Phil Ringnalda's "Keeping Up with Blogs the Easy Way" is a nice introduction to, for lack of a better phrase, weblog update services. We've been using blo.gs to manage our blogroll for a while [personally and publically; the blogroll on our main page is powered by a modified (see note below) version of Paul Hammond's blo.gs.pl, which, as the name reveals, uses blo.gs to create a list of recently modified sites], and we're trying not to remember the tedious task of visiting each site we read, every day, to see if it has updated.
We strongly recommend taking a look at the services Paul mentions and picking the one best for you.
Note: We're often peeved when webloggers mention that they use a "modified version" of X piece of software, but fail to mention in what way their version has been modified. If it's important enough to mention that the software has been changed, why not tell us how? So: Paul's script will be right for most people "out of the box." Unfortunately, our server lacks the Perl Template module required to run his script, so we decided to instead use HTML::Template. Now you know.
We've decided to take our (historically) reckless embrace of new technology a step further and use XHTML 1.1 for this site's home page. We're using Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect visitors using a browser that supports the 'application/xhtml+xml' MIME type to a .xhtml document, written using valid XHTML 1.1; all other visitors will get a .html file, written using XHTML 1.0. Our approach for other pages on this site remains unchanged. Creating an XHTML 1.1 version of every page on this site hardly seems worthwhile.
We made only two changes converting from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML 1.1:
id attribute on the html element. We'll work out a solution shortly. (See the post linked above for why we choose to apply our CSS Signature to the html element.)It's really that simple, folks. (Though, we must add that we're not necessarily endorsing such a move for your site. We just like having our name on fancy lists. Then again, that list's diminutiveness should be some indication of the scarcity of XHTML 1.1 examples available on the Web. We hope others considering XHTML 1.1 will find viewing our source helpful.)
We've successfully tested our site in legacy browsers and in Mozilla, but we'd love to hear about any incompatibilities.
Jason Kottke's revelation that "Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct" has elicited a lot of blog chatter from the usual suspects this week. There's some good information hiding in the numerous recent posts on the subject, but, frankly, we're surprised at the amount of coverage this topic has received. As they often do, Jeffrey Zeldman's comments perfectly put into words exactly what we were thinking:
[Discovering that web standards and semantics are different] is somewhat like discovering that spelling and grammar are not the same thing: good sentence structure does not guarantee correct spelling, and vice-versa.
We think of semantics and standards as independently important, while mutually beneficial. We wrap this site's header in a <h1> tag, for example, not because any validator or Web standard says we have to, but because it's semantically accurate. In this way, the semantic value of our header is independent of any standard. On the other hand, we've found that writing semantically rich documents assists us greatly in using simpler CSS to style our pages, especially when following the simple "context before class" guideline articulated so well by Tantek Celik. Simon Willison:
Semantic HTML elements add a small amount of meaning, but a great amount of structure - a fact that becomes particularly important when you start applying CSS.
We can't imagine why anyone would want to have one without the other.
Further Reading:
We completely missed last month's news that our beloved St. Louis, Missouri's downtown is getting -- already has? -- free WiFi covering, according to the Post-Dispatch, a "42-square-block area bounded by Broadway, Market Street, Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue." The company generously assisting the city with the project, O2Connect, isn't new to free Wifi in St. Louis:
In April, O2Connect built a much smaller, free WiFi network near the cafes at Maryland and Euclid in the Central West End. And usage is increasing, from 85 people in the first month, to 203 last month, and 270 so far in July. The O'Learys expect a similar quick uptake downtown.
In fact, O2Connect manages several free WiFi spots in the St. Louis area, from downtown to Clayton.
Update: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch article linked above is no longer available. The St. Louis Business Journal has the details.
Simon Willison just announced that he's moving to the United States to join Adrian Holovaty as a Web developer for World Online's KUSports.com, LJWorld.com, and Lawrence.com. Who would have thought the same small Web division of a newspaper for a town of barely 80,000, Lawrence, Kansas, would be home to two of the most recognized developers in the industry? Congratulations are obviously in order.
