the ryan king

You may have heard of people wiping the email inbox slate clean to deal with the overload.

Well, I’ve joined them, but not intentionally. With a mistargetted rm -f, I managed to wipe out all of the email I have hosted on this domain. I have backups, but of course they’re a bit old.

If you’ve emailed me recently (like the last 4 months) at ryan@theryanking.com, and are still awaiting a reply, please resend your email.

I’m restoring what I can find from backups (and I’ve already better automated my backups). As Tim Bray had mentioned before, I am the worst enemy of my data. In the last five years, I’ve only had one crashed hard drive (which was because I dropped a laptop), but I’ve managed to accidentally delete large quantities of personal data many times.

Each time, my backups have been insufficient. Maybe I’ll learn this time.

Tim Berners Lee, the Director of the W3C, has just announced (on his blog, no less) that the W3C will be starting a new Working Group to work on HTML (in parallel to the existing WG, which will concentrate on xHTML).

A few comments about the announcement:

• It doesn’t seem clear how the new and old HTML Working Group’s will interact. I wonder if the old one is being kept around as a compromise for those who still prefer that HTML be a strict XML dialect?
• TimBL mentions the WHATWG, an independent, less formal group with has been working on an alternative future for HTML. According to Hixie (the leader of WHATWG), TimBL is wrong to say that WHATWG has no process. They have a process, which is, as Hixie puts it: i listen to people, i make a decision, i publish, rinse, repeat.
  (source)
• I wonder if WHATWG and Hixie in particular have been contacted and/or recruited to join this new WG? I doubt how successful the new HTML WG can be without the support of the the individuals involved in WHATWG.
• TimBL says As always, we will be insisting on working implementations and test suites.. I find this somewhat disingenuous, was many existing W3C RECs (recommendations) don’t have test suites and where formalized without having interoperable implementations.

I have a dotMac email address, ryansking@mac.com, but it’s disappearing tomorrow. I’ve grown tired of paying $100 a year for an email address and a small amount of web space. So, if you still want to email me, make sure you use ‘ryan at this domain’.

Sadly, in addition to losing the email address, an old website of mine will be disappearing. This is why, as much as possible, I try to publish stuff on domains I control.