“Why can’t a newspaper [use] more blog [technology]?

Barry Parr just concluded his “Why can’t a newspaper be more like a blog?” series. Over the last week or so, Barry has taken his “deliberately provocative” headline and explored how online news publishers could learn much from blogs.

While he covers a number of different related topics, his main point is that news sites should encourage — not just allow — readers to comment on their content, either through comments on the story itself (just like your standard blog comments) or through TrackBacks (which most blogs offer these days).

It’s a good idea, but it’ll be a hard, hard sell to most newspaper management, the majority of whom are uncertain about how to proceed on the web. Most stick to formats and features that are much (or exactly) like their print product. While there are some legitimate issues about liability involved, I think the bulk of the problem is a fear of losing control. Most newspapers tightly control their content and presentation.

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Styling Forms with CSS

While I’ve been using CSS for positioning on most sites I design for a while now, I’ve been using the “forms are tabular data” argument to keep using tables to layout forms. Recently, I decided that as much rationalization as anything and started experimenting on good ways to lay out forms without having to resort to tables.

I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve found these articles very helpful in my search:

• WaSP > Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms
• aplus > styling form fields
• PPK > Tableless forms
• Man in Blue > Accessible, stylish form layout
• pixy > Styling Form Fieldsets, Legends and Labels

The Apostrolypse Cometh

As is so ably (and in great detail) explained in this entry from the Cover Pages: You should NEVER use an apostrophe to indicate plurality, e.g., DTDs and NOT DTD’s. Thank you.

new sounds

Some new independent artists I’ve come across lately (via various sources):

• Vienna Teng
• Odessa Chen

Both are extraordinarily good acoustic-y singer-songwriter types. Great stuff.