Simon Willison’s Weblog

Comment Authentication Prototype

I’ve built a prototype of the comment signature system discussed earlier. The prototype consists of an authentication server which anyone can register with and support on this blog for verifying signatures. So far it seems to work.

Mailinator and email validation

So, Mailinator (via Joel). It’s a brilliant concept; whenever a site you don’t trust insists on you giving them an email address you invent something-random@mailinator.com and give them that instead. Then you go to the Mailinator site, enter the something-random and see the emails recently sent to that address.

Learn to search!

Slate: Digging for Googleholes:

More CSS tips and tricks

• Lachlan Cannon shows off some neat tricks for styling forms with minimal markup on the freshly redesigned illuminosity. I used his CSS for the forms in the comment authentication prototype and it worked a treat.
• Adam Kalsey struts his stuff with techniques for dotted borders in IE and a nice new rounded box corners method.
• Dave Shea reclaims Times New Roman. I’d been avoiding it for so long I’d completely missed the idea of sprucing it up with CSS. Lovely.

Ludicrously simple templates with Python

A long, long time ago I wrote my first ever PHP templating system. It was pretty simple; it consisted of a function that took two arguments: the name of a template file, and an associative array of replacements to make on that file.

Better web forms

Adam Kalsey has kicked off Simplified, a new series on web usability, with some thoughts on creating usable web forms. The conversation continues on Paul Scrivens’ blog, and covers a lot of interesting ground. D. Keith Robinson also has some tips on better form design in his latest Gorilla Web Tip.

Let’s go ::outside

Tom Gilder has started a series of posts looking ahead to CSS3. In his first installment, he describes the awesomely powerful ::outside pseudo-element. Using this, CSS3 authors can apply multiple backgrounds and borders to single elements (at the moment doing so requires fussing around with nested divs). If you don’t instantly see the importance of this, take a look at some of the attempts to render rounded box corners using CSS. All of them require the addition of extra presentational elements, none of which would be needed if we could use the ::outside selector instead.

PHP XPath Implementation

This looks like it could be really useful: an XPath implementation in pure PHP (no extra modules required), via More Like This.

Validating HTML from behind a firewall

Steve Clay’s Private Validator is a really handy tool for people who working on intranet sites who want to be able to run them through the W3C’s validator. It’s a PHP script which you install on a server behind the firewall that has access to both the intranet and the outside world. It comes with a bookmarklet which activates the script. When the script is activated, it grabs the indicated page, then uploads it to the external validator and grabs the result. It’s pretty neat, but even neater would be some kind of desktop application that did the same thing. I can almost feel a Python script coming on.

Superb CSS template/tutorial

I’m not sure how I missed this one. Holly Bergevin’s Perched Upon a Lily Pad is a CSS demo that shows off a 3 column layout with a flexible header, full length columns, horizontal navigation bar and complete descriptions of exactly how it all works contained within the page. It’s very educational (I’ve learnt a trick or two just by reading it) and a great example of solid, cross-browser CSS design.

Quality news site URLs

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman is devoting this week on his blog to discussion and analysis of news site’s URLs.Nathan’s 5 attributes for a good URL are worth repeating here as they succintly describe my own opinions:

Python 2.3

After numerous alphas and betas, Python 2.3 has been released. Python.org has highlights of the release, while A.M. Kuchling’s What’s New in Python 2.3 goes in to a bit more detail. There’s some great new stuff, but the feature that particularly caught my eye is this: