Saturday, 11th January 2003
Stuart’s pingback roundup
Stuart has a good summary of the recent advances being made in the Pingback/Trackback implementation sphere.
[... 22 words]Chose URLs carefully
Name your sections carefully (via Adrian) discusses how news (and other) sites could end up adversely affecting their content through badly chosen URL schemes.
[... 31 words]Safari conditional comments
The current extended discussion over whether or not Safari should have some kind of specific CSS blocking technique built in (sparked off by Mark Pilgrim) reminds me of a relatively unpublicised feature of Internet Explorer called conditional comments. These specially crafted HTML comments allow web authors to specifically hide code from versions of IE, or alternatively to hide code from any browsers that are not a specified version of IE. Here’s how they work:
[... 198 words]Chat rooms and meetings
In-Room Chat as a Social Tool: Clay Shirky describes an experiment with an online chat room set up to accompany a meeting of 30 people taking place in the same room. The chat room (available to attendees via Wifi laptops and displayed on a big screen at the front of the room) had some interesting effects on the dynamics of the meeting, not least of which was the dramatic impact the chat room had on the “interrupt logic” of the proceedings.
[... 82 words]DOM2 almost recommended
Craig Saila notes that the W3C have released DOM Level 2 as a recommendation and simultaneously recommended against its use in an article on News.com. Scripts should be used sparingly as they are less machine-readable or transparent than so-called declarative languages like SVG and SMIL
. I’m a big advocate of the labels.js school of scripting where DOM scripts are used to enhance the functionality of a document using the semantic structure of the underlying XHTML, while degrading gracefully (and without loss of information) in user agents without the required javascript support.
Surfin’ Safari
Dave Hyatt has renamed his weblog Surfin’ Safari and is extensively documenting the Safari team’s progress in fixing problems and making their browser even more standards compliant. He has also been responding to questions posed by the blogging community concerning the new browser. Of particular interest is this post explaining the thinking behind Safari’s controversial User Agent string (which identifies itself as “like Gecko”):
[... 239 words]