Elouise Oyzon, a careful recorder of design processes, and author and animating spirit of Weez Blog has inspired me to think about folds. Take one point in a series of entries. Map it onto another point in the same series of entries. Like a crease in origami. Like this-day-in-history exercises.

The fold analogy is perhaps misleading. When I contemplate an XSLT transform to automate the folding at some arbitrary point on some set of blog entries marked up in XML, it is the image of cutting a deck of cards and laying them out in parallel rows or columns that comes to mind. I can imagine such shuffling as leveraging the attributes available through conformance with a DTD derived from the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. And so "corresp", "next", "prev" and "synch" can be accorded a variety of values based on generataing a reading traversal of the entries. And a reading traversal or web can be marked up in a stand alone fashion.

A point. A fold. A table. A set of moves familar to those conversant with re-reading. Some unit (page, stanza, paragraph, etc.) becomes the base for comparisons. A universe. A galaxy. A star.

Xooming. Cross-Zooming.

Elsewhere, what began as a trip into the brand names ended in speculation about material culture. I was intending to highlight spam's assonance with scam. Now that I have placed the verb "scan" in the first position in the title to this entry, I see that I was pointing away from spam towards cans (both as containers and capablities).

I like to scan spam. With Elm as my email client, should I by mischance open an incoming message doctored to fool the filters, I see the tagging and in that jungle it is difficult to tell what is being sold.

A game of stop words and proximity relations. Do the S and the E need to be separate? Or the X and the E? How would case and whitespace affect the readability for humans? <sxxx>T </sxxx>U R <iop>N I P</iop>

As the example shows, the poetry of spam resides not only in the single subject line. Nor does it dwell in single messages alone. Grouping matters. Like an index of first lines, a contingent series of spam messages sometimes clamour in a sometimes clumping polyphonous form. Reading those subject fields in clusters gives one a sense of the markets in porn, drugs, software, hardware and the pulse of the pitches to part fools and their money. One is tempted to plot frequencies.

Who has not felt tugged by the lure to get rich quick? Who has not been an avid bargain hunter? A voyeur?

Somewhere spam senders are paying for connectivity and somewhere that service is being taxed and somewhere revenues are being generated for kindergartens and old age homes. Ah, but you will ask, is it fair for the receiver to be reminded of veniality and incur expense in being reminded. What is the cost of forgetting?

As I scan the subject lines and provenance of messages I recall a version of processed luncheon meat called Click. A brand name very similar to the sound of the key used to open the can. A lever actually, with one end like the eye of a needle and the other like the handle of a key to wind up a toy or a clock. The key came attached to the can. The key was detached and the eye-end hooked into a tiny tongue. A winding motion resulted in a wrapping of a strip of the tin and paper round the key. Considerable skill was required to avoid premature snapping.

There were containers that did not come with tools. Some books still require their pages to be slit.

The can opener on a Swiss army knife could also open bottles.

One kitchen tool was the bottle opener (for glass bottle with caps) at one end and a can opener (for cans of liquids) at the other. The can opener too was a lever. It was used to perforate the top of the can. For example, tomato juice cans would receive two holes before pouring. The holes would be placed at diametically opposed positions on the circle. Sometimes one hole would be a bit smaller, the air hole.

Tetra packs don't quite have the same craft potential as an old tin can. However masses of them have been recycled into construction material. And the better ones make provision for an air hole.

A can not a tin. From the Old English for cup. Apt now when I think of cans as repurposed containers akin to the reusable mason jars. But unlike glass, a nail and hammer could tackle a can and produce amateur tinwork.

Prying caps with a bottle opener was also an art. You didn't want to dent the cap too much. It could be added to a prized collection.

No fuss with milk bottles. No bottle opener was necessary. Fondly hoarded collection of cardboard milk bottle tops were, I believe, to inspire Pogs, some time after glass bottles had been replaced by cartons. With the arrival of plastic spouts and foiled seals, the art of opening cartons now tackles a different set of fine motor coordination demands.

However much I like the design concept of a milk carton that unseals to form a spout, which produces no disjecta beyond its on shell and serves on occasion to create candles or nuture seedlings, I am not nostalgic. I am merely sensitive to the memories of handling containers and how such memories might impact not only on content modelling but also on text processing, that is reading and writing. Material culture counts.

