Disqus - Latest Comments for Joe Clark

Re: DemoCampToronto13, April 24, 2007 6:30pm

Joe Clark — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:34:26 -0000

No Regrets is too fucking far away, excuse my French.

Re: Great (web) designers write code

Joe Clark — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:53:46 -0000

I deny being a designer.

Re: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Joe Clark — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:01:32 -0000

Everyone needs a job. This one necessarily? I have my doubts.

Still need that Ferrari laptop? I guess it, and the trip to whatever that UI confab was, have paid off. They were both freebies, so it's the new Microsoft redefinition of paying off, I suppose.

Re: Canadians having an an impact on design

Joe Clark — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:18:34 -0000

'Impacting'?

Re: Getting off this crazy thing

Joe Clark — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:21:36 -0000

I know you didn't mean to, but endorsing the man who already has the entire market in Canada is twisting the knife.

Just think for a second of another interpretation of the reason I gave for leaving the business. Derek has done an excellent job in the last three years of plowing through the 1% of the market I had managed to keep. Of course that's the free market at work. Of course it is. But you don't have to send clients to Derek; Derek already has them.

Re: [Announcement] DemoCampToronto14, Sept 17, 2007

Joe Clark — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:03:07 -0000

Yes, but weren't you recently quoted as saying that DemoCamp had run its course? I mean, it has.

Re: Trendwatching

Joe Clark — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:01:28 -0000

Not only are you a Macintosh user who now works for Microsoft (where they chastise you for one or two stray words), you are a former employee of a university who supports charging hundreds of dollars for research.

Re: DemoCampToronto15 – Speakers

Joe Clark — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:18:03 -0000

What in the name of G-d is a shill from Bruce Mau Design doing there?

And anyway, you previously stated that DemoCamp had pretty much run its course. It had.

Re: DemoCampToronto15 – Speakers

Joe Clark — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:07:03 -0000

Additionally, your posting failed to tell us where and when the event is scheduled.

Re: Radiant Core is the best for the TTC

Joe Clark — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:11:24 -0000

A somewhat selective quotation. Also, you're acting like the contract has been signed.

Re: Apple’s Mail is the worst user experience

Joe Clark — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:56:43 -0000

Eudora works fine under X (it is poor with Unicode text); it actively attempts to stop you from doing something stupid; and refuses to choke on my 60,000 or more messages.

Re: Bubbleshare WP Plugin – HTML object tag

Joe Clark — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:39:07 -0000

XHTML 1.1 is of no interest whatsoever, nor will be in our lifetimes, and iframe is a perfectly viable element, replete with alternate forms.

And no, of course object doesn't work in IE/Win. That's why it can't be used on a production site.

Re: Celebrate failure

Joe Clark — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 09:39:47 -0000

This sounds like an excellent time for you to quit.

Re: Tangible results

Joe Clark — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 07:44:08 -0000

"Loosing" her mojo?

Re: styling: nick douglas

Joe Clark — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:27:51 -0000

Yeah, OK, *pictures*?

Re: From a friend on people who start those anonymous hate sites

Joe Clark — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:55:32 -0000

Is this not a tad disingenuous? One must manually install a comment apparatus “on the Tumblr”; you opt into comments that way.

The Reblog ability of Tumblr (one of its few innovations) of course provides a method of backdoor commenting.

It might be more interesting to examine why all the sad young literary bloggers insist on Tumblr instead of a real application.

Re: I wish there was a way to hide reblogs from assholes.

Joe Clark — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:57:23 -0000

Be less cutting with your friends.

Re: Too Much Nick

Joe Clark — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:58:48 -0000

I just can’t stand listening to him. A Canadian radio show imports him as a frequent guest rather than nurturing local talent. I don’t like his delivery, and his 43 Folders manifesto simply doesn’t work for procrastinators. Go tell whoever it is you’re quoting.

It simply doesn’t matter that I dislike Merlin Mann; he will press on regardless. But, Nick, ol’ chap, I don’t have to like it… or him.

Re: Why would anyone want to buy Opera?

Joe Clark — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:21:18 -0000

Mobile browsing *is* difficult to do well because of the requirements to handle tag-soup "HTML" (including nested tables) standards-compliant (X)HTML, JavaScript and Java applets, images, multimedia, and conflicting CSS (including the handheld media type). If it actually weren't rocket science, IE for Pocket PC wouldn't stink. It is actually a seriously vexing problem, at least among those who know something about it as opposed to those who merely toss presumptions around.

Re: Yes, it’s kind of a cruel joke, but…

Joe Clark — Mon, 29 May 2006 23:03:34 -0000

What you should do is improve your accuracy. AAC isn't a proprietary format any more than MP3 is, iPods play a wide range of audio formats, and customers are under no obligation to buy the iTunes Music Store’s DRM-locked music, which observably isn’t a deterrent for actual consumers.

