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Collaboration tools should be simple
Peter Merholtz has been thinking about collaborative software tools, and has concluded that the simplest are by far the most effective.
[... 207 words]Spatial indexes
Jeremy Zawodny demonstrates Spatial Indexes in MySQL 4.1. This clever new feature allows you to add data to a table in terms of geometric points, then run queries to find (for example) all points that occur inside a specified polygon. Weird and wonderful stuff.
Wiki hosts and ticket stubs
Matthew Haughey asks why no one has launched a free host for people to set up Wikis, similar to blogspot for blogs or Yahoo Groups for mailing lists / collaborative communities. It’s a good question.
[... 161 words]Vertical centering with CSS
Lots of people said it couldn’t be done (myself included), but evidently we were wrong. Joe Gillespie shows how to achieve vertical centering with CSS in the latest edition of WPDFD. Via Craig Saila, who also has an experimental piece showing how the height of three divs can be set to the height of the tallest of the three, using javascript.
Using page titles properly
Adrian Holovaty eloquently demonstrates why real page titles (as opposed to titles stuffed with meaningless marketing keywords) are so important, using local entertainment listings as his example. One site that would do well to take his advice (despite not being in the entertainments listings business) is The Register, which has been failing to provide story headlines in page titles for as long as I have been visiting it. This is almost certainly a flaw in their content management system, but in 2003 it is an inexcusable error to make.
A great year for Mozilla
The MozillaZine Review of the Year 2002 shows just how far the Mozilla project progressed in 2002. From a 0.9.8 milestone in January, the open source browser bounded on past version 1.0 and span off popular sub projects in Chimera and Phoenix (soon to be renamed).
Perl made less ugly
It seems Perl OOP doesn’t have to be that ugly after all. Tony Bowden disects the code from the recent Evolt article and shows how it can be made much neater using Perl’s Class::Accessor module. Much nicer—I should have guessed that there would be More Than One Way To Do It.
XHTML is just fine
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this weblog, I realised I needed a format for storing my entries that would keep my content “free” to be reused in multiple different ways. I thought about a simple UBB style markup language, with [url="http://www.example.com/"]links like this[/url], automatic line breaks and a few other simple structures such as lists and headings. I also considered Wiki markup of some sort, again looking for a reasonable expressive but controlled markup vocabulary for storing my blog entries in a reusable way.
Browser upgrade messages enter history
There’s been something of a backlash against “browser upgrade” messages recently, for a variety of reasons. Now Jeffrey Zeldman, the man who brought upgrade messages widespread attention in the first place, has admitted that he too is moving away from them. With 4.0 browsers almost a thing of the past and awareness of web standards much greater than it was a year ago it looks like they may have hit their retirement date. Incidentally, Jeffrey’s post includes the following piece of standards compliance propoganda which, while old hat to most people, I feel is still worth a quote:
[... 204 words]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.