July 2002
July 15, 2002
Accessible fonts
Mark has out-done himself today with his long awaited coverage of relative font sizes. This is a notoriously tough topic (thanks to a whole bunch of strange CSS bugs and browser differences) but Mark carefully and comprehensively explains the various work arounds and CSS hacks needed to get the right effect with maximum accessibility.
Via Blogzilla...
A couple of Mozilla pieces, courtesty of Blogzilla. First up is the news that Dave Hyatt is leaving Netscape to work for Apple (Hixie mentioned this the other day). Blogzilla’s jeffp wonders if this could mean the beginning of iBrowser, considering Dave’s previous work on the Chimera browser which builds a Mac interface on top of Mozilla.
[... 143 words]Blogchat rocks
I spent a while today over at Brent Ashley’s blog chatting away on BlogChat. BlogChat is Brent’s impressive DHTML chat system (backend in PHP, front end via JSRS) which allows anyone visiting his blog to talk to him (and other visitors) in real time, provided he is online to host the session. During the afternoon I got to talk to people from all over the world, all with similar interests because they all had the same taste in blogs. I am hoping to install a version of Brent’s system on this site in the not-too-distant future.
July 16, 2002
Pretty link on Kottke
In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than the link text. Today, Jason explains the technique and the thinking behind it.
EyeDropper
Handy software tip courtesy of Tim (my colleague at Incutio). EyeDropper is a tiny shareware program for Windows which adds a magnifying glass to your mouse pointer, displaying the hex colour code of the pixel under your mouse pointer. The download is a measily 27KB and it saves having to print screen and load up a graphics package just to find a HTML colour code. When not in use it sits in your systray.
XHTML nested lists
Things I learnt today part one: Nested lists in XHTML are possible, but you can’t just put a list inside another list. You have to nest the nested list in a list item. References: W3Schools XHTML differences and the www-html mailing list.
Fun with the link tag
Things I learnt today part two: The <link> tag is fun. I’ve been building support for it in to IncDirectory (not long now)—it took a while to find the necessary background information but Mark Pilgrim, www-html, and the W3C gave me everything I needed.
More CSS demos
Chris Smith has an interesting set of CSS demos, including some attractive CSS buttons and an excellent example of a more complex layout. There’s a lot of interesting creative work going on with CSS at the moment as more developers start exploring the possibilities it brings—Eric Meyer’s css/edge is just the tip of the iceberg.
Accessible headers
Mark’s latest accessibility tip concerns header tags (<h1> through <h6>). Mark explains that using headers in the right order helps screen readers to interpret the structure of your pages, and shows how to use CSS to effectively style headers. Mark once again demonstrates the comment hack as a way of bringing Netscape 4 in line with other browsers, a technique that has been criticised by the More Like This Weblog as unnecessary encouragement for NS4 users. Incidentally, Johannes Koch has an excellent summary of CSS hiding techniques.
CSS could be so much more
Stuart Langridge discusses the nature of minimalism and CSS design, following a post by Sarabian. Stuart wonders if the current trend for relatively plain site designs is an interim period while we find our feet in the relatively new medium of CSS. I am sure it is—while I personally love the elegance and simplicity being showcase in many pure CSS sites, it’s not going to help convert die hard table fanatics. The annoying thing is that CSS is capable of so much—the power it gives us over background images should free designers to do things that were difficult or impossible with tables. I’m a rubbish designer, but I’m considering taking on the challenge of “interesting” CSS design in the not too distant future. If I can make things look good, anyone can ;)
Goodbye to BurningBird
Burningbird has hung up her wings. Dorothea thoughtfully blogs her departure, disagreeing with her suggestion that blogged content suffers from a lack of permanence. One of the reasons I blog is that I hope to increase my skill with the written word, so it is interesting to see someone at the opposite end of the spectrum who feels they must stop blogging to keep writing. As for permenance, I have often worried that particularly valuable articles can get lost in archives—to this end I hope to implement a permanent feature archive in my blog redesign, somewhere I can keep larger articles in a more easily surfed format than an archive.
July 17, 2002
Amazon web services
Amazon have launched a brand new web service interface to their huge database of products. I’ve been playing around with it, and I’ve knocked together a simple search engine example in PHP, with the code available for anyone who wants it. I did a similar thing a few months ago when Google released their Web API so we’ve set up a new site at Incutio to host these and other open source projects—scripts.incutio.com. The site is only a few hours old and we’d love some feedback—contact us directly or add a comment to this entry.
Fun with Amazon
There’s plenty of activity surrounding Amazon web services today. My limited demo barely scratches the surface of the possibilities—people are already experimenting with Amazon’s similarity search and Mark Pilgrim has released PyAmazon, a Python wrapper for the Amazon API. I’ve started listing alternative implementations on the PHP Amazon Search page, and I’ll be sure to blog the more innovative examples as and when I find them.
Amazon search updated
I’ve updated PHP Amazon Search to implement a few more search methods, and altered the example script to allow searches for related items.
Addition to the blogroll
Small Values of Cool—links to things that I find interesting
by Simon Brunning. I turns out I find them interesting as well. Lots of Python stuff on there at the moment, including a link to the new Python Wiki.
Flash: Leave my text alone!
Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes good old fashioned text and locks it away in a pretty but shallow world, one that is out of reach of search engines, screen readers and my all important right mouse button. What good is text is text if I can’t search it, select it, copy it, paste it and generally processs it in whatever way I see fit? Flash is fine for graphics, animation and even some user interfaces (provided they don’t involve too much text) but please, please keep it away from anything I want to read.
Pimping opportunity
Tip off for Stuart: The new Python Wiki includes an index of available web frameworks, but there’s no mention of Castalian yet.
Positioning tips
If you’re still struggling to get to grips with CSS layout techniques (heaven knows I am) Dorothea’s latest will teach you more in a single post than many lengthy tutorials do in their entirety. Floats for layout (as seen on this site) are out—they work for small areas but anything larger can cause performance problems and other unpleasantness. Relative positioning is unreliable, which leaves us with absolute positioning and clever use of margins, along with intelligent use of background images for decoration. Dorothea explains these techniques in concise detail, and relates them to AKMA’s redesign.
July 18, 2002
I think I need more categories
No updates until Monday—I’m taking a long, offline weekend with my girlfriend.
July 22, 2002
Catch up time
I had a great weekend, and now it’s catch-up time. I’ve managed to find 15 things from the weekend that I want to blog so I’ll try and spread them out over the next day or so.
Ogg Vorbis
Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0. Ogg Vorbis is an open, patent-free alternative format to MP3 that boasts some seriously impressive abilities. A sample page is available which includes WAV files to allow quality comparisons between different formats.
New PHP vulnerability
Vulnerability found in PHP 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 involving HTTP POST requests. The PHP group have released PHP 4.2.2 which fixes this problem.
CSS books galore
I’ve placed an order on Amazon for both Cascading Stylesheets: Seperating Content from Presentation and Eric Meyer on CSS. I’ll probably post a side-by-side comparison of the two books in a few weeks time.
Dive into accessibility
Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility series has come to an end, and he has compiled the whole lot in to a fantastic new resource: Dive Into Accessibility. This is going to be required reading for anyone with a conscience and a weblog (or any other kind of site) for years to come. I’ve fallen a bit behind on implementing Mark’s accessibility tips but I am set on using them on this site soon (probably along with the new design) and applying them to any sites I develop in the future. Thanks Mark.