Items in Sep, 2002
Filters: Year: 2002 × Month: Sep × Sorted by date
Returning
Cameron Barrett is back from Russia and brings photos. Scott Andrew is back from his summer vacation and brings CSS tips. I am back at University and stuck without bandwidth for the next few weeks.
[... 43 words]No updates for a while
I’m moving back up to Bath this afternoon, in to a student house with 4 other people. I don’t know if we even have a phone line at the moment so I’ll probably be offline for the next few days.
[... 40 words]Mozilla 1.2 alpha
The first alpha version of Mozilla 1.2 has been released, with the most notable new feature being Type Ahead Find. I’ve played with this on previous Mozilla builds (it was available as an addon) and it’s an interesting feature—you can navigate around a page by typing the names of links on that page (as soon as you type enough of the link for it to be recognisable the browser selects the link for you). The implementation in 1.2 also allows you to search for items on the page by typing a backslash followed by the search terms.
[... 343 words]Pingback supported again
I’ve re-enabled PingBack on my blog. Auto-discovery is now supported via both the standard <link> element and the new X-PingBack HTTP header. I have also implemented a new experimental method on my PingBack server—pingback.extensions.getPingbacks(url). Send it the URL for an entry on this blog (it must be an archive page and must include the fragment identifier so the system knows which entry you mean) and it will return an array of pages that have been registered as linking to that page via PingBack. This new feature is explained in detail in this email sent to the the blogite mailing list.
Java GUI Builder
One of the things I really like about PythonCard is that it enables (and in fact actively encourages) you to completely separate the GUi of your application from the program logic. In PythonCard you design your GUI by adding and dragging elements around in the resource editor, then create a simple Python class with event handlers to define what should happen when your GUI is interacted with. Now, thanks to the Java GUI Builder (spotted on Small Values of Cool), you can do the same thing in Java.
[... 229 words]mod_python donated to the ASF
mod_python has been donated to the Apache Software Foundation. This is excellent news—I have always been slightly wary of mod_python as it has a reputation for being unstable, but with the ASF directly supporting it hopefully any stability problems will soon be a thing of the past.
[... 51 words]Mozilla web-sniffer
Because I keep on forgetting where it is, View HTTP and HTML Source, a handy tool for debugging HTTP type stuff courtesy of those fine Mozilla folk.
[... 31 words]Fun with Unicode
Hixie has submerged himself in Unicode. Stuart muses that the reason Unicode is so (potentially) huge is a legacy of the Y2K problem. I prefer the explanation given in XML in a Nutshell (my current reading matter of choice for three-and-a-half-hour-train-journeys-from-hell):
[... 115 words]More thoughs on Flash editors
Flash Voodoo’s Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting—the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pretty horrible (font tags and presentational markup galore). This is a limitation of Flash rather than a problem with the coders—our Flash Editor (currently under development by my colleague Richard) has the same problem, so we are looking in to ways of cleaning up the resulting code and turning it in to XHTML.
[... 220 words]Another excellent blog
Jeremy Allaire, Chief Technology Officer at Macromedia, now has a blog. Macromedia’s attitude towards weblogging has been fantastic—they seem to really understand the medium and the opportunities it provides, both in terms of PR and keeping their development community involved and informed. Jeremy writes:
[... 110 words]The RDF in RSS
DJ Adams: The RDF in RSS: Just a bit of a brain dump of what I’ve been learning over the past couple of days
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The float label bug
Strange Mozilla bug: In some versions of Mozilla / Netscape 6+ <label> elements that have a float applied to them will vanish. Tom Gilder’s test case can be viewed here. I tried it in Mozilla 1.1 beta and the page behaved as expected but Netscape 6.22 suffered from the bug. Apparently Netscape 7 still has the bug, which would suggest it was spun off from the Mozilla code base before that bug was fixed. Rust Randal’s CSS form demo gets around this problem with a span inside a label, which seems to be the most effective workaround but is frustrating as it requires additional markup to solve what is a pretty obscure bug.
Surfing the apocalypse
The Guerrilla News Network: S-11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse.
[... 155 words]Randal Rust on accessibility
Randal Rust has posted an updated version of his excellent CSS forms demo. While exploring Randal’s site I stumbled across ALPHABET SOUP: A web designer’s journey to standards and accessibility, an excellent article advocating CSS, web standards and accessibility which includes the following noteworthy quotation:
[... 77 words]More link muppets
HSBC (you have to look pretty hard for this one, they’ve hidden it under “Trade Marks and Copyright”):
[... 88 words]Wining and Dining
Kevin Burton: My Dinner with Dave Winer. Something tells me this won’t be linked from Scripting News.
[... 18 words]New form of spam protection
I’ve had an idea for a new way of hiding email addresses from spam harvesters—shield the address behind a form that must be submitted via POST. Site visitors can now click a button on my Contact page to reveal my email address. Spammers could always circumvent the system by writing a harvester that parses HTML pages for forms and submits every single one, but I’m hoping they won’t bother.
[... 72 words]RSS 1.0 feed now available
I’ve set up my first new syndication feed using RSS 1.0. I’ve checked the feed against this RSS validator and it seems to pass, but throws a warning that item descriptions are meant to be between 0 and 500 characters in length. As I want to provide the full contents of my entries in the feed (for people using aggregators such as AmphetaDesk) I’ve decided to ignore the warning and leave it as it is.
[... 78 words]Flash applications
Flash MX and the Bigger Picture: Lightweight Internet Applications:
[... 231 words]effnews part two
Fetching and Parsing RSS Data is the second installment of the effnews project, a series of tutorials on creating an RSS news reader in Python. This time topics covered include exception handling and event based XML parsing using xmllib.
Remind me why people still use IE
The Register: IE 6 SP1 omits fixes for 20 outstanding flaws:
[... 166 words]Disable CSS bookmarklet
A handy bookmarklet courtesy of Rick on the MACCAWS mailing list:
[... 20 words]RSS feeds coming soon
A quick note concerning RSS feeds. I have not yet implemented them on my new blog, but I plan to do so in the next few days. On the advice of Chris Coome and Bill Kearney (both of whom replied to my question on [rss-dev]) I will be providing feeds in both RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.91 formats, and I plan to provide individual feeds for the various categories on the site. I also have an idea for a feature that will allow people to “build their own” RSS feed consisting of the categories they are most interested in. As always, watch this space :)
[... 118 words]Testing Pingback client
This post exists partly to list the blogs I know of that support PingBack, but mostly to help test my new PingBack client implementation.
[... 68 words]Pingback spec
I just realised I haven’t linked to the Pingback specification yet, so here it is. The spec has been carefully assembled by Ian Hickson and, although it is still a working draught, should be the first stop for anyone who wishes to create a Pingback implementation.
[... 47 words]Labels.js
Spotted on youngpup: Labels.js: A Re-Introduction to DHTML (from December 2001).
[... 183 words]