It is not a straightforward progression from the lapwards look of the toddler sharing the page turning experience with an adult to the lone gaze upon the table where lies the precious paper and then to the vertical window-on-community of the screen. A toddler can face the inscription on a tombstone or some other monument. An older child can face billboards, traffic signs, the marks on a doorframe indicating growth spurts and can use the natural light from window to trace an outline.

An ergonomic workstation would of course allow a user to lower and raise the components to be able to play standing or sitting and allow a further position: contemplating the display device as if over a pool of water where even the blind enjoy ripples lapping. Of course the touch screen tablet exists. Will its deployment affect how office furniture, chairs and board rooms come to be viewed?

There is in the book by Brian Cantwell Smith a passage that fascinates me. World-directedness takes many forms. [...] subjects (their experiences, representations, documents, intentions, thoughts, etc.) point or are directed towards the transcendent-but-immanent world that surrounds them. A symmetrically realist account per se supplies two of the requiste ingredients in this pointing: (i) the fact that subjects are in an enveloping world, which gives them a place to point from; and (ii) the fact that they are made of that same enveloping world, which gives them the wherewithal to point with. What a theory of intentionality needs to add is the far-from-obvious third ingredient: (iii) a way for subjects to orient towards that enveloping world, the world of which they are constituted and in which they live. What fascinates me is the way in which "from" is paired with "in" and "with" is paired with "made" and that "towards" remains unpaired.

The trio of prepositions reminds me of the experience of modeling content or a way of writing in/with structured forms such as those offered by the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. Marking from.... marking with... marking towards. In a very fundamental fashion, writing is about how to segment and how to align. Pick a point. From that point there stem a before and an after. Pick another point and observe that part of one point's after is part of another point's before and observe a between that emerges with its own before and its own after.

Place a mark in a given space and with the given mark, place another mark [erasing is a type of marking] or stop.

Now I see "towards" in Smith's phrase "orient towards" could be read sous rature. Peeking out of those italics is the phrase "a way for subjects to orient [...] that enveloping world" which gives a hint of agency to acts of world-directed intentionality. And so I read again carefully and note a progression from the indefinite "an enveloping" towards a singularly demonstrative "that" through an attestation of "the same enveloping". This rereading helps me better understand the medial position of the "with" between the "in" and the "towards". It helps me comprehend that the connectedness of the made in and of the world might pass through an orientation for the world. Indeed the apperception of being in and of the world might depend upon the declaration of the thatness of the world. (Note, I am not arguing that the world depends upon either the apperception or the declaration.)

What fascinates me is the involutive relation to the actual. It is a relation that is not tautological. I am here because here I am. Contrast this with absolute circular assurance of the I-am-that-I-am.

Smith does not extensively treat the ontological status of the hypothetical, the counterfactual, the fictional. Yet the trio of ingredients in the theory of intentionality he sketches can offer a topological insight into the relations between the actual and possible worlds. And allows us to nuance his assertion that You can hardly cook for dinner something that is fictional [...] with the indication that with every cook hovers a hallucinatory body.

You cannot eat a story but a story can within limits alleviate the pangs of hunger. You cannot drink a sonorous sequence but within limits a sonorous sequence can quench thirst. You cannot but imagine and that is different from and not the same as the list of things you can do with fictional things that is offered by Smith: refer to it, wonder about it, or entertain it in a hypothetical. To be fair, one can hardly imagine without reference, wonder or entertainment.

In, with, towards the virtual... In, with, towards the textual... In, with, towards the interactive...

A story can eat you.

After participating in an exchange through the Text Encoding Initiative discussion list, I have decided that <label ana="category">user</label> is now to be encoded using <index ana="category" level1="user"/>. Although the Document Type Definition (DTD) allows for the use of the element <label> outside of a list setting, the Guidelines and the examples offered in the guidelines suggest restricting its use to the list setting.

It is a situation that reminds me that in some legal traditions both code and custom contribute to the construction of law. The letter of the law. A history of its interpretation.

