<Glazblog/>

1. Create a new folder on your hard disk
2. Rename it "George Bush"
3. Move it to the trash
4. Empty the trash
5. Let the computer ask you "Do you really want to delete 'George Bush' ?"
6. Stay calm and answer firmly "Yes".

The more I write on these guys when I read such articles, the more the only word I can think of is "shame".

"President Bush today raised the possibility that Saddam Hussein's government destroyed the prohibited chemical and biological weapons that were the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq."

Source: CNN.com

Just one remark, following a few private mails I just exchanged with Shane McCarron from HTML WG. The "U" element was deprecated by HTML 4.0, and the HTML 4.0 Strict DTD got rid of "B" and "I" and "B" and "I" are considered ugly by the purists of the Web. That was in 1997. We are 6 years later... The web is still full of B, I and U and I see nothing right now that can make that change so significantly it could trigger a "strict-ification" of the World Wide Web as we use it daily.

So, what was the point deprecating?

It just seems that users did not get the signal, that users (I really mean web authors here) did not want to get the signal.

So what's the Web really, and why do we see there two antithetic groups, gurus of strictness and semantic web opposed to people accepting presentation-oriented markup? Corollary, why can't the two of them coexist? Corollary, why is XHTML 2.0 intended to replace HTML 4 some time in the future? Corollary, why XHTML contains "HTML" in its name? The future of the Web should be built over HTML 5.0 and something new, totally independant from HTML.

And forget about deprecation. Things are used or are not. Deprecating unused things is pointless, deprecating things that people do use on a daily basis is counter-productive.

Check out the left vertical bar on this site. Just a shame.

Still thinking that the renaming of "french fries" and "french bread" to "freedom fries" and "freedom bread" is the supreme peak of human stupidity, I made a small bookmarklet changing all occurences of "freedom" into "french" in a web page. Works in both Gecko-based browsers and Internet Explorer.

Kind of a "bork bork bork" extension to my browser

Tantek, the new style of your blog is very hard to read. You should try green foreground and green background too

Netscape died monday the 14th of April 2003. There are still a few spasmodic muscular contractions but they will disappear quite fast. That's a premeditated murder. The killer was promoted just a few days before his act. Of course.

1. you're lucky Arte shows once again the documentary "CIA, secret wars" the 27 at 1:55am... This is the best documentary ever shown on TV and the video-recorder just broke for that one.
2. fix the f*cking video-recorder!

I have redesigned the Glazblog. There are some differences between Gecko-based browsers, Opera, MSIE and MacIE mostly because only Gecko is smart enough to handle CSS based menus.

It's sunny, warm, and I enjoyed my Honda NTV 650cc today. It really does not seem to be a bad day. Unfortunately, it is. A very bad one, indeed.

1. It is a presentational element, it represents nothing but a line. A line is defined by its rendering and nothing else. From that point of view, it's not less presentational that the <br> element,
2. The name of the element is terrible. Will lead to confusion between l, 1 and i,
3. It is useful only when you have a list of adjacent lines. So it's basically  a list (ul or ol) with list items (li) having no marker and no wrapping,
4. Using ul/ol/li instead of l makes it much easier to number lines since you have a known container to reset the numbering in CSS.

Bush has declared today "Freedom is beautiful". I wonder if he applied s/French/Freedom/g before saying that

A neighbour of mine thinks that the SARS epidemy is more or less something not very important that the journalists make important to have something to talk about, besides Iraq... Well, let's think about it. Its global lethality is about 10% and its specific lethality among doctors and nurses reaches 30% in some places. It has reached Africa and Japan. Airports are now dangerous places, where just crossing the path of someone coming from an infected place and breathing the same air can kill. A lot of doctors here in France, and in particular the ones who survived the outbreak in Hanoï, think it will reach Western Europe. The only good thing is that they think the epidemy could stop with the end of winter, giving us time to produce a vaccine before next winter.

Do you know the famous word by Benjamin Disraeli, answering to an antisemitic attack at the british parliament? "Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.".

Well... When the ancestors of Disraeli (and mine) were brutal savages in an unknown place, Mesopotamia had already given the "Epic of Gilgamesh" to the world.

Last thing, in the Basrah district, Iraqis are building community houses in reed. The model of house they build is more than 4000 years old. Described on ancient tablets. They still use it.

