I was reading the article When accessibility is not your problem today. It was pretty long, but interesting, and true.
What really stood out to me though were two simple words: "spacer GIFs". Ha ha ha! I've always hated those things, but never really came up with a name. Okay, sure, I used to use them. Mostly in my Neopets site, with the FrontPage borders and tables in tables in tables (in tables). You see these a lot in websites that people had designed for them back in the 90s and now need to update it. Lovely things. Spacer GIFs. Nice.
And another thing. GIFs are giffs, not jiffs. Who says jiff? Ah, actually, most people, I think. No. Jiff doesn't work. I don't say "I'll be back in a GIF". I say "I'll be back in a jiff". Jiff is already taken. And GUI is gooey. Or maybe gwee. But not G-U-I. It only became gooey when my grade 11 computer teacher called it that. The first time I heard it, I'm sure I giggled to myself, but now, a GUI is a gooey. And SQL is sequel, not S-Q-L, because that's the way I first heard it pronounced, on some video tutorial. That took some getting used to too, but now, that's just how it is.
Another thing at the end of the article intrigued me.
Next, if you want to use markup to make your complex writing accessible, maybe by including explanations of sarcasm and allusions, well, there’s pretty much nothing that would help for that. This is a perfect place for a microformat. You could use span or a div with a certain kind of class name, like metaphor or double-meaning. And you could style those differently if you wanted.
Joe Clark
How that would have helped me in the past five years! If every novel and poem and short story were marked up like this, and I could just view the source? Man, that would have been awesome beyond awesome.
Speaking of English, I had my Creative Writing exam on Tuesday. Well, I had the Peer Tutoring one on Monday, so let's start there. I didn't have to do anything for it, just walked up and down the rows every ten minutes or so. I had to go and get an exam from a kid doing it in another class and when I asked the teacher there for it she was like "oh, are you in his class?" and I said "no, I'm the peer tutor" and she was like "oh, I couldn't tell you look so young" and I was like "yes, I know".
Then Tuesday morning was Creative Writing. "I decided to go easy on you," she says, "I'm only giving you thirty multiple choice questions rather than sixty". One look at the exam immediately revealed why she was in such a generous mood. Back when we were doing our literary genre presentations, we were asked to hand in a sheet of ten questions on our topic. Turns out only three groups handed this in and our teacher couldn't be bothered to, you know, actually make up an exam herself. And there it is. The final act of stupidity from my Creative Writing teacher. I'm gonna miss her.
In the afternoon, I had my Communications exam. It's a grade 11/12 split class, with only four or five people in the grade 12 class, myself included. So, the teacher addresses the grade 11 class and tells them they have more time to work on their final project while he evaluates the grade 12s. Wait, what? I'm being evaluated? Shit! I didn't know I was supposed to do anything! I thought I was just going to watch the grade 11s present! Turns out we just had to show him the projects we had been working on all year. I'll probably be posting both of them here, since they're pretty cool. The first one is a mystery game, a pseudo-ARG, and the second is a Flash movie. He was really impressed by both of them, said he actually wanted to play the game and he seemed rather amused by the video. So looks like I'm going to do pretty well in that class.
Which is something I definitely need, considering it looks like I'm going to summer school for Calculus this year and I need at least a 90% with my current marks for it to even be worth it. Ugh.
And then yesterday was my Yearbook exam, which was just writing a page or two about what you worked on all year.
And so, there you have it. The end of my high school career. Mostly.
I was thinking about making a new blog, since I'll be starting university and everything. And because I wish I had a blog I could have read about what it was like to be a first year student. But I guess I'll just have to do it. Anyway, I was considering doing it elsewhere, anonymously, but naming the school, courses, teachers, etc, which I don't really do here, but would like to do. But then I thought, well, if I name the school and name the course I'm taking, it's kind of obvious who was doing it. Well, you'd probably have about a 10% chance at guessing, assuming there are 10% females in the course.
Anyway, I'll probably just do it here. I'm working on a new layout and it looks pretty good, so I want to put it up right now, but then I want to wait until university actually starts, you know? Well, I guess I have time to perfect it.