Tracy Kidder and the week after Christmas
Dec. 27th, 2008 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonAh, the dead zone. No, nothing spooky going on here, the "dead zone" is what I've always called that week between Christmas and New Year's. An entire week! Trapped between holidays, often forgotten about, it can seem to last a long time. (This year, I hope so. Things are peaceful. We have a new coffeemaker. I sit around, wired and relaxed all at once).
One of the things I'm doing with this time is reworking my website. Ostensibly, the goal is to get all the HTML pages to validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, but while I'm in there editing all my files I'm naturally noticing a lot of cruft and/or finding things that aren't cruft. I just found this prose-poem that I for some reason put into my www directory years ago, but never linked to... it's a tribute to Tracy Kidder and it will probably make more sense if you've read Soul of a New Machine, House, Mountains Beyond Mountains, and the rest of his work. Kidder writes beautifully, you see, but never about himself...
TRACY KIDDER'S BIOGRAPHER
The evening the vaccuum cleaner had kittens I hovered near the ceiling, balding and ridiculous, while he breathed life into the newborn machines. I grew less real the longer I watched him. I could not reach my notepad, could not even touch the floor until the light had gone and the closet was full of a dark electric purr. Where had he gone? He has, I think, a wife and child--or children? He does not look at them, they blur and are lost. I see the bones of the walls rise around me to the shouts of workmen while he remains in shadow. I become less and less, I can fold myself into his suitcase when he travels and still I can hardly see him. Sometimes I am convinced that he wears black loafers. After all these years I haven't written a word. The kittens grow up while I search for a pen. His name folds around me on the wind, as voices shout for this man who saw the world for us all, and they wish they had sent better than me. But the focus is lost. When he is gone they will find only this house, that hospital, these children, perhaps a machine that smiles in the night and remembers his hands.
One of the things I'm doing with this time is reworking my website. Ostensibly, the goal is to get all the HTML pages to validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, but while I'm in there editing all my files I'm naturally noticing a lot of cruft and/or finding things that aren't cruft. I just found this prose-poem that I for some reason put into my www directory years ago, but never linked to... it's a tribute to Tracy Kidder and it will probably make more sense if you've read Soul of a New Machine, House, Mountains Beyond Mountains, and the rest of his work. Kidder writes beautifully, you see, but never about himself...
TRACY KIDDER'S BIOGRAPHER
The evening the vaccuum cleaner had kittens I hovered near the ceiling, balding and ridiculous, while he breathed life into the newborn machines. I grew less real the longer I watched him. I could not reach my notepad, could not even touch the floor until the light had gone and the closet was full of a dark electric purr. Where had he gone? He has, I think, a wife and child--or children? He does not look at them, they blur and are lost. I see the bones of the walls rise around me to the shouts of workmen while he remains in shadow. I become less and less, I can fold myself into his suitcase when he travels and still I can hardly see him. Sometimes I am convinced that he wears black loafers. After all these years I haven't written a word. The kittens grow up while I search for a pen. His name folds around me on the wind, as voices shout for this man who saw the world for us all, and they wish they had sent better than me. But the focus is lost. When he is gone they will find only this house, that hospital, these children, perhaps a machine that smiles in the night and remembers his hands.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-12-27 11:50 pm (UTC)* Use the proper doc-type declaration.
* All tags (and attributes) are lower cased.
* Nest tags correctly: [b][i]stuff[/b][/i] <-- wrong.
* Use quotes for values [table cellpadding="0"] <-- correct
* Every attribute has to have a value, which makes things like "selected" weird for options or checked for radio/checkboxes. So, you either say checked="true" or checked="checked" or whatever makes you comfortable.
* Use the proper character encoding. & is &, etc.
* Anything tag that has a starting tag, must have a closing tag.
* Break tags are closed in this fashion: <br /> - Image tags and such follow the same suite. The space between "br" and "/" is important.
* target="_top" and such are illegal in XHTML strict, so you should try to be compliant in transition, but it's not required. Use javascript if you need to open a new page or whatnot.
* I'm sure there's more, but those are the more important ones off the top of my head.
Styling should always be done via CSS regardless if it's HTML, XHTML, XML (XSTL is the XML stylesheet) as it's not only good coding practice, but reskinning for future usage makes it stupidly simple if you coded everything properly.
If you have any CSS / HTML / jQuery questions, poke me. :) I'll be glad to answer even if it's just a simple css question. I've been really focusing on nailing this down at work and coming up with a best practice and simplifying work.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-28 02:16 am (UTC)The bones of my website predate CSS. It's not that I did anything especially wrong when I was designing it the last time around, it's more just that I'm dragging it into the current decade. At least it's simple -- no forms or interactive foo -- but I have a lot of files with old-style presentational HTML.
Here's a question... do you know of any utilities that would automatically tidy up at least some of my tags to be valid XHTML?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-28 02:50 am (UTC)Familiar with Java? :)
no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-29 11:16 pm (UTC)