Title says it all.

The new Debian, Squeeze, is out. This means that we can finally expect new things added to the unstable version, Sid, such as KDE 4.6.

I held a presentation on addresses and naming of resources in document management at the Teknisk Dokumentation 2010 conference (Swedish-laguage link; sorry) last week. The conference now stands out among the ones I’ve attended lately due to the fact that there was a power outage during the afternoon of the first conference day (leading to some rather different presentations).

I also learned a lot. Olaf Drummer’s presentation about the PDF/A format, especially the coming PDF/A-3 standard, gave me a few ideas that I intend to implement.

Gotta love AdSense. When checking my Gmail account’s spam folder, I noticed that AdSense did its thing. Above the dozen or so Viagra and penis enlargement ads, AdSense had placed this:

Spam Skillet Casserole – Broil until golden

Today it occurred me to have a look at the DITA Architecture Specification source to see how the people behind the spec would tag a list; as some of you know, this was the subject of my recent blog entry. There are a number of lists in that spec, many with introductory paragraphs, so it’s a pretty obvious way to find out, right? Well, after the examples in that spec, maybe.

Anyway, this is how they do it:

<p>Introductory para:
<ul>
<li>Item</li>
<li>Item</li>
</ul>
</p>

This was one of my guesses, and I have to say that it’s better than any of the alternatives I could come up with. It’s not good markup, though, in my opinion, as it says that semantically, a paragraph is sort of a block-level superclass, a do-it-all and one that you must use if you need that introduction.

But then, why limit yourself to lists? Why aren’t notes tagged like that? Or definition lists, or images, or tables? Think about it. Doesn’t this feel just a little bit like a cop-out to you? It does to me. It feels like the author realised that he needed that wrapper but there was nothing he could cling to, other than this construction.

I’m not saying that my way is the only way (obviously it’s not) but this bothers me because it muddies the semantic waters.

http://mag.ma/andrew/617364

Those familiar with my old schemas and DTDs will now probably raise an eyebrow, but I have finally succumbed to the lure of footnotes in the inline content model of my all-purpose personal DTD.

What finally convinced me was my need to create multiple references to a single note that, while interrupting the text flow and thus unwelcome in the text itself, was too short to place in a section of its own. There was no logical way to semantically identify that note in a form or in a place that would allow me to reference it from several different points in my text. Footnotes (and footnote references) solve that problem very neatly, and the allow me to present my footnotes as end notes using a different stylesheet.

Coffee, as you all know, is the lifeblood of any office. Well, our coffee machine is dead and while I would have liked to say that it didn’t suffer, the trail of dried-up coffee along the floor speaks the opposite.

Expect a slow day after the Eastern Holidays, here.

Title says it all.