October 2002
Oct. 17, 2002
Where PR flacks come from?
Dorothea Salo skillfully explains her theory of where soulless PR flacks come from.
contentEditable in Mozilla
ContentEditable for Mozilla is a hot topic at the moment. The main focus of the debate is this bug on Bugzilla, which gets pretty heated. Blogzilla has a good explanation of the principles behind the disagreement, while Scott Andrew makes an excellent case for copying IE’s implementation:
[... 111 words]50 XSLT tips
50 XSLT Tips. I particularly like Tip 13, whish shows how you can use a recursive template call to print things out multiple times (for example, 5 asterisks for something with a 5 star rating).
Tricking browsers and hiding styles
Eric Meyer on CSS: Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles. This bonus chapter which was not included in the book explains the various techniques that can be used to hide CSS rules from browsers, including the high pass filter and the infamous voice-model hack. Eric has also published Picking a Rendering Mode, a comprehensive guide to DOCTYPE switching and the effect it has on modern browsers.
Oct. 19, 2002
Lessons from the Bookmobile
I first read about the Internet Bookmobile last week on Aaron Swartz’ Weblog. Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile is a new article on the O’Reilly Network by Richard Koman, who spent the week preceeding the opening of the Supreme Court Eldred vs Ashcroft case travelling with the bookmobile as it made it’s way up from San Francisco to Washington, stopping off at schools and libraries along the way to demonstrate the importance of the public domain. The article discusses the potential effect cheap book printing technology combined with the internet and the public domain could have on schools, libraries and even commercial publishers:
[... 234 words]Dictionary of Linux commands
One for the bookmarks: O’Reilly’s Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands. 379 commands complete with a description and list of command line options. Found via an advert on the Internet Bookmobile story (and I usually never click on ads).
Oct. 20, 2002
Easy routing with Linux
I spent the last few days setting up a home network. I’m living in a student house with 4 other people and we recently shelled out for a 1 Mbit cable connection fron BlueYonder. I had never built a network before but neither had anyone else so the task of putting it all together fell on my shoulders.
[... 317 words]CD Zapping
CD Zapping: Take one CD, Microwave at full power for 5 seconds, and place on top of tesla coil. Enjoy!
Generating HTML with XQuery
Generating XML and HTML using XQuery (via More Like This). I had been confusing XQuery with XPath—it turns out XQuery is a fully featured scripting language which can be used to do all kinds of things with data from XML documents. The article explains how XQuery can be used to build a web photo gallery application and compares XSLT and XQuery using a Docbook transformation example.
Terminal Services vs WinVNC
Joel Spolsky explains why Microsoft’s Terminal Services performs far better than the open source WinVNC. Stuart points out that simple economics can make VNC a far more viable option in many situations.
Advanced PHP resources
HarryF on the SitePoint forums has compiled a fantastic list of Advanced PHP Resources, with links to sites covering object orientation, general application design, n-tier layering and using PHP with XML.
Oct. 21, 2002
More CSS layouts
I’m not sure when it happened, but Opera.com has been redesigned (since the last time I checked the site). The new layout is done with valid XHTML and CSS but is decidedly tabular in appearance, demonstrating that using CSS does not (as some people have claimed) make it impossible to achieve the same kinds of layouts as table coders have been creating for years. It also degrades quite nicely in Netscape 4 (losing most of the layout but maintaining a crisp look and feel). In related news, Jeffrey Zeldman is currently redesigning The Daily Report with CSS (replacing his old transitional tables/CSS layout). No menu yet, but it displays in Netscape 4 almost exactly the same as Mozilla and IE.
Qube
Qube looks pretty cool—it’s an open source first person shooter engine (and simple deathmatch game) designed specifically for mod developers. The client runs on both Windows and Linux, but the game server is Linux/BSD only. Spotted via this article on the O’Reilly network.
Validation on the fly
Douglas Bowman’s weblog is making very interesting reading at the moment. Douglas is responsible for Wired’s exciting new design and since the launch has been updating with observations and lessons learnt from the new look. On Friday he described how changing a problem with a design element took less than 60 seconds (thanks to global CSS files), but the post that caught my attention was this one:
[... 266 words]Blogrolled
Via Adrian Holovaty I discover Craig Saila has an excellent weblog, and is now pinging blo.gs whenever he updates. A welcome addition to my blogroll.
Oct. 22, 2002
Mozilla small screen rendering
Yesterday I blogged Opera’s impressive looking small screen rendering technology. Now take a look at this (via Blogzilla). Daniel Glazman has created a Mozilla bookmarklet that does everything Opera’s implementation claims to achieve using a combination of a custom style sheet and the DOM, and the results are impressively similar to Opera’s demonstration. The difference?
[... 104 words]Lots of iCal links
I’m writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I’ve been investigating using the iCal standard as the file format for storing events (I need a flat-file format due to hosting requirements). I’m particularly interested in the XML flavour of iCal, although it seems to be a lot less popular than the semicolon deliminated original standard. Mainly for my own reference, here are the sites I’ve trawled through this afternoon:
Oct. 23, 2002
The Web Style Guide
Spotted in Ordinary Life’s new bookmarks, the Web Style Guide is a full online book covering all kinds of different aspects of web design. I’ve only glanced through it so far but it appears to have some excellent material on the design process, typography and editorial style. There is a good focus on usability and accessibility but web standards don’t really get much coverage, and CSS for layout is discouraged in favour of tables for reasons of browser support.
Oct. 24, 2002
Office goes XML
Co-Inventor of XML Says Office 11 is “A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft” (via Slashdot). The comments are full of speculation over why Microsoft would open up their file format in this way having gained so much from having an obfuscated format.
[... 221 words]Tweaking sites for readability
Jeffrey Zeldman’s new design continues to develop, but remains virtually unreadable on my monitor (without extensive tweaking of the settings). I’m not griping though as this was an ideal opportunity to play with Mozilla’s DOM inspector. This handy tool allows you to load up a page and browser through the DOM of the page, tweaking as you go. More importantly, it lets you modify the CSS rules for each individual element. It took a matter of seconds to fire up the inspector, browse down to the CSS rules for the body element and change the colour setting to rgb(255, 255, 255)—not particularly pretty but a lot more readable on this monitor than the default black. Of course, a bookmarklet to do the same thing would be much more convenient...