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Internet Explorer cheats!
I had alway wondered why IE appears to work so fast sometimes (not that I am at all unhappy with the speed displayed by Phoenix). Now I know—unsurprisingly, IE and IIS are cheating. Read the explanation here (via mpt).
Top web design mistakes
Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. This is an astutely observed list, although I would add “relying on Flash for navigation” as one of the biggest modern mistakes (for some reason Jakob fails to mention Flash at all...). I particularly liked the following point about lengthy URLs, especially the (as far as I know) newly coined term social navigation.
[... 193 words]Considered harmful considered harmful
Eric Meyer: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful. That’s a shame, because I was planning on writing one for target=“_blank”. I guess I’ll have to find another way of expressing my forthcoming rant.
Information Architecture testimonials
Poor old AIFIA are still trying to explain what Information Architecture is in easily understood terms. Their latest effort should be pretty much garaunteed to succeed—14 testimonials from web experts explaining why it is important in pleasant little sound bites.
The anatomy of Google
Every now and then I stumble across this and then lose it again, so I’m blogging it for safe keeping. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine is the research paper that kicked off the Google phenomenon, and despite its age still provides a great insight in to how the world’s favourite search engine works (or used to work).
Crufty
I have no intention of starting a language war, but my God this is ugly. Still, I guess it must work for some people.
Christmas illness
I’ve had an off-line Christmas, during which I’ve been struck down with a particularly nasty combination of ’flu and a chest infection. After sweating it out for a week I finally decided it wasn’t improving and went to see a doctor. Verdict: I think you’re very ill
. Exams are looming (they start on the 14th) and I haven’t started revising yet. Ho hum.
Debugging HTTP headers
Tantek has released two new favelets for revealing HTTP information, using Mozilla’s ever useful Web Sniffer and Delorie’s HTTP Header Viewer. I spotted a similar tool on a recent trip to MozDev: LiveHTTPHeaders adds a “Headers” tab to the page information box in Mozilla 1.2, showing the full request and response headers used for the current page. It’s a very nice tool, but unfortunately does not yet work with Phoenix (the headers tab is added to the info box but the header information does not appear).
Blockquote citations
Inspired by Adrian Holovaty, I spent an hour this morning getting dirty with the DOM in an effort to replicate his funky CSS blockquote citations effect but with links that you can actually click on. The resulting code is now active on this weblog—check the javascript out here.
[... 86 words]Usability.net rant
Someone, please, tell me UsabilityNet is a joke. Spotted via an article on hebig.org, UsabilityNet (apparently recently redesigned) claims to be “a project funded by the European Union to provide resources and networking for usability practitioners, managers and EU projects”. Again, IANAUE but here are some things wrong with it just off the top of my head:
[... 407 words]Gracefully degrading
StopDesign is a superb example of a site that degrades gracefully for Netscape 4, thanks to a carefully crafted basic stylesheet. Doug discusses the necessity of including a browser upgrade message and some of the different approaches used around the ’net.
Conversations with Joe Clark
Jonathan Delacour is three days in to his Conversation with Joe Clark series (see also parts one and two and the introductory book review). I thoroughly recommend reading the whole series, but here are a few points that stood out for me:
[... 786 words]Hotbot redesign
Douglas Bowman provides some background to the new HotBot redesign, which uses CSS for layout and almost but doesn’t quite validate. It was all looking great until the HotBot Skins page told me I should upgrade to a browser that supports web standards (I was using Phoenix).
Tantek’s markup challenge
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn’t find anything in the overall structure, but I have a few (admittedly nit-picky) suggestions for his current entries. Firstly, the following line would, in my opinion, be better served with a titled <dfn> element:
Creative Commons copyright link
It’s great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception—as Lessig says on his blog, ’Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons
. If you haven’t seen their explanatory flash animation, Get Creative, you should really check it out.
Stuart on plays
Stuart has some interesting thoughts regarding Mark Pilgrim’s latest entry: an excerpt from The Real Thing, a play by Tom Stoppard.
Clearing a select box
Deep in to coursework now, but I just spent more time than I care to mention struggling with what should have been a very simple task; removing all of the items from an HTML select box using Javascript. Here’s the code that was causing me problems:
[... 217 words]Joe Clark interviews
On Monday, Slashdot posted an excellent in depth interview with Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Websites. In a fantastic display of cluelessness they pasted the XHTML document which Joe sent them straight in to the Slashdot template, <html> tags and all. The good news is that there’s more Joe Clark related goodness to come, courtesy of Jonathan Delacour:
Interview with Tim Perdue
OSDir: Interview with Tim Perdue. GForge and behind the scenes at SourceForge.
Trade it on Trodo
Adrian Holovaty has revealed his previously hinted at secret project. Trodo.com is kind of an online bartering site
. You give away stuff you no longer have a use for to earn credits, which you can then spend on requesting free items from other people. It’s a very interesting idea, and the trading model is explained in depth in Adrian’s comments section.
Google roundup
I’ve missed out on a whole bunch of Google news lately (all of which has come via the Google Weblog). Google labs have a couple of interesting new demos; Google Viewer, a weird slideshow thing that cycles through search results for you using bizzare DHTML and Google Webquotes, which annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites
. Google have also published their End-of-Year Zeitgeist which offers a unique overview of the year’s events based on Google search statistics.
A new source of rants
Soup is Good is a new blog by a friend of Jeremy Zawodny. It looks like one to watch—two quality rants and counting.
Lambda calculus links
An Introduction to Lambda Calculus and Scheme and Wikipedia’s Lambda Calculus page have both proved useful recently.