Of course, I don’t mean that literally… not in the “craving dick” way you’re probably expecting me to. Nevermind.
Got an email from one Nathan Sharfi this evening expounding the value and, indeed, wonder of Unicode. Not in so many words, but he did take me on a magical journey: explaining the wonder of my keyboard’s Option Key along the way. OS X, being a thoroughly–Unicode–friendly operating system, lets you type a great variety of Unicode “special” characters from your keyboard using the oft–neglected Option Key modifier. Option–Semicolon? Product: Ellipsis. Option–Underscore? Product: Em Dash. I’m impressed.
What does this mean to the average web developer? And why have I never been told this before? With reference to my ampersand rant, it means that I may never have to deal with HTML entities again; it lets me put those special characters straight into my documents. This assumes that my HTML documents declare their text-encoding to be Unicode, which they do; and assumes that the end–user’s web browser is capable of viewing Unicode characters, which they are. Internet Explorer 4 (yes, version four) on Windows 98 is capable of rendering Unicode characters (which is why I dare say with such authority that most User Agents are capable of such feats) and the same goes for Netscape 4. This blows me out of the water, since Netscape 4 can’t even render HTML entities correctly. That’s it. I’m sold. Thank you very much Signor Sharfi, I salute you.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 19, 2003 at 1:47 AM
To those of you that asked: yes, that article from Thursday’s West Australian is talking about Rose and Scott. Great to see your friends lives’ trivialized and used as a springboard for this year’s Easter road–safety initiative.
I hate the police.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 19, 2003 at 2:40 AM
Over the last few weeks I’ve watched more movies than I have in the last year. Weekly trips to the local Greater Union have become par for the course and videos have become increasingly common. Particularly since the accident, the last couple of days have been such that we (ie– my immediate group of friends and I) have stuck together like proverbial glue and have barely been out of each other’s sight. We’ve been watching videos and eating out together and sitting by the beach, which does a great deal to take our minds off the tragedy at hand, but it’s a little sad that it’s taken something like this to get us all together again.
Watching Donnie Darko tonight, Mike’s Mum drew parallels between Donnie and myself. Thanks. Thinking about it; I seem to fall into a very easily–defined, stereotyped (stereotyped both physically and in terms of personality) category of white male. Yes I know I’m a geek, though in this case that definition falls to the sideline. It’s something even more specific than that.
I’m Lucas from Empire Records. I’m Ricky from American Beauty. Donnie Darko from… you know. I’m every quiet, thoughtful, Nice–Guy–with–a–fucked–up–haircut ever to grace the silver screen. It’s a flattering category to be placed in (*cough* *cough*) and apparently these guys always get the girl, but I wish I could abandon that stereotype from time to time. Buying (and using) a video camera has only made comparisons between myself and “the guy from American Beauty” more common, particularly when it comes to strangers, so I’m glad I don’t work in a record store (as cool as that would be) and equally glad I’m not a hallucinating, time–traveling weirdo. I’m just a geek, gimme a break.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 19, 2003 at 2:58 AM