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CSS Support Charts
Time to update bookmarks: The Web Review CSS Support Charts, which went offline several weeks ago, are back at a new home on Netscape DevEdge. Despite not having been signiicantly updated since 2001 they still are still an excellent reference to refer to for CSS browser compatibility issues. More information from Eric Meyer.
PHP SOAP Documentation
Finally some good documentation on using SOAP with PHP: PEAR::SOAP Client Fast Start and Extending PEAR::SOAP WSDL, both from the excellent phpPatterns.
Lots of RSS Aggregators
Via Ed Tech Dev (and others), an RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators directory and an RSS Readers wiki page.
PHP5 and Questioning OOP
An Interview with Sterling Hughes on PHP5 from the PHP-Con site:
[... 353 words]Verbose Regular Expressions
Ned Batchelder describes Verbose Python regular expressions. This is one of the things I’ve known about (as in known that they exist) for ages but have never got around to using. I’ve been working with some pretty heavy regular expressions recently that could really do with the clarity of being defined in verbose format with comments.
[... 96 words]Isolating Crashing Bugs
CodeBitch’s tips on isolating “crashing” bugs in CSS are mostly common sense, but are well worth reading in any case. Her methods could easily be adapted to help track down less serious bugs as well.
Accessibility and DRM
Via Accessify, Joe Clark’s analysis of Accessibility implications of digital rights management. Also, the new issue of Made For All includes an interview with Joe Clark which focusses on web accessibility.
HEML
Via Ed Tech Dev, HEML, the Historical Event Event Markup and Linking project, looks like a really interesting concept. It defines an XML format for marking up historical events, along with tools based on Java and XSLT that can convert Heml data in to SVG timelines and other useful representations.
[... 179 words]IE6, italics and horizontal scrollbars
And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug had plagued my previous design as well). Bill Simoni on CSS discuss pointed out that the scrollbar wasn’t appearing on the comment / entry pages. After an extensive trial and error session I tracked the problem down to the fact that my blockquotes were in italic. If I removed the font-style: italic property from the blockquote declaration, the horizontal scrollbar vanished. No other changes were needed.
Half Hour Redesign
Redesigned. CSS changes only, took less than half an hour thanks to the zap style sheets, test styles and ancestors bookmarklets. I’m feeling orange :)
[... 58 words]The best bookmarklets on the web
Via Eric Meyer, the best bookmarklets collection on the web. Make a bee line for the Web Development Bookmarklets and grab test styles and shell (both Netscape / Mozilla only)—shell brings up a javascript console shell which can actively modify the DOM of the current page, while test styles (easily the most useful bookmarklet I’ve ever used) allows you to make live, dynamic changes to the CSS currently affecting the document. You type CSS statements and as soon as they are complete enough to be parsed they are applied to the current page. The other bookmarklets are well worth a look as well, especially ancestors which displays the CSS selector hierarchy of the element under your mouse pointer in the browser’s status bar.
XHTML Tips
Via the XHTML-L mailing list, Simon St.Laurent’s XHTML tips archive. An abundance of useful XHTML related information.
Category specific RSS feeds
I frequently check the Python Programmer Weblogs page for an addition to my daily blogging fix. It’s a simple but very effective idea: Subscribe an aggregator to a bunch of feeds about a similar topic and publish the results for all to see. I’m one of the more prolific bloggers of the ones listed there, and since I tend to post a whole bunch of entries in a relatively narrow timeframe my stuff often appears in a big lump on the front page of the site. I’ve been feeling slightly guilty about this, as most of my posts have nothing to do with Python at all. So I’ve finally got my act together and knocked out RSS feeds for individual blog categories.
[... 150 words]The Buzz
Russell Beattie rants with zealot passion about how next generation mobile phones will change the way we live
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LiveHTTPHeaders
Via Sam Buchanan, Daniel Savard’s incredibly useful LiveHTTPHeaders addon for Mozilla and Phoenix. It adds an extra tab to the Page Info dialog with the full HTTP headers sent with the page, and also adds a HTTP Headers tool to the Tools menu which can be used to watch and debug HTTP requests in real time. I wish I’d known about this when I was developing HttpClient.
