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Blockquote citations
Inspired by Adrian Holovaty, I spent an hour this morning getting dirty with the DOM in an effort to replicate his funky CSS blockquote citations effect but with links that you can actually click on. The resulting code is now active on this weblog—check the javascript out here.
[... 86 words]Usability.net rant
Someone, please, tell me UsabilityNet is a joke. Spotted via an article on hebig.org, UsabilityNet (apparently recently redesigned) claims to be “a project funded by the European Union to provide resources and networking for usability practitioners, managers and EU projects”. Again, IANAUE but here are some things wrong with it just off the top of my head:
[... 407 words]Gracefully degrading
StopDesign is a superb example of a site that degrades gracefully for Netscape 4, thanks to a carefully crafted basic stylesheet. Doug discusses the necessity of including a browser upgrade message and some of the different approaches used around the ’net.
Conversations with Joe Clark
Jonathan Delacour is three days in to his Conversation with Joe Clark series (see also parts one and two and the introductory book review). I thoroughly recommend reading the whole series, but here are a few points that stood out for me:
[... 786 words]Hotbot redesign
Douglas Bowman provides some background to the new HotBot redesign, which uses CSS for layout and almost but doesn’t quite validate. It was all looking great until the HotBot Skins page told me I should upgrade to a browser that supports web standards (I was using Phoenix).
Tantek’s markup challenge
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn’t find anything in the overall structure, but I have a few (admittedly nit-picky) suggestions for his current entries. Firstly, the following line would, in my opinion, be better served with a titled <dfn> element:
Creative Commons copyright link
It’s great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception—as Lessig says on his blog, ’Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons
. If you haven’t seen their explanatory flash animation, Get Creative, you should really check it out.
Stuart on plays
Stuart has some interesting thoughts regarding Mark Pilgrim’s latest entry: an excerpt from The Real Thing, a play by Tom Stoppard.
Clearing a select box
Deep in to coursework now, but I just spent more time than I care to mention struggling with what should have been a very simple task; removing all of the items from an HTML select box using Javascript. Here’s the code that was causing me problems:
[... 217 words]Joe Clark interviews
On Monday, Slashdot posted an excellent in depth interview with Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Websites. In a fantastic display of cluelessness they pasted the XHTML document which Joe sent them straight in to the Slashdot template, <html> tags and all. The good news is that there’s more Joe Clark related goodness to come, courtesy of Jonathan Delacour:
Interview with Tim Perdue
OSDir: Interview with Tim Perdue. GForge and behind the scenes at SourceForge.
Trade it on Trodo
Adrian Holovaty has revealed his previously hinted at secret project. Trodo.com is kind of an online bartering site
. You give away stuff you no longer have a use for to earn credits, which you can then spend on requesting free items from other people. It’s a very interesting idea, and the trading model is explained in depth in Adrian’s comments section.
Google roundup
I’ve missed out on a whole bunch of Google news lately (all of which has come via the Google Weblog). Google labs have a couple of interesting new demos; Google Viewer, a weird slideshow thing that cycles through search results for you using bizzare DHTML and Google Webquotes, which annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites
. Google have also published their End-of-Year Zeitgeist which offers a unique overview of the year’s events based on Google search statistics.
A new source of rants
Soup is Good is a new blog by a friend of Jeremy Zawodny. It looks like one to watch—two quality rants and counting.
Lambda calculus links
An Introduction to Lambda Calculus and Scheme and Wikipedia’s Lambda Calculus page have both proved useful recently.
Coursework frenzy again
Coursework frenzy is kicking in again. This time I have a large group project and two personal projects (one small, one large) due for Tuesday of next week. I’m clearing out my things-to-blog list and then I intend to knuckle down to some work.
Why MSN Messenger sucks
Acts of Volition: What’s wrong with MSN Messenger 5.0. I rarely load up MSN (I like to browse in peace) but I’d like to add a few points, aimed at Messenger in general rather than any particular version of the software:
[... 347 words]Personal web proxies
Les Orchard is considering building his own web proxy. I had never thought about the possibilities of these technologies beyond caching before, but Les’s post has really got me thinking. I often find myself searching around for a web page I visited a few months ago and can only vaguely remember—a proxy generated searchable history (I never got the hang of using my browser’s) would be a very useful tool. In addition, the ability to cache local copies of useful documents to preserve them should the original ever go offline would be very handy. How about a proxy with an accompanying small GUI desktop application which shows your recent browsing history (the last 15 pages or so) and allows you to mark documents for bookmarking / preserving? The application and proxy server could communicate via XML-RPC.
Generics in java
It looks like Java is set to get a new feature—Generics—in version 1.5. Generics are the Java equivalent of C++ templates; they severely help clear up confusions over types used with abstract data types such as lists and sets. Preparing for Generics explains this new feature and the kind of problems it solves.
One time URLs with PHP
Generating One-Time URLs with PHP has some simple example code which demonstrates PHP’s file locking functions in action.
The perils of semantic markup
Phil Ringnalda: The perils of good semantic markup. A throwaway comment by a blogger about some trashy manufactured band results in his (properly marked up) site ending ranked higher by Google than the official band’s site for searches on their name. This results in a barrage of moronic fan comments and apparently an even bigger barrage of moronic fan email.
Phoenix 0.5 and mouse gestures
Phoenix 0.5 has been released, and so far it’s an absolute dream. The Windows installer is a paltry 6.1 MB and it is noticable faster than Phoenix 0.4—the initial speed boost was so impressive I spent several minutes loading up large, bloated sites just to admire the speed with which they appeared. The Phoenix team are aiming for a 5 MB Windows installer for the final release—here’s hoping they manage it.
[... 224 words]PHP for the enterprise
PHP5: Ready For The Enterprise? (via Scott) discusses forthcoming improvements in PHP5 and asks if they will lead to acceptance of PHP as a suitable language for enterprise applications. It looks like a killer factor could well be PHP’s improved Java and .NET integration abilities. Write the back-end in Java/.NET and use PHP for the front end—that way you get a powerful web-specific scripting language for the front end of your site. Then if you ever need to change technologies on the back end your front end code can be reused.
W3C redesign
The W3C have redesigned to use CSS instead of tables (new layout explained here). About time too! It’s a shame the site still looks so, well, ugly. I know it’s a technical site and it doesn’t have to look pretty but it would be a lot easier to convince designers to try out CSS and web standards if they didn’t get instantly put off the W3C by the ugliness of the front page.
DHTML article deconstructed
Create Pop-Up Notes with DHTML is a disappointing new article on SitePoint which describes a technique for having a yellow Post-It style note appear when a link is clicked. The example given is for a link that shows the un-abbreviated form of NASA—a task better accomplished using the acronym tag. In addition, I spotted the following problems with the article:
The best 404 page ever
The best 404 page I have ever seen. Text reproduced here in case they ever change it:
[... 82 words]