June 2002
June 15, 2002
Anil Dash does Amazon
Anil Dash provides a copy of Amazon’s home page in HTML 4.0 Transitional, and it validates. Solid proof that you can rewrite a complex ecommerce site in valid HTML, and another victory for the web standards movement.
Meetup Launches
With launch notices on both glish and Signal vs. Noise I just had to check out MEETUP. I was not dissapointed. MEETUP is a beautifully simple concept that has been superbly executed. It aims to arrange real life get togethers around the world of people with similar interests. You simply find a topic that interests you and see when the next scheduled meetup for that topic in your area is, then enter your email address to have the site update you on the status of the meetup and remind you nearer the time. Meetup participants vote on the venue (from a list of over 11,000 suggested spots) and the rest is up to them. Why MEETUP?
[... 160 words]Meg replies
Meg has replied to Jonathan’s criticism of her piece on the nature of blogging via his site’s comments system. She defends her original viewpoint, commenting on blogging that we can’t define this thing based on the content we’re outputting
. It looks like this debate still has quite a bit of life left in it.
June 16, 2002
Fixed validation again
The road to validity is frought with peril. I’ve just fixed another small group of errors that were preventing this page from validating (after spotting the ominous W3C validator in today’s user-agent logs). This time is was a couple of forgotten </p> tags and an unescaped ampersand.
[... 242 words]My first XHTML mind bomb
I’ve been looking at PHP’s XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I’ve suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one of the features I considered adding was something that can pull all of the links out of an entry when it is submitted and index them or add them to a directory somewhere. I was preparing myself for some regular expression hacking, but thanks to XHTML this is now completely unnecessary. All I need to do is define a couple of handlers to deal with <a> tags and Expat will do the hard work for me. In fact, this approach gives me a great deal of flexibility in what I do with my entries. I can extract quotes and blockquotes, pick up on emphasized text and generally allow my blog software to “understand” my entries as and when I add them. The true benefits of XHTML have suddenly become clear.
Jonathan on Mark
Jonathan has meta-blogged (I think that’s the term) responses to Mark Pilgrim’s accessiblity series. He replies to my query about the wisdom of limiting the series to bloggers rather than expanding it to cover as much as possible:
[... 166 words]University of Blogaria
Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process
(Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to earn a position on the faculty, which no doubt requires slightly more than four days of blogging. Thank goodness their courses (or at least the benefits of their wisdom) are freely available to all.
Excited about XWT
New toy: XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. This is one impressive piece of open source software. It allows you to create a graphical user interface using relatively simple XML markup (with ECMAScript to define interactivity). Your application can then be executed using a browser plugin, implemented as an ActiveX component on IE and a Java applet everywhere else. The idea is not to write whole applications in XWT, but to create server side applications and provide a client side GUI using the toolkit. Both SOAP and XML-RPC are supported for communicating between client and server.
[... 140 words]Elm0 suggests libxml
Elm0 has suggested a solution to my XHTML validation woes in a thread on WMHub. He suggests using libxml to validate new entries against a DTD, via PHP’s exec() function. It looks like xmllint is just the command line tool I need—if only I could get it to compile on the University server. I’m getting “out of space” errors which is strange as I have over 10MB left on my account, so I’ll assume for the moment that it’s a problem with the server and try again in a few days.
June 17, 2002
Micah’s alternative Yahoo
Micah S Sittig on css-discuss has created an alternative version of the new Yahoo site design using CSS for layout instead of tables. The aim of the excercise was to demonstrate how much code can be saved by using CSS, and this has been achieved admirably with a 60% reduction in overall page size. The new version was developed for Mozilla 1.1 and looks great in that browser, but fails to render quite as well in IE. Still, as a demonstration of the file size benefits that come with CSS it works fantastically well. A full overview of the project alogn with file size statistics and implementation details is available here.
Blog fixed
I’ve just finished rebuilding the main data file for this blog, after it became corrupted last night due to a “Disk Quota Exceeded” error. It looks like this was my fault—I inadvertantly filled up my disk space when I was playing around with libxml and PHP choked when it tried to save the latest update to my blog. Luckily no data was permanently lost as the archives are cached as flat files, which allowed me to rebuild the data file from scratch.
[... 109 words]Styling <hr>
Interesting thread today on css-discuss about styling <hr> elements. I had tried this before with no luck, but the thread provided some useful tips. Marek Prokop provided this tutorial, and Kevin W responded with these tips on styling <hr> in Opera. Michael Guitton suggested that setting width: 100%; could help fix problems with Netscape 6.
Day 6: Doctypes
Mark Pilgrim starts his series of weblog accessibility tips today with tutorial on adding a doctype to a blog.
