Simon Willison’s Weblog

Clearing out some more tabs

30th March 2003

Clearing out some more tabs:

• Common HTTP Implementation Problems is a W3C Note describing a whole bunch of best practises for serving up documents and designing URIs.
• Iraq-O-Meter and Iraq Body Count provide some war related statistics (both with an anti-war bias).
• Salon: The dumbing-down of programming (from 1998).
• Architectural Design Patterns for XML Documents on XML.com suggests adapting the Design Patterns idea to XML, providing four examples.
• Three interesting javascript articles by Sjoerd Visscher:
  • Higher Order Programming examines Javascript’s ability to use functions as values and arguments.
  • Event Handlers and Callback Functions describes some clever tricks with closures that make event handling more powerful.
  • Beyond JS is an intruiging javascript library with a whole bunch of weird extensions to the language.
• Kevin Lynch from Macromedia is seeking suggestions for ways in which Macromedia software could be improved to help support the activity of blogging.
• eZ xml is a DOM XML parser written in pure PHP that includes support for document validation using XML Schemas.
• Compiling and Enabling GD in PHP 4.3—apparently doing so is harder than it looks.
• Six methods of creating rounded corners in CSS. I’d seen most of these before, but this one stands out in that it uses just one div and then appends the extra divs required for the corner effect using javascript and the DOM.
• Ten Security Checks for PHP, Part 1—better than my recent writing secure PHP article.
• Simple javascript RDF Parser and query thingy allows you to process RDF on the client.
• Really cool furniture via BoingBoing.
• Via Keith, some information on native XML scripting in ECMAScript:
  • Native XML Scripting in BEA WebLogic Workshop provides a tutorial style introduction to the concept.
  • Native XML Scripting discussion on Lambda the Ultimate.
  • Handling XML with ECMAScript Extensions provides the geeky details.