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OK, so according to the Los Angeles Times, “legal analysts” are saying Karl Rove is off the hook in the Valerie Plame case because he didn’t actually name her, but referred to her as “[Joseph] Wilson’s wife.”

Let’s think about this for a second. If I say, “The First Lady is going to be speaking at such-and-such an event,” I’ve identified her. I didn’t actually name Laura Bush, but it’s obvious who I’m talking about. Since marriage is a one-to-one correspondence (at a given time, anyway) and a matter of public record, identifying “Joseph Wilson’s wife” or “Hillary Clinton’s husband” is as good as identifying the person by name to anyone interested enough to look it up.

It seems to me that the legal issues for Rove should be whether the outing was intentional and whether he knew she was covert—not what your definition of “identify” is.

Not that I have any illusions that Rove will suffer any significant consequences. When a highly successful political strategist says, “go ahead, name me as your source,” you know he’s confident about his defense.

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Halo and Sprocket Vol 1With Comic-Con coming up, I thought I’d look for news on Halo and Sprocket, a very funny comic book by Kerry Callen about a most unlikely trio of roommates: a human, a robot, and an angel. It ran for just four issues and a collection with a few extra strips back in 2003(?).

Well, there’s no word on new issues, but the website now features four comic strips that appeared in the Kansas City Star last November and a four-page story from SLG’s Free Comic Book Day offering.

They’re definitely worth the read!

Update (7/20): My copy of the TPB arrived on Monday, and the four-page “Aw Heck” is included. The other four strips are new, though.

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The Web Standards Project has announced a joint task force with Microsoft to promote web standards in products like Visual Studio and ASP.NET.

I imagine this was probably a factor in the decision to divest themselves of Browse Happy last month. Certainly this project is more in line with their core mission—promoting the use of standards on the web—and fits right in with the Dreamweaver Task Force they ran with Macromedia back in 2001.

(via WaSP Buzz)

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The ridiculous Firefox/Opera rivalry (it’s software, not religion) has given rise to one annoyingly persistent meme: the belief that tabs are just MDI (Multiple Document Interface).

They’re not.

MDI, as implemented in many Windows applications and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, involves having a mini-desktop inside your application, with its own windows that you can minimize, maximize, and rearrange. If you have a taskbar-like interface it can look a lot like tabs, and you can certainly use it the same way as tabs, but it’s a different UI paradigm.

A tabbed interface is very specific. You have only one view at a time in your application window, and you switch between them based on a row (or column) of tabs along the window’s edge. You can look at it as a proper subset of MDI, but it is not the same thing.

Additionally, classical MDI uses one master window for the application. All documents appear in that window. Tabbed interfaces often (though not always) allow you to have more than one window, each with its own set of tabs. This makes it possible to group documents, web pages, etc. by category in a way that you can’t with a single-document interface or classic MDI.

So when people claim Opera had tabs first, they’re thinking of MDI—which Opera did have before Mozilla did. Tabs were showing up in browsers like Netcaptor and Galeon, however, long before they showed up in the Mozilla suite—and long before Opera hid its MDI capabilities under a tab-like veneer.

(reposted from Spread Firefox in response to Asa Dotzler’s post on the history of tabbed browsing)

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Since we saw the trailer for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last week, I’ve been trying to figure out just what Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka look reminds me of. Then last night it hit me:

Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka Amelie Poster

He looks like Amélie!

But then, while looking for photos to demonstrate this connection, I discovered a more disturbing resemblance:

Willy Wonka Poster A Clockwork Orange: Raising a Glass

Hmmm… A Chocolate Orange?

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Well, I finally found out the reason for the Grass Under Renovation signs. I passed a median where a road crew was setting out what I first thought was sod, but then realized was Astroturf.

Nice one. I suppose it’ll save money on water and maintenance, but then so would painting the concrete green.

Couldn’t they just put in some native plants and leave them alone?

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Why do some spammers insist on prefacing their junk with statements like “THIS IS NOT SPAM?”

Some idiot just posted a bit long letter offering to let me put my “products” on their online store. No, they didn’t send me an email about, say, the comic book collection I’m selling. No, they didn’t offer to sell prints or digital copies of my photography. No, they didn’t offer to publish my writing or Katie’s writing. They certainly didn’t look for contact information on any of those pages, because if they had, they would have found it and used proper channels. (Well, probably. I occasionally get comments on my Flash site via eBay’s “Question to Seller” feature because people don’t see the email address at the bottom of the page, but they do see the link to my eBay profile.)

They posted a very generic form letter—so generic that I can’t tell what they’re offering to resell—as a comment on a two-year-old blog post in which I remarked on some new comic books I had started reading.

And you know what? That’s spam. You can yell all you want that it isn’t, but when you post a completely off-topic advertisement on someone’s site, when you send someone a (supposed) business offer without checking to see whether it’s relevant—particularly when you claim to have checked them out, but clearly haven’t bothered—that’s spam.

And denying that fact won’t make me accept the offer (or leave the comment visible) any more than the “Please do not discard” statements on credit card offers will get me to fill out an application.