In other contexts I have resisted reading examples set forth by a given text as prescriptive [See my interchange with Nick Monfort in the comments to a blog entry by Matt Kirschenbaum on Douglas R. Hofstadter's MU/MI game from ]. Examples can be read as displaying what could be and not necessarily what should be. As one reads from the rule to the example, one is sensitive to the fidelity of the example, how it fits the rule. When one reads from the example to the rule, one is inclined, perhaps, to reach an understanding of the example as restricting the application of the rule. The clever sort of folk are likely to be opportunistic in their reading and shuttle between modes of approach to rule-example or example-rule pairings.

Clever or not. What intrigues me is that the subject positions involved in the reading of such pairings (hypertext in nuce) figure a governance structure that recall executive, legislative and the adjudicative functions. To act, to judge and to guide judgment and action. To deprecate.

One of the joys of working with Emacs is the buffer. The user can select and paste from many blocks of copied or cut text. Every time the user copies or cuts a region, the block is added to the buffer without wiping out the previous block. It's a compositor's dream.

One of the other joys of working with Emacs is the terminology: mark, point, kill-region, copy-region, yank from the kill ring. Text editing sounds like a playground game of dodge ball.

I like the symmetry: select a block to be copied or cut; select from copied or cut blocks. Emacs is a generous replicator. With other applications and platforms, I have achieved similar results using multiple windows to create and access scrapbooks. Still there is a difference. Select, copy and paste is not yank-pop. A clipboard is not a ring. See Bob Ducharme pages 14-18

Yes, memory management needs account for the difference. But the language makes one wonder. Does the ellision of selection in the common holophrastic expression (cut-and-paste) reflect a view of of the user as one-block-at-a-time reader? It may not just be memory management that is at work when one considers the metaphors that shape a user's understanding of what they do.

Intriguing how the ability to practice and compare different ways of writing serves remembering disjecta.

There is the book with a similar title by Raymond Williams. . This was going to be an entry about how to capture a list of keywords for the markup of a blog entry in a content model informed by the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. Then I remembered the title of a book that I have visited often and have on occasion cited as a nice and concise authority on the varied meanings of the term dialectic. If I had begun this entry under the rubric label, I might not have gone to the shelf and plucked down the 1990 imprint of the 1983 revised and expanded edition of the 1976 publication. And if I had not been thinking about the markup of poetry in blog entries, I might not have noticed. That I did notice is thanks in part to a current traversal of Robert Bringhurst's making me sensitive to right justification, the layout of the words on the book's cover. The title appears as one of the words in a list which appears to be an alphabetized listing (no Q or XYZ) of entries contained in the book. Marked by its end position at the end of a right justified line and by its colour is the one word in the listing that does not appear as an entry, the epynomous Keywords.

A first pass at transcription might want to register the line breaks. A first pass at transcription might want to capture the words. Let's get the words first and raise the question of whether in this case of a found poem one is dealing with lines or line breaks. The words: Art Behaviour Class Dialectic Experience Family Genius Hegemony Industry Jargon Keywords Liberation Media Naturalism Ordinary Peasant Racial Sex Tradition Underprivileged Violence Welfare

Rekeying such a listing and reading over such a listing, one develops an appreciation for punctuation. The line breaks? Art Behaviour Class Dialectic Experience Family Genius Hegemony Industry Jargon Keywords Liberation Media Naturalism Ordinary Peasant Racial Sex Tradition Underprivileged Violence Welfare

Bringhurst writes: The prose paragraph and its verse counterpart, the stanza, are basic units of linguistic and literary style. Nuance, not "the" basic units. Simply, basic units. There are others. In the case of the found poem on the cover of it might be the page which in this case also contains the author's name and the subtitle of the book [Raymond Williams A vocabulary of culture and society]. Would they too be part of some found poem? A stanza apart?

Parsing. Framing. Word wrapping. Line breaking. From reading lines to reading line breaks, what would I take? What would I set apart? How would I dance with the arrows of reading?

There is a secondness to my remarks. There is a sense of coming afterwards. It is a belatedness that positions me as a writer able to leverage a coming from, a carrying over. I am a person dragging a memory.

