dive into mark

• Housekeeping Monthly, 1955 (forgery): The good wife’s guide. Don’t greet him with complaints and problems. Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice. Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him. A good wife always knows her place.
• Werner Vogels, 2003 (sadly real): Web Services are not distributed objects. In principle this should be enough to build a web service, but in practice at least one more component is added to it: the envelope. This is a message encapsulation protocol that ensures that the XML document to be processed is clearly separated from other information the two communicating processes may want to exchange. This allows, for example, routing and security information to be added to the message without the need to modify the XML document. The protocol that is used for almost all web services is SOAP, which originally stood for “Simple Object Access Protocol.” This naming was a mistake as the protocol has nothing to do with accessing objects, and since the SOAP 1.2 specification the protocol name is now used without expanding the acronym. The SOAP message itself, also called the soap-envelope, is XML and consists of two possible elements: a soap-header, in which all the system information is kept, and a soap-body, which contains the XML document that is to be processed by the web service.
• Brent Simmons: HTML differences in NetNewsWire. It’s off by default. You turn it on via the General prefs panel, where it asks if you want to highlight differences for updated items. Now everyone can have their own personal Winer Watcher.
• Dave Hyatt: mezzoblackandblue.com and diveintopain.org. I now believe that Safari’s rendering (gap and all) is correct, so until a spec tells me otherwise, I’m changing nothing. NOTHING. Dave is almost certainly correct. Opera 7 was the only browser that rendered my markup properly, and I hacked it so it didn’t. If the next version of Safari renders it properly, I will resume my quest for a CSS hack that hides rules from Safari (since Dave fixed the bug that allowed for my last one). Standards are bullshit. HTML is a crock. I am irrelevant. People looking for pure CSS tabs should click here.
• Anyone who believes that link text doesn’t influence Google results should click here. Or exit. (And if you understand that, shame on you.)
• A gallery of inaccessible images.
• David R. Kendrick: What makes a fuckhead? The Fuckhead will defend his or her inflexibility by saying, “I have every right to my opinion,” and “I have every right to participate in this discussion.” And, in the egalitarian world of IRC and Usenet, the Fuckhead is correct. But the Fuckhead will find that other participants, who do not appreciate the Fuckhead’s presence or contributions, will make use of tools such as “Ignore” commands or killfiles. These tools would not exist if it weren’t for the Fuckheads. You can count on the Fuckhead to shriek “Censorship!” when you tune out their input. You can count on the Fuckhead saying rude things about you when he/she is sure you’re no longer listening. But it will never occur to the Fuckhead to approach topics and people differently, and never, ever occur to the Fuckhead to avoid venues where the atmosphere is unfriendly. This inability to exit gracefully is a distinguishing mark of a Fuckhead.
• Paul Ford: Taking the Edge Off, from 2003. We like the weaknesses in each other. We have each quit, gone dry, dieted — then been called, alone, late at night, to the bodega, knowing self-betrayal in every step.
• John Jones’ Monument, from 1883.

This thing we do, this is what we do when we’re not doing what we need to be doing. These things we talk about, this is what we talk about when we can’t talk about what we need to talk about. These links we make, they don’t lead us anywhere but where we are already.