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RNIB redesign a disappointment
Accessify: RNIB redesign does not go far enough examines the RNIB’s much hyped new accessible web site and finds it sorely lacking. While it includes basic accessibility features such as alt attributes and skip-navigation links it suffers hugely from out-dated development practises and unnecessary markup bloat. Here’s a prime example, taken from the left hand column of the front page of the site:
[... 385 words]BBC News Feeds
Adrian Holovaty has the scoop on the BBC’s new RSS feeds, one for every news index page of their site. Adrian has also written a bookmarklet to find the feed for any section of the BBC site.
PHP philosophy, and bundling SQLite
Here’s a great quote from Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) for people who have become disheartened with PHP’s lack of elegance when compared to other languages such as Python:
[... 232 words]Friends’ Blogs
My friend Tristan has got his blosxom powered blog up and running again. He’s also set up an experimental public aggregator of feeds from a small group of friends from Uni, using blosxom’s companion aggregator blagg. I think public aggregators are going to become a popular end point for RSS in the near future: they’re a great way of creating an instant community from existing weblogs. The Python Programmer Weblogs page is a great example of this in action.
[... 110 words]Another rant about Flash
Michael Pick has kicked off an interesting discussion on the usefulness of Flash, which is continued on mezzoblue. The key idea under discussion is that while Flash has its uses it remains a fundamentally bad choice for serving up text based content. I couldn’t agree more. It’s nice to see that some Flash designers think the same way.
[... 401 words]Sporting Gentleman’s Guide
If you’re still wondering what RDF is actually for, Ben Hammersley’s Sporting Gentleman’s Guide to the Semantic Web includes a perfect example of triples (even if it get’s a bit less obvious after that).
XML Shorthand Language
Via Keith, PXSL, the Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language provides a shorthand way of writing and maintaining XML documents. It’s based around the idea that a lot of XML formats contain more markup than actual text, thus by reversing the way the syntax is formatted and using meaningful indentation to express hierarchies markup heavy XML can be greatly simplified.
PEAR Tutorials
PHP Kitchen have compiled a list of PEAR tutorials, covering a number of useful PEAR modules. This is an especially important resource considering that PEAR’s module documentation is probably the weakest part of the project. Most modules have some documentation available in the PEAR Manual but much of this is incomplete and crucially there are no links from the package directory entries to the documentation for each package. It’s a shame because PEAR has a great deal of excellent code that many developers are completely unaware of.
Some thoughts on caching
Keith is thinking about caching. He’s drawn up a pretty interesting set of thoughts and requirements, such as support for conditional GET and fine-grained cache length control, and support for caching most of a page while leaving some small parts dynamic.
[... 206 words]Gorilla Web Tips
D. Keith Robinson’s Gorilla Web Tips: News and Featured Content, the first in a series of columns.
Jython as a learning tool
In Jython Is Just Too Useful, Joey Gibson shows how Jython can be used to quickly demonstrate Java class libraries interactively, including using Python’s dir() builtin to inspect available methods of Java classes. I used Jython last year while learning Swing for a piece of University coursework and found that being able to interactively create and manipulate Swing components (and see them appear on the screen as I typed) sped up the learning process a great deal.
More on Search
Tim Bray’s series on full-text search has got to the meaty bit: how search engines actually work, including an overview of the kind of data structures they use (presented in XML format for readability). The basics are a lot simpler than you might think. Tim has also posted some thoughts on how people actually use search, of which the most interesting point is that advanced search is hardly ever touched.
[... 222 words]Quick testing of alt attributes
Via Web Graphics, ScriptyGoddess’ Get ALT Info bookmarklet, which displays a list of all of the images on a page along with their alt attributes; great for testing a page to make sure you haven’t missed any.
