Monthly Archives: June 2004

I’m not a feminist, but…

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I appreciate the right to help choose my government representatives. I enjoy the option of wearing pants or shorts if I want. I’m pleased that I was allowed to learn to read and write. It can be very convenient to control how many babies I want to have. It’s awfully useful to be able to open a bank account and own property in my name. I like knowing that my husband or boyfriend cannot legally beat me. It’s really swell to keep the money that I earn.

poster from one angry girl designs

p.s. actually, I’m not so shy of using the f-word to describe myself, but I really liked this poster which I saw on my travels

language transformation

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I wonder how you say ‘jet lag’ in Italian. There should be a more beautiful word to describe why I am awake at this hour of glittering sunlight in a quiet city of red tile roofs and wrought iron balconies. I listen to conversations that sound foreign, yet familar, filtered through my understanding of Spanish, rather than any true grasp of Italian. It seems an odd translation. Not one of language, but it feels instead like a shift through a spatial transformation matrix, as if all languages could be visualized as surfaces in some n-dimensional space.

enabling freedom of expression

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The Future of the Web is not the Past of Windows: XML UI languages are commonly used to accelerate and simplify development and distribution of desktop-like applications. Languages like XUL and XWT encapsulate the set of Windows UI elements, and the ability to rapidly assemble a Windows-like Web application using XML is valuable and has many advantages over building a similar application in Visual Basic, let alone MFC or Swing. Unfortunately, using XML as a way to assemble interactive components that are defined using classic GUI toolkits leads to homogeneity and artificial simplicity, and does not reflect the diversity of today’s Web. Freedom of expression is essential for a UI markup language.

Read the complete paper in html or PDF.

I presented this position paper yesterday at the W3C workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents.

Many thanks to my editor, David Temkin, who also came up with the title.