Looks like the virus email onslaught is slacking off, finally. I must have recieved over two hundred of them over five days. Fortunately Thunderbird knocked them all down as spam after the first couple, but still annoying to have to download them all in the first place.

On the note of email viruses and Outlook, have a read of this post at Daring Fireball. Though written from a Mac user’s standpoint, it is still a good read. In my opinion Outlook and Outlook Express are severe problems. No other email client allows a virus to run without user intervention. We all learnt the “You can’t get a virus from opening an email” mantra, only to have Outlook make us eat our words. Hopefully the new security concious Microsoft will make viruses like this a thing of the past with new releases of Outlook, though many people will still be using old and vulnerable versions. Only time will tell.

Though this site isn’t XHTML (yet), I try my best to use structural and meaningful markup to the content of the document. In my mind at least, this is more important than having my pages valid to the latest standards in the most squeaky clean way. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that in the end people’s experience of the site is more important massaging our egos with “Valid XHTML” logos. This isn’t saying standards are not important; on the contrary, they help to ensure that our content is accessible to all, both backwardly with old browsers and for the new browsers that are released in the future. It is just making the point that a valid site is not the be all and end all of website authoring.

In light of some of the recent items online about semantic markup and valid markup and how one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other, Simon Willison makes a good point about HTML being more a structural rather than semantic markup language. An interesting observation, hitting the nail on the head of the difference between XML and HTML at a fundamental level.

Eric Meyer has put up a nice little article about using CSS floats and some of the pitfalls involved with the ways they are rendered. Not exactly indepth, but it puts forward some techniques to make working with floats that bit easier and more predictable.

I do admire OpenOffice.org, and use its products on Linux. I’m starting to use them on Windows aswell, recently. However, I’d be the first to admit that OpenOffice needs quite a bit of polish. The basic features are all there now, it just feels rather clunky. So it was with interest I read the product concept for version 2 of the suite. If they manage to do all that the document says they hope to, OpenOffice will become a lot more pleasant to use. Version 1.1 has improved things, but the ideas for 2 are leaps and bounds ahead of the current version. Good luck, guys!