I see or sense a pattern here and wonder if it may not be related to a pattern there. Always traversing, I move from observation into speculation. This here, that there. Moveable?

That here, this there. Moving?

Playing with blocks: a way of writing becomes a way about the written. I set a mark, draw attention to a spot. Then I can plot.

It is a mindset that remembers involution. It is an orientation that can imagine an element pointing to itself through ID/IDREF relations. To entertain an example of mark-up inspired by the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, consider: <ref id="Konvolut_O" target="Konvolut_O">URL</ref> Odd as this may seem it is a way of being able to entertain the use of mentions. Odd as that may seem even.

Adrian Miles in VLOG 2.1 records thoughts about texture and images provoked by a visit to a museum. The entry I have in mind contains a rather marvelous remark: None of that Pavlovian click nonsense. I like the sharpness used to distinguish one particular work experienced in this context from a heap of others. Rote behaviour seems remote from what Miles praises: it was just dragging or mousing over and through the work that made things happen. However it is the very sharpness of the distinction that makes me perk up to this tender spot. Miles doesn't rule out that texture can arise from Pavlovian click nonsense. Let's see how it could.

If I follow correctly there is an enthymeme at work that begins with the premise that interactivity is more than mere clicking on hotspots. Interactivity is more than activating a link; it is approaching an anchor. Approaches depend upon sitings; not in the sense of processing visual cues but in the sense of taking bearings.

A rendering of the hotspot does often take the form of a visual indication of a hotspot. This rendering can take the form of underscoring of words, a border around an image, a change in display colour of the words, rollover switches of image. Already with the roll over, one is in the territory of the mousing over. With stylesheet overrides one is deep into the territories of mousing as scan in search of the tell tale change in cursor shape when all traces of hotspots are gone.

Apart from hotspots for the point-and-click crowd, there is the necessary click as the first step to a mouse drag over an area followed by a release resulting in a selection and then the roll in and out of the selected area that changes the shape of the cursor. Apart from clicks and drags, there is at work here a type of zone formation: there is a marking a spot, marking a second spot, capturing the space between the spots. Once a zone has been demarcated, it becomes the possible target of for the application of different tools (via mouse or keyboard commands). This description is an abstraction of what often occurs in word processing, film editing or the manipulation of digital images. In all of these activities, the rote aspect may reside in the display of motor skill. Conditioned response certainly is not an aspect of the selection of the locus of action -- a selection marked by that initial click.

But that is clicking in an authoring environment! Consider that drop down menus in a viewing environment require clicks. Consider that even without a mouse click there is a touch-and-release activity in scrolling through screenfuls of lines be they visual or verbal.

I am pushing this to indicate that at a certain level of abstraction the experience of texture depends upon an input and the feedback to that input. The relation between input and feedback rests on the parsing of bodily movement according to the duration of the movement. The Pavolovian click nonsense can induce a perception of texture that ressembles aimless page turning or worry bead flicking or the twirling of a lock of hair or the swaying of a rocking body keeping time to a tune. The page turning will speed up and slow down. The flicking will alter in intensity. Twirl, sway, rock, all open to modulation.

All this to indicate that the texture can come from clicking. A degree zero of clicking texture could be imagined in the case where the I-bean of a cursor is aligned directly over a blinking insertion indicator: no change in the flow of feedback from the screen, just the sound and the spring back felt in the finger tip. That is the where and when, where texture is grounded in touch, and only if one is deaf. And the hearing are often deaf.

For further reading, see Adrian's Paintings are not images entry http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog/vlog_archive/2004_01.html#00212

For some time I have been meditating on a question central in the discipline of economics. I have been wondering about the means of achieving value. I am beginning to think that beyond the simple accural of interest and investment (modeled on the movement of capital) that value comes through association.