I assume you would prefer the Windows solution, which is in no way proprietary and involves no DRM?

Re: What is YouTube good for?

Joe Clark — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 08:22:56 -0000

Unless it was ceded to the public domain, all the “content” on YouTube is “copyrighted.” I assume you mean “content uploaded by somebody who doesn’t have the rights to do so” (as opposed to the content uploaded by creators, an imprecise definition for works like Hollywood movies and music videos).

Re: Not learning from Dave Winer

Joe Clark — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:09:36 -0000

A blog is a blog with or without comments. Really, it isn’t up to you to define. It never was and won’t ever be.

Essentially, you’re saying that because you are personally inoffensive enough not to elicit harmful coments, or are tough enough to tolerate the comments your site receives, everyone should tolerate whatever comments their sites receive. You discount entirely the fact that even reading a comment one goes on to expunge or delete can be harmful to a site owner. People write derogatory and pejorative comments *deliberately*. Remove the option and one *never* needs to deal with that degree of abuse.

They’re our blogs, not yours, and our blogs without comments are not the lesser creations you claim they are. You simply do not get to define the medium.

Some of us don’t write blog posts for networking or “conversation” or any such malarkey. Blogs are personal publishing; your claim that they really aren’t blogs unless they are two-way is mere ideology – not to mention hypocritical, given that you still write for a one-way medium, a print newspaper.

Re: Creating a top blog: So easy a kid can do it

Joe Clark — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:17:56 -0000

As search-engine optimization is all about Web standards and the younger you are the more you understand that, I’m not surprised at all. Now if only your own markup were more semantic. (Hint: H4 never follows H3.)

Re: Fair use costs/makes money — discuss

Joe Clark — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:07:20 -0000

Fair use, as a “concept,” exists in the minds of many people. It exists legally solely in the United States.

Re: Me on CBC’s The Current show

Joe Clark — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:58:20 -0000

I don’t see how you are qualified to act like an expert on the online music industry on a radio show.

Re: Is embedding better than quoting?

Joe Clark — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:44:48 -0000

I’d love to see a truly original post on your blog, Ingram. Anyway, no, you don’t want to be embedding plain text from other people’s sites because (a) that’s what BLOCKQUOTE with cite is for and (b) it leads to 360 validation errors, which is what this page had just before I wrote this paragraph.

Re: Is this what online news has come to?

Joe Clark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:38:49 -0000

How disingenuous, Mathew, as nearly your entire online œuvre consists of rapidly summarizing other people’s posts so you’ll look connected or like some kind of guru.

Re: Mark Cuban still won’t admit he was wrong

Joe Clark — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:54:13 -0000

Please don’t lecture wildly successful Internet billionaires on what to do with their “day jobs” when you can’t decide which one is yours – running “the conversation” for a news organization that is supposed to be above conflicts of interest or co-owing a for-profit technology conference.

But you’re still a super guy.

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:39:30 -0000

It would look better in RSS if you used no inline CSS and better semantics, like OL LI.

Re: Slight up-do design to DesignNotes

Joe Clark — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:06:37 -0000

Styling an H2 was troublesom, Michael? Now, really.

I wouldn’t use orange on grey, and the ALL CAPS SIDEBAR LINKS are a bit de trop.

I trust your print CSS uses only black markings of all kinds, with no background colo(u)r.

Re: What do you expect when you click on an image?

Joe Clark — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:56:44 -0000

Michael, Michael, Michael. I know you have a magnificent set of blue eyes, but you really need to learn more about HTML and CSS.

Try using a title attribute on your links to explain where a link goes. Or just say so in the plain text that introduces the image.

You need to look at your CSS :hover and :focus states, and also at your background, if you’re concerned about lines showing up. a img needs to be styled differently from a and from img. I have had my own troubles with that combination.

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:38:05 -0000

Michael, please. Unordered lists. You can add borders to the top automatically. Not every single thing on the Web (or your site) is a paragraph. Gain mastery of your tools.

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:33:22 -0000

We’ve been through this already: Sitting on a board, judging a competitino, or whatever requires years of obsessive focus with no end in sight, and men on the whole have brains that are more suited to obsessive focus for years on end. Women, on the whole, have brains that resist putting all eggs in one basket, literally and figuratively.

This isn’t an old wives’ tale or some kind of ideology; it’s backed up by science. Read Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox and come back and tell me you’re surprised that “leaders” of the design field are, on the whole, male. It is not related to male- or female-specific talent or sexist discrimination in the workplace.

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:59:48 -0000

Well, still hoping for better code quality. It seems attainable, as the whole process on the blog is manual.

Re: Design Week and ICFF is here, but where to find the news on it?

