I argued with a friend this morning about the citeelement in HTML. I thought <cite> could only be placed at the end of a blockquote element to indicate the source of the quote. And she thought it was for define citations in a paragraph while I thought that the q element was for them. But we were both wrong.

As it’s said in the W3C HTML 4.01 Specification, CITE contains a citation or a reference to other sources.. Well, the example is more explicit:

As <cite>Harry S. Truman</cite> said,
<q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</q>

The cite element is mostly used to define who said something.

That’s quite confusing, isn’t it? <cite>, <q> and <blockquote cite=""> are really different, but are used for the same thing: quotes.

A List Apart (which also offers great t-shirts) has two great articles about two different things related to multi-columness: one about multi-column lists by Paul Novitski and another one about the “experimental” multi-column CSS3 module by Cédric Savaresse. Worth a reading.

I ordered my laptop yesterday evening at Dell.ca.

Dell Inspiron 6000d

Intel® Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz/2Mb cache/533MHz bus)

15.4 inch WSXGA+ LCD Panel

1Go DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms

128Mo ATI’s Mobility® Radeon™ x300

80Gb Hard Drive

8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer write capability

Can’t wait to receive it.

In the same topic as Jeff Croft’s one, I have to admit that I am addicted to Lost. I watched the first season in french at bought by Radio-Canada and loved it immediately.

Now, I’m watching the second season on fridays — I know it’s on Wednesday — since I don’t have ABC here; but it’s more, more interesting in english than in french.

Anyway, I’m addicted. Spoiler just there -› Can’t wait to see wednesday’s episode to see who’s that Desmon living under the island.

• Lost in Wikipedia
• Informations section about Lost in Francophone Wikipedia — especially great stuff about the numbers
• Lost on Wikiquote
• The “numbers” on Google

Relative links (<link rel="" />) are an important accessibility feature each website should have. A lot of websites got their data structured like a directory, like WordPress powered sites, and users should always have the opportunity to navigate in this structure without the help of the navigating system provided by the site (eg. XHTML+CSS navigation menu).

So I’m finally releasing my plugin for WordPress called “Relative Links“.

As it’s written in the work page:

This plugin places relative <link>’s in each page header, such as rel="next" and rel="up", which allows some browsers to take advantage of this feature, by
providing sequential and structured navigation for a website to the user.

So, basically, what it does is: it puts relative <link>’s tags in each page header. It adds:

• Top link based on weblog’s name and URI
• Up link based on requested URI’s structure
• Next, Previous, First and Last links based on the selected post/day/month/year.

The plugin is still in beta state, so it’s normal if you find bugs in it. Reading the “Notes” part included in the file before using it would be a good idea.

The plugin is here: Relative Links.

Enjoy!

I’m looking for a laptop. The two best choices I’ve got yet are:

PC

Intel Pentium M 740 FSB 533 1.73 1.8Ghz

80GB Hard drive

1024MB RAM

Mobility™ Radeon X600 128MB

DVD/CD burner combo

Price: $2,065.30 CDN + tax

Mac

12′ inch Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz

SuperDrive (DVD/CD burner)

NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 (64MB DDR)

512MB RAM

80GB Hard drive

Price: $1,899.00 CND + tax (student price)

The only thing that keep me from buying the mac is that Apple are supposed to change their PowerPC cpus to Intel’s ones. Plus, my iriver H10 isn’t mac-compatible… but did I mention that if I buy a Powerbook, I get a free iPod mini?

What do you think? Would buying a Mac at this time be a good idea?

Back in the old 2002 web, my first experience in a web community was with VirtualPlastic. Modzine (the big “M”) , Winmod, Skinnables, Tek, etc.

But when I kinda left the community to become more active in the blogosphere and the web design community, Matthew Malensek (known as pogrelz) had shut down Modzine for weeks I think.

I kept posting on Winmodz forums for few months after that, and I completly left it when pogz lost the database that contained all the forum data since its beginning, on May 2003.

But this morning, when I came to my friend Joël’s blog, akikaze, and I saw that his latest post was titled “the Big M“, I thought “omg“; Finally, we’re gonna see that nice “M” again! YAY!

Say hello to Modspots!

Each time Is see something like this, I’m very, very pleased. Look at the names that are in the same list as me: Matt, Dan, John and Jason! Not that I don’t admire the other ones in the list, but — oh my gosh — it’s so good to see that someone who dares to compare me to great bloggers.

Anyway, you may think I’m boring because I’m too enthusiastic about the fact that someone put me in their blogroll with some of the best-known web designers in the world.

But seriously, if you were in the same unordered list as Dan Cederholm, you’d understand. ;-) If there was a XFN value named “idol“, I’d tag an hyperlink to Dan’s website with it.

Mint? Don’t know what Mint is? Well, if you have been away from the Earth since tuesday, it’s probably normal; otherwise it’s quite not normal!

Mint is the replacement for ShortStat, the freeware statistics viewer using PHP. Both are — were (for ShortStat) — made by Shaun Inman.

First, let’s talk about the weekend buzz caused by the release of the so-waited software. Announced on the weblog of mostly every beta testers (I guess, I don’t know how many they were): Jeff Croft, Jason Santa Maria and Kevin Cornell to only name a few. There were so much good words about the final product that the community couldn’t dislike it.

I didn’t test the software so I can’t say if it’s worth 30$ for each site it’s installed on. My instinct tells me that it is a excellent product (as ShortStat is) but there are some excellent freeware or open-source alternative out there. Awstats to name only one.

Also, I don’t think my site is popular enough to spend 30$ to see max. 20 different referrers a day. If I had over 200 uniques per day, I think I’d consider buying it.

The best thing for me — but not for Shaun — would be a free version with only basic features, like last referrers, total unique visitors/day, etc. Something like ShortStat, but with that awesome green and gray design.

At school we’re currently doing something I expected but not wished: we’re learning how to design websites with… tables. Well, we’re using CSS but not for layout structure, only typography, backgrounds and such — what a waste of time.

At least I’m trying to convince my school mates that tables suck for designing.

*Sigh*.