Items in Jun, 2002
Filters: Year: 2002 × Month: Jun × Sorted by date
NPR again
More on BoingBoing about NPR’s link policy. It seems NPR are reconsidering their policy, but in the mean time they have posted a defence of it which Cory Doctorow criticises at length.
[... 34 words]Presenting your content first
Mark’s accessibility tips are getting harder. Today we are advised to Present our main content first in our source code. This benefits both text based browsers and search engines such as Google. Mark points out the ingenious table trick which allows table based layouts to present the main content before the left hand menu in the source code and provides tips on implementation. Thanks to the benefits of CSS layout my blog only needed a small alteration—I was presenting the div containing the navigation in the source code before the div containing the main content. A quick switch of the order of the divs and the CSS did the rest for me without any further alteration.
[... 129 words]Amazon’s hairy feet
Elegant Hack: Today Amazon introduced the soon-to-be standard dancing tab with hairy feet.
Next-Prev implemented
I’ve implemented the next/previous additional aids options in the archives. It ended up being quite an ugly hack, but it works.
[... 21 words]Additional navigational links
Today’s accessibility tip: Providing additional navigation aids. Mark explains the concept of “relative” links using the <link> tag, which can be used to provide shortcuts to the next and previous page in a sequence as well as links to a site’s homepage. He also provides instructions for implementing them in Moveable Type, and asks for suggestions as to how it could be done in Radio. These links are not rendered in the actual body of a page but can be used by many browsers to provide additional navigation aids. My blog has these already but only as shortcuts to my categories and a link back to the home page—I haven’t yet implemented them for next/previous buttons while browsing the archives (which is arguably their most useful ability). Time to get hacking...
[... 134 words]RSS XML stylesheet
This is clever. The RSS feed for the World Wide Web Consortium uses an XML stylesheet to render visually in both Mozilla and IE. It’s a shame the links don’t work but it’s still a nice idea.
[... 39 words]Mozilla versions
Peter-Paul Koch on evolt: One browser, many names—an invaluable guide to the many different version numbers and user-agent strings resulting from the Mozilla project.
[... 28 words]Apple rant
John C. Dvorak: E-Mac, i-Mac, No Mac. This is so poor I just had to link to it. John claims that the Mac is on it’s last legs and deserves to be put down, which is a complete contradiction to almost verything I’ve read about Macs in the past siz months. I’ve never had a Mac and I’ve had few chances to use one, but I would jump at the chance to own one at the moment. Why? Simple, OS X. Apple have taken a truly world class operating system (FreeBSD) and added a truly world class GUI—a combination that I don’t think is matched anywhere else in the computing world. They’re innovating like never before—AirPort and the i-series of software are great examples. John completely fails to back up his viewpoint at any point in his article—in fact the worst he does is to criticise Apple management of running Apple “like a tire company”.
[... 251 words]OOP and XP
There’s an interesting rambling thread on SitePoint at the moment which started off talking about coding standards but has moved on now to discussing OOP and eXtreme Programming. In it, I try to explain inheritance and the difference between -> and :: while Vincent Oostindië explains the principle of refactoring from eXtreme Programming.
XFML
XFML—eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (via Guide to ease). Now this is interesting. It’s an open XML format designed to facilitiate the publication and distribution of metadata—it uses a load of terms that are currently way over my head (hierarchical and faceted taxonomiest, topicmaps?) but the general principle looks fantastic. I wrote a metadata system last year that used a relational database and it was something of a nightmare—XFML looks like it solves some of the problems I faced, although my biggest challenge was how to grab and present usable information from the huge amounts of metadata collected which is a problem that falls outside the scope of XFML. XFML is best summarised by the following quote:
[... 307 words]SitePoint graphic design resources
I’ve never been any good at graphic design, but today I discovered a fantastic resource for Photoshop tutorials and general inspiration. This list of resources highlights the most useful threads of the past year over on the SitePoint Graphic Design forum.
[... 43 words]Slashdot threads
A couple of interesting threads on Slashdot today: Content Management Software—Build or Buy? and Properly Testing Your Code.
[... 23 words]Day 8: page titles
Day 8: Constructing meaningful page titles—the accessibility tips are flying thick and fast now. I’ve always been conscientious of my page titles (after all, they’re all you get when when you use your browser’s history feature) but it seems I was not quite conscientious enough. My titles now all carry a reference to the name of the blog in addition to a description of the page.
