Monday, 6th October 2003
A better way of entering dates
The CreativityGoblin dropped in on me today, and as a result I’ve been tackling the challenge of entering dates in to a web application. In the past, I’ve used DHTML calendar widgets for this purpose (my favourite is Mishoo’s highly configurable, standards compliant JS Calendar) but while widgets like this have a great deal of “wow” factor I’m not convinced that they are the best entry mechanism when it comes to raw user speed. Today’s experiment was partially inspired by PHP’s strtotime function, which accepts a string in a wide variety of formats and converts it in to a time.
Infinite Python Data Structures
Hans Nowak has been churning out some really interesting Python stuff recently. He’s been experimenting with Self style objects in Python (similar in many respects to objects in Javascript), developing Wax, a coder friendly wrapper around wxPython, working on a Python framework for writing text adventure games and most recently experimenting with streams in Python using generators.
[... 168 words]Targetting CSS at IE5
Tantek has created/discovered a new CSS hack, the Mid Pass Filter. This filter allows you to write CSS rules that will only be applied by IE 5 and IE 5.5 for Windows. This is great news, as those are the browsers with the broken box model (provided you trigger standards mode in IE 6).
[... 104 words]