August 2003
Aug. 27, 2003
Code Kata
I recently read my way through The Pragmatic Programmer and found it easily lived up to my epectations based on reviews I’ve seen on the web. Dave Thomas, one of the book’s authors, has an excellent weblog on which he has been posting a series of programming exercises called Kata. Some are programming problems while some are more related to software design, but each one provides an interesting thought exercise with no instantly obvious solution.
XML textarea validation bookmarklet
Jesse Ruderman’s Blogidate bookmarklets cycle through all of the textareas on the current page and submit their contents for validation. I suggested an alternative approach, and to my great delight has has followed it up with the essential Blogidate XML well-formedness. One click, and each textarea on the page will be checked to see if it contains valid XHTML. If it does, the background goes green—if not, it goes red. Hopefully I’ll never post another invalid entry (my previous solution broke when I switched to application/xml+xhtml).
Hire Meyer
Congratulations to Eric Meyer on the launch of his new consultancy business, Complex Spiral Consulting (named after his famous css/edge demo). The new company’s tag line is “Helping clients improve the bottom line through the use of Web standards”, so it looks like the theme of standards advocacy is continued from his role at Netscape. Eric has also promised a series of occasional articles/tutorials, the first of which explains some useful techniques for using floats as part of CSS designs.
Aug. 28, 2003
Advocating Standards
Ian Lloyd: Designing for the future, and the training gap. Ian highlights the frustrations faced by all web standards advocates when trying to encourage their less web-enthused co-workers to take the leap. I’ve been incredibly lucky in that both Incutio and LJ-World have a remarkably forward thinking approach to web standards, but I can still identify with the spirit of Ian’s article.
[... 441 words]Banning Google Comments
Russell Beattie has an ingenious solution to the problem caused by weblog un-savvy Google users turning up on old entries and posting comments on them, without properly understanding the nature of the site. He simply displays the page without a comments form if he spots Google in the user’s referrer. I’d be tempted to do the same thing on this site if I didn’t find the comments on my ancient MSN Messenger rant so amusing.
Great liquid design example
I’ve started browsing the web at 1600x1200, because I have a nice big monitor and a tendency to browse with my font size set to large. At this resolution you really begin to appreciate the argument put forward by fixed-width site design advocates that liquid designs can end up plain unreadable on some setups. I could just reduce the size of my browser window, but I’m lazy. Instead I’ll point out that the Rocky Mountain Harley-Davidson dealership is a liquid site that manages to look great even at ludicrously high resolutions. It’s got some very decent CSS and structural markup under the hood as well.
HTML: More structural than semantic
Semantic markup is getting a lot of blog coverage at the moment, following a starter post by Jason Kottke. There’s some great content flowing around (Dave Shea, Doug Bowman and Paul Scrivens in particular devote whole essays to the topic) but the central point is the same: just because a page validates doesn’t mean it’s good HTML; semantic markup is equally if not more important for building good pages.
[... 274 words]Aug. 29, 2003
Too much accessibility
Tom Gilder is right on target with his latest rant about sites that add accessiblity features without thinking about their consequences. Accessibility frequently involves adding new markup but you can definitely have too much of a good thing.
Learning mod_rewrite
I think I’ve finally cracked mod_rewrite, thanks mainly to SitePoint. Key resources:
[... 60 words]On mod_python
So, I’m getting stuck in to mod_python in a pretty big way at the moment. I’ve never even used mod_perl before, so coming from PHP this is turning out to be a real eye opener.
[... 332 words]