Simon Willison's Weblog: tantek-celik

What is the Open Web?

2010-10-09T10:47:00+00:00

Tantek Çelik describes the three pillars of the open web: open publishing of content, freedom to code and implement the standards needed to access that content and open access to that content over an unfiltered internet.

Tags: openweb, tantek-celik, recovered

Principles of visibility and human friendliness

2005-06-04T20:20:05+00:00

Principles of visibility and human friendliness

Tantek makes an excellent argument that visible metadata works better than invisible metadata.

Tags: tantek-celik

Subject: Moving on...; To: co-workers

2004-07-01T19:30:43+00:00

Subject: Moving on...; To: co-workers

Tantek on quitting Microsoft, and the highlights of his MS career.

Tags: tantek-celik

Tantek's Fridge

2004-06-23T09:33:31+00:00

Recently spotted on Tantek's fridge:

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Targetting CSS at IE5

2003-10-06T23:35:04+00:00

Tantek has created/discovered a new CSS hack, the Mid Pass Filter. This filter allows you to write CSS rules that will only be applied by IE 5 and IE 5.5 for Windows. This is great news, as those are the browsers with the broken box model (provided you trigger standards mode in IE 6).

As with almost all hacks it looks pretty revolting. My recommendation is to accompany all hacks like this used in live stylesheets with a commented link to the page describing the technique.

Tags: css, tantek-celik

Diagonal shapes with CSS

2003-07-04T18:03:39+00:00

Information on Border Slants (via Paul Hammond). Border slants are the effect whereby diagonal lines can be created using pure CSS, by taking advantage of the fact that thick borders around a box meet at an angle. This article describes the effect in detail and shows how it can be used to achieve a number of interesting shapes, then goes on to show off with an impressive Valentine's Day Heart. See also Tantek's awesome pentagon site map and A Study of Regular Polygons.

Tags: css, tantek-celik

Introspection

2003-04-22T19:55:37+00:00

Tantek: What to do with things to do:

Some areas of your life you want to expand and grow. Others have been neglected, and you need to work on restoring them. Most things just need to be maintained, and it might help to make a list of all the things that demand maintenance (how much and how frequently) in your life. Some of those things should probably be pruned away. And everyone I know has areas of their lives or unfinished projects that need to be closed off and put/parked away for good.

I can really relate to this. There are definitely things in my life that could do with either closure or pruning (or both). The problem is facing up to them.

(I think this is the most introspective thing I've ever posted on here).

Tags: tantek-celik

Merging comments and pingbacks

2003-01-05T11:17:27+00:00

Tantek:

[...] we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I must ask - why is there any distinction in the presentation? I ask because many blogs present separate and different interfaces for their comments, trackbacks, and/or pingbacks.

A comment is a comment is a comment. Why should it matter whether it was posted using a web form, sent via email, entered into a blog, or posted to Netnews? From a blog reader's perspective, I'd just like to see a list of the comments, and not care (nor know) about how the comment got there. Presentation/interface should be designed to present the data (information), not the underlying plumbing.

Good point (besides, I'm kind of fed up of having a seperate counter for comments and pingbacks under every post). I'm sure I've seen a blog that combines comments, pingbacks and trackbacks in to the same interface - I think it was Sam Ruby's and I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere as well. Something else to add to the list for the forever forthcoming redesign.

Tags: pingback, tantek-celik, trackback

Debugging HTTP headers

2002-12-20T20:37:55+00:00

Tantek has released two new favelets for revealing HTTP information, using Mozilla's ever useful Web Sniffer and Delorie's HTTP Header Viewer. I spotted a similar tool on a recent trip to MozDev: LiveHTTPHeaders adds a "Headers" tab to the page information box in Mozilla 1.2, showing the full request and response headers used for the current page. It's a very nice tool, but unfortunately does not yet work with Phoenix (the headers tab is added to the info box but the header information does not appear).

Tags: tantek-celik

Tantek's markup challenge

2002-12-19T00:55:04+00:00

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:

New <strong title="shopping by surfing">shurfing</strong> tool.

Secondly, Tantek frequently uses a combination of a pre and a code tag to mark up sections of example code. This works fine, but could potentially be improved by adding a class element hinting at the type of code being displayed, for example:

<pre><code class="css">
p.sidebartext { 
  padding:0 5px 2px;
  font-size:11px; 
  margin-top:2px
}
</code></pre>

Finally, Tantek's use of <a class="local"> to differentiate local and external links introduces (technically) redundant data - the fact that the link is to a local resource is implicit in its URL. This information can even be extracted using CSS3 selectors, as is demonstrated by Stuart's ingenous article External link icons the CSS way.

Tags: tantek-celik

rel="bookmark"

2002-11-29T23:57:38+00:00

Mental note: add the rel="bookmark" attribute to my permalinks, as recommended by Tantek. I'd never realised the rel attribute could be applied to normal hyperlinks.

Tags: tantek-celik

Interesting but ultimately useless

2002-11-22T22:42:36+00:00

Via Stuart, Tantek has an intriguing new (valid) hack for adding HTML documentation to an external javascript file. The hack uses some clever multi-language comments to hide the HTML in the file from the script interpreter, while ensuring that the documentation remains readable when the file is interpreted as HTML. Unfortunately the trick does not work in Mozilla, as that browser respects the Content-Type served with the document (whereas IE "guesses" the content is HTML from clues in the document).

Tags: tantek-celik

Impressive CSS

2002-08-05T01:42:16+00:00

Take a look at this page in Mozilla, view the source code and ask yourself "how on earth did he do that?". It appears to involve very creative use of borders, possibly relating to the fact that a single border in CSS (at least in Mozilla and presumably in IE5/Mac as well) is actually a trapezium, not a line. Tantek Çelik was the project lead for IE 5 for the Mac (and the creator of both the Box Model hack and the High Pass Filter) so general CSS wizardry is to be expected.

Tags: css, tantek-celik