As we've mentioned before, there are some great conversations going on at Sam Ruby's site concerning what is currently being called Echo. But in the schoolyard that is the Internet, Dave Winer and Mark Pilgrim need to be separated in time-out.
Mark:
Let the record reflect that we have clearly communicated a solid technical reason why we can not use XML-RPC for this project, and both Dave [Winer] and Fredrik [Lundh] have responded with nothing more than personal ad hominem attacks.
Dave:
Mark, I'm sorry I don't know what else to say to you. Is there any way for me to win with you? Could I do anything that you would approve of? Yours in utter exhaustion, Uncle!
Update: Dave Winer has taken his ball and gone home.
Welcome visitors from intertwingly.net. Feel free to take a look at what else we've been talking about lately: Markup Review #1: Revisiting CSS Signatures; Markup Review #2: Citations.
Update: Dave has brought Scripting News back online. He has linked to the page that announced he was discontinuing the site.
We’ve added the cite tag to previous entries to mark references to other people, companies, and Web sites. Mark Pilgrim made this simple semantic gesture famous late last year when he used the cite tag to auto-generate a list of posts by citation. We’ve done no such thing yet, but the key here is that enhancing our markup gives us options. Writing semantic markup up now means that we can implement this, or something similar, someday, because the markup’s already there.
For further reference on using rich markup see <A>norexic </A>nchors by Tantek Celik, and comments on Mark’s system at Couchblog.
We've added id="www-dionidium-com" to the html element of each page of our site, a practice dubbed "CSS Signatures" and introduced by Eric Meyer late last year. This technique allows anyone to restyle pages on our site within a user style sheet without affecting other sites. For example, if you think links on this site would be easier to locate if they had a dashed, red border, simply add the following line to your user style sheet:
#www-dionidium-com a { border: 1px dashed red !important; }
Visually impaired users may wish to increase our font size. Color-blind users may wish to change color combinations. The possibilities are nearly unlimited.
We're adding id="www-dionidium-com" to the html element because we already use ids on the body element to control presentation of other elements in our own style sheets. We could have applied the signatures to the body element and used classes for other controls, like Mark Pilgrim (suggested to him by Simon Willison), but felt a little dirty using a plural attribute, the class, to control singular items on the page, like our you-are-here marker.
We're bringing this up now because, though this technique was first discussed in September 2002, there are still several high-profile webloggers who do not use it, even those who traditionally jump on simple accessibility enhancements. This is a very simple way to increase usability and grant control to those who should have it: users.
The Web Standards Project speaks out on Microsoft's recent announcement that "Internet Explorer for Macintosh and Windows [will] cease to exist as free, standalone products," noting, however, that Microsoft plans to provide bug fixes for existing versions, and demanding that we know when:
Microsoft should demonstrate their continued commitment to industry standards by letting us know when we can expect fixes for the remaining standards-support bugs in Internet Explorer for Macintosh and Windows.
...
Confirming that they plan to fix the remaining bugs in their browsers would demonstrate that customers considering their browsers and other software can expect to realize the cost and time savings of open standards, now and in the future.
The WaSP's level-headed comments are refreshing in the wake of numerous Chicken-Little statements from well-intentioned webloggers.
Andreas Bovens's From Footnotes to Sidenotes is a nice, forward-looking use of CSS to display footnotes in HTML documents. Due to poor support for CSS3 pseudo-selectors, this solution currently works only in Gecko browsers, but degrades nicely to show footnotes inline in older browsers. A couple notes:
We used Mozilla Firebird 0.6 to view the examples, which, incidentally, is a smashing browser.
Several webloggers, most notably Dave Shea, have recently commented on using CSS3 selectors in ways that take advantage of current browser support, but that degrade gracefully in browsers like Internet Explorer 6, which has limited support for advanced CSS. We view From Footnotes to Sidenotes as a fine step in this direction.
We now offer an RSS 2.0 feed. Though we've made several comments about RSS recently, we've never offered our own feed, primarily because we've never used RSS to track weblogs and we just didn't have the fire to look deeper into RSS. We've always used blo.gs to tell us when our favorite sites have updated.
The feed validates both with Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby's validator and with UserLand's. Thanks to Brad Choate for his Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template. We don't use Movable Type, but we found his template to be a pretty good model for what we wanted to use here.
Commenting on the Log Format Roadmap, Tim Bray laments the agony and confusion of dealing with multiple active versions of RSS, but Simon Willison's account of helping his girlfriend establish a feed for her site is a real-world demonstration of exactly why this is a problem.
On a related note, it's nice to see Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, publicly show support for this new format. The community is clearly behind this effort. We'd be stupid not to be.
Most designer/programmer webloggers fail to directly market their skills or company on their weblog, presumably because their audience consists primarily of other designers and programmers, not prospective clients. The Kalsey Consulting Group is now offering a special deal on retainer consulting to readers of the company's weblog. We hope the strategy is successful.
Sam Ruby's Log Format Roadmap Wiki has generated some great comments there and elsewhere. The Roadmap proposes a fresh start and new API for the "Anatomy of a Well Formed Log Entry" to be used for archiving and syndicating weblogs. We see great benefit in an open, extensible, vender-neutral implementation. A few high-profile voices agree: Mark Pilgrim, Shirley E. Kaiser, Tim Bray, Aaron Swartz.
