight to raise standards up.
posted by Seth on Jun 16, 2004 - 63 comments

Start saving for your childrens future therapy. What they learned this month is dead bodies being burnt and strung up on a bridge is ok to print on the front page of a newspaper, and watch on the news at dinner time; but you better not see any nipple, even for a half a second.
posted by CrazyJub on Apr 3, 2004 - 67 comments

The first time ever I saw your face: Is beauty perhaps not entirely in the eye of the beholder? [Via LinkFilter.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo on May 17, 2003 - 25 comments

Be happy MeFi has better standards than this. No, I have no interest in submitting works to these folks, and if I had, I wouldn't bother. And not in fear of rejection, but in embarrassment of simply reading their submission guidlines that only the Soup Nazi could appreciate. Have any MeFites ever come across guidelines such as this?
posted by bluedaniel on Apr 3, 2003 - 42 comments

State of Validation 2003. Off the 430 W3C members, only 28 (6.5%) have sites that validate with the W3C validator as either HTML or XHTML! This represents an increase in standards compliance of 75.7% from the year ago tests. [via the big orange Z]
posted by riffola on Feb 25, 2003 - 28 comments

99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete An excerpt from an upcoming book by Mr. Zeldman in which he continues to argue the practice of standards compliance - "Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, backward compatibility sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie." I enjoy his writing but he seems to be repeating himself as usual. Still, it is a good argument: where do we focus our priorities for future development - pure standards compliant CSS models, backwards compatibility, or somewhere in between? I know this has been discussed before but thought it postworthy due to the new book and all.
posted by poopy on Sep 6, 2002 - 110 comments

The Web Standards Project is back, now in easy-to-swallow blog form. Stand up straight! Close that HTML tag! And wipe that silly browser off your hard drive, mister! And the other one.
posted by gazingus on Jun 11, 2002 - 17 comments

Perhaps AOL isn't that bad. I've never liked AOL, but this recent article makes me want to give the company a big hug. Finally, people are stepping up to the Microsoft juggernaut and deciding to use other means to deliever content and run their own machines. AOL is trying to cut costs by migrating from UNIX and Windows to a Linux environment on the server-side. On the client side, they will apparently be pushing the use of Mozilla instead of their previous default browser, Internet Explorer. This has the potential to impact the web enormously, as AOL's 30 million subscribers will soon be using Mozilla as their browser. Web designers will have to start sticking to w3c specs instead of using MSIE-specific coding, which will hopefully force Microsoft to follow the specs more closely. Begun this browser war has. (via /.)
posted by Hammerikaner on Mar 11, 2002 - 43 comments

State of the Validation 2002. Off the 506 W3C members, only 18 (3.6%) have sites that validate with the W3C validator as either HTML or XHTML! 141 members' sites have definite markup errors. 342 members' sites don't even include the DTD, therefore they can not be tested. [via the big orange Z.]
posted by riffola on Feb 22, 2002 - 26 comments

web developer's guide to AOL. just in case you've ever wondered what their standards really are (well, yeah, neither have i, but...).
posted by patricking on Jan 8, 2002 - 18 comments

W3C and Fee-based Standards for the Web The last call review period is over today. If you have an opinion that needs to be heard by the W3C, get it to them now. At last check, they had received 396 comments. What's your take on the proposed policy change? Will the W3C survive?
posted by bragadocchio on Sep 30, 2001 - 1 comment

This is a list of airports currently meeting FAA security standards. Possibly of some benefit to those needing to use air travel for business, to reunite with loved ones, etc. I discovered this link while visiting Flightview, which has been down most of the day, presumably due to traffic. Flightview is a flight tracking system which runs on standard PCs.
posted by bargle on Sep 13, 2001 - 1 comment

Remember George Carlin's 7 words you can never say on tv? Well, make that three, because four of TV's seven dirty words have now become part of the television lexicon. What's your favorite word?
posted by Rastafari on Aug 28, 2001 - 52 comments

The Morality Police. "Our hysterical attempts to shield kids from images of sex and violence are stunting young lives -- and trapping us all in a Big Lie." A well-argued piece, more of an op-ed than a straight-up book review. As a scientist I only quibble with the author's musing that "if there really were a cause-and-effect link between real violence and media violence, then it would have been proven by now."
posted by topolino on Jun 11, 2001 - 13 comments

Disenchanted comments on the "Web Standards Project" and he disagrees with it. And I think what he says rings true: "There's no point in hanging a 'No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service' sign outside a web site."
posted by Steven Den Beste on May 8, 2001 - 71 comments

A spectre is haunting the Web - the spectre of standards. Jeffery Zeldman takes a bold step and stops supporting "bad browsers". Will the Web follow?
posted by geir on Feb 22, 2001 - 47 comments

Time to toss the 3.0 and 4.0s in the trash - and I'm not talking about GPA. The biggest problem for Web developers right now is the prevalence of old browsers that don't fully support standards like HTML 4.0 and CSS 1 & 2. Now that we have at least 3 browsers that can handle most of these standards, why not encourage a move from the less standard browsers to ones that will allow us to more easily design sites. Write once view anywhere....Woo hoo!
posted by bkdelong on Feb 16, 2001 - 50 comments

what will be supported now that browsers are a-changin' again? handy resource from a Netscape product manager.
posted by patricking on Nov 18, 2000 - 0 comments

Here is a somewhat innacurate review of opera - yet another example of lousy 'web' journalism

if you're going to test a browser for standards compliance, does it really make sense to do it by browsing a site with ~ 200 occurances of non standard html on its homepage?
posted by sawks on Jul 10, 2000 - 4 comments

What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted by werty on May 19, 2000 - 17 comments

MS set to drop support for Java. Isn't it great that they are so committed to standards? I wonder if they'll change Jscript or heck, why not just drop ECMA all together? ugh.
posted by bryanboyer on Apr 13, 2000 - 2 comments

The Web Standards Project blasts Microsoft's "arrogant" break with standards in IE 5.5/Windows Edition. Please read the press release and, if you agree, post it to your favorite mailing lists and news groups. This must not stand.
posted by Zeldman on Apr 10, 2000 - 5 comments