I think that the fact nsSelection::MoveCaret() does not check nsFrame::IsSelectable() is the root of my current problems. That's a bug anyway since it allows to place the caret in a frame that's not necessarily selectable...

Alexandre Adler dont je lis en ce moment "Au fil des jours cruels" écrit décidément bien, et ne pense pas que des bêtises. Mais il devrait arrêter de dire méso-Amérique au lieu d'Amérique Centrale, je trouve ça très pêteux.

Ganska roligt att läsa Gemal's blog på danska och förstå allt

Update: Malina (joli prénom) me demande pourquoi je n'écris pas à chaque fois en anglais ET français ET suédois. Malina (nice first name) asks me why I don't post every time in english AND french AND swedish. Malina (fint förenamn) frågar varför jag inte skriver varje gång på engelska OCH franska OCH svenska.

Malina, you want to kill me or what ?-)

I am looking for the etymology of the name Evros (or Ebros depending on your transliteration), region of Greece. Drop me a mail please if you know about it.

The most beautiful aircraft in he world, the only intercontinental aircraft having a name, will disappear from our skies before the end of the year. Sad day.

By the way, the CNN.com article linked above fails to mention that the tire burst because a Continential aircraft lost on the take-off track a piece of metal just minutes before Concorde's take-off. As an investigation from the french TV showed it, that piece of metal had been replaced by Continental Airlines just a few days before Concorde's crash. In front of the camera, a manager from Continental Maintenance team recognized the part was not the one they had to use. They used another similar one, but made in a different alloy, weaker and cheaper. 113 people died in Concorde's crash in July 2000 mostly because Continental Airlines used a $100 part instead of a $200. Deserved to be mentioned, I think...

Watched Arte yesterday night (for me, all TV channels could disappear but that one) and the documentary "The Dark Side of Henry Kissinger". Very interesting. Very scary.

Received today a nasty email from someone asking me why I care about the political changes in the US anyway since I live in that fucking country of cheese-lovers, and why I care about the arab-americans since they can go back to where they come from, after all.

Well, since you read this blog and since you asked, you'll get the answer in public, you moron: (a) I work for an american company, I work with a lot of cool people I appreciate, I have a lot of good american friends (b) I like the US, correction, I like what the US were before november 2000 (d) one of my best and oldest friends is an arab-american; he hates the fundamentalists, he is clever, speaks even more languages than I do, has a general knowledge (and a collection of books) I'd love to have. And I'm afraid the asshole at the White House, a clone of yours from a neuronal point of view, could put his name on a lettre de cachet.

Yves Lafon, grand fournisseur de beignets de fleurs de courgettes au W3C, entame apparemment un tutoriel sur HTTP, sujet qu'il maîtrise plus que bien. C'est en français, profitez donc...

• Alexandre Adler, "Au fil des jours cruels".
• Thorvald Steen, "Constantinople".

warning: "Reading this week" will come back...every week It does not mean anything about the quality of the book. It's just the book I have with me those days in the train.

Reuters, December 10, 2003, 4:36 PM EST (09:36 PM GMT).

Nearly seven months after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the victory of the forces of the coalition against the Iraqi troops, the controversy over the "second Gulf war" makes an unexpected come back. In a very unusual act of political defiance, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and its five members awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2003 to...France!

Some rumors, immediately contradicted by a Nobel Committee's spokesperson, gave last week the French President Jacques Chirac and his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin as possible winners. The spokesman of the White House commented that rumor by the single word "ridiculous".

The Nobel Committee did not explain what motivated the choice since its statutes do not allow to disclose such information, but in another very strong act, it issued during the evening a press release explaining that the Nobel Committee is completely independent and that it denies any government to interfer with its choices. While no reason was officially provided, this warning is probably linked to the intense lobbying done last week in Norway against France by US political and industrial representatives on behalf of the Bush administration.

In his speech, right after the King Harald V of Norway gave him the Prize, the French ambassador Louis Amigues said that "this war was useless, war is a failure". He regretted that the US decision to start the war "put the United Nations in the background at a time we need more global consensus for the benefit of all". The American and British embassadors showed their disagreement remaining seated while the other attendees were standing up, applauding L. Amigues.

Do not blog when you are above 39.5° of fever. And thanks Mike.

USA, country of the freedom of speech and freedom of press, country that tells the other countries that they don't have a real freedom of speech nor freedom of press. Well, not really. Shame, shame, shame.