Making good FOAF files is a pain. There’s the foaf-a-matic web page, that lets you type stuff in and formats it for you, but who wants to re-type all that data? There’s a Java-based successor, but that’s overkill, and still doesn’t have any way to import data, as far as I can tell.

Thanks to Address Book Exporter, it’s easy for me to extract data from my address book in a tabular form. I suspect that most people interested in using FOAF probably already have their data typed in somewhere, and would be able to extract it in this form if needed. From there, it would be pretty easy to use GREP to mark up the file into a usable FOAF file, except for the sha1 e-mail address encoding (which is not required, but is the responsible thing to do). And not everyone would be comfortable writing a GREP pattern, for that matter.

What we need is a little web utility that ingests tab-delimited text files and spits out FOAF files. I know it can be done–it’s just out of my reach.

I recently discovered that some spam was being sent with my address as the return address–the bounces were coming to me.

Other than pissing me off, I wasn’t sure what those smegma-sucking spamming scumbags hoped to accomplish by doing this. Now I have an idea: it may be to undermine challenge-response spam-blocking systems.

These challenge-response systems are a klunky way of dealing with spam: if Alice sends Bob an e-mail, and she’s not on Bob’s whitelist, the system sends Alice an automated response asking her to visit a web page and prove that she’s a real human being worthy of Bob’s valuable attention. This usually involves looking at a graphic showing distorted text, and typing the text into a box.

Even if this all works according to plan (and there are plenty of reasons why it might not), it’s very annoying. But as soon as spammers start sending out e-mail purporting to come from real people, it really goes to hell:

• If I am already whitelisted with a C/R service, the spam gets a free pass.
• If I am not already whitelisted with a C/R service, the challenge comes to me. Maybe I’ll respond correctly, in which case the spam gets a free pass
• Or maybe I won’t respond, or (acting mischievously or perversely) respond incorrectly, in which case the spam is blocked, but so is any e-mail I might want to send to any person using that system in the future.

I’ve recently noticed a couple of blogs that use an awkward “span” kludge to create “run-in” headings. These are both by smart guys who should know better. Instead of using structurally correct headings and paragraphs, the heading text is part of the paragraph, and is just bracketed with SPAN tags so that it can be styled differently.

CSS-2 does include a “run-in” display style that achieves exactly what these guys want, but it is not universally supported. There are a couple of possible workarounds, both of which I’ve documented. One is to float the header; the other is to style the header and the paragraph immediately following as “inline.”

I’ve written before about this, and now other people are too.

This solution is elegant–I like the “reusable postage” concept.

I’ve only tried this in Safari, but imagine it would work in some other browsers.

Safari allows you to set a custom base CSS stylesheet. In fact, this is the only way to turn off link underlining in Safari. Since I prefer this, I had already set one up. Simply create a text file, call it “mystyles.css” (or whatever) and drop it in ~/Library/Safari. Put the appropriate CSS in the file, quit Safari, and restart. For example, to turn off underlined links, I used the following:

a:link { text-decoration: none; }
a:active { text-decoration: none; }
a:visited { text-decoration: none; }
a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

It occurred to me that I could use the often-ignored attribute-matching selector capability of CSS to create a primitive ad blocker. Banner ads are normally 468 x 60 pixels. Using CSS, it is possible to select images that have declared height and width values, and style them as invisible. Here’s how:

img[width="468"][height="60"] {visibility: hidden;}

You can add variations on this with different dimensions for the tall sidebar ads one occasionally sees, use it with different tags, etc. For example the New York Times hides gigantic sidebar ads inside an IFRAME, and use javascript to indirectly load an image (actually, I think it’s a flash animation). This makes it hard to block the image if you have javascript turned on, but you can just block the IFRAME instead

iframe[width="352"][height="852"] {visibility: hidden;}

I’d be eager to hear any other uses for this trick. It would be nice if CSS allowed partial matches, so that we could match on, say *[href="*doubleclick.net*"] As far as I know, this isn’t possible.