However, we've yet to hear anyone tell us what's technically wrong with RSS 2.0, and we're reluctant to join a primarily political battle, though we'll acknowledge that a vender-neutral specification is preferred. To many, vender-neutrality is the whole point. Mike Champion argues convincingly that we need a specification "not dominated by any person, company, or ideology," one that is "explicit enough so that someone other than the spec authors can determine whether an instance is in compliance or not." It's hard not to agree.
Mark Pilgrim marks as a flame the following comment on his site:
Perhaps people are just fed up of having to deal with [Dave Winer], fed up with his attitude, and fed up with the whole damn mess that is RSS.
Yet we're not so sure that this isn't exactly why so many people have been eager to support a new format when a technically adequate specification (RSS 2.0) exists.
All this is to say that we'll be watching Sam's Wiki closely. For the record, we like the name Pie.
Dave Shea recently detailed the technical benefits of using the PNG image format in Web projects, noting, however, that even the most recent versions of Internet Explorer do not support alpha transparency, the most compelling reason to use the format. As a result, some argue that the only reason to consider PNG is to support the spirit of open standards. Despite basic browser support for PNG, we continue to use the GIF format on this site, which I guess means we have drawn the conclusion that there is currently no overwhelming benefit to switching formats.
We've signed the "Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows Petition to the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows Development Team." You should too. With your help the situation may be better three years from now. Read Jeffrey Zeldman's comments on the PNG petition if you're unsure why you should sign.
Simon Willison points us to more CSS rollovers. We have some gripes (see Simon's site), but these are very nice, all things considered.
We're just hearing about the Technorati Keyword Search feature. We'd love to query the Keyword Search API to post links to related sites along with new entries to our site, a feature that would be technically trivial to implement, but something we'll probably never do because the API merely returns links to each site's front page, not permanent links to pages containing the searched terms.
John Dowdell points out another problem in a comment posted to Technorati creator David Sifry's site:
Hi David, I'm glad you did this, thanks for the work, but... is there any way to index on the individual RSS entry rather than on the whole HTML page? I'm getting a lot of false-positives on two-word queries, where the words actually occur in separate items.
W6 Daily noticed the same problem with Daring Fireball’s referrer logs we did:
However, I note that as I write this, Jason Kottke constitutes six of the last 44 referrers. He is listed in positions 1 (as ‘www.kottke.org/’), 3 (as ‘kottke.org/’), 7 (as ‘www.kottke.org’), 12 (as ‘www.kottke.org/index.html’), 33 (as ‘www.kottke.org/remainder/’), and 43 (as ‘kottke.org/index.html’).
While defending TrackBack W6 Daily ultimately finds several faults with a referrer-based system. One criticism in particular struck a chord with us:
Referrer links also often include links that are not meant to be followed, including search engine links, web-based aggregator links, web-based email links and other “garbage” links.
We found this out the hard way. We recently followed a link to an outside site from our home-brewed CMS to verify we had typed it correctly. This, of course, sent as the referrer the URL of our CMS. This is bad enough. Anyone who follows that link looking for further discussion will find only a login screen—a dead end. But we made it worse. Later, we manually typed the address of our CMS directly into our browser’s location bar—as we often do—with the password tacked right on the end of the URL. You can probably guess what happened next.
We’ve fixed the problem, changed our password, and learned a very important lesson. We got off lucky. A site with actual traffic would have been wide open to abuse. Luckily, we were alone in following the referrer link back to our site (before the password was changed, anyway), saved only by obscurity.
John Gruber explains in detail why he believes referrers are better than TrackBack at tracking conversations. His primary argument -- TrackBack is only available to TrackBack-enabled systems while referrers are avaiable to everyone via standard hyperlinks -- is appealing, but his system for displaying referrers isn't without problems.
The referrer log for this entry at Daring Fireball lists 113 visitors from 'www.kottke.org/', 32 from 'kottke.org/', 11 from 'www.kottke.org', 6 from 'www.kottke.org/index.html', and 1 from 'kottke.org/index.html'. Referrer logs that group visitors by the referring URL need to standardize these URLs before saving them to their database.
We do, however, love and use Mr. Gruber's fantastic SmartyPants as part of this site's poorly-crafted CMS.
Update: Our criticism is not aimed toward the practice of logging referrers per se. We simply prefer Dean Allen's method of arranging referrers in the order they were received, instead of by domain.
We've been using a pure CSS menu bar -- no images or JavaScript -- on personal projects for some time now. Our solution combines the best parts of many of the examples linked in this entry, but did not previously include a "you are here" marker. We're now using an indicator developed by Eric Meyer and brought to our attention by Jeffrey Zeldman.
Older versions of Opera (6.0 and before), IE 6 for Windows, and most other modern browsers disagree by one pixel on how to display this design's absolutely positioned menu div. The result is that at least three distinct sets of CSS positioning rules are needed: for IE 6; for Opera 7 and Gecko browsers; and for all versions of Opera before 6.0. We're using the lifesaving Owen Hack to serve each of these browsers a different set of rules. See this document's corresponding CSS for our solution.
Why didn't we simply use position: floatfloat? We didn't want to disrupt the flow of the page in devices that display it as an unstyled document, such as wireless phones.
This design has been tested -- and works as expected -- in Opera 6.0 and 7.0, Mozilla 1.3, Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0. We're working on Opera 5. Alas, we do not have access to a Mac, so this design has not been tested on a single Mac browser. This keeps us up at night.
This design uses valid CSS and XHTML 1.0 Strict
Like others, we've gathered several of the most useful CSS tab examples for later reference: