Useful Links: Twitter Fan Wiki, State of the Web, and an off topic foray

Useful links, including the Twitter fan wiki, a short essay of mine, the results of the state of the web survey and a look at bold and italic.

Thanks to a tip from the fabulous Miraz, I discovered the Twitter Fan Wiki and its page of apps that work with Twitter. I was just reading in Macworld yesterday about the Twitterific app for the iPhone, but this page reveals many more choices.

The Gift is a story of mine, totally off topic and only for the incurably curious about me. Published at The Elder Storytelling Place.

A Blog Not Limited reflects on the results of the state of the Web 2008 survey. At a Blog Not Limited, we see,

What surprised me the most (in an entirely unpleasant way) were the findings for use of HTML elements:

Seventeen percent use <b>
Fifteen percent use <i>
Seriously? Someone please explain this to me.

I can explain why I occasionally use <b> and <i>. There are times when I need a presentational effect that does not involve emphasis or strong. I don’t want to give the impression that the marked up text should be more important or in any way distinct.  I just want a presentational effect that will be apparent to the majority of users and won’t confuse users with assistive software.

If I don’t have control over the CSS for a site, and I write for a lot of sites where I do not, then how can I achieve benign presentational effects like bold or italic without using <b> or <i>? Em and strong have semantic meaning that I may not want to attach to text. Therefore, I may resort to bold and italic for appearance sake.

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