January 2003
Jan. 4, 2003
Christmas illness
I’ve had an off-line Christmas, during which I’ve been struck down with a particularly nasty combination of ’flu and a chest infection. After sweating it out for a week I finally decided it wasn’t improving and went to see a doctor. Verdict: I think you’re very ill
. Exams are looming (they start on the 14th) and I haven’t started revising yet. Ho hum.
Crufty
I have no intention of starting a language war, but my God this is ugly. Still, I guess it must work for some people.
The anatomy of Google
Every now and then I stumble across this and then lose it again, so I’m blogging it for safe keeping. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine is the research paper that kicked off the Google phenomenon, and despite its age still provides a great insight in to how the world’s favourite search engine works (or used to work).
Information Architecture testimonials
Poor old AIFIA are still trying to explain what Information Architecture is in easily understood terms. Their latest effort should be pretty much garaunteed to succeed—14 testimonials from web experts explaining why it is important in pleasant little sound bites.
Considered harmful considered harmful
Eric Meyer: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful. That’s a shame, because I was planning on writing one for target=“_blank”. I guess I’ll have to find another way of expressing my forthcoming rant.
Top web design mistakes
Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. This is an astutely observed list, although I would add “relying on Flash for navigation” as one of the biggest modern mistakes (for some reason Jakob fails to mention Flash at all...). I particularly liked the following point about lengthy URLs, especially the (as far as I know) newly coined term social navigation.
[... 193 words]Jan. 5, 2003
Internet Explorer cheats!
I had alway wondered why IE appears to work so fast sometimes (not that I am at all unhappy with the speed displayed by Phoenix). Now I know—unsurprisingly, IE and IIS are cheating. Read the explanation here (via mpt).
Browser upgrade messages enter history
There’s been something of a backlash against “browser upgrade” messages recently, for a variety of reasons. Now Jeffrey Zeldman, the man who brought upgrade messages widespread attention in the first place, has admitted that he too is moving away from them. With 4.0 browsers almost a thing of the past and awareness of web standards much greater than it was a year ago it looks like they may have hit their retirement date. Incidentally, Jeffrey’s post includes the following piece of standards compliance propoganda which, while old hat to most people, I feel is still worth a quote:
[... 204 words]Jan. 6, 2003
XHTML is just fine
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this weblog, I realised I needed a format for storing my entries that would keep my content “free” to be reused in multiple different ways. I thought about a simple UBB style markup language, with [url="http://www.example.com/"]links like this[/url], automatic line breaks and a few other simple structures such as lists and headings. I also considered Wiki markup of some sort, again looking for a reasonable expressive but controlled markup vocabulary for storing my blog entries in a reusable way.
Perl made less ugly
It seems Perl OOP doesn’t have to be that ugly after all. Tony Bowden disects the code from the recent Evolt article and shows how it can be made much neater using Perl’s Class::Accessor module. Much nicer—I should have guessed that there would be More Than One Way To Do It.
A great year for Mozilla
The MozillaZine Review of the Year 2002 shows just how far the Mozilla project progressed in 2002. From a 0.9.8 milestone in January, the open source browser bounded on past version 1.0 and span off popular sub projects in Chimera and Phoenix (soon to be renamed).
Jan. 7, 2003
Using page titles properly
Adrian Holovaty eloquently demonstrates why real page titles (as opposed to titles stuffed with meaningless marketing keywords) are so important, using local entertainment listings as his example. One site that would do well to take his advice (despite not being in the entertainments listings business) is The Register, which has been failing to provide story headlines in page titles for as long as I have been visiting it. This is almost certainly a flaw in their content management system, but in 2003 it is an inexcusable error to make.
Vertical centering with CSS
Lots of people said it couldn’t be done (myself included), but evidently we were wrong. Joe Gillespie shows how to achieve vertical centering with CSS in the latest edition of WPDFD. Via Craig Saila, who also has an experimental piece showing how the height of three divs can be set to the height of the tallest of the three, using javascript.
Wiki hosts and ticket stubs
Matthew Haughey asks why no one has launched a free host for people to set up Wikis, similar to blogspot for blogs or Yahoo Groups for mailing lists / collaborative communities. It’s a good question.
[... 161 words]Spatial indexes
Jeremy Zawodny demonstrates Spatial Indexes in MySQL 4.1. This clever new feature allows you to add data to a table in terms of geometric points, then run queries to find (for example) all points that occur inside a specified polygon. Weird and wonderful stuff.
Collaboration tools should be simple
Peter Merholtz has been thinking about collaborative software tools, and has concluded that the simplest are by far the most effective.