[... 96 words]Accessible Python
A post on Bryan Richard’s blog about Safari leads to a query about whether or not Py (a Python print magazine) should move to PDF, which in turn leads to a fascinating discussion about the accessibility of both websites and Python source code itself. Well worth taking the time to read.
Hydra: Collaborative text editing
Via Sam Buchanan, Hydra is a remarkably innovative text editor that allows multiple users, via a network, to edit the same document at the same time and have it update live on each other’s screens. This screenshot probably demonstrates it best, showing multiple participants working on the same code simultaneously. The colour coding (where each person’s edits shows up in a different colour) is a particularly nice touch. Unfortunately, Hydra is only available for Mac OS X so I can’t try it out myself. Hopefully they’ll release the code at some point and let aspiring Windows / Unix hackers try and port it to their respective platforms.
More on the new Yahoo
Unsurprisingly, the new Yahoo is generating a whole load of commentary. There’s a good thread going on Signals vs Noise, and ia/ has coverage as well. I’ve been playing with it a bit and it’s definitely an immense improvement on the current Yahoo, although it’s still not quite as usable or responsive as Google. I also noticed that the search results are exactly the same as Google’s (even for image search) so it looks like Yahoo haven’t switched over to Inktomi just yet.
[... 179 words]A new Yahoo
New York Times: Yahoo Plans Improvements in Effort to Regain Lost Ground. I’m guessing this is what it’s going to look like (via thelist).
getNodesByType()
On gazingus.org, Flexible Node Retrieval introduces a new addition to the getElementsBy* family of javascript functions, getNodesByType. This general purpose function uses a callback function to “filter” the child nodes of a DOM element. It works a bit like PHP’s array_filter function. One for the toolbox.
Onyx Relicensed
Ed Swindelles has relicensed his Onyx RSS Parser under the MIT License, meaning it can now be used without risk for building commercial software. I haven’t decided which license to place HttpClient under, but that one looks like a pretty good bet. I’ll work it out in the morning.
UltraEdit and the clipboard
UltraEdit tip (discovered just now): If you keep trying to copy and paste between UltraEdit and other applications and it just doesn’t work, the chances are that you’ve accidentally hit Ctrl + 1 through 9, which is the UltraEdit shortcut for selecting a custom clipboard. Hit Ctrl + 0 to get back to the Windows system clipboard and have everything behave as it should again. I suppose this feature could be useful, but I’ve got ridiculously fast at hitting Ctrl + Windows Key and typing “notepad” whenever I want to dump my current clipboard contents somewhere temporary without losing it.
HTMLCleaner class for PHP
htmlcleaner is a PHP class which claims to be able to clean up the revolting HTML generated by Micrsoft’s HTML libraries, in particular the one that is used for browser embedded WYSIWYG editors. We’re using HTML Tidy for this with excellent results, but for people who can’t run HTML Tody this could be a useful solution. Unfortunately the class is hosted on PHP Classes which still insists on making you log in for no apparent reason.
Archive woes
Mike Golding has some interesting thoughts on Archive Navigation in blogs. He uses mine as an example of what not to do. I agree—the archives on this site leave an awful lot to be desired. I’ve got a few ideas to improve them (mostly inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent calendar navigation) but I can’t really do anything until I’ve been through and added titles to every single entry :/
Lots and lots of CSS buttons
The alternative W3C buttons on AntiPixel are great. Jamie Zawinsky suggested recreating them in CSS. Stuart Langridge, Marek Prokop, Nick Boalch and Eric Meyer all had a go. Eric even did the Raging Platypus ones as well.
HttpClient PHP class
I’ve been working in quite a roundabout fashion recently. My principle target is to build a collaborative blogging system. As part of this, I needed an RSS aggregator to allow a single blog to show the most recent entries from a number of other, related blogs. Then I needed a way of downloading RSS feeds from external sites. While thinking about this (although to be fair it’s pretty much a solved problem) I was inspired to build something that could cache whole sites. And that lead me to need a PHP HTTP client class for retriving information from the web. So I wrote one of those :)
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