Blue Cord

The Biblical Studies Blog Carnival for May was delayed a bit, but Tyler Williams now has it up and running at Codex. A few hours later, the carnival for June was ready to go at Ketuvim. I know you are probably too busy to go to two carnivals in one day, but the weekend is coming up soon. Toss your tent in the trunk and shove the kids in the car and make a two day trip of it!

I have been tagged in the Binary Biblical Studies Carnival 11111 meme by Jim at Idle musings of a bookseller. Although Jim changed the number from 31 to 63 through the addition of a digit, I still feel compelled to play along.

The rules are as follows:

1. Tag five Biblical studies bloggers.
2. Invent fictional posts that they might have written over the last month.
3. Link to the original meme post at Lingamish.

Here is my offering for the meme:

1. Christian Brady at Targuman: “The Study of the Targumim Matters. No, Really!”
2. Steve Cook at Biblische Ausbildung: “Why So-Called ‘Second Isaiah’ is Actually the Work of the 8th Century Prophet.”
3. Jin Yang Kim at Old Testament Story: “Daniel the Wise-Guy: Interpreting the Book of Daniel as a Marx Brother’s Routine.”
4. Calvin Park at Random Bloggings: “How to Get Your Church Youth Group Interested in Learning Akkadian.”
5. Chris Heard at Higgaion: ” Simcha Jacobovici Has Asked Me to Write His Next Script!”

The monthly Biblical Studies Blog Carnival is up and running at Jim West’s blog. Head on over an take a look.

If you are visiting this site on April 8-9 (instead of reading it in an RSS reader), you will notice that the presentation of the site is a bit naked. That is because it is CSS Naked Day (which for some reason takes 48 hours). This was an event started two years ago to promote web standards. For those who are not familiar with web standards, they are a way of ensuring that web pages are displayed the same in all browsers and that web sites are accessible to people with disabilities.

One of the practices encouraged by web standards is the use of (X)HTML for the content of the site and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the display. In the “old days” of web design, HTML did both. This made the sites hard to update and was a nightmare for people with disabilities. Making sure your (X)HTML is POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) allows people who have trouble seeing the screen to access the site, because there is nothing to interfere with software that scales your site to be large enough to read or programs that read the content aloud. Although users cannot override (X)HTML in a browser, it is possible to tell the page to display with a different style sheet. This is a very helpful feature for those who need assistance viewing the content.

As a Christian, I consider accessibility to be an ethical issue. It certainly falls under the umbrella command to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). But more to the point, it would seem to be demanded by the admonition not to put a stumbling block in front of the blind (Leviticus 19:14). When I write my code, I do my best to ensure that it does nothing to hinder a blind person who wants to read my sites.¹

CSS Naked Day is a way to encourage web standards. Participants agree to turn off their CSS, so that what is seen is the structure of the site. The pages displayed on these days are nothing but (X)HTML. This is what accessibility software and search engines see. Showing the pages without CSS gives people a better understanding of the underlying structure of a web page.

For those not familiar with CSS, I encourage you to visit the CSS Zen Garden. That site presents a number of different CSS designs. Although the designs have a variety of appearances, every single one of them has the exact same XTHML coding. All that is changes is the CSS.

1. For the record, I did not design the theme that is used on my blog. I am currently writing my own theme, however, which should premier in a month or so. The current theme would validate according to web standards if it wasn’t for the Amazon.com link to my book. For some reason, Amazon uses an older technology to deliver this content. [back]

Chris Weimer at Thoughts on Antiquity has the latest Biblical Studies Blog Carnival up. Chris issued a post on Tuesday saying that he had not received enough posts to include in a carnival. It didn’t occur to me that this was an April Fool’s joke. Last month when I hosted the blog carnival, I was encouraging people up to the last minute to submit posts so that I would have enough material to make up a carnival. When I saw Chris’s post saying he didn’t have enough submission, I went back over my own posts in March to see what I could submit. I couldn’t find anything, as it turns out that last month I only had eight posts, the lowest number of posts in any month since I began blogging two and a half years ago. Spring Break and Easter really slowed down my blogging.

Be sure to check out Chris’s blog carnival, especially if you like discussions about translations and liguistics or posts slandering Zwingili.