Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 4th March 2008

We've decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we've posted previously.

IEBlog

# 3 am / ie, ie8, internet-explorer, web-standards

The real reason Google’s clicks are flat. Rich Skrenta explains that Google’s recent reduction of the clicable area in Adsense ads, while reducing click-throughs by 60%, will eventually balance out due to non-accidental click-throughs being worth more to advertisers.

# 4:34 am / adsense, clickthroughs, google, richskrenta

Two data streams for a happy website. Useful architectural concept for scaling: keep user-specific and generic data separate from the start, in recognition of their different caching and partitioning constraints.

# 4:40 am / caching, scaling

ExpanDrive. Looks like this SFTP mounting application for OS X fixes the problems I’ve had with sshfs (which tends to freeze things up if you lose your network connection while using it).

# 7:32 pm / expandrive, john-gruber, sftp, ssh, sshfs

Principles and Legality. Eric Meyer notes that language about legality in Microsoft’s recent IE announcement suggests that Opera’s much criticised EU threat may have helped positively influence the result.

# 7:45 pm / eric-meyer, ie8, legal, microsoft, opera, standards

Table-Based Layout Is The Next Big Thing. Kevin Yank points out that the inclusion of display:table in IE 8 will finally open up a powerful tool for creating CSS layouts that has so far been mostly ignored.

# 11:01 pm / css, displaytable, ie8, kevinyank, tables

Making bridges talk. Tom Armitage hooked Tower Bridge up to Twitter: “I am closing after the MV Dixie Queen has passed Upstream”.

# 11:07 pm / tom-armitage, towerbridge, twitter

WhatDoTheyKnow (via) New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.

# 11:38 pm / foi, government, mysociety, politicalhacking, whatdotheyknow

Google Maps Without the Scripting. Google Maps has finally added a simple API for retrieving static map images.

# 11:54 pm / google-maps, mapping, staticmaps

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