September 2002
Sept. 12, 2002
More link muppets
HSBC (you have to look pretty hard for this one, they’ve hidden it under “Trade Marks and Copyright”):
[... 88 words]Randal Rust on accessibility
Randal Rust has posted an updated version of his excellent CSS forms demo. While exploring Randal’s site I stumbled across ALPHABET SOUP: A web designer’s journey to standards and accessibility, an excellent article advocating CSS, web standards and accessibility which includes the following noteworthy quotation:
[... 77 words]Surfing the apocalypse
The Guerrilla News Network: S-11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse.
[... 155 words]The float label bug
Strange Mozilla bug: In some versions of Mozilla / Netscape 6+ <label> elements that have a float applied to them will vanish. Tom Gilder’s test case can be viewed here. I tried it in Mozilla 1.1 beta and the page behaved as expected but Netscape 6.22 suffered from the bug. Apparently Netscape 7 still has the bug, which would suggest it was spun off from the Mozilla code base before that bug was fixed. Rust Randal’s CSS form demo gets around this problem with a span inside a label, which seems to be the most effective workaround but is frustrating as it requires additional markup to solve what is a pretty obscure bug.
The RDF in RSS
DJ Adams: The RDF in RSS: Just a bit of a brain dump of what I’ve been learning over the past couple of days
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Sept. 13, 2002
Another excellent blog
Jeremy Allaire, Chief Technology Officer at Macromedia, now has a blog. Macromedia’s attitude towards weblogging has been fantastic—they seem to really understand the medium and the opportunities it provides, both in terms of PR and keeping their development community involved and informed. Jeremy writes:
[... 110 words]More thoughs on Flash editors
Flash Voodoo’s Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting—the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pretty horrible (font tags and presentational markup galore). This is a limitation of Flash rather than a problem with the coders—our Flash Editor (currently under development by my colleague Richard) has the same problem, so we are looking in to ways of cleaning up the resulting code and turning it in to XHTML.
[... 220 words]Fun with Unicode
Hixie has submerged himself in Unicode. Stuart muses that the reason Unicode is so (potentially) huge is a legacy of the Y2K problem. I prefer the explanation given in XML in a Nutshell (my current reading matter of choice for three-and-a-half-hour-train-journeys-from-hell):
[... 115 words]Mozilla web-sniffer
Because I keep on forgetting where it is, View HTTP and HTML Source, a handy tool for debugging HTTP type stuff courtesy of those fine Mozilla folk.
mod_python donated to the ASF
mod_python has been donated to the Apache Software Foundation. This is excellent news—I have always been slightly wary of mod_python as it has a reputation for being unstable, but with the ASF directly supporting it hopefully any stability problems will soon be a thing of the past.
Java GUI Builder
One of the things I really like about PythonCard is that it enables (and in fact actively encourages) you to completely separate the GUi of your application from the program logic. In PythonCard you design your GUI by adding and dragging elements around in the resource editor, then create a simple Python class with event handlers to define what should happen when your GUI is interacted with. Now, thanks to the Java GUI Builder (spotted on Small Values of Cool), you can do the same thing in Java.
[... 229 words]Pingback supported again
I’ve re-enabled PingBack on my blog. Auto-discovery is now supported via both the standard <link> element and the new X-PingBack HTTP header. I have also implemented a new experimental method on my PingBack server—pingback.extensions.getPingbacks(url). Send it the URL for an entry on this blog (it must be an archive page and must include the fragment identifier so the system knows which entry you mean) and it will return an array of pages that have been registered as linking to that page via PingBack. This new feature is explained in detail in this email sent to the the blogite mailing list.
Mozilla 1.2 alpha
The first alpha version of Mozilla 1.2 has been released, with the most notable new feature being Type Ahead Find. I’ve played with this on previous Mozilla builds (it was available as an addon) and it’s an interesting feature—you can navigate around a page by typing the names of links on that page (as soon as you type enough of the link for it to be recognisable the browser selects the link for you). The implementation in 1.2 also allows you to search for items on the page by typing a backslash followed by the search terms.
[... 343 words]Sept. 14, 2002
No updates for a while
I’m moving back up to Bath this afternoon, in to a student house with 4 other people. I don’t know if we even have a phone line at the moment so I’ll probably be offline for the next few days.
Sept. 17, 2002
Returning
Cameron Barrett is back from Russia and brings photos. Scott Andrew is back from his summer vacation and brings CSS tips. I am back at University and stuck without bandwidth for the next few weeks.
Sept. 18, 2002
RSS2 modules
It seems RSS 2.0 has the capability to support modules (I was under the false impression that this ability was restricted to RDF modules in the rival RSS 1.0 specification). Following a post by Mark Pilgrim on B-linking (the blogging equivalent of a B-movie) Dave Winer has released a draft of blogChannel, the first ever RSS 2.0 module.
Sept. 23, 2002
Maths for Apps lecture 1
These notes are for Dr Daniel Richardson’s course “Mathematics for Applications I” at the University of Bath.The required text book is “Linear Algebra with Applications” by G. Williams, published by Jones and Bartlett
[... 803 words]Blogging my lecture notes
So what was all that about? University term started today, and with it comes my grand plan to blog my lecture notes. Don’t worry, I will be restructuring this site in the near future to keep lecture notes off the front page so people who come here for web development stuff don’t have to wade through the details of my Computer Science degree. Unfortunately I have limited internet access at the moment so it may be a week or two until I can make the necessary changes to my blog.
How the RIAA was hacked
The Register: Want to know how RIAA.org was hacked? They had an un-password-protected admin panel listed in their robots.txt file. Muppets.
Sept. 24, 2002
How to install Mozilla on Bath University PCs
Since I’m using the University Library computers at the moment I’m having to reinstall Mozilla on a daily basis. Here’s how I do it:
[... 303 words]Pingback 1.0
Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I’m not entirely happy with the following statement:
[... 117 words]Bath University web guidelines
The Bath University Web Standards & Publishing Guide makes interesting reading. They have standardised on HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS level 2, although the actual page that suggests those standards has an XHTML doctype and fails to validate. The University also aims to support the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, priority level 1.
Sept. 25, 2002
Pingback coverage
The Pingback 1.0 specification is getting some serious attention. Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer have linked to it. Ben Trott (co-author of Moveable Type and creator of TrackBack, the system that inspired Pingback) has objected to Hixie’s suggestion that Pingback is more transparent than TrackBack, claiming that TrackBack could be made just as transparent by the right blog tools. Ben blogged some further thoughts which lead to the following comment by Phil Ringnalda:
[... 278 words]ESF
RSS 3.0 was a joke. ESF is serious, and is already getting a fair bit of attention from the blogging and syndication communities.
Formal systems
These notes cover the first lecture in Dr Dan Richardson’s Formal Systems, logic and semantics lecture. I missed the lecture so these notes are being made with the help of the course notes from Dr Richardon’s homepage (which can be viewed using DVI Viewer for Windows).
[... 568 words]