Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Archive for October, 2006
News Wire: Reinventing HTML
-
Reinventing HTML
W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee addresses the state of HTML, and how the wholesale switch to XHTML with no further work on non-XML HTML has failed, and how the W3C’s approach will change. It’s a relief to finally hear from the W3C leadership on this.
(tags: html standards xml) -
Reinventing HTML: discuss
Comments on Berners-Lee’s “Reinventing HTML” have been solicited here. Some of the more thoughtful reactions are definitely worth reading.
(tags: html standards xml) -
How not to fix HTML
Accessibility guru Joe Clark criticizes Berners-Lee’s “Reinventing HTML” as not addressing the fundamental problem with the W3C’s work on markup: that it is dominated by computer-science and math applications. Also, he asks again: what about WCAG 2?
(tags: html standards accessibility) -
Friday Fun: I Hate Cookies
From the technical minutiae file, Mark Nottingham looks at some of the vagaries of the HTTP headers associated with cookies, and discovers that, of the current batch of modern browsers, only Opera fully supports the applicable standards. (thanks harryf)
(tags: opera standards http) -
HOWTO Make Yahoo! Web Service REST calls with Ruby
The Yahoo! team has put together a short reference on how to call the Yahoo! web services from Ruby. (thanks mattymcg)
(tags: yahoo! rubyonrails) -
Neat fonts - Discover Free fonts from all over the web
One …
The Case for Registering Multiple Domains
Via /. - Optimizing Page Load Time has some very interesting insight, in particular this point;
By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits. Using up to four hostnames instead of one will give you more connections. (IP addresses don’t matter; the hostnames can all point to the same IP.)
That’s actually an HTTP 1.1 recommendation (section 8.1.4);
Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of
simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A
single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with
any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to
another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously
active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response
times and avoid congestion.
More snippets of insight here and here. This is also something you should think about related to AJAX.
A minor nit: the approach recommended in “Optimizing Page Load Time” is;
Rather than loading all of your objects from http://static.example.com/, create four hostnames (e.g. static0.example.com, static1.example.com, static2.example.com, static3.example.com)
That may not …
The Joy of Regular Expressions [4]
Having found some more joy, time to interrupt your Friday evening viewing, picking up the saga from where we left off last time.
Contents
- Is that a date?
- The \d meta character
- More sub patterns
- User friendlier dates
- The PCRE Extended Pattern Modifier
- Non-Capturing Sub Patterns
- Branching
- Hex Literals
- Exploding with Patterns
- The White space Meta character
- Capturing Split Delimiters
Is that a date?
You’ve already had your first taste of sub patterns here, where they where used to capture a word and wrap it in an HTML span tag via preg_replace_callback(). It’s time to explore sub patterns a little further…
You’ve got a string containing a date / time stamp like ‘20061028134534′ - that’s year (4 digits), month (2 digits), day of the month (2 digits), hour (2 digits, 24 hour clock), minutes and seconds (both 2 digits). You need to break it up into it’s constituent parts so you can use them for calculations.
Now you could use multiple calls to substr() but an alternative solution is a regular expression, for example;
<php
$date = ‘20061028134534′; # The input date string
preg_match(
‘/^(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})$/’,
$date,
…
Browsershots.org: Test nine browsers for free
Ever lay awake at night wondering what your latest web masterpiece looked like in Konqueror 3.5.5 on Ubuntu Edgy? I think we all have. Lie awake no more.
Although Web-based Browser testing services are nothing new — Browsercam has provided a paid service for years and sites like Dan Vine’s iCapture Safari testbed have done a wonderful job filling the gaps — Browsershots.org may just be the most comprehensive free service I’ve seen.
Still in alpha release and termed a “technology preview”, Browsershots.org currently provides full-length (i.e. not just the viewport) renderings of nine browsers across three OSs, including such family favorites as Safari 2.0 on Mac, MSIE 7.0 on Windows and Opera on Ubuntu Linux.
Although it’s not clear whether this service will become a paid subscription service, it’s certainly free, robust and very useful at the moment.
Apparently Digg ground it to a halt a little while ago, so feel free to test it out but perhaps don’t tick
all the browser boxes unless you really need to.
Oct 26, 2006 News Wire
-
Getting Real, the book, now comes in three flavors
37signals re-releases its popular ebook, Getting Real, in print-on-demand paperback and as a free HTML version for online viewing.
(tags: business) -
XSS Fragmentation Attacks + MySpace 0day
A new vulnerability in MySpace arises when posting two fragments of code, neither of which is harmful on its own, but when they appear next to each other on the page combine to produce harmful code. The researcher labels this an XSS Framentation Attack.
(tags: security) -
Adobe Soundbooth
Adobe has launched a free beta of SoundBooth, a new sound editor for Windows and Mac. The software is ideal for designers that need to clean up, apply effects and add music to individual clips, but to combine multiple tracks you’ll need another editor.
(tags: audio software) -
Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds
An interesting technique for dislaying RSS/Atom feeds in browsers that don’t recognize them (such as IE 6). Using an XSLT style sheet to convert the feed to HTML, you can present a usable view of the feed’s contents, or redirect to a subscription service.
(tags: xml) -
How To Look Like A UNIX Guru
A cheat sheet of sorts for rapidly getting up to speed on UNIX concepts. Great to have on hand if you only …
The State of ColdFusion
The following is republished from the Tech Times #151.
In issue 145 of the Tech Times, I offered some advice on which web technologies beginners should invest time in learning. Ben Forta, the Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe, felt I misrepresented ColdFusion when I described it as “relatively stagnant.” Having done some homework, I’ve now changed my thinking a little.
