Que cette zone autour de Washington DC a l'air triste, coincée entre l'aéroport international de Dulles et les belles maisons de Reston. Plus on approche du centre de Washington de ce côté, et plus c'est beau; mais ici, c'est la zone. Des flots de voitures, des avions en permanence, aucun centre urbain. Et au milieu de toute cette inhumanité, soudain, la surprise. Un vol d'oies cendrées superbes vient de passer juste au-dessus de moi, à très faible altitude, peut-être une dizaine de mètres seulement. Voilà, c'était mon rayon de soleil matinal. Je me peux maintenant m'enfermer pour plusieurs heures dans un cubicle à l'air conditionné et pondre du code entre deux meetings. Je me demande tout de même si les oies cendrées ne sont pas mieux loties en l'occurence...

Really funny. None of the americans I met during these 4 days gave me a positive opinion of G.W.Bush. I heard a lot of very strong words, and even strong insults. I heard strong thanks to France and its international position. I heard people hoping I had no problem at the customs because I have a french passport.

It really seems that a large part of the population here just cannot stand Bush and considers him as the dumbest and most dangerous US president ever. The second part of the population has the exact opposite opinion. And it seems that these two fractions of the population really don't live at the same place. Anti-Bush on east coast and California, pro- elsewhere.

So after two days of quite productive CSS WG in Boston, I had to skip the Plenary Meeting day and fly to Dulles. AOL Offices are a big place, in the middle of almost nowhere. I mean the only important fact about the area is "close to Dulles airport". Apart from the airport, there is nothing to do here. Fortunately, Clayton Lewis took me to an Irish pub somewhere far away for dinner (and a few pints of Guiness).

So from Dulles, I virtually attended today's joint meeting between the HTML WG and the CSS WG right on time for the hot topic, the topic I started fighting for about a year ago, the main one that was making me consider XHTML 2 harmful. And it seems that I won that fight. Not alone, of course.  But I am quite glad I initiated the discussion and kept it alive during all these months. People, the style attribute is back. And I am glad we made it. Hixie has strong feelings about this, of course. I don't mind. Again it's about being pragmatic and about keeping the future open.

Just would like to tell Tantek that I proposed a W3C namespace for all things common to all XML dialects to a few W3C team people when namespaces appeared. The original answer was a strong no. It took a while to percolate apparently...

As Marek Stepien noticed it, I was taking advantage of Mozilla's lazy behavior, allowing many CSS properties on ::first-line that are in fact illegal there according to CSS 2. So I revamped completely the markup of this blog and now use dl, dt and dd only for the architecture of the posts. This is much cleaner now.

By the way, I think that we have a little problem with the standards. And read me well and think 37 times before saying I am wrong and sending me flames. The CSS 2 spec says that property 'blah' does not apply to ::first-line because only 'foo', 'bar' and these other properties do... Mozilla's conformance to CSS 2 implies then that we cannot go beyond that rule and allow 'blah' to apply to ::first-line unless we make a clone of 'blah' and call it '-moz-blah'. This makes no sense. I think that CSS should list the properties that a CSS conformant implementation MUST implement for ::first-line, but should imply no restriction on the properties the same implementation MAY implement too for ::first-line as a proprietary extension of the CSS property...

Oh well; "Pragmatic" is not in everyone's common vocabulary I guess.

Just heard at Boston's Logan airport that 33 million americans live (survive is probably better worded) under the level of poverty. Is there anything to be proud of?

Now available as a debian package!!! Thanks Mike!

Just a followup. And a second one

my SecurID is dead again. The 8888888888 disease. Be happy, I wrote that without using a blink tag nor 'text-decoration: blink'. AOLTW should use a more stable hardware anyway, it's the second time in 3 months and that becomes painful.

As a consequence, I am totally unable to read my @netscape.com mail so use the link in the previous blog entry below if you have to mail me. Thanks.

You don't have the right to look at specs, drafts, emails, nothing. Please try to guess what each proposed CSS property below does looking only at its name and send me a mail with your guesses. Please do NOT send direct mail to my @netscape.com address. Thanks a lot for your cooperation.

1. white-space-treatment
2. all-space-treatment
3. white-space-discard
4. white-space-collapse
   

This article is great. A consultant from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young France is interviewed by the webnews service Le Journal du Net about the future of WiFi. His conclusion is crystal clear : it will be a niche market or a mass market. He could have said success or failure....

Hey, reader! If you want to be famous, be recognized as an expert, and are able to call a journalist to tell him pure tautologies, change of job: apply for a Consultant position at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young France.

Can't believe the yogurt I had during my breakfast was 227 grams! This is about twice the size of a french yogurt. 99% fat-free, looks like bubble gum, tastes like bubble gum, has the consistence of a jellyfish. The list of ingredients show stuff that you would never find in an european yogurt. If this is fat-free, our french yogurts should be caloric bombs, and they are not. I guess everything here is a question of quantity. People won't buy products packaged in small quantities, and when they open something, they finish it. Nice vicious circle indeed.

What's a torus? You don't know? United Press International can explain: that's a donut!

We should, in the CSS WG, make a graph showing the hourly rate of proposed keyword additions to CSS, correlated to the number of posts in w3c-css-wg. This would be quite funny. We could easily see when Hixie is awake or not, see when we start working on CSS white-space treatment, and so on. I clearly remember one of the main concerns expressed by our norwegian bork-bork-bork komrad Håkon Lie: the more keywords you add, the less embeddable is a CSS engine. I wonder if we reached a point where we can just call CSS "bloated". We'll see, our meeting starts in two hours and a half from now.

Sérieusement, c'est du foutage de gueule. Colombani appelle ça un débat? J'ai progressé dans la lecture du livre dans l'avion; mon opinion n'a pas changé. C'est une enquête apparemment minutieuse et fouillée.

Therefore, I consider totally dropping my daily reading of Le Monde even if my reasons are totally different from some others'. What I learn in this book is really shocking and sometimes frightening. But I have a problem: there is no replacement in France and my brain needs to read information on paper with opinions attached; not only pre-digested copies coming directly from AFP, Reuters, AP without any additional value. And that's unfortunately what most of the news network are today. I am currently watching CNN in my hotel room, and that's a real shame. The ads are better than the news... Blogs are not well enough written or have no journalistic background guaranteeing the quality and fairness of the contents. Hmmmm...

I'm in Boston for the CSS WG meeting. The flight was not very funny, with that fat italo-american sitting next to me, stinking and taking part of my place all the time. Saw Vincent who goes to the W3C Plenary Meeting too; we were students together and had dinner together in Boston. The restaurant was quite good but there was enough food for 3 persons with each order... No wonder people are getting so fat in this country. My bruschetta was made of 5 big slices of bread and enough tomato/basilic/stuff to feed a whole mafia! It's actually not so cold here, only 1-2 celsius. A car alarm just rang below my hotel window and I am now awake even if it's only 6am. Btw, my hotel, Hampton Inn in Cambridge, 5 minutes away walking from the expensive Sonesta, has free high-speed internet access in all rooms. To be compared to the $10 daily fee at the Sonesta!