cookiecrook²

11:49 PM #

I haven't posted much lately because I've been concentrating on cutting video clips. This Thursday, September 27th, we are running the visual portion of this CD Release Party for ROCKnBASS and Alien Records. The lineup includes a lot of big name local djs and electronic musicians like: Herb, Merrick Brown, Coy West, Chris Specht, Kathy Russell, Claude 9, and Michaelangelo. For more details, check the flier front and back. I will post video of the event on the digital?confusion site.

11:49 PM #

The W3C just updated it's (x)html validator today.
<pseudo:sarcasm> Validate your site to make the world wide web a better place. </pseudo:sarcasm>

10:48 PM #

I've been trying to concentrate on learning more PHP recently. I suppose it would be good practice to index a bunch of video clips for the digital?confusion site. Jordan made a kickass picture album interface with PHP for the txraves.org homebase. Dig down a couple levels and you'll know what I mean. I emailed O'Reilly about six months ago to ask when they'd be releasing a PHP book. They responded that "Programming PHP" was scheduled to be released in September or October of 2001. That was the last I heard about it. As of today, there is still nothing listed on their website.

10:26 PM #

Yesterday, the W3C released the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as an official recommendation. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before a browser can claim full compliance. I'm guessing two years, minimum.

9:43 PM #

I found a beta program called Vischeck. It allows you to input a web URL and the image engine simulates how the page might look to someone with a color deficit. Very cool stuff for accessibility testing.

It doesn't handle CSS-P very well. It must be using an old rendering engine because the color-blind simulation of the cookieCrook site doesn't look quite right. ;) Hopefully they will change that before the final release.

9:01 PM #

I can't say anything new about the terrorist attacks today, but I must express my sympathy for those people and families directly involved in this horrible event. I hope that the terrorists responsible for this attack will be brought to justice swiftly. I also want to emphasize that uneducated and predjudiced retaliation will not solve anything and may jeopardize more lives. I am not a supporter of President Bush, but I do wish him strength and wisdom during the following course of events. Please also support the countless rescue workers who are persevering through one of the most dreadful tragedies in American history. Give blood.

12:44 AM #

With the addition of a couple new features, I've made cookieCrook compliant with all the Level Double-A checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. One of them was a new Site Map feature. I'm pretty proud of this one. It's got new interactive cascading lists that I designed with a combination of PHP, DHTML and HTTP modifications. I even got it to save state with cookies and all the JavaScript I wrote for it is DOM-compliant.

10:37 PM #

Corporate Software VS. Web Standards... hmmm. My friend Patrick told me today that I'd have an easier time at work if I didn't try so hard to promote web standards. I just laughed. Of course I would in the short-term, but I like to think I'm one of the people that helps to usher in the future of the web. Maybe I'm just dreaming. Unfortunately, the testers still need their pixel-precision in Netscape 4, for now...

I don't think most server-side developers fully appreciate or even realize the control of their situation. Each backend environment is comprised of a certain limited set of software. They don't have to worry about their jsp code (for example) working on a server that only has php installed. If they discover a bug and need a patch, they can download and install the update themselves. How I wish I could do that with my users browsers... Instead we have learned to code hacks for a multitude of user agents and in those cases where we fail, we have learned to fail gracefully. Well, some of us, that is...

I was working on a site for Procter & Gamble last week when I noticed how convoluted their source code was. Instead of using table layout or css-p, they use an oddly redundant combination of the two. One thing that interested me was the fact that they had a left-side table spacer column, twenty pixels wide. They then surrounded that table in a div with a negative left position of 19 pixels, effectively undoing the table layout. Something tells me it would have been much easier just to set the original spacer column to 1 pixel wide. The advantage to using tables is usually backwards compatibility and the main advantage to css-p is ease of control. By combining the two in this way, the site authors got the worst of both worlds. But I think I discovered their reasoning. I've narrowed it down to three choices in no particular order.

1. A developer had limited access to certain files and yet managed to modify others to achieve the desired outcome. Messy and highly unlikely.
2. A developer started the site in css-p and quit the job without providing documentation. His successor had no experience with css-p so he hacked it to pieces with html tables. Even messier, yet most likely.
3. The design firm wanted to write unmanagable code so that the client would have no choice but to come back to have it updated. Messy in an ironically talented sort of way.

Which is it? You be the judge. My point is that this is exactly the type of mess I want to avoid. I'm surprised it works so well for how hacked it is.

9:01 PM #

I'm looking to do an overhaul of the site. Hopefully I'll be able to overload it with video samples of our work. I'm not gonna worry too much about web standards and accessibility, because I'd rather concentrate on making a kickass visual experience (probably in Flash). After all, it's supposed to represent our live performance and static web pages still don't come close to that.

I should probably include some EPS files of our logotype. I just looked at the flier for our next gig and, once again, they got our logotype wrong. I would expect it from a promoter, but after all, a designer designed the flier. I don't ask much: lower-case, no space, sans-serif... Is that hard? What? You think I'm too neurotic? This is how is came out: Digital?  Confusion. That may be okay for Joe Average, but I'm way too picky.

2:19 AM #

I reposted some videos on the digital?confusion website. This one is of a Windsor for the Derby show I did with John Barker. They opened for Built to Spill. It's availalable in AVI (3.18 MB) and Quicktime (10.98 MB) format. I'll probably recapture it again because it's missing the audio track.

4:21 PM #

XML is self-describing data, or metadata. Metadata is data about data. XML as metadata has so many documented advantages that it's nice to know Cory Doctorow has taken the time to document some flaws of metadata.