You make a plan, a plan in your head, and assume that’s how things are going to happen. They won’t.

Maybe you thought you were going to the cinema for a movie and a quiet night, but somehow you end up with a group of friends you haven’t seen in a while, drinking and chatting until the quiet hours eventually arrive.

Maybe you thought you were going to see an old friend at a certain place at a certain time, but he doesn’t show up in the three hours you wait (with others).

Maybe you really thought you were finished, but you know you’re not.

Plans change, nothing is concrete, people are unpredictable. This is not a bad thing. Life should be about the unexpected.

Maybe you should plan for the unexpected, but you’re probably planning yourself into a corner.

It’s always great when I can shape a random links post into some sort of tenacious collection. This time it’s language:

• Scrambling Words – If you scramble letters in a word (leaving the first and last letter the same), you can still read sentences full of garbled text. An odd bit of pattern matching on behalf of the brain. Via Aquarionics.
• The Shizzolator – Shizzles up any site. Not particularly effective on this site. However, a few random bits get through, making it funny enough.
• Tim Bray has cracked – He’s suggesting that we use “read” and “readd” to tighten up the English language a bit. Reminds me of Mark Twain’s improvements.

Like I said, tenacious… That’s all for today.

Time for another round of fighting with XHTML, accessibility and the like.

First, I now provide a custom id on the root (html) rather than on the body, for those browsers that I send the site to as real XHTML (Opera, Mozilla, etc). Other browsers still get it on the body.

Also, given the recent findings about screen readers, I’ve changed my skiplink CSS as appropriate. I wanted to use Tom Gilder’s skiplink method, but it refused to work with my site. I’ve gone for a more basic version, and will come back to the problem at a later date.

Finally, one thing I’ve yet to implement is marking up all instances of acronyms. Jacques is offering some excellent advice on that page that I intend to follow. But not yet, I’ve had enough of looking at code for one day.

I hate to say it (especially after putting in so much effort), but is the project codenamed Atom/Echo dead? Let’s look carefully:

1. The Echo wiki is largely dead. A quick look at the wiki’s recent changes shows that work has definitely slowed right down.
2. The Name Voting is an absolute mess. All of the originally cleared candidates have been voted out, the best names (Echo/Atom) have been deemed unviable, and the new names are… well, awful. Kitak, Mota, Syntia? Are we naming concept cars?
3. Oh yeah, and the number of votes for each entry are very much single figures, which doesn’t look good for community adoption.
4. The Atom mailiing list has plunged in usage. From around 30 entries a day at it’s peak to, at best, 5. Ouch.
5. The Formerly Echo blog is pretty dead too. Updates are sparse and short.
6. Very little mention of it in the places we used to see it mentioned at least twice a post.

From this, we can say that work has definitely died down. But, that doesn’t quite paint a fair picture. Important avenues are being explored elsewhere.

The AtomAPI is doing particularly well. Amongst others, a PHP implementation of the API is pretty much done, as well as PERL and Java versions. That’s a big step.

It’s tough to say. The forward motion we once saw has hit a wall. Hopefully, the apathy will clear up soon. We’ve all put in too much effort to let it die.

It’s been one of those fun days, but to save much moaning I’ll cut to the point: my mobile phone has died a horrible death and it’ll be a few days before I’ll be able to fix it or replace it. Fun. I know some people who actually know me read this, so consider this the best notice I can give for a few days.

In my infinite wisdom, I made sure not to keep a list of peoples numbers I had stored separate (on paper etc), so chances are I’ve lost 90% of the numbers I had. Joy.