Archive
March 2003’s Posts.
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New Position Is Everything layout; blogging as reporting; Fast Company does CSS
Big John has released another template hosted on his new-ish site, Position Is Everything. The latest layout has three columns, which are all the same height no matter which is the longest. Although I couldn't load it in IE 5.5, it apparently works with IE 5+, Opera, and Gecko-based browsers.
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Style sheet guide gone with Webreview.com; screen rulers
Any request to webreview.com is now being redirected to ddj.com — home of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Not only does the latter have almost no Web development content, the move has rendered Style Sheet Reference Guide Master Grid and everything else at WebReview.com’s Style Sheet Reference Guide unavailable except through Google’s cache or the Internet Archive’s.
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Web Page Analyzer; getElementsByAttribute
Andy King’s Web Page Analyzer is a great tool that offers coherent breakdown of the various parts of a Web page (by size and type). Despite the overly simplistic recommendations, it’s a quick way to flag problems with a page’s size and a worthy bookmark.
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Why I’m doing this
What I hope to accomplish in this redesign, one of the biggest this site has gone through in its six years online.
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getElementsByClassName; CSS tabs; Mozilla Mail
Via Simon Willison: Andrew Hayward’s document.getElementsByClassName.
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Standard savings; accessibility: do as we say, not as we do
ESPN.com redesigned its homepage a while back, and now uses CSS to lay the page out. Given its size, a lot of people took notice including Eric A. Meyer who interviewed ESPN.com’s associate art director Mike Davidson about the process. The second half of the interview appears this Friday.
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War coverage
Want to know the price of lay-offs? The Globe and Mail’s Crisis in Iraq section still has a large graphic suggesting the war is still to come (it reads “Countdown to war”) and the latest news story is from March 15, 2003. Although breaking news is appearing on the homepage, what’s the point of having a special section and linking to it, if it is not being updated? At least the site is fast loading (as are most news sites).
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Where I stand
A brief explanation of the editorial guidelines for this site during the war (hint: this site has always been about Web building and online journalism).
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Spell-checking; CSS; war
Simon Willison has done a PHP translation of Sam Ruby’s Python-based spell checking tool. While that in-and-of itself is impressive, Willison has also added a function offering suggested corrections to the misspelled word. This I will be added to my slowly-developing CMS.
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March 18, 2003
The site should function a bit better in Opera 7 (i.e., it should behave closer to Gecko-based browsers). I’m hoping it won’t cause problems in IE 5.x now
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FIR and DOM
My comment system is acting up, but a short-term fix is in the works. Will probably rewrite the comment script in another language. Of course this won’t be an issue when/if I switch to a new back-end system.
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Laid-off via PowerPoint
Online news content is being reduced everywhere, it seems, including the BBC, where staff were told of the job cuts via a PowerPoint slide presentation. How unbelievably callous.
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Open redesigns
Macromedia has taken a beating over its new site for the last ten days. When launched it was all-Flash and unbelievable slow. Now it’s back to being primarily HTML and is much better. There still are problems that are probably coming to the surface only because people are so thoroughly critiquing it (for example, try accessing the site’s “Accessibility” page from the homepage without a mouse).
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Post-boom job guide; Mozilla 1.3
Webmonkey has another good article, this time a seven-page post-boom job guide. Even those still employed should read it…just in case.
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WiFi; TV on the Web; progressive enhancement
WiFi is being pushed into the mainstream consciousness, thanks to Intel’s new chip and some McDonald’s restaurants, among others.
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Ottawa Journal resurrected?
Seems the decades-dead Ottawa Journal might be resurrected on September 1, 2003 according to a promo site at ottawajournal.com. In late February, The Toronto Star reported that the domain owner is located at the same address of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Might someone be making an run around Canada’s foreign ownership rules? Doubtfully, the phone number and name seem bogus and the hosting company is in Ottawa. Guess we’ll find out in about six months
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Standing up for standards; background-image to replace text
Adrian Holovaty has posted two excellent new items, the first is an interview with Andy King on optimization as it relates to news sites; the second is an open letter to the OJR’s editor/columnist Staci D. Kramer about the need for those same sites to support standards. The latter is an excellent argument on why standards are important, and was spurred by a shockingly naïve post to online-news suggesting it’s okay to block non-IE browsers.
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“Big idea” essays; war and online journalism
Two “big idea” essays today:
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Internet2; hack HotBot contest
I think it was the dot-coms; once those IPO-bound companies started capturing the media’s attention, Internet2 faded to the background. Webmonkey, though, pulls it front and centre in an excellent four-page summary of the network and the technology behind it.
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CANOE at eight; the frame spacing test
CANOE is now paddling into its eighth year. Despite all the hardships the site has been through, it is good to see that CANOE’s still online.
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Google: any way left but down?
Google has risen to the top, but now faces a troubleseome balancing act.
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Preventing linkrot
Came across this error message at the location of a major site’s marketing page:
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Mackenzie King diaries online
Seems blogging isn’t that new: in the olden days, people apparently wrote in what was called “diaries.” Canada’s great, wacky, slacker PM kept extensive diaries for almost 60 years, and thanks to Cold Wind North, they’re available online. The diaries are fully searchable, and available in handwritten and transcribed versions. These project represent the true potential of the Net.
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March 1, 2003
Added a new, reader-submitted “origin” to “Why end with 30?”
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Nemesis Project; CBC Home Delivery
Gary Bland’s “Nemesis Project” is up and running offering a good collection of links to CSS and XHTML resources.
View all (it might be a looong page, though)