AllTheWeb claims
Boston.com, via Slashdot: Online search engine AlltheWeb claims bigger index than Google. I was under the impression that the 2,073,418,204 quoted on Google’s home page is no longer accurate (it hasn’t changed in months, and I know Google have been adding things to their index). I had a play with AllTheWeb and it turned up some decent results for my test queries, but it seems to load slightly slower than Google. Further discussion on this can be found over at WebmasterWorld, which is also home to the best Google discussion forum I’ve ever seen.
Open source economics
Food for thought: Joel Spolsky on the economics of Open Source software. Joel starts by explaining the economic concept of complements—products that complement your product so that if their price goes down, demand for your product increases. He then goes on to demonstrate how this concept explains the decision of several large companies (including IBM, Sun and HP) to financially support open source software. As is usual for Joel on Software the article makes fascinating reading.
Amazon with CSS
More CSS layout fun courtesy of Webdesign-L. This time Steve Clay has taken Anil Dash’s standards compliant Amazon and reworked it to use CSS for layout. Unfortunately it is likely to be a while before a major ecommerce site or portal decides to go with a CSS layout simply because of the continuing relevance of Netscape 4 users, but these examples demonstrate how close we are to being able to leave the era of nested table designs behind us.
Mark replies
Mark mailed me in response to my query about limiting his accessibility series to weblogs rather than expanding it to cover general sites:
[... 176 words]June 18, 2002
Minimal XML
Minimal XML is a project of SML-DEV, who describe themselves as a group of over 125 XML experts working to create simple XML standards and to simplify existing XML
.
Knowledge Management
New buzzword (at least for me)—Knowledge Management. Apparently this is a theoretical corner stone of content management, an area I’m very interested in. Plenty of information about it in DMOZ as well.
Email interfaces
Peter Van Dijck: Email interface design 101—a short article examining the possibilities of using email interfaces for web applications. This is an interesting topic and one that deserves further exploration. I am particularly interested in the security problems faced when building this kind of interface (something that is not covered by Peter’s article)—how can you effectively secure an email interface? I’m guessing that for true security the only real solution is PGP encrypted mail and some kind of password driven authentication system. Peter’s blog carries a discussion on the article.
Suicidal chipmunk
From Google Answers via Elegant Hack: The tale of the suicidal chipmunk. On a related note, I saw chipmunks on sale at a farmer’s show (the Bath and West) a few weeks ago for ten pounds each—very cute but I have no idea if they’d make good pets.
PHP Documentor
phpDocumentor version 1.1.0rc2 has been released over at www.phpdoc.org. The feature list (from their press release):
[... 136 words]Javascript select boxes
Via thelist: Javascript Selectbox Functions. Extremely useful demonstrations of how multi-line selectboxes can be used to create advanced user interface widgets with javascript, including tools to alter the order of items in a list and pass values from one selectbox to another and back again.
Language tag
Mark Pilgrim’s accessiblity series continues: Day 7: Identifying your language. Since I’m using XHTML 1.0 I’ve changed my opening <html> tag to the following:
[... 55 words]XHTML list
I’ve signed up for a new mailing list (probably not a good idea, I’m getting over 200 mails a day which isn’t much fun on a modem)—XHTML-L, which describes itself as A forum for discussing XHTML issues for both XML and HTML developers
. The list is adminned by Simon St. Laurent, who coincidentally is involved with the SIG-XML project I mentioned earlier today.
Python and the space shuttle
Dan Shafer: Space shuttle engineers use Python to streamline mission design.
[... 62 words]June 19, 2002
Why software sucks
MSNBC: Why software is so bad. First time round I gave up on this article after reading the joke at the start, writing it off as another dumbed down piece of ill informed rubbish. Then I saw Scott raving about it and decided to give it a second go. My initial impressions were completely wrong—it’s a well written (and surprisingly unbiased) article that takes a good look at the problems software faces and how industry practises lead to software getting worse rather than better. This year I’ve been doing a course on Software Engineering at University and a lot of the article made a great deal of sense in the context of the course. Well worth reading.
NPR link muppets
Via Boing Boing: NPR—another site that demands you obtain permission before linking to a page on their site. Will these people ever learn? This is compounded by the fact that their link request form is a classic example of asking for way too much information.
Andrei interview
Interview with Andrei Zmievski on SitePoint. Andrei is the guy behind PHP-GTK, the project that enables developers to write client side GUI applications using PHP. He is also one of the two lead developers on Smarty, the world’s greatest PHP templating engine. Oh, and he’s contributed various bits to PHP itself, including Perl compatible regular expressions and WDDX support. All that and he still has time for an interest in the history of western culture ;) The interview makes great reading for anyone interested in PHP, and also provides a link to a web server written in PHP.