Friday, 30th August 2002
Back from Reading
Back from Reading. 3,200 emails (I forgot to unsubscribe from some mailing lists). <sigh>
DevShed stuff
DevShed have published two useful new articles—MySQL Connectivity With Python and Understanding SQL Joins. They also now provide nice looking printer-friendly PDF versions of articles, which appear to be dynamically generated. Having found this article on Google I suspect they are using HTMLDOC to create the PDFs.
Mozilla pie menus
I’ve installed a brand new shiny copy of Mozilla 1.1, and thrown in the new Pie Menus addon for good measure. The new build seems a fair bit speedier than the 1.1 alpha version I was using before, but other than that and some funky new icons I haven’t spotted many differences. Pie Menus are interesting (and have already been discussed at length on Mozillazine, Blogzilla and Slashdot) but don’t seem as useful as mouse gestures, although they have a much shallower learning curve.
Marquee in Mozilla
News to me: Mozilla supports the <marquee> element (marquee test page)! Support was added a couple of months ago in light of the fact that nearly 30% of top 150 sites in China use the marquee
element
. Bug 156979 contains a fascinating discussion of this issue and why the decision was made to implement this controversial extension to the standards. Hogarth has a page detailing a way of disabling the behaviour of the element in your own Mozilla installation.
DOM-Drag
youngpup’s DOM-drag is a cross browser library for creating draggable interfaces in DHTML. I had previously been looking at using Glen Murphy’s dragdiv for this kind of thing but DOM-Drag looks like a more mature implementation.
Zeldman gems
Two gems from Jeffrey Zeldman: Show, don’t sell and Table Layouts, Revisited. An extract from the former:
[... 91 words]Trackback roundup
Plenty of action on the TrackBack front. Michel V is adding TrackBack support to b2, Moveable Type have released a standalone Perl implementation of TrackBack under the Artistic license, MetaFilter have added TrackBack support and Matt Kingston has published a full blown Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial for people who want to roll TrackBack support in to their own home grown blogs. Yet another thing to add to the todo list...
Phil says goodbye to the popups
Phil Ringnalda has done the decent thing and rid himself of comment popups (the comments attached to his post make interesting reading). I haven’t got round to doing this yet, which is especially silly considering I open my own comments links in new tabs to avoid the popups myself. The main problem I have is that I want people to permalink to each entry within the context of the day it was posted—comments without a popup would need each entry to have its own comments page which could lead to people linking to the wrong place. My options so far are either to trust people to link to the permalink rather than the entry comments page or to go with a “show comments on the page” feature, possibly using a hidden div or even an external comment loader script as demonstrated by kryogenix a few weeks ago.