Great knowing you John!

Or perhaps they have caught up to the latest technology of the last millennium and receive the documents as electronic copies — in PDF. Then they are at the mercy of whoever generated the document in terms of whether they get a usable file with embedded structure or a scanned image of text.

Government agencies large and small need to do what a very few have done: Don’t look at how you can use the new technology to fit the old process, take a look at what’s possible with the new technology and change the process to take advantage of it!

The pleasant irony is that this approach usually makes all parts of the process more efficient. Electronic files with proper structure can be posted, cataloged, and indexed faster and more reliably. The resulting copies will be more useful to researchers. They in particular will find that they can find and retrieve documents faster, and even search within those documents for specific information in just seconds. Everyone will be able to provide better service because they will be better informed.

I realize that from this podium I’m preaching to the choir, but I hope a few who can change these processes might also read down this far. Making documents accessible is fast, and they are far easier than their inaccessible counterparts to manipulate, too. Anyone who says, “We don’t have time to do it,” really needs to take a look at how much time doing it will save them. The changeover will take time and effort, but everyone I know who has done it has sworn never to go back to the old way of doing things.

John, you make me proud to be in this field.

I believe many authors avoid using [button] *because* they cannot be “easily styled”. Unlike [div] and [span], [button] comes with default UA styling.

Imagine the person responsible for posting the statements by the witnesses, and how far his/her job is from the environment of this hearing, and its content. It’s always shocking to me how little connection there is between the Policy Elites (who I believe are good people even when I capitalize them) and the thousands of people called upon to implement those policies without explanation, resources, or reward.

By the way, it was an uphill battle to get the hearing webcast with real-time captioning.

Which brings up an interesting point: If we’re truly interested in shortening long words for use as hashtags, why aren’t we using hexadecimal notation in our numeronyms? Lowercase letters should designate letters from the original word; uppercase letters would designate hexadecimal values. And, of course, case would not be absolutely required; we could tell that the first and last letters came from the original word and all in between was a hex value. So instead of #a11y, we could use #aBy. Same concept, but using a more compact system of notation enables us to save that crucial character.

Of course, I’m saying this with tongue in cheek. Of course #a11y works better. Those ones *look* like “ells,” and the next-to-last letter in “accessibility” is an “ell,” and they’re simple vertical strokes, as are so many of the letters in, well, in the second half of “accessibility.” So there’s a *visual* cue that makes #a11y work better.

Unless you’ve never seen the shape of numbers and letters. Then it makes no sense at all. In Twitter, to conserve characters we should count in a system that makes numeronyms as compact as possible, without regard for vague cues that only some can detect.