First, here’s Forta’s objection:
You are correct about the gentle learning curve, but can you clarify “relatively stagnant”? Just to be clear, the Webster definition of stagnant is “not advancing or developing”. ColdFusion was first released in 1995, ColdFusion MX 7 was released in 2005, 7.0.1 later that same year, and 7.0.2 in June of 2006. In addition, the ColdFusion team is hard at work on the 8th major version of ColdFusion (currently codenamed “Scorpio”), to be released in 2007. Obviously, we are both advancing and developing ColdFusion, and so the term “stagnant” is utterly inappropriate. As such, I must request that you update and correct your statement.
Forta goes on to point out that ColdFusion sits atop a Java foundation, and as such benefits from the full power and flexibility of that platform. My thinking here is that to take advantage of the …
The Browser Wars: Not Taking Sides
The following is republished from the Tech Times #151.
The past week has seen the releases of both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. The browser wars are back on, and for the first time in a while, it’s our duty as responsible developers not to take sides.
In response to the IE 7 release announcement on SitePoint, I was surprised at the proportion of comments vowing to “stick with Firefox”, some even suggesting they wouldn’t bother installing the IE 7 update at all!
Thanks to its versatile extension system, Firefox is likely to remain the primary browser on most web developers’ systems, I’ll certainly grant you that. But these latest releases are in no way justification for us to treat Internet Explorer as a second-class citizen in the work that we do! If anything, we should be looking to embrace any browser that prioritizes support for web standards by basing our work on those standards.
And in that respect, Internet Explorer 7 is most certainly a very respectable stride in the right direction. I just don’t understand how people can claim that IE 7 has “horrible CSS support.” Microsoft has done an excellent job of fixing the most …
Oct 25, 2006 News Wire
-
Mozilla Firefox 2
Firefox 2.0 was launched today, featuring a refined user experience and a great many new developer features.
(tags: firefox software opensource) -
From Redmond With Love
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sends Mozilla a cake in congratulations for the release of Firefox 2.0 today.
(tags: firefox ie) -
Web design is 95% typography
A nice primer on typography as it applies to the web, with links to some meaty resources on the subject. (thanks gnarly)
(tags: design) -
CSSVista: Live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously
Neat tool that lets you view your site simultaneously in Firefox and Internet Explorer as you tweak the CSS code in real time. Windows only, obviously. (thanks lox)
(tags: software css ie firefox) -
Fedora Core 6
Although the site is down due to the surge of traffic, Fedora Core 6 was released today and most of the mirrors and BitTorrent trackers remain online.
(tags: opensource software linux) -
Flash Conceptions and Misconceptions
If you haven’t looked at Flash in awhile, this run-down of common misconceptions is a good start in getting a better picture of the state of Flash (and Flex) development today.
(tags: flash flex) -
ColdFusion 8 Image Support
Word comes out of Adobe’s MAX conference that ColdFusion 8 (currently still in alpha stage development) will have support for dynamic …
Oct 24, 2006 News Wire
-
I think IE7 is going to break language negotiation on many servers
An IE 7 change that was announced at the last minute was a change in the behaviour of locale-based content negotiation (serving a different page based on the user’s language). W3C Internationalization lead Richard Ishida considers the new behaviour a bug.
(tags: ie i18n standards) -
Ajaxian » The Ajax Experience
Ajaxian is providing some excellent coverage of the sessions at The Ajax Experience in Boston this week.
(tags: ajax) -
Visual Studio.NET development on OS X w/ Parallels
A .NET developer makes the switch to Mac OS X and writes about running Visual Studio 2005 on his mac using Parallels Desktop. (thanks spiky_simon)
(tags: .net software windows macos) -
Dojo 0.4 is here!
The release includes new accessibility features, charting, 2D vector graphics, slick API documentation, and 529 bug fixes.
(tags: javascript software) -
RubyConf: History of Ruby
A brief history of the Ruby programming language, as presented at RubyConf 2006.
(tags: rubyonrails programming) -
Clorox - Shared Memory Abstraction for AJAX Applications
An interesting addition to the world of JavaScript tools, though a bit too low-level, I suspect, to really catch on. Clorox lets you access server-side data structures as if they were ordinary JavaScript variables by “compiling” to AJAX JSON requests.
(tags: ajax javascript java) - Six years …
IE 7 Incompatibility Sightings
My girlfriend is about to graduate from a teaching degree, and is looking for a job in the area. Upon visiting the official government site where these jobs are posted today, she noticed this message:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
Microsoft now has available for download version 7 of Internet Explorer (IE7). Recruitment Online is based on a PeopleSoft platform which is yet to be certified for use with the new version of Internet Explorer. Recruitment Online users who have downloaded IE7 are unable to successfully log in to Recruitment Online. Currently there is no setting that can be altered to overcome this issue. Instructions for un-installing IE7 are available from the Microsoft web site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/releasenotes)
Nice, eh? And if this looks like an attempt to pass the buck to PeopleSoft, you’d be right. According to related discussion groups and other sources, PeopleSoft, recently acquired by Oracle, has no significant issues with IE 7, and Oracle expects to certify current versions of PeopleSoft for use with IE 7 shortly.
Has anyone else seen any cases of IE 7 unpreparedness in the wild?
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
SitePoint Kits
Download sample chapters of any of our popular kits.
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, 2.0
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0
The Email Marketing Kit
The Usability Kit
SitePoint Books
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.