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Fixing an IE scrolling glitch
Mike Golding offers a solution to the slightly odd IE bug whereby divs in CSS layout sites suffer glitches as the page is scrolled (from December 2002):
[... 151 words]overflow: hidden
I’ve never really played with the CSS overflow property, partly because I don’t trust it to work in a decent number of browsers. Haiko Hebig’s Title Pictures show off a clever use for the property to display varying amounts of an image depending on the user’s browser size; what’s more, I’ve tested it and it works in Gecko, Opera 7 and IE6 (no IE5 to test on at the moment).
Custom XML templating with PHP
Dynamic XML conversion using the SAX parser and a stack is the best new article I’ve seen on PHPBuilder in a very long time. It introduces several interesting ideas. The first is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: using PHP’s output buffering to implement a kind of templating system so that all of the scripts in a system just have to generate an intermediate content type, then the output buffering function adds on the HTML framework and finalises the page. The second idea is ingenious: invent XML elements to represent specific behaviours, then handle them with a SAX before the page is displayed. Here’s some example code from the article:
[... 280 words]Browser innovation is anything but dead
Rafe Colburn slams Marc Andreessen for his recent comments regarding browser innovation. Marc thinks browser innovation has been dead for the last five years. To make a statement like that he must have missed out on Mozilla, Firebird, Safari, Opera and all the other Gecko variants. Which leads to the worrying conclusion that he’s either still using Netscape 4 or (even worse) he browses with IE!
Reintroducing HTML
Jay Small: Reintroduce yourself to HTML. A call to web authors everywhere to go back to their roots and realise that HTML is not something that should be avoided. He makes some great points, such as the following:
[... 161 words]XML-RPC Errata
Fredrik Lundh: Unofficial XML-RPC Errata, a work in progress. It’s good to see that the unicode limitation has finally been cleaned up. What would be really useful is if someone could work out a list of all of the older implementations that only support ASCII strings.
Diagonal shapes with CSS
Information on Border Slants (via Paul Hammond). Border slants are the effect whereby diagonal lines can be created using pure CSS, by taking advantage of the fact that thick borders around a box meet at an angle. This article describes the effect in detail and shows how it can be used to achieve a number of interesting shapes, then goes on to show off with an impressive Valentine’s Day Heart. See also Tantek’s awesome pentagon site map and A Study of Regular Polygons.
Simple Python Sockets
Moshe Zadka: Networking for non-programmers (and a follow up), via Hans Nowak. A nice gently introduction to sockets, with example code using Python’s socket library.
Accessing cookies with application/xml+xhtml
I’m completely stuck on this one. When serving XHTML documents to Mozilla as application/xml+xhtml, the available DOM is for an XML document rather than an HTML document. This means it’s missing the document.cookie object normally used to access cookies from Javascript. I can’t figure out how you access cookies without it (I’ve searched Bugzilla to no avail). Anyone got any ideas? I sure wish the Mozilla project provided better documentation on this stuff.
RDF and PHP
If you’re still struggling to get to grips with what RDF is actually for, you could do worse than read this guide to Parsing FOAF with PHP. It shows how the FOAF flavour of RDF can be processed using the PHP RAP library, and in doing so demonstrates how RDF documents are built from collections of triples anmd how these triples can be queried to extract useful information. If you’ve ever used Prolog, RDF is actually a very similar concept.
Norwegian Hixie
Congratulations Hixie on his new job at Opera software, in sunny Norway. That’s a pretty exciting opportunity. Does this mean he’ll be contributing less to the Mozilla project? (Dave Hyatt has managed to keep working on it despite his move to Apple).
More unobtrusive DHTML
I’ve talked about unobtrusive DHTML before, and here’s a superb example of it in practise from Chris Casciano. His zeitgeist is enhanced by some clever javascript which hides and reveals tables of data when certain page elements are clicked. View source, and you’ll see that the document contains only structural HTML, with no embedded javascript at all. The special behaviour is added by an external Javascript file which adds the necessary event handlers when it loads, based on the structure of the existing document. This approach maintains the usability of the information in a non-javascript supporting environment, while seriously enhancing the maintainaility of the page as new structural elements can be added to the HTML which will pick up the special behaviour without any further modification to the javascript needed.
