cookiecrook²

2:54 PM #

Happy birthday Mosaic...

Mosaic, the first widely popular graphical web browser, celebrates it's 10th anniversary today. NCSA has a celebratory symposium and webcast event scheduled from 7-9 PM in Champaign, IL tonight.

9:13 PM #

The WASP

The Web Standards Project has removed, or at least revised, it's browser upgrade campaign. The reasoning behind the change appears to be twofold:

• The BUC was being abused by both spammers and by lazy developers who had no interest in web standards.
• The support tagline commonly included for sub-standard browsers still showed on, but did not necessarily relate to, other forms of user-agents such and PDAs and web-enabled mobile phones.

While I completely agree with the direction taken to avoid misuse, I think it may be a bit too early to declare victory over sub-standard browsers. As a compromise, I've removed my "support tagline" by default, but I still browser sniff to serve a recommended upgrade message to Netscape 4 users.

11:45 PM #

Spring Surprise...

Springtime always hits me by surprise. I never notice when the leaves all come out; I only notice that they're out... and they're all out now. Bare branches to full bloom seems like overnight. The fall is different though; I always notice the fall.

9:00 PM #

Too much info? Thanks for sharing, James...

Road trips and chihuahuas with explosive diarrhea do not mix. Yuck! Needless to say, we threw away that floor mat in the nearest dumpster we could find.

12:55 AM #

No unrequested popups...

Ever since I've been using Mozilla as my default web browser, I've been getting spoiled on the "block unrequested popups" feature. Before, I had gotten used to closing popups as a normal, unconscious act of web surfing. I seriously didn't notice it anymore.

Now, whenever I use Internet Explorer again, popups annoy me more than they ever did. One popup is annoying; two "pop-unders" is unforgivable. The crummy part comes in when the developer requires an unrequested popup as part of the real content, not just an ad. With a little bit of thought, any developer can get around this though. Just add a backup link to the content.

6:02 PM #

Acrobot...

Ian Lloyd of Accessify has built a new HTML acronym and abbreviation generator entitled Acrobot. It offers some pretty sharp functionality because it allows you to use either all acronym elements or the semantic alternative, both acronym and abbr.

Why the choice? Internet Explorer for Windows doesn't give a tooltip popup for abbr elements. Ian explained more about how, why, and which to choose on this page about the differences between the two elements.

5:42 PM #

Web Standards Meetup.

Thursday, May 1st, in a city near you, people will meet up to discuss web standards. Sound boring? Don't come. If you're like me and this sounds irresistable, come on down. Also, if you're in Austin, vote for the CopperTank location. It's the only one downtown and me lazy bum don't wanna drive. Ha!

8:07 PM #

NetDiver interviews Eric Meyer...

Friday, NetDiver posted a new interview with CSS guru Eric Meyer. My favorite quote, which sounds a little bit like John Nash's economic theory, follows.

What I think is revolutionary about the Internet is not its technology, but its culture. To me, the Internet culture expresses the best parts of capitalism and socialism with its a dual emphasis on individual achievement and reward, and on supporting the common good. That may sound all touchy-feely-New-Agey, but the truth is that contributing to the common good rewards the individual as well as the community. The reputational capital you build up by contributing to the common good can translate to direct benefit to you, and that reward can take many forms. If you post a lot of helpful messages to a forum, then when you need help, the forum members are far more likely to help you out. If you release tools into the public domain, then you provide more free time and conserved effort to other programmers, who are then more free to develop tools that they will release and you can use. And all of that put together can make you a recognized name in a field of study, which increases your chances of being able to derive individual benefit in the form of speaking and consulting fees.

Eric Meyer

9:58 PM #

WthRemix (W3 mix)

The WthRemix announced the competition winners on Friday. My favorites ended up winning. Sweet! Maybe I can judge it next time. :p

12:28 AM #

Two years...

On this day in the year 2001, James Craig made his very first web log post ever.

10:43 PM #

Cynthia versus Bobby

Watchfire Bobby has been the standard web accessibility validation software for some time now and has just released version 5.0. Their main competitor, Cynthia Says, just published a comparison table of Bobby vs. Cynthia.

While Cynthia does offer many improvements over Bobby, keep in mind that the comparison was done by the makers of Cynthia. The comparison also doesn't mention which version of Bobby was tested, though I assume from the date that it was the latest version: 5.0. Both tools are valuable assets for checking web accessibility, though like any script, they are only as smart as the user, and can't check for everything.

9:17 PM #

Reason number ten why Mozilla rocks IE...

Chris Casciano announced his latest creation this week: the PNH Toolbar for Mozilla. It combines many development tools I use on a daily basis:

• W3C validation and recommendations,
• WDG validation,
• Watchfire Bobby accessibility validator,
• modify and disable CSS,
• disable images,
• view cookies, and
• view form data.

Nice...

6:29 PM #

Scared?!

