Items in May, 2004
Filters: Year: 2004 × Month: May × Sorted by date
Wikipedia enhancements
I don’t know when it happened, but Wikipedia has a stylish new design in mostly valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional (the front page validates, some of the inside pages do not) with a CSS layout to boot. They even have an option to turn off the single layout table used on their home page. The site seems much easier to navigate now and the organisation of the front page is a masterpiece of information architecture. When you’ve got over 250,000 articles just in the English version providing a useful home page is going to be a challenge, but Wikipedia pulls it off with aplomb.
[... 220 words]Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite (via) This time it’s web standards vs whatever MS are cooking up for Longhorn. # 31st May 2004, 9:59 pm
Cheese-rolling gets back on track. I guess I missed the cheese rolling this year. # 31st May 2004, 8:45 pm
Hackers & Painters (via) Paul Graham’s new book. # 31st May 2004, 8:42 pm
Understanding Apache file permissions. From OnLamp’s A Day in the Life of #Apache series. # 31st May 2004, 8:09 pm
Solving the “silent data loss” problem in RSS 2.0 (via) RSS to take inspiratiom from Atom? # 31st May 2004, 7:56 pm
Repro, Man. “... the age of Word’s code base has surpassed the legal drinking age in all 50 states.” # 31st May 2004, 7:46 am
Edward Tufte: Sparklines. An entire chapter from E.T.’s forthcoming book “Beautiful Evidence”. # 31st May 2004, 5:05 am
Daring Fireball: Security Cannot Be Spun. Apple’s communication handling of the recent security problem was atrocious. # 31st May 2004, 4 am
Everything Can be a Link with Mozilla’s window.getSelection() Method and the W3C DOM Range API (via) Impressive is an understatement. # 31st May 2004, 3:31 am
Pink Numbers [dive into mark]. Because you can’t go wrong with even more blog clutter. # 31st May 2004, 3:07 am
A note on testing classNames in Konqueror and MSN/Mac (via) Apparently running a regex on .className can cause problems if an element has no class. # 31st May 2004, 12:09 am
Id-Ego-Superego. Web service that adds ID attributes to HTML and XHTML documents. # 30th May 2004, 10:56 pm
The Internet Slum (via) I can’t decide if this is pessimistic, realistic or both. # 30th May 2004, 10:50 pm
’Purple Numbers" show a need for better linking tools (via) He’s right of course, but for granular linking to be useful it has to work in today’s browsers. # 30th May 2004, 8:26 pm
More Purple Haze. Jonas Luster is tracking the purple numbers discussion. # 30th May 2004, 8:22 pm
A few more thoughts on plinks
From the comments on my plinks entry, it seems some people are seeing ugly green hash marks all over the place. If that includes you, you need to force-reload my stylesheet to ensure you are getting the copy with the plink hiding styles.
[... 444 words]Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers. mnot reveals his ID anchors using CSS generated content. # 30th May 2004, 9:06 am
plinks—a purple numbers variant
Via Tim Bray, I came across the concept of Purple Numbers. In a nutshell these are permalinks attached to every paragraph on a page which, to paraphrase Tim, make every paragraph on a page a first-class Web citizen.
[... 1213 words]Time to fix those broken pages
I have a whole bunch of gripes about Internet Explorer, but my personal favourite is the way it will render a document served with a text/plain Content-Type header if it thinks the file might contain HTML. The direct result of this is that people with misconfigured web servers who are serving their HTML with the wrong Content-Type frequently don’t realise, so when users of better behaved browsers such as FireFox visit they get hit in the face with a page of raw source code.
Sam Ruby: Détente. Absolute required reading for anyone with an interest in syndication. # 29th May 2004, 7:53 pm
Neowin Interview: Ben Goodger from the Mozilla Foundation. FireFox 0.9 will only be a 4.9 MB download. # 29th May 2004, 4:35 pm
How to debug JavaScript using MS script editor. This kind of comment is why I will never implement comment registration or anything like it. # 29th May 2004, 4:12 am
An Intelligent Nim Computer Game, Part 1 (via) Implementing game AI in Java. # 28th May 2004, 7:30 pm
Building large strings in PHP. Unlike Python, concatenation is faster than array joining. # 28th May 2004, 7:27 pm
EclipsePlugins (via) Eclipse is the only IDE I’ve ever used that has actually increased my productivity. # 28th May 2004, 7:23 pm
FreeBSD Info Files. In HTML, Postscript, PDF and ASCII. # 28th May 2004, 5:27 pm
Rounded Corners with CSS and JavaScript. In which I attempt to show that you CAN have your cake and eat it too. # 28th May 2004, 5:11 pm
TextDrive: An Offer [SOLD OUT]. Dena Allen’s new hosting service gets off to an impressive start. # 27th May 2004, 10:57 pm
Rejecting rejection letters (via) “Please do not regard this letter as a criticism of your qualifications in attempting to refuse me employment. I wish you the best of luck in rejecting future candidates.” # 27th May 2004, 9:46 pm