Teresa Nielsen Hayden greets me with:

Hi there. Looks like you’re using barfy ol’ Netscape 4.x. I don’t want to seem unkind or rejecting, but it’s a real pain to design a web page that’ll work with Netscape 4. . . .

Funny, I seem to have managed it (better) without half trying. Oh well, better that attitude than Bennett’s ‘get lost’.

As for why I’m still using barfy ol’ 4.79: it works for me, dammit. (Most of the time.) Housekeeping – managing bookmarks and mail – is much smoother than in NS6. For example: In NS4, if I’m reading mail and decide not to deal with the current item just now, I hit ‘u’ (for mark-as-Unread). That’s not even on the menu in NS6; I have to take the mouse to another window, figure out which entry there matches what I’m reading, and click a tiny icon. A petty matter, but ease-of-use is made of such minutiae.

NS6 Mail cannot respond properly to a digest – it thoughtfully cuts off everything after the first sig-bar (any line consisting only of “−− “); but that doesn’t matter, because there’s no way to tell it that my SMTP (outgoing mail) server is not the same as my POP (incoming mail) server!

TNH continues:

In the meantime, this raw-text version of my weblog should be accessible to just about everyone. It won’t be pretty, but it should be readable. Sorry about that. . . .

Furrfu!

Some say rebuild the towers exactly as they were. Some say leave their footprints bare. Seems to me you can have both: rotate the plan by a quarter-turn.

Jane Galt comments on the boorishness of Americans as seen by Europe: inter alia,

They wear sweatshirts with the names of their colleges on them.

Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Heh.

American college sweatshirts were immensely popular in Europe in the Seventies. I used to see fake ones in Lausanne shop windows. (I knew they were fake because one of them said ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY around the seal – accurate, i believe – of the University of Illinois.) Somewhere on our family tour in 1975 we got a book of Lego designs in which the only words (other than LEGO) were UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CLARA on a child’s sweatshirt – not the school’s logo (even fake), mind you, but spelled out in custom iron-on letters!

Single-atom bits. (Link from Eric Hall.)

Airport screeners seize GI Joe’s rifle.

“We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.”

Fair’s fair. Wouldn’t want our airports to be less secure(d) than our schools.

It had to happen: I just got a “Nigerian scam” letter from someone representing himself as “the secetary of Africa White farmers co-operation (AWFC) OF Zimbabwe.”

If Susanna Cornett hadn’t changed hosts, I might never have read Meryl Yourish’s rant on web design:

The first standard of web publishing I learned was: The reader is in control, not you. You shouldn’t care if your readers want to completely override your backgrounds and fonts. Web publishing is all about malleability; if you can’t grasp that, you should be publishing on paper and ink. Those of you who insist on using templates that don’t allow the user to increase the font size need to find another template. You’re cheating your reader out of the control the web is supposed to bring her.

Which, friends, is why my pages have as little design as I can give them. If you’re at all like me, you’re here for the words, not the colors. (And if you’re not at all like me, why the heck are you reading this?)

Let us join hands and pray that Samizdata sees the light.

Later: Bruce Baugh is perhaps more to the point:

Folks, you really don’t know who’s reading. Some people are color-blind, and depend on contrasts in shades of gray. Some people have optic nerve damage, from multiple sclerosis or other conditions. Some are nearsighted or farsighted.

(This is on Bruce’s old site; his new site did not carry over the old archives.)