Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Thursday, 31st October 2002

Phoenix usurps Mozilla

Phoenix 0.4 is out, and it’s so good it has replaced Mozilla as my default browser. Type Ahead Find makes browsing links and searching pages a dream (I’ve really come round to it after my initial whinge) but my favourite feature is the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” integration built right in to the address bar. Type in a single word and Phoenix will try word.com (and possible word.org/word.net) before passing it on to Google and redirecting to the first search result. Type in multiple words and I’m Feeling Lucky is invoked straight away. Normal Google searches can be run from the smaller Google field to the right of the address bar. It all adds up to a virtually seamless browsing experience, especially now that I’ve memorised the Google URLs of most of my favourite sites.

[... 138 words]

Linux Gazette Python articles

Linux Gazette has a couple of interesting Python articles at the moment. Dealing with User Input in Python is a beginners guide to validating user input, while Pl/Python and Cursors in Pl/Pgsql for PostgreSQL explains how Python can be used to write stored procedures in PostgreSQL.

[... 48 words]

Pull quotes and page titles

Adrian Holovaty has followed up his discussion of page titles on news article pages with a look at the oft-abused pull-quote. Adrian points out how pull quotes can lead to poor accessibility for text browsers and screen readers, and suggests that providing a “skip quote” link could help improve things. Adrian’s comments section attracts a number of professional web deverlopers working on all kinds of news sites so the discussion is likely to be well worth watching over the next few days.

[... 88 words]

RSS validator uses my CSS

I just noticed that the RSS validator is using my numbered code listing CSS experiment :)

[... 22 words]

CSS roundup

Jeffrey Zeldman has resolved his niggling CSS bugs, and posted the workarounds for all to see. What’s amazing and unprecedented about CSS layout is that it’s completely abstracted from the data it presents. he muses. Dorothea Salo points out that the publishing industry has been doing this for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, Todd Dominey has overhauled his CSS to get rid of the javascript browser detection and Mark Pilgrim and Scott Andrew have both posted funky Halloween CSS makeovers.

[... 94 words]