In the practices of content modeling and markup, value is a technical term. Elements have content; attributes possess values. In a sense a value is the equivalent of content to an attribute. Much thought is given to deciding whether information should be encoded in an attribute or in an element. Strategies differ. For example, take the following bit marked up according to Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines: <div type="entry"> ...</div> Why not create a new element called _entry_ or _blogDiv_ or _blogEntry_? The Guidelines allow for modifying the Document Type Definition assembled from the TEI tag sets and they supply instructions for documenting modifications. I would miss the discipline of associating the text I was authoring with the content model that was devised by an international consort of working groups. I would miss not the rigour of discipline but the fecundity of the gesture of comparison. If I had chosen to create a new element would I have been able to think about the parts of a blog entry in quite the way I did? I doubt that I would have been able to translate a date & time stamp into the functions I saw at work across many blog interfaces. I was able to sort out the function of the time stamp as a serial marker from its use as a navigational anchor.

The tasks of a textual critic preparing an electronic edition are not just to add markup to a document instance. Not even carefully choosing what to add where. The tasks of an author creating an original electronic text such a blog is not just to fill in content for an element or provide the value of an attribute. Nor the tweaking of templates. The task of a critic and the task of an author are like the task of a translator. It is to imagine the otherwise. To work the form. To inform the work. Express what you want to do and eventually folks will gather round to help you. Time and time again I have witnessed textual critics and blog authors frame a wish and then seen communities of readers and fellow creators respond.

Worth remembering.

Blog entries are often time stamped and dated. It is assumed by many readers that the displayed time stamp corresponds to event of composition. However the resourceful author could be publishing from a store of pre-written texts. As well, time stamps can be fudged for a variety of purposes.

In modeling a blog with XML markup conforming to the Text Encoding Inititative Guidelines, I have opted for accession numbers (e.g. <num type="accession">111<num>). Accession numbers are used by museums and libraries for additions to the collections. I like the idea that a blog is a window on a collection. Accession numbers can indicate to a user that any given exhibit represents only a portion of the collection. Accession numbers can be used to calculate the distance between entries.

Of course, one can develop a content model that encodes a date and time format with every entry. Thus, permitting the user to retrieve all the entries bearing a 03:00 hours time stamp and comparing them with those that bear a 15:00 hours time stamp. Or gather and compare all the Monday entries. But there is not really a way of indicating in a such a succession of dates and times a suppressed entry (an entry written but not accessible to the user from the current display -- an entry that may make its way into the public record later [or never]).

There is a term in accounting that means to divide some fiscal activity into equal units of time, usually months, within a year. The term is "to calendarize." One can calendarize payments. Some blog authors calendarize their writing either by not publishing more than one entry a day or not skipping a day in a chain of publication. Some blog authors reserve specific days of the week for certain types of writing ( a bit of Friday verse, a Wednesday film review, a Saturday recipe). Some blog authors contract among themselves to write/draw upon a given topic on a given day.

If accounting is to telling, could collecting be to accessing? In a sense blogging is a redistributive activity. By playing with the partitions, the user, be they writer, reader or viewer, affect the nature of redistributive activity.

Consider time capsule blogging. Archival: combing the records (and those search engine caches) to read/view that Author X was blogging about Topic Z before blogging about Topic W. Future-oriented: sealing an entry with encryption and tying release to a calendar date or to some other conditions. Imagine that a requiste number of accessions attained in a friend's blog triggers the release of encomia and a treasure map (both encoded in TEI of course). Gives new expression to the phrase "blogging on borrowed time."

My favourite base-2 number is expressed as the numeral "101", my favourite hexadecimal number is expressed as the numeral "F1", my favourite number expressed by an ASL numeral is the decimal number "3".

I like the conjuction in my mind of the five senses and the suggestion of basic introductory courses captured by such titles as "Perception 101". I like to link the functionality of F1 (in one text editor [Tom Bender's Tex-Edit] the key is used to toggle between the last string typed and the last string deleted; in other applications, the key invokes the help menu) to a very sweet sixteen quandry of choice. I like the feel of incorporating the thumb in the sign for "3" in American Sign Language. I further like the feel of how ASL signs for number rotate so nicely with a wrist flick (indeed the flick is a necessary part of signing some numbers).

