While Apple has announced a new Apple TV and movie rentals on iTunes, now more than ever it’s high time they made sure that all their video content is closed captioned. With the writers’ strike affecting television programming and more people switching to downloadable content, let’s not take a huge step backward by delivering a huge mess of inaccessible content over the Internet! The ADA does not require Internet deliverables to be closed-captioned because the ADA was drafted before the Internet, but the spirit of the law is to ensure that people have access to media, and since most movies and television shows have already been captioned for legacy media, it shouldn’t be difficult to deliver those captions along with new media. Apple has put the technology in place for the viewing of closed captions in iTunes, QuickTime, and iPods. The next step is actually selling and renting closed-captioned videos!
Author: Daniel Greene
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Introducing Lady
We have a new family member: Lady. We’ve already known her for more than a year now. She’s our neighbor lady’s dog, and our neighbor decided she just can’t keep up with her anymore. Buxley already fell in love with her when they first met. Adopting her feels like the most natural thing to do since J.J. died and our neighbor wants to put Lady in a new home!
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Remembering J.J.
Andy lit candles and laid J.J.’s collar and leash on the table. I wrapped the collar and leash around the candle and took this photo to complete the artistic expression of our loss.
J.J. suffered several seizures in early December but rallied after taking medications for a couple of weeks. After a few weeks of seemingly good health, he suddenly took a turn for the worse. His hind legs gave out and he became incontinent. He started trembling and chattering his teeth. After a week of this, we made the decision to put him down.
I’ve never loved a dog so much, or felt so loved by a dog. He took to me right away when I started dating his daddy (my partner, Andy), and we had many great times together for almost five years. He had a good life, was loved, and will be missed. Thank you, J.J.!
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Typography, Typography Everywhere
I noticed an interesting use of underlining at the gas pump today. I learned, when studying typography, that underlining is mostly a relic of the typewriter, which was incapable of emphasizing text with italic or bold typefaces, and that other means of emphasis are more aesthetically pleasing.
One problem with underlining words as a way of underscoring their importance is that the underlines interfere with the descenders– those “tails” of letters that descend below the baseline as in the lowercase letters g, j, p, q, and y. I once read that a proper underline breaks at the descenders to allow them to descend without interference.
I am happy to report that the typesetter of this sign knew well enough to underscore only the “round” of the word “ground” and let the descender of the lowercase g hang down without the interference of the underline.
You just never know where you’ll see an example of proficient typography! Er… typography! Yeah, that’s better.
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Hyperlinks Weave the Web
There would be no World Wide Web without hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are what allow us to add photos to web pages, link from one page to another, etc. These days, much of this hyperlinking is done for us automatically on sites such as Flickr. But Flickr also allows you to create hyperlinks yourself in many areas of the site, including photo descriptions, comments, and group threads. I create links between photos and members all the time, and it’s easy for me to do so because I’ve memorized the HTML. Once you learn the HTML for a hyperlink, you can be a hyperlinker yourself!
An HTML tag begins with a less-than sign, created by holding down the shift key while you tap the comma key. Then you type “a” for “anchor” and “href” for “hypertext reference”. Then you type the equals sign (=) followed by a quotation mark. This quotation mark is the beginning of a “container” for the URL, or “uniform resource locator.” The URL is the “web address” for the object to which you are linking. As a mnemonic device, I think of this opening tag as the English phrase, “Anchor hypertext reference is…”
Recently, I posted a photo I took of a fellow Flickrite at a FlickrMeet. I wanted to link to her photostream so that other people could appreciate her photos. This is a way of showing respect and giving credit, similar to the citations used by academic writers. So, what did I do? Well, first, I wrote the text, “katdavis kindly posed for a portrait.” Then, I decided to make “katdavis” (her username) into a hyperlink. In order to do so, I found her photostream and copied and pasted the URL from my browser’s address bar above the first page of her photostream (the URL being http://www.flickr.com/photos/katdavis/ ). Then, I returned to my photostream— specifically, the photo page containing the portrait of her (the URL being flickr.com/photos/danielgreene/2100926688/ ). I clicked in the description text so that I could edit it, and I placed my cursor just in front of her username. There, I inserted the magic of the Web: I typed <a href= and I pasted the URL I had copied from the first page of her photostream. The “aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash” is absolutely essential to the HTML expression. Immediately following that URL, I typed a closing quotation mark (a.k.a. “close quote” — same as an open quote in this case, since HTML uses only the “inch mark” type quote, not “curly quotes” or “typographer’s quotes”). I then completed my opening HTML tag by typing a greater-than sign. The greater-than sign signifies the end of an HTML tag.
But the tag would not be complete without the link text being bracketed by the closing HTML tag. So, after I typed the opening HTML tag and typed the link text “katdavis” I enclosed the link text with the closing HTML “anchor” tag which is a less-than sign, slash, a, and a greater-than sign. As you can see, enclosing HTML tags are bracket by less-than and greater-than signs. The slash mark represents a closing HTML tag which marks the end of an HTML expression. You can think of the end of the anchor tag in English as “end of anchor.”
The resulting hyperlink looked like so when I finished editing it:
What the visitor to my pages sees is a hyperlink they can follow to jump to katdavis’s photostream, like so: katdavis
Hyperlinking creates virtual connections that can lead to or supplement the actual connections we have with each other in the real world. Hyperlinks are the sine qua non of the World Wide Web, and are even more important in the social, democratic "Web 2.0." Learning the HTML for creating hyperlinks is one of the steps to joining the ranks of the digerati and harnessing the power of the Web for yourself.
Have fun, and weave on!
Daniel Greene 