In miscellaneous additions to the HTML5 language since v4, you’ve gotta love the choice of example the standards committee uses (further down the page) for the new dialog element…
The element means (although I abhor the lack of ending tags) that a browser could conceivably "play" a dialog through a voice synthesizer bank, with each "actor" (identified by the dt) being assigned a different voice. Read more »
The Australia 2020 Final Report is not very easy for the poor and vision-impaired folk to get at, so I’ll be providing (non-canonical, non-authoritative) versions to fix the problem.
The other thing affecting usability is the lack of metadata in the documents, which would have been extremely useful for searching and classifying the documents of individual chapters. Read more »
Three versions of the Medieval IT Helpdesk sketch with subtitles (a monk familiar with scrolls is having problems with a book). Each is a slightly different translation. I think the first is the funniest, but the writing is a bit small. Read more »
As noted elsewhere, the RSS feeds for the minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research via the Australian Government Media Announcements feed are particularly useless, so I used the feedback page to express my disappointment and hope that it might leed to improvements.
Text of my feedback to ministry.industry.gov.au is over the fold.
Just published (2008-05-15) in Nature (doi:10.1038/453257a) is The Next Big Climate Challenge, which argues that significant funding is needed for climate modellers, indeed so much that climate modelling and the supercomputing grunt it requires, should be considered as international "big science", with projects funded internationally in the same manner (although hopefully more effective) than CERN’s hadron smasher and space telescopes. Read more »
The W3.org (THE standards body for the web) has a video element in its HTML5 draft standard 2008-06-10. A standard way of defining videos will make it easier to write and use web pages that contain videos, allow standards-compliant browsers to give you a consistent interface to videos, as well as encouraging development of add-ons that can integrate such content, including better mash-ups. Read more »
It’s good to see change in what comes out of a government agency after you’ve made a suggestion. Read more »
The Victorian Parliament Website has a current survey about how good it is.
Personally, I think the Victorian site is far inferior to the federal parliament, the survey is in a particularly closed format, and, what is surprising, is that the survey is not even hosted by government, but by surveymonkey.com. Read more »
Why is the KRudd government wanting to resurrect an even more intrusive very of AccessCard and database shared by all agencies on citizens, when the easier option of keeping similar information on businesses is less hypocritical, has fewer technical and governance risks, and could provide much greater benefit for improving the economy? Read more »
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