November 2005 Archives

The Nation announced today they won't support any candidate that is not for a speedy withdrawal from Iraq. I disagree with them.

I was against the invasion of Iraq. I still think it was wrong, more strongly than ever. However, the reality of the situation is that we have destroyed the infrastructure and government of another country and we need to replace what we have broken before we walk away. We walked away from Afghanistan. Look what happened there.

Here's who I will vote for - people that admit the invasion was a mistake, and accept that we need to deal with the fallout of that mistake by assisting Iraq to rebuild. I don't want to vote for someone that thinks pulling out of Iraq is the solution.

It's kind of like a bad marriage that produces kids. You should have never married that person. Even worse, you should have never had kids with your partner. But you did. Step up to the plate and be responsible. It's not the fault of the children that you made a wrong decision, and the reality is that you need to be responsible for your actions.

The US needs to be responsible and help Iraq to stabilize itself before we leave, otherwise we are, once more, acting like a spoiled brat.

BTW, I also don't want my representatives to waste any time on blame. The Bush administration shoulder the majority of the blame, but the legislature went along with decision to invade. Perhaps the legislative branch of the federal government should look at why they were so willing to go along with the executive branch. First, though, they should accept a portion of the blame for the invasion.

In some of the best election news I've seen in a long time, USA Today reports that 'Intelligent design' backers lose in Pennsylvania. See, sane people are the majority!

The new school board members ran on a pledge to "discuss intelligent design in the proper forum" - philosophy or religion classes. Intelligent design is not science.

More non-science teaching in science classes in Kansas. Kansas education board downplays evolution - Science

It's so interesting to see religious conservatives, those who are really behind the non-scientific idea of intelligent design, call those who believe in evolution as fundamentalists.

ID is not science. Teaching evolution is not clinging to dogma. Get the politics out of education.

DITA has two ways of adding section-like structure to a topic - a topic within a topic and a section within a topic (of course, you can also have a section in a topic in a topic, or a topic in a topic in a topic, but you get the idea).

We've used section quite a bit, and it's really nice for online help. It's a way to keep the topic small, add some sections, and indicate structure. For example, if an object has two groups of fields, you could do something like this (note, this isn't really valid, but it's detailed enough to give you the idea):

[code lang="xml"]

This object is composed of two groups of fields: foo and bar.

Then you can add some more content that describes the object.

[/code]

You can do something similar using nested topics.

[code lang="xml"]

This object is composed of two groups of fields: foo and bar.

....

....

Then you can add some more content that describes the object.

Notice how I had to add an extra topic, with a required title, if I wanted to include information about the object after foo and bar, something I didn't have to do with a section.

You can see why section is so useful - there are times where you want to set of a piece of information with a sub-title within a topic.

However, this throws everything for a loop when you want to create output that combines multiple topics, some with nested topics and some with sections.

If you combine those two examples, what hierarchy do you apply to the structure choices?

Imagine your output is HTML.

Etc.

Assume that you decide the topic/section/title is higher in the hierarchy than the topic/topic/title. You set topic/section/title to an H2, and topic/topic/title to an H3. But what happens if you have a topic/topic/title without a topic/section/title? Do you make topic/topic/title an H2 or an H3? If you make an H2, then it's not consistent with the other topic/topic/titles. If you make it an H3, then your HTML isn't well structured (you don't have an intermediate H2 between the H1 and the H3).

Another issue is the body tag. The default DITA XSL FO generation indents the text based on the body element. A topic/section/title is within the body, but the topic/topic/title is not within that body element. So your output looks like this:

[code]
topic/title
topic/body
topic/section/title
topic/topic/title
[/code]

This implies, to me, that topic/section/titles should be looked at structurally different than topic/titles. In HTML, we should use H1-H6 only for topic titles, never for section titles.

I'm not sure what the solution should be for this. Section, while useful, just seems to break the whole hierarchy of DITA topics, and I think you should have a plan for how to deal with it before creating content using DITA.

One of the reason we invaded Iraq, according to the Bush administration, was because the UN weapons inspectors were not allowed full access to prove that WMDs were not being developed. Now, according to US News, we won't be giving UN inspectors unrestricted access to investigate allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo. Because of this, the UN inspectors refuse to visit.

Once more the Bush administration shows its hypocrisy. We can demand that other countries allow the inspectors unrestricted access, but we have the right to refuse the same.

Three more years of this, folks. Brace yourselves.

I told my wife and friends about this when Miers was first nominated, but I never posted it here. It was clear that she was a straw-man nominee.

The administration never believed she would be confirmed. She wasn't qualified for the job, yet the administration put in her nomination. Why? To see how she would be attacked, so they could develop a plan for that. To show everyone that they learned from the first nomination and got it right the second time. She was nominated to make the real nominee, Judge Samuel Alito, seem like a good choice, because, in comparison to her, he is.

It's the only plausible explanation for why Miers was nominated. She was not qualified in any way and would never have been confirmed. Bush knew that and she knew that. She was nominated because she, as a long-time and close friend of Bush, was willing to put up with the carnival that surrounds being nominated even though she knew she'd never be confirmed. Only a true believer would be willing to do that. She was willing to put up with everything that comes with the nomination because she believes it will be worth it in the end.