[... 207 words]Pepy’s diary
Pepy’s Diary is a serialization of the Diary of Samuel Pepys in weblog form, which launched on Christmas day plans to continue for the next ten years (the time period covered by the diary). The weblog is quickly becoming a meme, and Phil Gyford, its creator, has written an overview of how publicity spread after the diary’s launch. He has also written a story for BBC News Online describing the project. I am reminded of Bloggus Caesari, a historical weblog by Julius Caesar.
Safari surprise
I dunno, you take the evening off to watch a daft Bond movie (Goldeneye was showing on ITV and when you log on again the world is aflame with reports of Apple’s new browser, Safari. To everyone’s surprise it’s based on the KHTML engine as seen in Konqueror, rather than using Mozilla’s Gecko engine. I’ve used Konqueror a fair bit in the past few months and it really is an excellent rendering engine (I was amazed when it rendered all of my favourite CSS layout sites flawlessly) but this is still something of a shock, especially considering Apple’s recent hiring of Dave Hyatt, a key member of the Mozilla project and the guy behind the excellent Gecko-based browser Chimera.
[... 176 words]Jan. 8, 2003
XHTML is still great for content
In response to Mark Pilgrim’s Poisoning the envelope, Brian Donovan has expanded upon his opinion that long term web facing content should not be stored as (X)HTML:
[... 317 words]Dorothea Salo on semantic HTML
Dorothea Salo has posted her thoughts on Semantic HTML as well. Dorothea points out that while pre-defined tags (paragraphs, lists and so forth) are well defined it is easy to run in to problems when you start to define extra semantics via the class attribute. Start with something like <code class="python"> and the chances are that six months down the line your list of custom classes will have spiralled out of control, and as tools and validators will not be checking your class names (for typoes and so forth) you’ll soon be in a whole world of trouble.
Jan. 11, 2003
Surfin’ Safari
Dave Hyatt has renamed his weblog Surfin’ Safari and is extensively documenting the Safari team’s progress in fixing problems and making their browser even more standards compliant. He has also been responding to questions posed by the blogging community concerning the new browser. Of particular interest is this post explaining the thinking behind Safari’s controversial User Agent string (which identifies itself as “like Gecko”):
[... 239 words]DOM2 almost recommended
Craig Saila notes that the W3C have released DOM Level 2 as a recommendation and simultaneously recommended against its use in an article on News.com. Scripts should be used sparingly as they are less machine-readable or transparent than so-called declarative languages like SVG and SMIL
. I’m a big advocate of the labels.js school of scripting where DOM scripts are used to enhance the functionality of a document using the semantic structure of the underlying XHTML, while degrading gracefully (and without loss of information) in user agents without the required javascript support.
Chat rooms and meetings
In-Room Chat as a Social Tool: Clay Shirky describes an experiment with an online chat room set up to accompany a meeting of 30 people taking place in the same room. The chat room (available to attendees via Wifi laptops and displayed on a big screen at the front of the room) had some interesting effects on the dynamics of the meeting, not least of which was the dramatic impact the chat room had on the “interrupt logic” of the proceedings.
Safari conditional comments
The current extended discussion over whether or not Safari should have some kind of specific CSS blocking technique built in (sparked off by Mark Pilgrim) reminds me of a relatively unpublicised feature of Internet Explorer called conditional comments. These specially crafted HTML comments allow web authors to specifically hide code from versions of IE, or alternatively to hide code from any browsers that are not a specified version of IE. Here’s how they work:
[... 198 words]Chose URLs carefully
Name your sections carefully (via Adrian) discusses how news (and other) sites could end up adversely affecting their content through badly chosen URL schemes.
Stuart’s pingback roundup
Stuart has a good summary of the recent advances being made in the Pingback/Trackback implementation sphere.
Jan. 13, 2003
Generated content observation
Mark Pilgrim is unhappy with XHTML 2.0. Since the rest of the blogging community has already provided mass commentary on his post, I’ll make an observation concerning his further reading feature instead. The first link I saw to Mark’s post (and the one I followed) was on techno weenie, but I was surprised to later notice that techno weenie was not listed in the further reading list. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Mark’s further reading list is automatically generated from referrals, with verification from a clever Python script that checks the source page to make sure there really is a link, extract a relevant portion of the page and attempts to find a permalink for the entry as well.
[... 313 words]Jan. 14, 2003
Blogs as agents
Scott makes an interesting observation: Are blogs nothing more than agents for the internet?. A few years ago “intelligent agents” which knew your tastes and found content you would be interested in were the Next Big Thing™. Scott points out that by reading bloggers with similar tastes to us we are essentially getting the same service, with a nice human touch.