Let's get something straight: I don't think that. That's actually the title of a blog post on an Opera Dev blog I wanted to link to.

There's always a lot of talk of accessible JavaScript, especially from designers. Usually they advocate complicated solutions involving appending event handlers onto HTML elements after load, to avoid inline onclicks and such. And to me, that's an audience thing. Yes, flashy scripts on blogs for no good reason are silly, but to say that the user experience is equivalent between the real Flickr and the example prototype he put together is... well, you know.

I go around in my head about this occasionally, and sometimes I feel like I've sold out accessibility in the name of great features and ease of use for customers who can see at the expense of people who can't. Because let's face it, when we talk about accessibility and Ajax, we're talking about the visually-impaired or blind (and that's largely because of the terrible technology those users are forced to deal with).

But then I think about what amazing products we've made with Ajax, and what advances we made in usability and user experience (yes, the two are different) because of it, I don't want to stop what we're doing.

Besides, there's a semi-universal truth here: no absolute statements are always true.

Except that one.

Ha! But really. That's extreme. And worse - while the designers adding event handlers may be cautiously and constructively conservative, this is plain reactionary. I don't have an answer for it, but like most things, the solution lies somewhere in the middle of a pure Ajax world and a purely plain hypertext world.

Hot on the heels of Muxtape, a new (I think?) service called Mixwit lets you create mixtapes that are a little different.

• The tapes are visually more fun
• They're sharable on a blog
• It's flash-based (so unlike Muxtape, no iPhone compatibility)
• You can have multiple tapes per user

But most fundamentally different, Mixwit's pretty well protected from a C&D order by the fact that they don't even host music. All they do is let you search using Skreemr and Seeqpod, two already cool services, and grab the audio from the results.

It's a little lacking in social features, but much like Muxtape, a lot of the fun comes from randomly discovering new mixes and seeing what people have done with it.

Here's a tape I made of old ska, rocksteady, and reggae from the 60s and early 70s.

Why? Because WordPress 2.5 came out, and I pine for Blogsmith every time I use it.

This was supposed to be the be-all, end-all, Mr. fixit version because it changed so much design-wise in the CMS/backend portion. Well, it did change. Let's look at some of the benefits:

• Improved image handling: I won't lie, this is an improvement, and something that we need to work on as well. The biggest improvement is a Flash multi-upload, but I think Blogsmith proves that you can't end there, we've had it for ages but still have work to do.
  Note to all WordPress users: "Full" size does in fact resize your images, to the width defined in wp-includes/media.php. I use the image caption easy plugin, so I need two "full" sizes - one for with captions, one for without. I have to change that setting in that file every time? I'll work on it and see what can be done.
• Better tagging: looks a lot like ours now. But that's ok, with the exception of the auto-complete (really the big thing and we finally got around to it only a short time ago ourselves), we got the interface style from Flickr.
• "Improved" dashboard: Wastes piles of space.The same information, except I can only see some of it without scrolling.
  
• "Improved" post editing screen: Approximately 480 pixels down from the top of your browser viewport lies the top line of content in your WYSIWYG editor. I thought our 300 was bad, and we have a logo and two rows of navigation showing at all times. On my Macbook, I have a hard time blogging because I can see about three lines of content. I could scroll down, sure, but hitting "enter" in your post will re-scroll the page back to the top. Just a frustrating bit of unneccessary nonsense. All of the options, except the publishing options, are underneath the post, which I suppose doesn't technically bother me but why not use all that empty space on the right? I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind that, 2.0's collapsible side boxes were great.
  

I don't mean to insult what are basically my people, and I certainly am not trying to be on a high horse, but WordPress 2.5's CMS was quite obviously designed by "designers" who seemed to be striving for aesthetics rather than useful software. White space is very pleasant to look at, but a calming effect is secondary in my writing environment to the ability to do my writing.

I hope someone out there does a reworking of the back end a la the "Tiger" version from a while back, but frankly a little CSS work isn't gonna hack it. Maybe we'll do it...