Storing trees in a database
SitePoint: Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database, by Gijs Van Tulder. The article first shows how the easy way of storing hierarchies in a database, using parent fields and a recursive PHP function to iterate up the tree. It then goes on to talk about a far more interesting alternative called “Modified Preorder Tree Traversal” where trees are first “flattened” in to a heap-like structure, then each node is stored with a pair of numbers representing that node’s position in the tree. I’d seen this somewhere before but Gijs Van Tulder’s explanation is far clearer, and comes with some good examples showing how this unconventional storage method can retrieve all of the eventual children of a node in a single query. He also talks about ways of updating the tree structure when new items are added.
Thunderbird supports extensions
I’ve been pretty unexcited by Thunderbird so far: I’m pretty picky about my mail clients (so far Evolution is the only client I’ve really liked) and Mozilla’s never really lived up to my expectiations. I’m preparing to change my mind now that Thunderbird supports extensions. Firebird’s extensive collection of extensions is one of its strongest advantages, and the idea of a mail client that can be customised in a whole bunch of different ways by adding new extensions is pretty inspiring. I might even have to try and learn to write some myself.
The Matrix Reloaded, Abridged
The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script, by Rod Hilton (via teeb!). Do NOT read this if you haven’t seen the film yet; you won’t get the jokes and it’s full of spoilers. It’s the best/funniest analysis of Reloaded I’ve seen yet.
Gorgeous CSS Rollovers
I’ve been planning a follow-up to my basic link styling tutorial for over a week now, but it’s going to be a lot shorter now thanks to Al Sparber’s excellent Uberlink CSS Rollover tutorial, which covers a lot of useful concepts and ends up with a truly gorgeous looking result. Thoroughly recommended.
Easier form validation with PHP
Let’s talk about form validation. Here’s what I would class as the ideal validation system for a form in a web application:
[... 1,170 words]HTML Definition Lists
Ben Meadowcroft has a new tutorial up showing how definition lists can be used in semantic markup for lists of definitions, such as glossaries.
[... 189 words]Gecko beats IE!
I haven’t looked at the statistics for this site in a few months. It turns out I was in for a pleasant surprise:
[... 103 words]Eldred Act Reasoning
Lawrence Lessig explains why the proposed Eldred Act does not go further in its aims to reclaim the public domain.
IRC on your mobile
Russell Beattie has posted an enthusiastic description of a new IRC application for his mobile phone. It looks really neat, but what got me really interested was his post today about his new laptop:
[... 148 words]Origin of “list comprehension”
Via Jarno Virtanen, a comp.lang.python post explaining the origin of the term “list comprehension”, Python’s clever alternative syntax for filtering lists (see this chapter of Dive Into Python). The term comes from set theory; it’s nice to know that stuff was worth learning after all ;)
Python generators for database result sets
I’ve read several articles on Python generators now, and I had almost got my head around them, but then I read this: Iterators and Databases by Andy Todd, which demonstrates a simple but intuitive way of using generators to iterate through rows from a database query without having to load all of the rows in to a list in memory first. Brilliant.
[... 165 words]Accesskeys on ALA
Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation is the first new technical article on A List Apart in months. I didn’t think there was much that could be said about accesskeys, but the tutorial has some nice ideas to help make them more obvious without being too intrusive. I think the approach demonstrated by the The Ontario Ministry of Energy site is the most appealing, with single letters corresponding to accesskeys underlined as they are in application menus.
Another MP Blogger
Fantastic! Tom Watson has now been joined by Richard Allan (Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam) in the ranks of MPs with their own weblog. It looks like it’s going to be really good; Richard is something of a geek (he runs RedHat 8.0 at home) and in one of his first entries he takes advantage of his position as an MP to extract information from Tiscali about broadband pricing issues in the UK.
[... 123 words]Evangelism is WAR
Evangelism is WAR is a fascinating account (actually, the first chapter of an upcoming book) of the principles behind Technical Evangelism at Microsoft and the methods they use to establish their platforms as the dominant players. It’s author is James Plamondon, who worked at Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist for 8 years. It’s a great read, and it’s also entertaining to see developers and customers referred to as “pawns” throughout. Found via a link on the Mozilla Tech Evangelism site.
Further more...
By coincidence, Jeffrey Zeldman just posted something in a similar vein to my previous rant, looking at things from a different angle:
[... 181 words]