September 2002
Sept. 25, 2002
String rewriting systems
These notes are from the second lecture in Dr Richardson’s Formal Systems course.
[... 824 words]Deng—HTML rendering in Flash
DENG (via WaSP) is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript
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More lecture notes
As you can see, I’ve posted some more lecture notes. The second set uses a HTML entities to display greek letters, as listed on this page of the HTML 4.0 recommendation.
[... 234 words]Sept. 27, 2002
Functional programming
These notes cover the first two lectures of Dr Bradford’s Function Programming course.
[... 1,210 words]Usability and interface design
This course covers HCI with a heavy emphasis on implementation. We will be developing the interface/interaction components of software using Java, in particular the AWT and Swing toolkits.
[... 441 words]XFML 1.0 soon
Peter Van Dijck: Future XFML news will be posted on the XFML.org site.
XFML 1.0 will be with us soon.
Sept. 30, 2002
Peter Gabriel
Today’s weird blogging observation: Bloggers love Peter Gabriel. Jeremy Zawodny is a big fan, Scott Andrew can’t wait for his new album, Jeffrey Zeldman praises his sophistication and daypop returns 44 blogs currently talking about him. Despite being good friends with his nephew I’ve never really listened to him that much, but with glowing reviews such as these I’m tempted to grab the new album and see what the fuss is about.
CSS in the real world
Adrian Holovaty: CSS in the real world. Adrian uses CSS to reduce the markup for a list of news headlines by 75%:
[... 56 words]Taming lists
In CSS Design: Taming Lists, Mark Newhouse explains in detail every CSS list trick in the book, including inline lists, nested breadcrumbs and a variety of other useful techniques. He also links to Eric Meyer’s essential DevEdge article Consistent List Indentation which explains how to deal with the differences between list indentation in Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
XML transformations with CSS and the DOM
Scott Andrew: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. Forget about XSLT, Scott demonstrates how CSS can be used to visually style XML documents while a bit of Javascript can add additional behaviour such as clickable links. Unfortunately the demonstration document doesn’t seem to work in my 1.1 version of Mozilla (the styles work fine but the clickable links don’t work at all).
Pingback and Trackback
Hixie has written a whitepaper comparing Pingback to Trackback, and answering pretty much every question that has been asked about Pingback in the past week.
Maths for apps problems class
I didn’t quite understand this part of the lecture as we arrived late. These are the notes copied from the board.
[... 1,060 words]Managing data
These notes cover chapter one of “Data Management” by Richard T. Watson.
[... 974 words]Basic Lisp
Typically, Lisp is run as an interactive interpreter. People write a whole load of Lisp in a test file and then load it in to the interpreter and try it out to see if it works. Lisp is a very dynamic language—functions can be redefined on the fly and it is perfectly possible to shoot yourself in the foot (by redefining Lisp internals for example) if you really want to.
[... 905 words]