As a student of archaeology I find the notion of an indigenous British population frankly amusing, so I thought I might offer my thoughts and response on the matter regurgitated here

…since it’s first occupation several millennia ago Britain has been a rich mixture of people featuring a diverse range of origins, races, ethnic backgrounds and beliefs.

So, it all depends on how you define indigenous.

• Do you mean the African hominids that first appeared on the British landmass, long before it was a separated from Europe?
• Perhaps the Germanic hunter-gatherers who settled here after crossing the channel during the last Ice Age?
• The Romans who immersed and bred themselves into Iron Age society after 42AD?
• Maybe the northern-Germanic tribes – the Angles and Saxons from which the term Anglo-Saxon (and ‘England’) derives – that settled Britain in the post-Roman period?
• Possibly the Norse that dominated large parts of northern and eastern Britain in the 9th and 10th centuries?
• Per chance the French Norman invaders who arrived in 1066?
• The Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – sorry – Windsors that currently rule Brittania?
• Or are you referring to the members of the Commonwealth countries that arrived – invited – to help rebuild post-war Britain?
• Maybe our European cousins who have arrived in Britain keen to make a life for themselves by putting in a hard day’s work – the opportunities for which are numerous when so many here seemingly have no inclination to do so?

But then again I’m perhaps not entitled to comment. I was born in England the grandson of a German refugee who came here in the Second World War to escape the threats of a nation that feared and had turned against anyone that was different from an artificial ideal manufactured by a mad man.

Britain was a nation that welcomed her, protected her and accepted her. If these qualities ever desist to apply then I’ll be on the first boat out of here.

At the time I was working for a government heritage agency responsible for the online presence for an organisation that managed over 14.5 million archive items relating to 280,000 archaeological and architectural sites and monuments throughout Scotland.

Despite its public remit, RCAHMS had a perception of being closed and restrictive and I was keen to promote the idea within the organisation of communicating its resources outwith the confines of its website(s), as well as enabling other users to contribute their own information to RCAHMS from other contexts and social networks.

I’ll offer my ramblings on the relative success of RCAHMS’ efforts in another blog post but I wanted first to reflect on the notion of a web of data itself and whether it had any currency two years on.

The idea of a web of data is one that has come under fire in the last week or so. A regular user of twitter I was quite surprised to discover today that only a user’s last 3,200 tweets were visible through twitter. in the meantime, tr.im can no longer support its url shortening service, social bookmarking site ma.gnolia withered unexpectantly earlier in the year and we seemingly can’t even rely on flickr to conserve our much loved snaps.

Is then the idea of web of data – information, data and user-generated content moving freely between sites – still achievable? Is this a utopian, liberal ideal endorsed by those that have grown up with the open source and web standards communities? Or is it synonymous with the excesses of a pre-credit crunch world, haemorrhaging money and minutiae across the infinite possibilities of affordable digital storage?

Web applications are easily built, cheaply deployed and quickly disseminated. But rarely are the full technical and financial implications of such ventures considered in detail.

So what does this mean for the web of data? Is the movement of information now merely transient (who would be interested in what i had to say more than 3,200 tweets ago)? Should we be curating and archiving these relics of communication? Or is this web of data about me just a further signifier of excess that can no longer be sustained within the current economic climate?

Are the strands of the web robust enough to survive such losses or are we just going to end up with loads of broken links in the chain? Quite literally¹.

¹ Apologies for the mixed metaphor

I left the employ of RCAHMS at the turn of the year so it was great to catch up with some old faces and frantically bid some fictional cash against each other to acquire the crème of the crap.

So, after three or so hours battling out with our imaginary cheque books I concluded with the following squad of fifteen, coupled with an ominous sense of inebriation:

What thinks you for the coming season?

5 minutes on the computer without a mouse made me realise how completely and utterly dependent on them I was so an urgent, out-of-hours trip to Asda was in order.

Imagine my delight to discover a wireless mouse with the following features:

• Delicate figure, fluent and smooth linearity, gracefully curved top cover designed, comply with somatological philosophy
• Left side has striped and anti-slip plate, wonderful touch feeling
• Adopted 27MHZ Radio frequency to transmit, enjoy yourself freely in the wireless space
• 256 sets of ID code, there is no interference even many mice being used at the same time
• 800DPI, accurate position, free yourself on the internet
• It will be auto-sleeping without operation within a long time

Anyone know what somatological philosophy is?

In usual, dependable fashion answers were forthcoming from accessibility stalwarts (if that is the right term) Patrick H. Lauke and Bruce Lawson who offered the following responses respectively:

@cole007 fieldset, legend “date of birth”, hidden labels “day”, “month”, “year”

@cole007 3 separate inputs, each with a unique title, no label, in a fieldset with legend “Date”

These two solutions are perfect for my example of day/month/year, but what about less obvious examples and what about inputs that might have no obvious label or title.

At Net Resources, we are currently working on a search form for a client to query against a database on tartans.

One of the criteria you can search against is ‘slog’ which is to do with the thread count of a particular tartan. In official tartan parlance, a slog comprises of two three letter groups divided by a colon, eg. BGK:WRK. The logical break in the data means that the query input should ideally be broken into two divided with a colon, eg:

Slog :

<label>Slog <input type="text" size="3" /> : <input type="text" size="3" /></label>

However, these slog fields do not have obvious names that can be applied through a title or hidden label, so my question is this. How best would you mark a form with these two inputs divided by a colon?
What – in your opinion – would be the most accessible, semantic, dogs bollocks approach to marking up this particular part of the form?