Entries in Jan, 2003
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2003 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date
PEAR templates and bitshifting
Codewalker.com have a tutorial up describing PEAR’s ITX template system. Their forums also have an explanation of how bitshifting operators work in PHP (in the fifth message from the bottom of the thread).
[... 51 words]Colour blindness filter
Via Anitra Pavka (who has an excellent usability and accessibility weblog): Colourblind Web Page Filter, a clever server driven tool which shows how web pages would look to people suffering from three different forms of colour blindness.
[... 40 words]Blogging with AppleScript
Les Orchard describes an intriguing blogging tool built with AppleScript that posts links to a weblog when they are dragged on to a special folder on the OS X desktop.
[... 38 words]Vellum looks nice
Stuart has released the code for Vellum, his new Python blogging system. I haven’t tried it out yet (the installation process is pretty in depth and I don’t have a properly configured server to hand) but it looks damn sexy. Key features include:
[... 242 words]Who needs web standards?
Aquarion points out a truly moronic “browser upgrade” notice. I especially like Anything larger than 800 x 600 is too large, and the pages do not diosplay [sic] properly
.
Fun with body IDs
Mark has hit on the clever idea of using the body tag’s id attribute to apply different styles to different pages all from the same stylesheet. The technique is very neat, but it would be even neater if he combined it with Eric Meyer’s CSS Signatures to allow advanced users to specify their own styles for his site. Since the ID attribute can’t be overloaded with more than one value doing so would probably mean having to use the body tag’s class attribute as well—the id attribute could hold the signature while the class attribute specified the page (or vice versa).
PEAR out of beta
I just noticed that PEAR is finally out of beta. This means that the PEAR installer will be included with PHP 4.3, but more importantly it means that the PEAR website finally has a usable navigation system.
[... 46 words]Feedback loops
Mark Pilgrim has been having an interesting problem with his Further Reading feature: Feedback loops.
[... 64 words]First deployment of Vellum
Oooh... Stuart has moved his blog over to Vellum, his brand new sparkly Python powered blogging system. The full post is here, but his archive / permalinks aren’t working yet. It’s going to be fun watching the system develop.
[... 50 words]The making of Python
One for the reading list: The Making of Python—A conversation with Guido van Rossum, Part I.
[... 19 words]Apple snubs Mozilla
News.com: Apple snub stings Mozilla. Surprisingly comprehensive coverage of the Mozilla communities reactions to Safari. What impressed me was the number of links to weblogs in the news story. It looks like CNET “gets” blogging.
[... 36 words]Blogs as agents
Scott makes an interesting observation: Are blogs nothing more than agents for the internet?. A few years ago “intelligent agents” which knew your tastes and found content you would be interested in were the Next Big Thing™. Scott points out that by reading bloggers with similar tastes to us we are essentially getting the same service, with a nice human touch.
[... 62 words]Generated content observation
Mark Pilgrim is unhappy with XHTML 2.0. Since the rest of the blogging community has already provided mass commentary on his post, I’ll make an observation concerning his further reading feature instead. The first link I saw to Mark’s post (and the one I followed) was on techno weenie, but I was surprised to later notice that techno weenie was not listed in the further reading list. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Mark’s further reading list is automatically generated from referrals, with verification from a clever Python script that checks the source page to make sure there really is a link, extract a relevant portion of the page and attempts to find a permalink for the entry as well.
[... 313 words]Stuart’s pingback roundup
Stuart has a good summary of the recent advances being made in the Pingback/Trackback implementation sphere.
[... 22 words]Chose URLs carefully
Name your sections carefully (via Adrian) discusses how news (and other) sites could end up adversely affecting their content through badly chosen URL schemes.
[... 31 words]Safari conditional comments
The current extended discussion over whether or not Safari should have some kind of specific CSS blocking technique built in (sparked off by Mark Pilgrim) reminds me of a relatively unpublicised feature of Internet Explorer called conditional comments. These specially crafted HTML comments allow web authors to specifically hide code from versions of IE, or alternatively to hide code from any browsers that are not a specified version of IE. Here’s how they work:
[... 198 words]Chat rooms and meetings
In-Room Chat as a Social Tool: Clay Shirky describes an experiment with an online chat room set up to accompany a meeting of 30 people taking place in the same room. The chat room (available to attendees via Wifi laptops and displayed on a big screen at the front of the room) had some interesting effects on the dynamics of the meeting, not least of which was the dramatic impact the chat room had on the “interrupt logic” of the proceedings.
[... 82 words]DOM2 almost recommended
Craig Saila notes that the W3C have released DOM Level 2 as a recommendation and simultaneously recommended against its use in an article on News.com. Scripts should be used sparingly as they are less machine-readable or transparent than so-called declarative languages like SVG and SMIL
. I’m a big advocate of the labels.js school of scripting where DOM scripts are used to enhance the functionality of a document using the semantic structure of the underlying XHTML, while degrading gracefully (and without loss of information) in user agents without the required javascript support.
Surfin’ Safari
Dave Hyatt has renamed his weblog Surfin’ Safari and is extensively documenting the Safari team’s progress in fixing problems and making their browser even more standards compliant. He has also been responding to questions posed by the blogging community concerning the new browser. Of particular interest is this post explaining the thinking behind Safari’s controversial User Agent string (which identifies itself as “like Gecko”):
[... 239 words]Dorothea Salo on semantic HTML
Dorothea Salo has posted her thoughts on Semantic HTML as well. Dorothea points out that while pre-defined tags (paragraphs, lists and so forth) are well defined it is easy to run in to problems when you start to define extra semantics via the class attribute. Start with something like <code class="python"> and the chances are that six months down the line your list of custom classes will have spiralled out of control, and as tools and validators will not be checking your class names (for typoes and so forth) you’ll soon be in a whole world of trouble.
XHTML is still great for content
In response to Mark Pilgrim’s Poisoning the envelope, Brian Donovan has expanded upon his opinion that long term web facing content should not be stored as (X)HTML:
[... 317 words]Safari surprise
I dunno, you take the evening off to watch a daft Bond movie (Goldeneye was showing on ITV and when you log on again the world is aflame with reports of Apple’s new browser, Safari. To everyone’s surprise it’s based on the KHTML engine as seen in Konqueror, rather than using Mozilla’s Gecko engine. I’ve used Konqueror a fair bit in the past few months and it really is an excellent rendering engine (I was amazed when it rendered all of my favourite CSS layout sites flawlessly) but this is still something of a shock, especially considering Apple’s recent hiring of Dave Hyatt, a key member of the Mozilla project and the guy behind the excellent Gecko-based browser Chimera.
[... 176 words]Pepy’s diary
Pepy’s Diary is a serialization of the Diary of Samuel Pepys in weblog form, which launched on Christmas day plans to continue for the next ten years (the time period covered by the diary). The weblog is quickly becoming a meme, and Phil Gyford, its creator, has written an overview of how publicity spread after the diary’s launch. He has also written a story for BBC News Online describing the project. I am reminded of Bloggus Caesari, a historical weblog by Julius Caesar.
[... 101 words]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.
[... 45 words]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]