CSS Roundup
- SitePoint are running a CSS Design Contest, inspired by the Zen Garden.
- CSS/Exp is Mark Schenk’s collection of CSS experiments which show off some pretty advanced CSS, much of which oonly works in Opera due to its full support of generated content.
- CSS Destroy is a similar collection, with an emphasis on pushing CSS to its limits and beyond.
Knowledge Representation Timeline
This is pretty impressive: A Timeline of knowledge-representation that starts at the dawn of the Universe and continues through the whole of human history right up to the present day.
The Verbosity of Echo
Sam Ruby has called for people to start experimenting with the current (very early) Echo example feeds, and the response has been pretty impressive; check out these feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringnalda and Mark Pilgrim. Now that Echo has progressed to a stage where there are concrete feeds to examine, I have some serious concerns over the verbosity of the format. As they stand, Echo feeds contain a lot of duplicated information. Considering that the default behaviour of aggregators is to poll a feed for updates once an hour, any unnecessary information in the feed itself is going to have a very real monetary cost in terms of burnt bandwidth.
[... 257 words]Simple FTP uploading with Python
Here’s a nice example of a simple Python script which can be bound to the right-click menu in Windows and used to quickly upload files to a specific FTP server.
Further reading on the RNIB redesign
There’s been a flurry of blogger activity concerning the RNIB redesign over the weekend. isolani created an XHTML/CSS redesign independantly of mine, while Tom Gilder took mine as a starting point and made several improvements. Ben Meadowcroft has posted an open letter summarising the concerns felt by him and others over the way the redesign has been implemented. Meanwhile, Julie Howell (the RNIB’s Good Web Design campaign co-ordinator and a well respected member of the Web Accessibility community) has replied on Tom Gilder’s blog promising to collate feedback and pass it on to the web team (Julie herself was not involved in the redesign). It’s good to see they’re listening, but I really wish they would hurry up and fix their broken links!
Join the Buzz
Artima.com keeps getting better and better. In addition to the world’s most interesting collection of technical bloggers, Bill Venners has just added Artima Technology Buzz, a collection of community based public aggregators. They work a bit like the Python Programmer Weblogs page, but covering a wider range of topics and with the important difference that you can add your RSS feed up to the relevant community yourself. I’ve just added some of my category feeds to the relevant sections—you can add your own site using the links in each section, but you need to register a user account on Artima first.
time_since() on Feedster
This is pretty cool: Scott’s taken Nat’s time-since function and added it to Feedster, giving a quick indication of how long ago an item was posted.
The new RNIB site in CSS
Just to show it can be done, here’s the new RNIB site design (as mentioned earlier) re-done with a CSS layout. It’s something of a first draft—I’ve only tested it in IE6 and Firebird on Windows and it still has a few glitches here and there, but as a proof of concept it works pretty well. Here are a few notes on the implementation:
[... 550 words]More caching
One of the golden rules of web site development is “never launch a new feature on Friday”, because it’s almost certain to break over the weekend while you’re not around to fix it. I’ve just extended my hacked together caching system to cover entries as well as the front page in a bid to reduce the load on the database a bit, and since I’m off to Glastonbury tomorrow morning it will have a whole four days in which to collapse in to a smoking hole in the ground. What’s the point of golden rules if you don’t break them once in a while?
Moving forward from Internet Explorer
Dave Shea is advocating moving forward from Internet Explorer, enhancing pages for more advanced browsers (Mozilla, Opera, Safari) using additional style rules that are hidden from IE by using selectors it doesn’t understand. Essentially it means adapting the approach we’ve been taking to Netscape 4 for the past few years to work around flaws in the current browser generation’s backwards cousin.
[... 159 words]More thoughts on RSS
I helped Natalie set up an RSS feed for her (home brewed) weblog last night. Explaining what RSS was was easy. Explaining what she needed to put in her feed took a little bit longer. All she needed to do was provide a feed of entries, each with a title, the full body of the entry, the date it was posted and a permalink to the archived entry. In working out how to do this, we identified the following steps:
[... 460 words]Tom Gilder’s blog
Tom Gilder has finally started his blog properly, powered by Moveable Type. Nice design too (be sure to view source to figure out how he achieved the drop shadows). He’s already covered the RNIB site and has some refreshing thoughts on the IE/Windows situation.