June 2003
June 1, 2003
Mouseless
My mouse stopped working a couple of days ago. This hasn’t ben as big a problem as you might have thought, mainly because Vice City refuses to install on my PC so I’ve been playing it on a housemates instead ;) Surfing the ’net mouseless has however given me an interesting insight in to a number of accessibility issues.
[... 387 words]From HTML to CSS
Tom Gilder: “I did this in HTML, how do I do it in CSS?”. A collection of tips for replicating visual formatting effects in old-style HTML with their CSS equivalents. A good resource for people just getting started with CSS.
June 3, 2003
Using bookmarklets to experiment with CSS
I’m in the middle of a whole bunch of exams at the moment, but here’s a quick tip that should make experimenting with and learning CSS a great deal easier. It involves bookmarklets. If you haven’t seen them before, bookmarklets are bookmarks that embed javascript; when you click the bookmark, the javascript is executed in the context of the currently loaded page. What that means is that in a suitably advanced browser bookmarklets can be used to modify pages, analyse their structure and do a whole host of other useful things.
[... 813 words]June 10, 2003
Home improvements
Exams are all over and I’ve had a few days of doing nothing to recuperate. I’ve also made a couple of small improvements to my blog. Firstly I’ve finally updated the comment system (after numerous vocal complaints) to provide a preview option and redisplay the form in the case of invalid markup. I’ve also changed the monthly archive pages to display the titles of all of the posts from that month instead of just showing which days had entries. In my experience date based navigation is the least useful way of finding old content in a blog (search, categories and related reading are far more valuable) but the new way of presenting monthly archives at least gives an overall view of the topics I was posting about over a particular time period.
Authentication via POP3
Authenticating users through a third party POP3 server (Python sample code provided) is a really interesting idea, but one that I don’t think could ever be used in the wild. Firstly, I haven’t the slightest idea what my POP3 password is as I tend to save it in my mail application and forget about it. Secondly (and more importantly) is trust: how many web sites do I trust enough to give them my email password whenever I log in?
[... 133 words]Under the Iron
Under the Iron is a series of interviews with interesting people. The most recent three include one with Mark Pilgrim, which talks in part about Mark’s reasons for creating diveintoaccessibility:
[... 140 words]June 11, 2003
Eric Meyer Redesigns
Eric Meyer has released a new selection of designs over on Meyerweb. The designs are inspiring, and Eric’s CSS is well worth perusing for style tips and insights in to reliable methods of creating relatively complex layouts.
June 12, 2003
Structured content defined
Peter Van Djick: The structure of content and metadata, a glossary style overview of important concepts in structured content and website metadata. Peter also links to Victor Lombardi’s excellent Metadata Glossary.
Safely consuming RSS: RegExps don’t cut it
Mark Pilgrim highlights the severe security issues introduced by RSS aggregators that display potentially unsafe HTML, often executing it in the “secure zone” generally reserved for trusted local documents. Mark suggests a number of dangerous tags and attributes that should be removed before display. Unsurprisingly, regular expressions have cropped up in the comments as the suggested solution. Jamie Zawinsky famously once posted the following to comp.lang.emacs:
[... 396 words]Official film sites almost always suck
Why do official film sites almost always suck? www.x2-movie.com is a prime example: 100% Flash, ridiculous loading times (and I’m on broadband), totally unintuitive interface, tedious, unnecessary animations every time you click on anything and when you finally get to the content (all I could find was the “Mutant Database”) it gives you hardly any information above what you get by watching the film! It looks pretty (pretty expensive at any rate) but really is nothing more than a glorified trailer.
[... 347 words]One year of blogging
Today marks the first anniversary of the start of my blog (and, by a slightly contrived coincidence, my thousandth blog entry). It’s been a fun year. Here are my highlights—if you can’t stand lengthy self-congratulatory bullet points, stop reading now.
[... 666 words]June 14, 2003
The reason monopolies are a bad idea
I wasn’t planning to cover the recent AOL and Microsoft announcements as they’ve been covered to death elsewhere by people with far more insight than myself, but this third piece of news seems to bring things to a head: Microsoft have announced the end of development of Internet Explorer for the Mac. I’ve never really had access to this browser but I’ve read enough to know that it was the first full browser release to take web standards seriously, and as such plays a very important part in the history of the web standards movement. It’s sad to see it come to an end, but it also raises yet more questions about the direction Microsoft is taking with regards to the web.