Yes, my Blogsmith-powered blog is safe from all these issues, and has some of the best people behind it, but I do have other sites and projects, and they're hosted on Dreamhost. In fact, some of them are clients and friends' sites. The $7.5 million dollar fuckup notwithstanding (it didn't affect me), Dreamhost's ridiculous amount of downtime in the past 2 years versus the great service they offered when I first jumped on has gotten ridiculous.

High class problems to have, I suppose - they grew too fast. But I use a fraction of my alloted services, so it kind of makes me think, why not scale back the 180,000TB of storage and bandwidth you offer customers like me who pay only $10 a month?

The only thing they seem to be doing is coasting by on their "personality," i.e., joking on their blog about mistakenly charging customers hundreds of dollars.

At any rate, my account comes up for renewal next month, and I think I'm going to be gone by then.

It's that time of year again. Time to hit some warmer weather and hang out with a town full of geeks off the leash. It should be crazy, fun, and yes, even edifying. Maybe I'll blog my thoughts on some panels, but time can get away from you around there.

If you see me and the Blogsmith crew, stop by and we'll hoist a nerdy beer for Gary Gygax.

I suppose I'm a little behind the times, and maybe hindsight has left both of the authors here with a little change of perspective, but I was kind of bothered by a couple different blog posts on the same subject, namely that iPhone-specific or iPhone-optimized sites are tantamount to "this page best viewed in" warnings of the 90s.

First, there's CSS whiz Eric Meyer being absolutely, unequivocally, against optimization for a single platform. I get red flags going off all over the place when I see anything absolute - to put it another way, "absolutes are always wrong ;) - and this is no exception. The problem with his position is that is contains a lot of assumptions (and no actual evidence: I've never seen a site give the warnings he claims to have seen), not the least of which involves the "lockout of other users."

Now, if there is an iPhone-optimized site out there that locks out other users from the same content, point me there. A standardista's pledge of total inclusivity is all well and fine, but an iPhone-based site does not negate that inclusion. It provides an additional alternative for someone with a specific device. Comparing that to requiring users to be at a certain screen resolution or running a certain desktop browser? Off base. It's not the same. Don't get me wrong, I straight up learned CSS from Meyer's books, but this is the same guy who insisted that reverse-chronological blog post order is somehow "broken."

Second post is on a Wired blog, comparing the iPhone to IE4. Well, that's even more ludicrous, although a couple half-decent points are raised.

"In essence, Apple has forced a third tier of websites on the world by failing to provide developers with an alternative means of creating applications on the iPhone."

That I'll say is partially true, but I don't think the SDK is going to stop iPhone-optimized sites. Why am I going to waste valuable storage space on my iPhone to download (for instance) an RSS reader that has to connect to the internet anyway, when Bloglines provides me a browser-based experience tailored to my device?

And if I want that tailored experience, goddammit I should be allowed to have it. Saying you feel excluded when Bloglines provides a fine desktop interface and a great mobile interface in addition to the iPhone one makes little sense. You're not being excluded. And that third tier is hardly "forced" anyway.

In essence, here's my thing: if a content or web app provider gives you a full desktop experience, and a mobile experience, why not a third? Google, Bloglines, 37Signals, tons of people are doing exactly that and I love it. I understand that you don't want to see the "standard" mobile version suffer, but if it doesn't, what's the harm?

Your policy of inclusion looks pretty non-inclusive if I can't have the optimal experience with my device just because you're afraid of "locking out" non-iPhone users from, uh .... iPhone Battleship.

If, like me, you weren't at IxDA Interaction '08 in Savannah, you might enjoy this collection of videos from the conference. I've only watched a few so far, and though some skip the slides at seemingly important parts, many are really interesting. I especially liked Doug Bolin of Avenue A | Razorfish's presentation on making the complex help system for Microsoft's Sync, but maybe that's because we've been working on a help system recently as well. [via Thomas Baekdal]

Merciless deadlines at the hands of a famous wizard (you know what I'm talking about) have really had me busy and a bit high strung lately, so here's some Japanese Zen wisdom for you.

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.

"Come on, girl" said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"

"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

You're welcome.