In related news, Adrian was recently interviewed at zlog. Also, apologies for having just used the phrase "the industry."
Update: We'd also like to point out, given all this talk about the X-Philes, that Simon is serving his site with the correct MIME type (application/xhtml+xml) to browsers that support it, and that it appears his archive and individual entry pages, as well as his home page, validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Keeping pages valid will be easier for him -- the rest of us, too -- with the help of Jesse Ruderman's XML well-formedness bookmarlet, which Simon has linked to. This bookmarklet is even more useful now that we're serving our site as 'application/xhtml+xml,' since Mozilla will display only an error in place of documents that are not well-formed.
We've been officially listed as a member of the X-Philes. We're in great company; the sites listed are a fine place to start if you're thinking about XHTML for your site.
Dave Shea mentioned yesterday that he is on his way to becoming a member of the X-Philes, a short list of designers with sites that pass two validation tests and serve their pages with the correct MIME type to browsers that can handle it. When we first heard about Evan Goer's XHTML 100, as he calls it, we were satisfied passing two of the three tests, fully aware we failed to serve our sites with the proper MIME Type. We were even glib about it:
Though we use XHTML 1.0, we serve our documents with a mime type of "text/html," not "application/xhtml+xml." This bothers some people. It doesn't bother us.
Well, it bothers us, now.
We're now using an Apache mod_rewrite rule -- lifted from Mark Pilgrim's excellent XML.com article on this subject -- to serve our XHTML documents as 'application/xhtml+xml' to browsers that support it (Mozilla) and 'text/html' to those that don't (everything else). A few notes:
We're now closer to the spirit and letter of the XHTML standard (relevant text). Besides simply serving our documents as 'application/xhtml+xml,' we've removed our http-equiv statements. From the W3C:
Note that a meta http-equiv statement will not be recognized by XML processors, and authors SHOULD NOT include such a statement in an XHTML document served as 'application/xml' (and 'application/xhtml+xml' as well for that matter).
As far as we can tell, we now qualify as an X-Phile.
Also: In January of this year we developed a valid XHTML 1.1 document as a resource to others, but never linked to it. Here it is (only works in Mozilla): Valid XHTML 1.1 Document.
Don Park points us to Petr Stanicek's fast CSS-2 image rollovers, shown to him by Paschal L., who points us to Blogarithm, another weblog update service.
We spent the last few hours gaining an understanding of Pingback and adding a working client to our weblogging software. We're late to the Pingback party, but here's a few notes anyway:
John Robb doesn't want Trackback or Pingback. We agree with Les Orchard:
I want as much automated and intervention-free invitation to participation in my blog as I can provide. I want manufactured serendipty to operate here while I'm away or asleep.
Pingback enabling this site is next.
Doc, our thoughts are with you.
Kevin Davis has been creating weblog "themes" using XML/XSLT/CSS:
The showcased XML document is linked to an XSLT (extensible stylesheet language tranformations) document. This document reads the XML data and transforms it into something that a web browser (in our case, IE6, Netscape 6+, Mozilla) can read. In turn, the XSLT document is linked to a CSS (cascading style-sheet) document which defines font-sizes, background images and other superficial (but important) styling.
Kevin shows us a future in which Movable Type outputs standard XML templates, which users may then link to a central repository of themes. In a best case scenario, novice webloggers are able to effortlessly render their site using widely available, semantically correct, standards compliant, and, we'd hope, attractive themes.
To illustrate the power of his project, Keven has created copies of his CSS Zen Garden entry and Dave Shea's mezzoblue.com using identical XML documents.
Jon Hicks notes in a comment to Kevin's site that this project makes him feel like a "silent movie actor with the talkies about to come." We know what he means.
Also: Those interested in following Kevin's lead should read Carey Evans's notes on getting Mozilla to display escaped content.
