Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

I was debugging some problems quoting a piece of a Google Doc article when I noticed something funny in their HTML source, an apparent string bogon. For example:

<pre> List&lt;String&gt;<string> ls = ... ;<br/> Collections.sort(ls, new Comparator&lt;String&gt;() {<br/> public int compare(String s1, String s2) {<br/> return s1.length() - s2.length();<br/> }<br/> });<br/></string></pre>

In context, I think this is really a tag, not a badly escaped piece of the source document. A little googling didn’t find any information about it. I’m fairly sure this was never a real HTML tag or a browser extension, though I could have missed one somewhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?
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For my next book, I need a complete list of all the empty tags possible in classic HTML such as <br>, <img>, and <hr>. This is a list of the genuinely empty elements, not including the ones with omitted end-tags such as <p> and <li>.

So far here are the ones I’ve got. Am I missing any?
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For my next book I need a complete list of all the valueless attributes possible in classic HTML. e.g.

<input type="radio" name="p" value="debit" checked>

So far here are the ones I’ve got:

input

checked, disabled, readonly, ismap

select

disabled, multiple

optgroup

disabled

option

selected, disabled

textarea

disabled, readonly

button

disabled

script

defer

img

ismap

area

nohref

object

declare

Am I missing any?

Apparently it’s now all about Robert. When someone links to the New York Times instead of him, it’s a direct personal assault, not that we happen to read the New York Times more than Scoble so we never even noticed his original piece, or that we prefer a well-written text piece to a long streaming video.

P.S. Scoble was more interesting when he was blogging from inside Microsoft. That at least gave him a perspective most people did not have. Now he’s just one of dozens of independent bloggers.

Steve Wiseman nails Vista. It’s crap like this that separates the pros from the amateurs. The reason I do most of my work on the Mac is that Apple and the Mac community seem to have a much higher ratio of pros to amateurs than do Microsoft and the Windows community.

The Mac isn’t perfect by any means. I could say a few unkind words about its file copying too. However, problems crop up a lot less often there than they do on Windows.

The Linux community mostly doesn’t even try. These days they’re pretty much all amateurs when it comes to user interface design. The pros all left when Eazel closed shop, and the money spout got turned off. As a rule, talented kernel hackers and server optimizers do not make great designers. However, Microsoft still has the money spout flowing. Can’t they hire somebody who knows what they’re doing?

On the plus side, at least the Aero dialogs look pretty, not the crayon colored monstrosities XP offered. I suspect this time around Microsoft hired a real artist to design the look and feel. That’s important, but it’s still just skin deep. The user interaction design is much more important than the graphic design, and here Microsoft is still sucking wind.

Anyone know off the top of their head how to get a regular HTML link to bring up the linked document in a new background window when clicked? I do not control the document being linked to. The goal is to run through a site such as Artima or Digg and click all the interesting links. Then close the window and have all the articles opened there for me to read. In my case, I can control the page I’m linking from but not the page I’m linking to. This is for my personal aggrgeator so it only needs to work in Firefox. Ideas?