Joe Clark — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:30:34 -0000

I don’t think there’s a single thing more annoying, not a single thing, than using a rare acronym without explaining it. ICFF off, Michael.

Re: AIGA makes a turn for the better hopefully

Joe Clark — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:06:51 -0000

Michael, how am I expected to read your nine-million-word single paragraph above?

You understand you have actually created an unordered list without knowing it? So why not know it and actually create it?

I’m pretty sure you are capable of learning the five or six HTML elements your structurally simple blog posts require. Why not actually try?

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:10:26 -0000

Yes, you “set your notes in type” without alt texts. I’d say your actual Web skills are getting worse by the day, Michael.

Re: DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive »

Joe Clark — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:19:52 -0000

This book seems to have no discernible reason to exist.

Re: Link Drop (8·14·09)

Joe Clark — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:53:18 -0000

What needs “redesigning” is code, not appearance. Seriously, can you learn six HTML “tags,” Michael?

Re: Human Cost

Joe Clark — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:55:56 -0000

Cf. http://www.globalnerdy.com/2009/07/15/futurerub...

Re: Burning Man Set on Fire Early Due To Arson | Laughing Squid

Joe Clark — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:18:07 -0000

Which exact person, real or corporate, owned the effigy? In other words, how was it legally possible to commit arson at a lawless location like Burning Man?

Re: spy mag.

Joe Clark — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:40:44 -0000

Gessen, aren’t you too fucking young and Russian to have read the actual _Spy_?

Re: reader response

Joe Clark — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:09:45 -0000

Me, you dick.

Re: Why Flickr Licensing Fails

Joe Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:39:47 -0000

Whoa, hold on here. There are lots of permissible uses of all-rights-reserved content via an API – RSS and machine-tag harvesting (à la Adactio) come to mind. You’re American; don’t make me remind you of fair use.

I don’t know what you mean by “embedding,” and you probably don’t, either. Images are presented on Web pages using IMG elements (or, if you really insist, OBJECT, but that won’t work in the real world). As such images are not part of a Web page, but are called from elsewhere, like elsewhere in the same server directory or from another site, and assembled together with the HTML, CSS, and JS output to render the page. Your blog may have a sidebar with all your recent Flickr photos, and that sidebar might even be animated, but if so it’s some kind of iframe and/or JavaScript and/or Flash application; in that last case you could view the Flash application as a movie and use the (non-HTML) EMBED tag to put it on the page.

But there is no way, via Flickr or otherwise, to “embed” a photograph on a Web page like the Sword in the Stone. It doesn’t happen.

Additionally, your suggestion to walk Flickr users through a menu of options after the manner of Creative Commons is merely a way to induce people to erroneously license their photos under Creative Commons without full intention and consent. It would be cynical of me to view this as another example of “scratch a copyright activist, find someone who wants copyright abolished and replaced with Creative Commons.” All rights reserved *is* the default for a copyrightable work and should stay that way *unless* you really know what you’re doing and want some other licence.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Europe’s Copyright Wars - Do We Have to Repeat the American Mistake? (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin)

Joe Clark — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:59:49 -0000

Re: And I Don’t Much Want Your Business Card Either

Joe Clark — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:10:06 -0000

Push this too far and maybe your new book-related organization will miss the one person with the experience and wisdom to actually solve your problem because he is antediluvian enough to merely publish everything he does with RSS feeds and be available by E-mail and chat 12 hours a day.

Or! Shorter Datachondria: You must be a total lose if you aren’t on Twitter, so why would I even bother?

Re: Zero tolerance for silence, or the literalization of “Writers write.”

Joe Clark — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:52:24 -0000

A real critic names his subject.

Re: Meeting your teacher at the mall

Joe Clark — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:26:37 -0000

Ask Bopuc. He’s so important he’s go two Twits.

Re: Name Our Design Show - This is episode #1 of the Name Our Design Show...

Joe Clark — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:31:43 -0000

One of you kidz erroneously stated that, “scientifically,” we read two letters at a time. False. (Heck, doesn’t that mean the Chinese cannot read at all? They don’t even have letters!)

Do please look up fixations and saccades for your next podcast. Perhaps a phoner with Kevin Larson would be in order.

Re: Read Between The Leading - On this episode we discuss a 1991 interview with...

Joe Clark — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:30:29 -0000

The term you were looking for in your episode is photo illustration. It is now commonplace for print periodicals to slug or credit any photo illustration using that term. The practice was solidified after an event that happened before you kids’ time – the appearance of the same photo of O.J. Simpson on the covers of Time and Newsweek, one of them altered.

Matt Mahurin did that alteration; he’s a leading photo-illustrator and he’s done work for me. He’s a bit of a recluse, but he might be an interesting podcast guest.

Re: Temporary Redesign

Joe Clark — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:55:34 -0000

Please show me the beta so I can stop you from using DIV and SPAN and BR and CENTER on everything.

