Burningbird

In Technology at Burningbird:

The Learning Node book is far enough along so that I can publish the Table of Contents for the book and it shouldn't differ significantly from the TOC for the book when it's finished. The chapters with an expanded TOC are those already finished—the rest are still in work. Before I print out the TOC, though, I thought I'd write about some of the underlying themes that helped define the book structure and determine the direction of the writing.

I decided it was time to publish the book's structure. Hopefully it generates some interest.

Yes, some folks wanted to build a horse slaughterhouse here in Missouri.

Let's just say, folks here didn't take kindly to the idea.

The last horse slaughterhouses in the US closed several years ago, when the funding for horse slaugherhouse inspections was yanked from the USDA. Thanks to three Congressional representatives tacking an amendment on to a budget bill, the USDA funding for house slaughterhouses has been added back. Thing is, they didn't provide any money to do the inspections. Our Congress, not at work.

For an insider look at what it means to have one of these plants in your community, check out Texas Mayor Paula Bacon Kicks some Horse Slaughter Tail. Note that there's ongoing efforts to build a plant in Missouri, Tennessee, Oregon, and Washington.

I had no idea I had comments on a couple of my stories at Technology at Burningbird.

I am opening my sites up for comments again. No, not Facebook or Disqus, Drupal comments. You don't have to sign up for a user account, because I get too much spam when I expose this form. But the comments do go into moderation. Unfortunately, I discovered today that I'm not getting emails when people comment, so I had comments in moderation for several days. I guess I'll have to keep checking.

Does anyone know how to turn on email notifications when new comments come in? (update Re-discovered triggers and actions, all better now...)

And I had to turn on the air conditioning today. It got up to 86 degrees. I can't believe this weather.

In Tech at Burningbird, Any element can be replaced by something more relevant:

And now, the gauntlet has been tossed: longdesc is our princess in the tower, the W3C the wicked sorceress, and the demand has been made that either a knight in shining armour rescue the poor damsel or she be dragon kibble.

I challenged the hidden attribute years ago because it seemed to me it was nothing more than an elemental equivalent of display: none. However, others, including the co-chairs, disagreed with me, and agreed with the HTML5 editor: the hidden attribute had the additional semantics related to its irrelevancy.

Based on this decision four years ago, I'm at a loss to understand why the HTML5 co-chairs would consider an option to allow aria-describedby to link to this content so that it can be rendered by screen readers—in effect, to make the content in the element with the hidden attribute, relevant. Something cannot be both relevant and irrelevant at the exact same time.

Read more in If it had remained the Irrelevant Attribute.