deebeedee

Found this mummified banana at an unoccupied cubicle at work today. It was underneath a bunch of papers. No wonder gnats were flying about the office several weeks ago.

Jeffrey Zeldman today discusses the use of Clarendon in his work. I correctly observed his use of the ubiquitous typeface in the redesign of Zeldman.com but I totally missed the initial implementation of it in the redesign of Happy Cog. I guess I haven’t really followed Zeldman’s body of work closely until recently, when I started subscribing to his sites’ RSS feeds using Net News Wire.

I bought Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards sometime last year but I am now just reading it. It’s a book that pushes for the building of forward-compatible sites by advocating web standards such as XHTML, CSS, XML, ECMAScript and the DOM. I’m glad to say that I’ve been coding in XHTML for a while now. Thanks to my faithful reading a few years back of the now-defunct Web Techniques magazine (which became New Architect), I was convinced early on of XHTML’s benefits and was taken by its easy implementation. I’ve also been using CSS stylesheets in lieu of the <font> tag and other deprecated formatting tags. But one thing that I have not gotten myself to do is to use CSS2, or layer positioning. I’m still a holdout for tables, even sometimes for ones with a smattering of one-pixel gifs to hold them up (yeah, I know, kill me now). My last foray into CSS2 experimentation was frustrated by a yet fully web standards-compliant IE 5 for the Mac and the equally-wanting Netscape 6.0.

I remember promising in 2003 to serve up a new version of DeeBeeDee before the year was over, but alas, it has not happened. But thanks to Zeldman’s book, I’m convinced now is the time to finally take the plunge into CSS positioning. It’s also time to finally get rid of this awfully dark and archaic-looking site. My transition from a Pirouz/Siegel design disciple to a Zeldman zombie is underway.

With Yahoo! Mail’s new basic service, I can now send 10MB messages and have 50MB more space while looking at a somewhat sleeker interface. This is no doubt precipitated by better offerings out there.

Why is this even news?

I give props to Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) for ending the Cold War but I’d like to think the Filipino people helped inspire the world to fight oppressive regimes in the 1980s. The People Power Revolution that followed Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983 catapulted his widow, Cory, to run, and eventually win, against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos during snap elections held in 1986. It was this revolt that gave hope, I believe, to oppressed people worldwide. I remember in 1987 watching South Korean protesters on TV holding up the “L” sign, the initial of Cory Aquino’s LABAN party, as they appropriated the symbol for themselves in their own fight against unfair elections. I see the image of the lone guy standing defiantly against a tank in 1989’s Tiananmen Square protest mirrored in the image from 1986 of nuns and ordinary citizens praying in front of tanks during a rally in Manila. Even as Reagan set the stage in his resolve to rid the world of communism in the 1980s, the People Power movement demonstrated to the world how non-violent peaceful resistance is done.

Update: found this interesting article on the legacy of People Power.