Also been playing with Gnome 2.8 now it's in Mandrake Cooker (thanks Fred!). I don't have much time to spend compiling stuff or doing system administration, so I give back a little of my time back by helping beta-test the Mandrake distributions. I'd actually give more if I could post messages to the mailing list, but that seems to be a problem with the dns server for the holoweb computer my brother and I share, and he's working on fixing it.
One of the reasons I got involved in Gnome originally was that it seemed to have a greater focus on graphic design and typography than other desktops at that time. I'm pleased to see Raph thinking about font editing again! Gill was the application that persuaded me, even if it wasn't in a useable state at the time as far as I could tell!
yeupou worries about Inkscape and (as I read the post, after boiling it until there is almost nothing left) whether advertising affects people. It does, which is why there's such a large advertising industry in the world today. Control of the media is something some politicians ennjoy, too, of course, whether through totalitarianism or through shared goals with the owners of Fo... er, television channels. :-)
Uraeus, I recognise those borders on your Web page! :-)
And I at least don't feel violated by it, although I obviously can't speak for our organisation as a whole.
We'd like everyone to use valid markup. It'd be a good start if more people simply used well-formed markup. Some of the earlier Web browsers indicated when the user was looking at a page containing syntax errors, but it was not a popular feature.
MichaelCrawford, I read your essay on Living with Schizoaffective Disorder. I applaud you for writing something that must have been so difficult. I'd like to hope that A Beautiful Mind helped a lot of people to let go of some prejudices, but maybe that's hoping too much.
chrisme - early on using Advogato, I posted an article to the rong site altogether - there were two sites using mod_virgule, combined with a bug in the Web browser I was using whereby window titles didn't always get updated properly or something, and the artcle for advogato went instead to the gender and sexual studies academic site. I've since been more cautious!
On people not reading it to the end: It might help to have a clearer indication of how many more pages there are to go, "page 6 of 9" or something: in printed books we have tactile feedack when e've nearly finished, but in a series of separate HTML documents we don't even get a scrollbar.
This leads me to a note on relationships between and within documents.
An early attempt to let authors give the necessary information to user agents ("this is a chapter of this book, here's the table of contents, here's the next and previous chapters) was implemented by SCO for their online help (back when SCO did technical work, I suppose) and partly in Lynx. But it never really took off.
Relationships between documents are useful and important, but neither the simple typed links of HTML (link and a elements with rel and tt>rev</tt> attributes) nor the more powerful RDF havereally taken off to represent them.
I greatly lament the lack of progress in Web browsers in the past decade. Maybe if Mozilla gets more popular we'll see some competition, although what I fear most is... no, I'll leave that one unsaid. After all, I need some sleep!