As would be my wont, I looked into how the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines suggest numbers be marked up. And found that I could mark up my favourites thus: <num value="5">101</num> <num value="16">F1</num> <num value="3">Transcription for the ASL sign in a notation such as Stokoe's </num> The element <num> can take an attribute "value" to indicate a standard form. The standard form should be described in prose description captured in the <stdVals< element in the TEI header. In this case, the prose description would indicate the standarded form would be decimal. The TEI Guidelines also provide a feature structure mechanism for more detailed analyses. With feature structures and values, one could even weight the metaphoric import of the numeral. That would be ideal for something like my favourite colour combo: #99FF99 (R:255 G:255 B:153) with #CCFF99 (R:204 G:255 B:153).

Counting to five. Counting five. Nuance.

If I recall correctly as a child I learnt how to count on the fingers of one hand close to the same time that I learnt how to trace the outline of a hand. Two different ways of counting. A discontinuous numbering associated with the tips of the fingers and the thumb. A route through the peaks and valleys giving the numbering a durative character. When is one one? When two has begun?

Years later I find myself enjoying the sweep of second hands and the cycle of hours portrayed in round clock face. Years later I find myself playing with the pulse of the time separator and the chimes to punctuate my time at a keyboard, my sessions in front of a screen. Sometimes I find myself controlling a cursor with a rhythmic movement of the mouse: feeding a beat back to myself as I deliberate. Other times I feed on the click of the keys. Or, for a pause, foreground for myself the staple sound of the fan motor.

And now I return to the hand. I compare ways of counting up to five. Begin with thumb and wind through the fingers. Begin with index finger and save the thumb for last. What is counting down from five like. It feels different. Counting down in American Sign Language (ASL) is a stretch treat for a tendon that runs along the ridge the middle finger: five digits spread out, thumb in and four fingers out, thumb back out and two fingers out, thumb in and the index and middle finger out, the index alone. That wonderful distinction between the three fingers representing the letter form "W" and the thumb with two fingers representing the number or the numeral "3".

There are many lessons here for how memory works. I've lost count.

I have begun to alphabetize. The XSLT transform files that I use to output HTML from XML contain a number of xsl:include elements. Some are now to be found in alphabetical order by the name of the files to which they point which in turn incorporate the name of an element they target in an XML instance encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. Almost. The para.xsl file targets <p> elements. An artefact of hand rolling.

None of this alphabetical order matters to how an XSLT engine proceeds to process the xsl:include elements.

There is a set of xsl:include elements that are segregated into another listing. Another artefact of hand rolling. This so-called segregated listing also contains xsl:include elements that are commented out (<!-- and thus inactive --*gt;). The commented-out elements in the so-called segregated listing point to XSLT files that offer variations of templates found in the XSLT files pointed towards by the not commented-out elements. Confusing to explain. Easier to show. <xsl:include href="c_plus.xsl"/> <!-- <xsl:include href="c_dash.xsl"/> -->

I could create and run an XSLT transform over the XSLT files to select, sort and group the nodes of xsl:include elements and of the comments. Easy to grab all the elements and all the comments and alphabetize each type of node independently. Not so easy to grab the relations between the comment nodes and the element nodes. The relation is implicit in the look-alike naming. Of course, I could try and rely on position: the commented-out element always following the not commented out. And XML-schema could help keep it all tidy.

I began to alphabetize when I had two files that began with the same letter and they targeted different elements in the XML (not variations on how to treat the same targeted element) and when I had about a dozen xsl:include elements and I was comparing xsl:includes across four XSLT files. Naturally a quick Unix diff command on the files would have produced a list of differences.

The push to alphabetize: critical mass to sort, comparative need (to align two or more masses of stuff to sort), plus trigger (remembering that alphabetic order helps humans run comparisons), and reluctance of applying an alternative method (machine comparison) and ignorance of how to apply alternative methods across platforms (the files gets worked on with various text editors in various operating systems). Reluctance to apply methods, ignorance of methods, reluctance to overcome ignorance of methods, remembering other methods, it is quite the route to automation.

Because I am authoring, I get to sort at source. The alphabet serves my automation needs well.

Elsewhere I have suggested that Kari Kraus's musings on accidentals and substantives led me to contemplate using an ID/IDREF mechanism to assist an XSLT transformtion in selecting which of two different characters would appear at a specific spot. The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines provide the author with the possibility of using the value of the "exclude" attribute on the <c> element (the attribute is also available for other elements). A fine mechanism for exclusive alteration. Great for providing a case for teaching a module relating to the application of the xsl:if element in XSLT using a test on an attribute value.