I'm so scared. So are the rest of my former co-workers. Maybe it was the fact out of the nineteen pictured, at least fourteen or fifteen of us were laid off in 2000 and 2001. I know at least two of them quit, but I can't remember the situation with the other two or three.

My favorite pictures out of the bunch are Patrick Wood and Jenn Baldillez. Ha ha!

12:34 PM #

More technical writing...

For those of you who enjoy my technical tips and tricks, I've posted a new page entitled: Avoiding CSS comment hacks. This is the same document I posted to the CSS discussion Wiki yesterday, but I wanted to keep a local copy, too.

10:46 AM #

WikiWikiWeb

I made my first wiki post yesterday to the wiki companion of the CSS-Discuss email list.

You may now be asking yourself, What's a Wiki? In short, it's a web page that anyone can edit. Yes, that's right, you can go in and edit my post if you like... Sound like bad idea? Maybe, but it seems to be working pretty well so far.

2:21 AM #

The illusion of permanence...

I finally got around to adding permanent links to each of my web log entries. Just use the pound sign (#) right after each time stamp. Now I can link back to semi-useful Chinese phrases or my nephew's first picture.

11:32 PM #

Hydra...

I just installed Hydra, a Mac OSX real-time co-authoring application using Rendezvous. It looks pretty sharp. Think of it as CVS meets IM. Dane pointed it out to me as a way to debug and co-write style sheets and/or HTML documents. I'll let you know more once I try it out on some real files.

11:04 PM #

Light Graffiti...

The interface is not as intuitive as it could be, but trust me, the artwork is worth digging for. First, you need the Macromedia Shockwave plug-in if you don't already have it. Then check out the light graffiti sculptures on Pipslab. Once the file loads, look at each of the links in the bottom center. Nice! (Thanks for the link, Yi May!)

9:49 PM #

More on Mozilla...

I've been thinking about Mozilla a lot recently because they announced several new changes in their development direction last week. It appears they will discontinue development of the Mozilla software suite in favor of separate applications: Phoenix as the web browser, Minotaur/Thunderbird for the mail and news application, with other applications like ChatZilla being discontinued completely.

I've started using Mozilla as my mail client at work mainly because of the trouble I had to go through when I transferred my mail from Microsoft Outlook for Windows to Microsoft Entourage for Macintosh. You'd think two email programs from the same massive software corporation would play well together, but not so. I decided then that open standards for email were definately the way to go. Also, the application gives you much more control over a lot of the technical details (like full headers). I just recently switched to Mozilla as my default browser at both work and home. What applications do you use, and why?

11:58 PM #

Nine reasons why Mozilla rocks Internet Explorer...

Built for developers, by developers... Some of these, like Venkman and the DOM Inspector, are native to every build; the others are optional downloads. I recommend each and every one.

Venkman

Venkman is the code name for Mozilla's JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers, including the Netscape 7.x series of browsers and Mozilla milestone builds.

DOM Inspector

With the DOM Inspector, you can see the web page exactly as mozilla sees the page, allowing you to quickly isolate and fix your problems. In addition to quick troubleshooting, the DOM Inspector offers a variety of utilities to aid in the reporting and repair of errors in HTML and XML. The final use for the DOM Inspector is as an experimentation environment for temporarily testing CSS styles and editing the DOM tree.

Netscape DevEdge Sidebar

The DevEdge Sidebar combines several sidebars such as the CSS2/DOM2/HTML 4.01 reference sidebars and the DevEdge News sidebar.

Tabbed Browser Extensions

An add-on package for extending operations of tabbed browsing via advanced preferences, drag-and-drop reordering, etc.

Context Menu Extensions

A utility that extends the context menu of Netscape 7 and Mozilla. It adds some useful features to browser, user-defined scripts, external applications, etc.

Checky Validation Services

Checky adds a submenu to Mozilla's context menu that allows you to run whatever page you're on through one of (currently) 19 different online validaton and analysis services such as the W3C validators and Watchfire's Bobby.

CaScadeS Stylesheet Manipulation

CaScadeS is a stylesheet editor for Composer, the HTML editor of Mozilla/Netscape. It will allow to create complex stylesheets from scratch and will provide the user with all needed UI to edit/move/remove stylesheets and style rules in/between stylesheets.

Live HTTP Headers

Adds a 'Headers' tab in the 'View Page Info' dialog box and a tool in the 'Tools->Web Development' menu to be able to display HTTP headers in real time while pages are being downloaded from the Internet.

Optimoz Mouse Gestures

Mouse movements in combination with a click-hold and optionally a modifier that execute some browser functions. You press mouse button, draw a gesture, and release mouse button. This gesture is recognized and appropriate action is triggered.

Hat tip: Most of this list compilation came from Liorean and Chris Casciano posts to the WebDesign-L email list.

4:18 PM #

Hurray!

The war is over!