Wednesday, June 27, 2001
I wasn't going to post this, because it's pretty basic, but Yimay wanted it for her site. Anyway, we use a free service called The Counter to track stuff like number of hits, average browser and OS usage, recent referrals, etc. Over the past few weeks, The Counter has sent messages saying this service will no longer be free. Either you pay them or you have to sport a big nasty logo on your site. Yuck...
Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Now I'm not cheap, but I do believe that a "free" service should remain free. So the solution is, put the image (and surrounding script) in section of the page that you can "turn off". Here's the code:
<div style="display:none;">
<!-- counter code goes here -->
</div>
I told you it was simple, right? This works in all 4.0 browsers and above... If The Counter wants to advertise on my site, they can have my Netscape 3 audience. (which is just barely above 0%)
If you read my July 11th post you'll see that this solution didn't work after all. The code works perfectly, but "The Counter" thwarted our plan by denying us access to our account information. Oh well, you win some; you lose some.
Monday, June 25, 2001
On June 9th in the Sesame Street themepark in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, a man was cited for Assaulting Cookie Monster. I can't believe he did it on my birthday! Ha ha!.
I read A List Apart every week and the content is superb every single time. This week is a particular gem. If you can only read one, read the accessibility article, All the Access Money Can Buy by Joe Clark. He’s definately not a designer, but he knows his Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s choice reading with many links to other accessibility-related content. Notice the detailed ”title” attributes of every link in that article.
Much Ado About Smart Tags by Chris Kaminski is a very detailed, in-depth, and somewhat long (but well worth the read) article about Microsoft’s OfficeXP and IE6 addition, ”Smart Tags.“ Do they pose a threat to the free web as we know it? Chris thinks so and I tend to agree.
Excerpt of the W3C HTML discussion group from Johannes Koch of Germany:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html and http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html tell you about which elements and attributes are deprecated. Mostly because they are presentational things.
This is some very useful data that I couldn't find before. Now I have an easy-to-read table on which elements are deprecated and why. <noscript></noscript> was NOT deprecated from HTML 4 and was carried over into XHTML.
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
I was talking about W3C recommendations today and I realized that there are some seemingly conflicting aspects of the XHTML and WCAG recommendations. For example, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines state that anytime JavaScript or multimedia is used, there should be an alternative way to access the information provided in the multimedia. However, the <noscript></noscript> tags have been deprecated from the XHTML specifications in version 1.0 Strict and version 1.1. It seems that this combination could make for some very accessible, yet utterly boring websites.
I'm not sure why the specifications are this way, but I would like to think there's a reason other than it was an accident because of lack of communication on the part of the W3C working groups. I realize that they are all busy people, yet some things just seem to have slipped through the cracks. I've been proven wrong before; there is probably a reason.
Looks like I got the W3C HTML discussion list fighting about this one. Some people, like me, swear they had read that <noscript></noscript> was deprecated but nobody can find where. Others argue that it's not deprecated. At least I know I'm not the only one who finds it difficult to interpret the recommendations sometimes. - james
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
I've been under the weather lately. I missed my whole weekend and a couple days of work. I've gotten better just in time for our digital?confusion gig tonight at the Austin Museum of Digital Art's Digital Music Night.
I feel like I'm behind on homework. I haven't read anything about DHTML, PHP, or Flash in almost 5 days. How can I keep up? W3 Schools maybe? It has some cool resources. How about <?PHPBuilder?>? Anyone have comments about where they like to beef up their skills?
Thursday, June 14, 2001
The topic of interest lately has been the new browser beta releases.
Netscape has released Version 6.1 Preview Release 1 which is based on Mozilla 0.9.1. The most recent full release is based on Mozilla 0.6 and seems a bit to buggy for serious consideration, however, I've been using Mozilla 0.9 and all the bugs I noticed in Netscape 6 have been fixed. Long live OSS!
Internet Explorer 6 Public Preview is available for download but the word is that when combined with OfficeXP, IE6 will include "Smart Tag" functionality, a way for the browser to insert Microsoft links into every previously private web page on the planet. Smart tags are OK for MS Office, but keep them off my web page! Read more propaganda!
In related news, DaveNet has a new survey to promote Microsoft-Free Fridays. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or just a funny one, but I probably won't implement it on cookieCrook anytime soon.
This just in - Microsoft Kills Smart Tags.
Thursday, June 07, 2001
cookieCrook is now serving XML pages to Mozilla and Netscape 6 users. I wanted to do the same for Internet Explorer, but apparently version 5 still can't handle it.
Actually, I serve well-formed and valid XML pages to all browsers, however, some cannot parse the XHTML with an XML style sheet processing instruction (<?xml-stylesheet?>). For those browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.), I simply returned an HTTP Content-Type of "text/html" and linked to the style sheet in standard HTML form. I used the @import technique so styles would be unrecognized by 4.X and lower version browsers. More info on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), can be found at the W3C or O'Reilly's xml.com.
July 25th - I removed the "text/xml" mime-type from the pages in NS6/Mozilla. It still works but there are bugs in the parser. Sometimes it breaks when you hit the Back button. I noticed the error in Mozilla 0.9.2
Sunday, June 03, 2001
I haven't written much lately because I've been on vacation. I just got back from hiking in the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. However, I wasn't completely out of commission.
I read a lot about Flash on the plane and discovered some more useful information about PHP's control over the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) header that I hope to implement on cookieCrook soon. For example, I'm going to try and serve straight XML pages to the browsers that can take it. Also, I'd like to have a Spanish language version of the site which would be accesssible through a cookie and/or the browser's default language setting. I choose Spanish because Texas is close to Mexico and I know more Spanish than any other language besides English. Although if you've got a better suggestion or would like to help me translate, I think I'd be down for trying another language.
