cookiecrook²

11:31 PM #

xhtml. Is it worth it?

I've spent a lot of time getting this site validated as xhtml strict compliant. There are a lot of pros and cons to this, though sometimes it seems the cons outway the pros. For example, <form> and <noscript> tags cannot contain inline elements outside of a block-level element. Basically what this means is that you can't include code like:

<noscript><em>Turn on javascript, punk!</em></noscript>

Instead, the code must include a block level element (such as a paragraph) so it would look more like:

<noscript><p>Turn on javascript, please.</p></noscript>

Unfortunately, adding these block level elements adds display blocks to your document. I'm not even sure why they're required. On the comments addition, I had to go to the trouble of hacking the CSS with negative margins. Yuck! Most of my friends and colleagues wouldn't even bother trying for xhtml strict. Lately I've been considering going back to xhtml transitional. If for nothing else, the window target attribute is incredibly useful...

Okay, I've got comments working now so I'm officially opening this one as the first cookieCrook discussion entry. "To xhtml or not to xhtml. That is the question." Do you have an opinion? Am I speaking greek?

2:19 PM #

Sweet! Thanks to UIGUI Gabe, cookieCrook now has comments available on each weblog item. Post a comment for me if you enjoy or use the site. Thanks.

2:29 PM #

Another useful addition to the Mozilla 0.9.6 release is the availability of "print preview". This sounds like a fairly standard and for-the-most-part useless addition, but with css you can have independant printer stylesheets. For example, the cookieCrook printer stylesheet does not include the navigation bar and the margins and typeface are different. The "print preview" addition is going to be great for developers in the fact that (if nothing else) we'll save tons of paper and ink on test prints.

12:17 PM #

If you visit this site using Mozilla 0.9.6+ or bookmark this page in Internet Explorer 5+, you too can enjoy the cookiecrook icon in you location bar.

It's also pretty simple to make your own. Just save a 8-bit 32x32 pixel bitmap and run it through the bmp-to-ico converter (344k). Name the new file "favicon.ico" and then store it in the root directory of your website. Internet Explorer looks for it any time someone bookmarks your site. In order for Mozilla to see it, you must include a special <link /> tag for the favorite icon. View source for an example.

Don't use the converter above if you want transparency in your icon. Instead, use the online editor at favicon.com. They also have a library of free images you can use if you don't want to design one yourself.

5:28 PM #

There is a new article, Reading Design by Dean Allen, on A List Apart and I loved this quote so much that I had to post it. It includes an essential list of commonly overlooked knowledge for graphic designers.

I bite my lip when I hear a young designer say something like "Helvetica sucks;" while it's true that Helvetica indeed does suck in many and varied contexts, those situations inevitably involve the work of one who'd make such an airless declaration.

He also goes into some detail about how a designer should take great care in literary style and editing. It's not only the work of the editor. Designers need to be able to render ideas clearly. Speaking of which, if you haven't read this book, you should.

4:59 PM #

James Tikalsky found an entry on the Macromedia Flash Support Center that gives more instruction on how to create transparent flash movies like the experiment I did last month.

I go back to work on Monday. I got a new job at a place called Vertex Software. About thirty of us got laid off from Powered at the beginning of this month. I feel very fortunate to have gotten a new job so quickly in these troubled times. I guess you could say I have a lot to be thankful for.

2:20 AM #

I made some new additions to my dynamic image form. Now you can change the colors and the shadow color is generated as a darker shade of the background color.

11:24 PM #

I went to a footbag tournament today in Zilker Park. I had thought it had been 2 or 3 years since I entered a tournament but as it turns out, it's really been 4 or 5 years. A lot of time has passed and there are a lot of new faces that I hadn't seen before. By the way, I'm not referring to Hacky-Sack. I mean footbag.

1:33 AM #

I found evil today.

While watching television, I found potentially the most evil marketing ploy ever created. The commercial was for a child's video game of Jurassic Park. However, the game comes with a PC peripheral barcode scanner. Apparently the children are rewarded with game points and powers if they scan the barcodes of household products and load them into the game. I would bet money that the game then sends that barcode information back to the company who can use that data for targeted marketing to the family. There was a video (Quicktime Movie - 2Mb) on the site that displayed children scanning all their household products and happily loading them into their computer. I'm sure more evil can be found on the Scan Command Website... It's even under the misleading guise of education.com. How do they sleep at night? :p

7:12 PM #

MSN was apparently blocking access on their website to users with non-Microsoft web browsers such as Opera and Mozilla. I tried a few days ago and it doesn't appear to be blocked anymore, but here is Microsoft's response to the previous allegations:

All of our development work for the new MSN.com is ... W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.

According to the CTO of Opera Software, they're lying. Håkon Lie wrote an article on A List Apart debunking the Microsoft claims. Opera has great support for valid W3C standards and apparently none of the MSN pages were even valid xhtml.

11:39 PM #

I will pay you 25 dollars...

...to help me find a solution to an Internet Explorer css rendering error. I'm using Windows 2000; I'm not sure if this affects Windows 98 or Macintosh. The bug appears in both Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0 on my portfolio page and revolves around the images of the portfolio websites. You may have to scroll or resize the window in order to see the bug. Also, sometimes refreshing the page with clear the bug temporarily. Let me first state that it is all valid code and displays correctly in all other standards compliant browsers.

In the css, I've specified that the images on that page should {float:left}, or allow the text to flow around the right side of the image. Unfortunately, this causes the left-margin of the surrounding <div> to display with gaps in it. These gaps happen semi-randomly near the images where the text flows around them.

I was able to figure out a solution to this problem. By setting the background-color of the surrounding <div> to white instead of transparent, the border displays correctly. Unfortunately this causes another error. With the background color specified, it randomly does not display large portions of the body text. I decided that the previous setting was less detrimental to the subject matter and left it the former way.

I've set up screenshots of the former and the latter (also a 60k animated gif), and I've rigged a way to view the former and the latter bugs directly. Please use these for bug testing and email me if you'd like any more info or if you have a solution.

The second solution doesn't appear to be causing the same error in Internet Explorer 5.5 so I'm going to to use a server side browser check to switch between the two. This bug was also recently noted on A List Apart

10:33 PM #

I am 51% Raver.

I may not be freaky like those Candy Kids, but I do know how to party. I am well connected in the scene, but may be getting a little tired of it. Take the Raver Test!

The really funny thing is that this would have described me perfectly about two years ago.

7:23 PM #

The spark has a pretty interesting IQ Test online. A few friends and I took it this morning but we still can't figure out the last question. Please help! It's driving us nuts...

p::/w..eees:par/kcosmht.pey.ztx.xyzsp:t