When I encountered another use case, it became interesting to consider inclusive alternation as again, the appearance (or not) of the content of an element in a specific spot. I was rather pleased to be able to consider inclusive alternation in relation to position. Again the ID/IDREF mechanism assists in expressing a relation in XML markup that can then be transformed in XSLT. <title> <w next="MetaM" id="HyperM">HyperMnemonics</w> ... <w prev="HyperM" id="MetaM">MetaMimetics</w> </title> Handy for introducing the xsl:choose element with xsl:when testing on the value of "prev" and "next" attributes and supplying an xsl:otherwise option. A yen for reversals and XPATH can make an appearance in the lesson play with the use of following::sibling and preceding::sibling to accomplish some matches.

The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines also provide for the markup of morphemes for the hypermimetic. And for the metamnemonic there is some XSLT that concatenates the content of a <num> element of type "accession" with the content of a <label> element of type "category" to create an HTML anchor element in the output (i.e. <a name="#label_num"></a>).

The use of the <label> element to produce these anchors has been deprecated. The <index> element is now used to achieve the desired result. See Entry 117.

The memory part is about getting the correct label attached to the correct spot. Imitation, like acting, is about threading labels and spots into dismantle-able chains.

Certain rendering engines in certain versions of certain browsers do not implement the @import mechanism available in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Given these conditions, stylists have some choices: Option One Maintain one set of modular stylesheets for all browsers whatever the implementation; rely on graceful degradation. Option Two Offer two sets of stylesheets: a single basic all-purpose stylesheet and a more elaborate set of stylesheets (built out of @import declarations); use Javascript to detect browser version and determine the appropriate stylesheet to serve. Option Three Give up styling, let user preferences determine display. Option Four Give up styling but implement an interface where a user could generate a stylesheet of their own devising.

At present, I am tending, for the Jardin project which is exploring content modeling of blogs via the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, to opt for Option One. The modularity that I have introduced into the CSS files relates to the background colours of the body and the divs of class entry. Depending upon which CSS file gets imported, the colours are reversed.

Option Two appears in and of itself to be lots of work for little return. However, the notion of browser version and setting detection driving a selection of a stylesheet can be coupled with a command to write content. A distinctive combination of message and style can alert or remind users of the control they can exert over display. Why bother? Why not just serve up a document with the message "best viewed with browser [name]"? Because that little message assumes that the user has not overriden the browser settings and that the content pusher can always control the styling. It also assumes that the stylist has chosen colours that work across all platforms, has ensured that the colours for text, background, links, visited links are all set (and none left to user discretion), has ascertained that font families and sizes are appropriate to a variety of screen resolutions and user perceptual abilities and preferences. "Best viewed" is a very relative designation and browser choice alone does not determine its measure. So why not lean towards a single stylesheet for all or no stylesheet at all? There is some value in thinking through what could be accomplished by browser-version dependent stylesheets. Option Two becomes interesting when an HTTP refresh response can situate it as an introductory step to Option Four.

Option Four seems to be a route that demands HTML forms, cookies and other fancy stuff. End state: automation, user stupidity. Just thinking through a possible implementation from the perspective of the what the user needs to know uncovers some very interesting assumptions. An interesting question arises as to where to store the generated stylesheet (server or client side?). A collection of generated stylesheets could become accessible to others through a library housed on a server. For me, this space of the collection as differentiated from the space of the generation also lays bare some other assumptions.

While authoring a stylesheet there is the desire to move between the declarations in the stylesheet file and a rendering in some display. One wants to see if one is getting what one wants. HTTP is stateless protocol. Copies of the stylesheet and document are fetched and cached. If users know about file systems, they can transfer files from cache (which gets flushed periodically) to less transient storage. If users know how to either override stylesheet settings with their own stylesheet or can modify files and create their own stylesheet associations, then Option Four can be implemented without any fancy stuff. The objective of facilitating user generation of stylesheets can be accomplished via text files: a simple listing of the elements available, an example of a stylesheet that can be modified, and possibly a pointer to a resource for more information on CSS or file systems or etc. This is in the great tradition of the read.me file. No magic without application.