Re: The Old Ones Migrate

Joe Clark — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:31:12 -0000

Hey, don’t forget about me.

Re: Production values debate breaks out during videologger session

Joe Clark — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 09:05:43 -0000

OK, is accessibility a “production value”? Microsoft has more money than God, yet the entirety of Channel 9 is, for example, uncaptioned. Oh, but that might interfere with your *immediacy*, I suppose.

Re: Your exit interview of me

Joe Clark — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 14:05:23 -0000

The United States seems alone among constitutional democracies in its inability to see the dangers of subjecting minority rights to majority votes. It seems impossible to eradicate the myth that people should be punished, e.g., by being fired from a job, because others disapprove of them. Adherents are curiously willing to use 21st-century technologies like blogging, and 20th-century methods like lobbying, to perpetuate a philosophy that seems nothing more than medieval.

Seen at a purely pragmatic level, if you run a business in a state that's hostile to minorities, even to minorities you think justly and properly deserve hostility, your business is gonna suffer. Deservedly.

Re: Thank you Dave Winer: now I can read TechCrunch on my cell phone!

Joe Clark — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 12:49:41 -0000

This is very much an issue of Web standards, which Winer doesn’t care about or understand but will inevitably claim to have invented.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Joe Clark — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:13:30 -0000

Michel Kenward, “the last version” did not “create a new file format.” Acrobat and PDF versions are two different things. The current PDF version is 1.6 and there is no obligation whatsoever to use that version if you don’t want to or don’t need its features. Just as you can continue producing HTML 4.01 Transitional documents even though XHTML 1.1 exists, you can keep on using PDF 1.4 or earlier.

I suppose I’m biased in saying this because I volunteer on the PDF/Universal Access committee, but an imaginable reason to upgrade to Acrobat 8 is the easier creation of accessible PDFs. (The committee is working on the Portable Document Format, not Acrobat.) As Adobe offered me a beta-test only of the Windows version and I have seen no information whatsoever on accessibility improvements, I certainly concede this reason is hypothetical at the moment.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Joe Clark — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:43:58 -0000

Duff Johnson, PDF/UA chair, covers Acro 8 and saving files in the bare Reader application.

Re: Working on a Saturday?

Joe Clark — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:26:55 -0000

You don’t need a “camera crew” (just don’t aim the camera at your back) or an “audio engineer” (put mikes on all speakers and test the levels). Transcription is inexpensive and you know it.

Re: What I learned

Joe Clark — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:49:10 -0000

Um. *Lightning* rod, Robert.

Re: Will videoblogs be outlawed because of California’s accessibility laws?

Joe Clark — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:01:03 -0000

First, quit talking about “transcripts.” Captioning is how you make video accessible. And yeah, if you’re running a video “industry,” you need to grow up and make your videos accessible. Watched TV lately?

Now, home videos are quite another matter.

And at some point you’ll notice that the Target lawsuit involves accessibility for blind people, not deaf.

Re: Starck reviews Kindle at LeWeb3

Joe Clark — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:01:07 -0000

No, I’m pretty sure my conference liveblogging blows the doors off what this guy does.

Re: On work and family and having a “real life”

Joe Clark — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:20:11 -0000

If you expect your readers to make smart arguments, you need to be smart enough to differentiate “flaunt” and “flout.”

Employees with a medical need to visit a restroom frequently are people with disabilities who need to be accommodated in the workplace. Smart enough answer?

Your whole point here is a spirited defence of an asshole employer. Many of us aren’t buying it.

Re: A Bit Behind the Scenes

Joe Clark — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:58:19 -0000

Do what MetaFilter does for its podcasts. Or maybe you are already. Unite multiple separate recordings in GarageBand.

Re: The New Face of Blogniscient

Joe Clark — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:29:15 -0000

You've still got 78 validation errors and no declared character encoding (resulting in a hideous character error in somebody else's Unicode hyperlink as I look at it right now).

I don't see how your span class="rollover" is useful at all (just style the parent element, using :hover if you want). You're not using list elements properly ({li}{em}4{/em} is not correct). You claim to use XHTML, but you have upper-case attribute names (STYLE); why not just use HTML, which is case-insensitive? Your navbars are styled lists, which is certainly correct and semantic.

You had a makeover; now you need a markover.

Re: mac tip: typing special characters

Joe Clark — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:43:59 -0000

Copyright © is just Option-g on a U.S. (Canadian, Australian, NZ) keyboard and has been for 25 years. Opening some kind of windoid to laboriously search for “special” characters is a Windows™ approach. I touch-typed every character in this comment and you can too.

Re: mac tip: typing special characters

Joe Clark — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:43:59 -0000

Re: mac tip: typing special characters

Joe Clark — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:43:59 -0000