Semi-transparent backgrounds are nice. They would be more popular, but Internet Explorer doesn't support .png transparency. There are a few clunky workarounds. Here's another that's a little less clunky.

Update: Here is probably the easiest way. You can stop reading this page now.

Update: The kind folks on css-discuss point out some other methods. I believe most of them use javascript.

Update: An article from A List Apart has more techniques (some of which are downright painful to look at...)

Update: Workaround for link bug in IE 6.0

Update: Now works in IE 5.0 (Thanks MG)

Example:

When I was a teenage kid, I worked at a boy scout summer camp. The camp director gave us some advice.

"During the summer, something will happen to you: A kid will come up to you all happy and amazed because he just caught a frog. But it won't impress you much, because you'll have seen a dozen kids catch a dozen frogs."

"The thing to remember is, that's his first frog. He's never going to forget it. That kid and that frog and that moment are special, and they're why we're here."

"You may get exhausted during the summer, but remember - your purpose is to be as excited as that kid with his first frog."

Adobe: Hey Steve, your iPhones and iPads and stuff are great! What a fantastic opportunity to help drive our tools and solutions and platform into the mobile space!

Steve: Yeah, I bet you'd like that. How much would you like to pay us?

Adobe: Zero dollars. But just think, all the flash games on the whole WEB could be on the iPhone.

Steve: Uh sure. We have this app store, where we receive dollar money for every single app sold. How much dollar money would all those web flash games make for us?

Adobe: Zero dollars.

Steve: Eat a bag of dicks.

Adobe: Developers want to develop for the iPhone. Flash developers. There are thousands and thousands of them.

Steve: Yeah, we have thousands of developers too.

In 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote the "unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit "showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks"

The essay below is a heavily modified copy - you can read the original here.

The substituted EFCE costs come from the 2006 and 2009 Minnesota state budgets (both links are .pdf files).

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You can’t escape the topic of education reform today, no matter what you do. Hours of the president on TV, and the onslaught of media ads are designed to tell the American people how terrible the current education system is, and the utopia we will experience once we have public education. Everyone will be covered from kindergarten to grade 12, and the cost will be less than what we are currently spending.

If that is the case, sign me up! Who in their right mind wouldn’t want the best education in the world for less money? Of course, I’m being facetious here, and for good reason.

The night before, we passed through occasional hazes of gunpowder smoke. Tonight, the whole area was blanketed with a similar haze, but it was fog, not smoke. It was the kind of night where if you were camping and you hung something on the clothesline to dry, you'd be disappointed.

Barack Obama went on the O'Reilly show of shows last week. Mr. O'Reilly wrote a column about the interview.

I transcribed the column below.

My copy-paste key is broken, so I had to do it from memory. Apologies for any mistakes or omissions.

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Like him or not, you have to give Barack Obama credit for waging a smart, focused campaign. Destroying the Clinton machine was a major achievement and so was putting together a successful convention in Denver. Obama is now firmly a part of U.S. history, no matter what happens in the presidential election. He's placed himself squarely in a historical place. An important place, just for him.

The problem some Americans continue to have with the Senator is that he is long on charisma but short on detail.

A little man-on-man action right here:

(Thanks Selah!)

I wrote a rant about something that annoyed me greatly when working with JS libraries.

read the rant if you want. Or read below, which is the same thing, but in a nicer and hopefully clearer way.

Because about half of what I ranted about was wrong, and the other half wasn't worth getting angry about. It's just slightly annoying.

A great deal of what I do with js libraries is move page elements around, change their size, and toggle them on and off.

Every JS library has slightly different ways to do this, and these ways aren't internally consistent.

(By "internally consistent", I mean that functions which get a value should return data in the same format accepted by functions that set that same value.)

This isn't too surprising, considering that the properties in question are really css.