Bob Sawyer today announced the Re-Useit Design Contest, an opportunity to rework Jakob Nielsen's useit.com for fun and profit. The list of judges is impressive:
The contest requires entries to meet all WAI Accessibility level 1 requirements, eschew tables, and use valid XHTML and CSS. Good luck.
Mike Pick recently created a wish list of print design features missing from CSS, a discussion that continued at Dave Shea's mezzoblue. Would that CSS provided element awareness -- height: inherit(#otherElement), Shea points out, would accomplish effective proportion control -- a method to create linked text boxes, and a way to properly set vertical alignment. Dave Shea asks:
Why aren't a few designers involved in building a language meant for style?
We don't know, either.
Update: As it turns out, David Baron was thinking about multi-column text with CSS as early as June 1998, though the idea would not have been new even then to the W3C, which decided in 1997 to merely add the concept as a note to CSS-1. Just next week it will have been 6 years since that note. Talk about familiar memes.
We've implemented the following Apache mod-rewrite rule on our server (by Thijs van der Vossen; via Simon Willison):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L]
The rule checks to see if the requested file exists if the .html extension is added, and serves it if it does. This puts us one step closer to our ideal URL design, though we haven't yet changed any permanent links. Why? We have two problems with the current solution:
We're not sure about a better solution, but we hope the fine folks at Simon's site (where we left a comment similar to this entry), or one of our readers, can help.
It took us only six days, by the way, to break our promise to stop posting about URLs indefinitely.
Russell Beattie recently posted his thoughts on Web design using CSS and XHTML, saying that he believes we're entering a "cool new era of the web." We couldn't agree more, but his most important comments are on the community that's making such design possible:
The ability to directly learn person-to-person this way is incredible. When has a specific technical problem been so thoroughly and communally examined before in this way? It's almost like a scientific research community - the different design techniques are named for their creators.
Paul Scrivens recently said that he believes "everyone has said almost everything there needs to be said in web design" and that the design community has "reached a saturation point for knowledge." His charge is not without merit, but it's that very characteristic of design weblogs, the nearly excessive examination of problems, that has propelled the community, specifically the CSS/XHTML community, so far in such a short period of time.
Paul quickly found new inspiration, and, what's more significant, is doing his part to inspire other designers with his popular Bridgeport design series. Familiar memes are tiring, to be sure (and nobody does familiar memes like the design community), but we truly believe this is a "cool new era." CSS image replacement variants -- Aaron Smith's technique, via Tom Gilder, for example -- we hope, are the beginning of a long line of attention-getting CSS techniques. We don't know what the design community will be talking about next month, but it's likely we'll think of something.
As a postscript, allow us to be the most recent weblogger to fawn over Dave Shea's ability to say just the right thing (here speaking about creating accessible Web sites with CSS/XHTML):
The bonus is that Accessibility, that multi-headed hydra of legend, becomes not only practical and largely reasonable, but even a pleasurable and satisfactory pursuit.
Don Park's Hand-blogging is both what the weblogging world needed to "get it out of current muck over formats, API, business models, personality conflicts, etc." and the most clever thing we've seen this week.
Semantic Web be damned; this is cool.
Two more links concerning URLs before we drop the subject indefinitely (barring a truly revolutionary article on the topic; after all, we've been merely repeating age-old conventions):
Also of interest:
span tag.A List Apart is back with sage advice on Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign. The article focuses on using readable code to increase page rank, but misses an opportunity to discuss the most important element of an SEO campaign, the title tag.
Our site isn't moderately popular, overall, but we've managed to drive traffic to a few entries almost entirely through high-ranking Google search results. A quick scan of our logs shows that we're currently the number two result for 'css tab examples' and the number one result for 'benefits of png.' These are very specific searches, but they lead to very specific articles. We use the following title for individual entry pages:
<title>Entry Title [dionidium.com: design 03]</title>
A couple points: