Evan Williams recently noted that people often
link
to the print-friendly version of an article, suggesting that their smaller,
less encrusted with advertising nature makes them easier to read. He also
suggests that on-line magazines may take steps to prevent this, for whatever
reason. (And probably not the step of not having a separate printer version.)
Certainly, the simplicity is a big part of why I do it, but there’s also
the issue of sites that split articles into multiple parts. I generally
prefer one big file to a bunch of smaller ones, especially if they’re
continuous.
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More on domains
Having referenced John Gilmore’s argument against
ICANN,
it’s only fair to note this response from Joe Sims,
who writes that Mr Gilmore “doesn’t have a clue about most of what
he is talking about”. At this point, I’ll freely admit that I don’t know
enough about the situation to judge who makes the better argument. I
will say that it’s amazing how much bureaucracy has been built up around
what should be a fairly straightforward process. (via
ICANNWatch)
The best suggestion I’ve seen for bringing sanity to the domain
name system involves getting rid of generic
top-level domains, which solves many of the problems. A big part of the
cybersquatting problems (real and imagined) comes from the fact that com has
such a cachet. If there were dozens or hundreds of top-level domains run by
different registrars, then someone who couldn’t register mycompany.verisign
could get mycompany.isc or something. One might object that this makes it
difficult to figure out what domain a company has, but that’s the case
today as it is. In the future, search engines will make “good” domain
names less important.
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Date and time
I’m working on a standard way to present information about weblogs,
and one of the pieces of information is the date that a post was published.
I naturally gravitated towards the recommendations given in the
W3C date and time note, which defines
a profile of ISO 8601, the international standard for representing
dates and times.
While poking around, I came across two good articles explaining what
ISO 8601 is about, by Markus Kuhn
and Jukka Korpela.
They do a pretty good job explaining what the standard is and why we would need one,
so I won’t take space here to go into detail here.
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