[... 69 words]Free books
I like free books (who doesn’t?), so when a story on Slashdot asked for book recommendations I started a thread asking for links to free technical books available online. Here’s a list compiled from the thread:
[... 377 words]djc on Kuro5hin
djc (formerly of evolt) has posted his views on the recent Kuro5hin problems. His take on things can be summarised as “don’t quit your day job until you’re sure your hobby can pay for itself”.
[... 40 words]Advogato rant
Interesting rant on Advogato (from June 11th): Professional Programmers. The author complains that the industry is infested with programmers who don’t really know anything more than how to write Visual Basic macros, and HR departments who hiee them over “real programmers” because they have more VB experience. The article makes some good points but the resulting thread is where the truly worth-while content is. My hope is that the abundance of VB programmers will make it easier for serious programmers (which I’m hoping will be me) to get more highly paid jobs. Time will tell.
[... 96 words]Andrei interview
Interview with Andrei Zmievski on SitePoint. Andrei is the guy behind PHP-GTK, the project that enables developers to write client side GUI applications using PHP. He is also one of the two lead developers on Smarty, the world’s greatest PHP templating engine. Oh, and he’s contributed various bits to PHP itself, including Perl compatible regular expressions and WDDX support. All that and he still has time for an interest in the history of western culture ;) The interview makes great reading for anyone interested in PHP, and also provides a link to a web server written in PHP.
[... 102 words]NPR link muppets
Via Boing Boing: NPR—another site that demands you obtain permission before linking to a page on their site. Will these people ever learn? This is compounded by the fact that their link request form is a classic example of asking for way too much information.
[... 65 words]Why software sucks
MSNBC: Why software is so bad. First time round I gave up on this article after reading the joke at the start, writing it off as another dumbed down piece of ill informed rubbish. Then I saw Scott raving about it and decided to give it a second go. My initial impressions were completely wrong—it’s a well written (and surprisingly unbiased) article that takes a good look at the problems software faces and how industry practises lead to software getting worse rather than better. This year I’ve been doing a course on Software Engineering at University and a lot of the article made a great deal of sense in the context of the course. Well worth reading.
[... 124 words]Python and the space shuttle
Dan Shafer: Space shuttle engineers use Python to streamline mission design.
[... 62 words]XHTML list
I’ve signed up for a new mailing list (probably not a good idea, I’m getting over 200 mails a day which isn’t much fun on a modem)—XHTML-L, which describes itself as A forum for discussing XHTML issues for both XML and HTML developers
. The list is adminned by Simon St. Laurent, who coincidentally is involved with the SIG-XML project I mentioned earlier today.
Language tag
Mark Pilgrim’s accessiblity series continues: Day 7: Identifying your language. Since I’m using XHTML 1.0 I’ve changed my opening <html> tag to the following:
[... 55 words]Javascript select boxes
Via thelist: Javascript Selectbox Functions. Extremely useful demonstrations of how multi-line selectboxes can be used to create advanced user interface widgets with javascript, including tools to alter the order of items in a list and pass values from one selectbox to another and back again.
[... 47 words]PHP Documentor
phpDocumentor version 1.1.0rc2 has been released over at www.phpdoc.org. The feature list (from their press release):
[... 136 words]Suicidal chipmunk
From Google Answers via Elegant Hack: The tale of the suicidal chipmunk. On a related note, I saw chipmunks on sale at a farmer’s show (the Bath and West) a few weeks ago for ten pounds each—very cute but I have no idea if they’d make good pets.
[... 54 words]Email interfaces
Peter Van Dijck: Email interface design 101—a short article examining the possibilities of using email interfaces for web applications. This is an interesting topic and one that deserves further exploration. I am particularly interested in the security problems faced when building this kind of interface (something that is not covered by Peter’s article)—how can you effectively secure an email interface? I’m guessing that for true security the only real solution is PGP encrypted mail and some kind of password driven authentication system. Peter’s blog carries a discussion on the article.
[... 96 words]Knowledge Management
New buzzword (at least for me)—Knowledge Management. Apparently this is a theoretical corner stone of content management, an area I’m very interested in. Plenty of information about it in DMOZ as well.
[... 39 words]Minimal XML
Minimal XML is a project of SML-DEV, who describe themselves as a group of over 125 XML experts working to create simple XML standards and to simplify existing XML
.
Mark replies
Mark mailed me in response to my query about limiting his accessibility series to weblogs rather than expanding it to cover general sites:
[... 176 words]