Saturday, 13th September 2003
Python for teaching mathematics
Kirby Urner provides some great examples of how Python can be used as an aid to understanding mathematics on the marketing-python mailing list. I particularly liked this demonstration of Pascal’s triangle using Python generators:
[... 139 words]Listutorial
Russ Weakley has followed up his excellent Listamatic with a useful set of tutorials on styling lists. The style of the tutorial looks worth emulating: each page adds a new property, explaining what it does and showing how it affects the list. I particularly liked the Icon lists demonstration.
[... 53 words]Screen readers and display: none
I’ve long heard rumours that some screen readers fail to read out text hidden using the CSS display: none property, but I had never really investigated it as I don’t have access to a screen reader myself (I should really download the JAWS trial some day). Bob Easton’s What do screen readers really say? describes the problem and specifies a number of tests for screen reader abilities, the results of which are collated on this Wiki page. As a side note, quickly collecting the results of this kind of test is an excellent way to make use of a Wiki.
Prior Art
The most interesting thing to come out of this whole Eolas disaster could well turn out to be Ray Ozzie’s description of how Lotus Notes was demonstrating many of the funamental abilities of today’s browsers, including dynamic application embedding remarkably similar to that covered back in the patent, way back in 1993. The patent was filed in 1994. Prior art? We can only hope.
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