[... 571 words]Small design tweak, big difference
I’ve changed from using the day as the principle heading on the front page to using the title of each post instead. This is quite a minor alteration, but I expect it to have a relatively large impact on my blogging habits. For the past year I have treated my blog as a daily endeavour, thanks almost entirely to the way the site was layed out. This was intentional; when I orginally launched blog I made the decision to keep each entry as part of an ongoing narrative, with no individual entry titles and permalinks to entries in the context of the day they were posted.
[... 270 words]time_since()
I’ve changed the date heading for each post to display the relative time since the entry was posted, rather than absolute the date and time. My main reason for doing this is that it solves the timezone problem; all times on this site are in GMT, but the majority of the site’s visitors are likely to be in different timezones. Showing the time elapsed since the entry was posted serves everyone regardless of their location.
[... 126 words]Course management systems
Via EdTechDev, this report on the important characteristics of course management systems makes very interesting reading. I’ve been considering doing something along these lines for my final year project at University, but I hadn’t realised how much work had already been done in this field. It still looks like an area with a lot of space for improvement though.
More CSS Zen Garden submissions
The CSS Zen Garden is growing at a pretty impressive rate, with another three submissions since I last checked it a few days ago: Friendly Beaches, Calm & Smooth and Viridity. Also added recently is What Lies Beneath, which is unique in being the first horizontally rather than vertically oriented layout. It’s a shame there’s no automated way of tracking the garden (an RSS feed of new submissions for example) as I keep on forgetting to check back for new material.
June 15, 2003
Phil Ringnalda on Firebird extensions
Phil Ringnalda writes about Firebird extensions:
[... 188 words]Javascript, the DOM and application/xhtml
One of the side-effects of switching my blog to serving pages as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that support it (mainly Gecko engine browsers) was that my blockquote citations script simply stopped working in those browsers. The reason this happened is touched upon by Mark Pilgrim in The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types: essentially, when dealing with XML documents Gecko needs you to use document.createElementNS in place of document.createElement when manipulating the DOM.
Aha!
Well that explains an awful lot. I was getting a huge number of complaints about lost comments when people were told off by my comment HTML checker, so it’s nice to know that the problem wasn’t entirely my fault! I fixed the problem (and dramatically improved the usability of the system as a whole) a few days ago by adding a proper preview / re-serve the form ability to the comments system.
More practical benefits of web standards
D. Keith Robinson recently launched the redesigned website for the Washington State Drowning Prevention Network. He has written a fascinating account of the development process used for the site, which validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and uses CSS for layout. The following extract in particular caught my eye:
[... 199 words]Improving label element discoverability
My good friend Andy is soliciting applications to be his other half via his blog. He’s a lovely guy, so go sign up! More importantly, the stylesheet for his romance test includes this gem:
[... 98 words]June 16, 2003
Tim Bray on search
I love it when bloggers stick to their word. The other day, while describing a quick Perl hack that really impressed a major client a few years ago, Tim Bray mentioned the following:
[... 240 words]Missing the point
The Register’s coverage of the end of development for IE on the Mac makes some worrying conclusions:
[... 506 words]Further more...
By coincidence, Jeffrey Zeldman just posted something in a similar vein to my previous rant, looking at things from a different angle:
[... 181 words]Evangelism is WAR
Evangelism is WAR is a fascinating account (actually, the first chapter of an upcoming book) of the principles behind Technical Evangelism at Microsoft and the methods they use to establish their platforms as the dominant players. It’s author is James Plamondon, who worked at Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist for 8 years. It’s a great read, and it’s also entertaining to see developers and customers referred to as “pawns” throughout. Found via a link on the Mozilla Tech Evangelism site.
Another MP Blogger
Fantastic! Tom Watson has now been joined by Richard Allan (Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam) in the ranks of MPs with their own weblog. It looks like it’s going to be really good; Richard is something of a geek (he runs RedHat 8.0 at home) and in one of his first entries he takes advantage of his position as an MP to extract information from Tiscali about broadband pricing issues in the UK.
[... 123 words]Accesskeys on ALA
Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation is the first new technical article on A List Apart in months. I didn’t think there was much that could be said about accesskeys, but the tutorial has some nice ideas to help make them more obvious without being too intrusive. I think the approach demonstrated by the The Ontario Ministry of Energy site is the most appealing, with single letters corresponding to accesskeys underlined as they are in application menus.
June 17, 2003
Python generators for database result sets
I’ve read several articles on Python generators now, and I had almost got my head around them, but then I read this: Iterators and Databases by Andy Todd, which demonstrates a simple but intuitive way of using generators to iterate through rows from a database query without having to load all of the rows in to a list in memory first. Brilliant.
[... 165 words]