Option Three is the de facto case with browsers that do not implement CSS. From a rendering perspective, the glory of divs in HTML 4.0 is in the line breaks they cause. Always useful to check one's HTML output with a text-only browser. Makes for scrolling heaven.

Kari Kraus's blog entry under a rubric which highlights the term pixel driving launched me on a meditation that gave me the notion of exploring the mimetic and mnemonic through hyperspace and metadiscourse. Kari's blog is called accidentals and substantives. A search string with Kari's name plus the term "pixel driving" will turn up a path to the November 2003 entry in question.

In the spirit of paying attention to detail, Kari's pixel and accidental musings inspired me to develop a content model that allows play with a single character. A hyphen taken as a minus sign leads one to contemplate the possibility of a plus.

For the technically-inclined: here is the XML conforming to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines: <c id="dash" exclude="plus">-</c> <c exclude="dash" id="plus">+</c>

The XSLT files that handles the output to HTML use a modular approach. A top-level xsl:include element is used to select the template generating the output of one or the other character in a given version. Both templates could be called in a given XSLT file to generate, for example, a header and footer which differ only by a dash or a plus, or a header with both versions one above the other (a plus followed by a dash or a dash followed by a plus) or a square formed by some combo (+, -) and (-,+). A giddy multiplication of a Cartesian take on a Johari Window.

Suffice it for now to mention that the exclude attribute in TEI takes a value that is of type IDREF. A value of type IDREF references a value of type ID. Values of attributes of type ID are unique in a given document instance.

Now I find myself asking how it is that humans create unique identifiers on the fly to help with memory work. The third house on the block before the fire last May... I find myself asking what sequencing might have to do before, after and across in reading and authoring blogs. The URL to Kari's blog is http://karik.wordherders.net/.

To read Kari's pixel-driving entry, access a copy using the following URL http://karik.wordherders.net/archives/001061.html

Elsewhere, I have remarked that blog authors can and do play with the serial potential of titles to entries and how searching and ordering provide alternative reading paths. Part of this observation comes from attempting to model the content of a blog in XML following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. The other part came from authoring in TEI. Both trajectories involve encounters with structure.

I chose to model blog entries using the <div> element. The <title> element appears as a child of the <head> element which is itself a child of the <div> element.

If several blogs and authors use the same content model, it becomes possible to research patterns over time. Imagine: author So-and-so favoured titles consisting of adverbs beginning with such-and-such a letter for a run of such-and-such a number of entries and when the author broke the pattern a ripple was felt in a particular cluster of blogs. A dream of formalist feedback!

I wonder about how blog authors begin to write entries. There are choices in opening the composition process: they might begin with a title or append the title afterwards. Before the products of composition are published, the writers could shuttle between title and entry and make many many changes.

I am interested in this in terms of the locus of compositional attention. A clue to remembering what happens in composition is to recall the reader. In some displays, the reader is afforded with a list of recent entries. Such lists usually pick up the titles to the entries in reverse chronological order. An author could play with the serial nature of such a listing. To embed a palindrome. To sketch a run through a spectrum of colours, seasons, planets. To establish a formalist pattern (or disrupt an established pattern) by an arbitrary run through a given alphabetic or numeric series. Such compositional behaviour could be called title tracking.

In French the semantic fields of cutting a loaf of bread and broaching a subject intersect through the verb entamer. So easy to imagine loaf cutting as broaching. And titles as serrated knives.

I rolled the die before beginning to write. Given that I know how the transformations work to send the entry to one of six alternatives, there is some chance that the knowledge of destination would exert some influence upon the content of the writing. This is espcially true of the roll of the die indicates that the entry would land in all the HTML (1) output or none (6). Three voices could emerge based on the partitioning of the publication space.

I will roll the die after the entry is written. This may lead me to rework content. I could want to populate all the output possibilities with a piece of content and the workings of chance may not favour the result that I seek. A game of variations could ensue.

Interesting how voice is connected with a projection into space. Also interesting that the degree of volume or amplification is the result of the encounter between a resistence and a desire.

test entry para

There is an unfolding about.