December 2002
Dec. 13, 2002
Clearing a select box
Deep in to coursework now, but I just spent more time than I care to mention struggling with what should have been a very simple task; removing all of the items from an HTML select box using Javascript. Here’s the code that was causing me problems:
[... 217 words]Dec. 16, 2002
Dec. 19, 2002
Stuart on plays
Stuart has some interesting thoughts regarding Mark Pilgrim’s latest entry: an excerpt from The Real Thing, a play by Tom Stoppard.
Creative Commons copyright link
It’s great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception—as Lessig says on his blog, ’Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons
. If you haven’t seen their explanatory flash animation, Get Creative, you should really check it out.
Tantek’s markup challenge
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn’t find anything in the overall structure, but I have a few (admittedly nit-picky) suggestions for his current entries. Firstly, the following line would, in my opinion, be better served with a titled <dfn> element:
Hotbot redesign
Douglas Bowman provides some background to the new HotBot redesign, which uses CSS for layout and almost but doesn’t quite validate. It was all looking great until the HotBot Skins page told me I should upgrade to a browser that supports web standards (I was using Phoenix).
Conversations with Joe Clark
Jonathan Delacour is three days in to his Conversation with Joe Clark series (see also parts one and two and the introductory book review). I thoroughly recommend reading the whole series, but here are a few points that stood out for me:
[... 786 words]Gracefully degrading
StopDesign is a superb example of a site that degrades gracefully for Netscape 4, thanks to a carefully crafted basic stylesheet. Doug discusses the necessity of including a browser upgrade message and some of the different approaches used around the ’net.
Dec. 20, 2002
Usability.net rant
Someone, please, tell me UsabilityNet is a joke. Spotted via an article on hebig.org, UsabilityNet (apparently recently redesigned) claims to be “a project funded by the European Union to provide resources and networking for usability practitioners, managers and EU projects”. Again, IANAUE but here are some things wrong with it just off the top of my head:
[... 407 words]Blockquote citations
Inspired by Adrian Holovaty, I spent an hour this morning getting dirty with the DOM in an effort to replicate his funky CSS blockquote citations effect but with links that you can actually click on. The resulting code is now active on this weblog—check the javascript out here.
[... 86 words]Debugging HTTP headers
Tantek has released two new favelets for revealing HTTP information, using Mozilla’s ever useful Web Sniffer and Delorie’s HTTP Header Viewer. I spotted a similar tool on a recent trip to MozDev: LiveHTTPHeaders adds a “Headers” tab to the page information box in Mozilla 1.2, showing the full request and response headers used for the current page. It’s a very nice tool, but unfortunately does not yet work with Phoenix (the headers tab is added to the info box but the header information does not appear).