Barely had I installed Opera 8 beta 2 when Opera 8 beta 3 comes along. Big improvement to the preferences interface. (Though where has the option to have visited links struck through gone? It’s still supported because it still worked when I copied my old profile across but now it seems to require either User CSS or editing a .INI file to implement.)

But the most exciting thing is native support for SVG. That plus support for XMLHttpRequest and voice browsing is making Opera even better than before.

And at the same time leaks indicate that MSIE 7 will fully support transparency in PNGs. What took you guys so long?

Of course the technique I outlined a few days ago isn’t limited to favicons. It can be used with any appropriate image. I realised that I could make links to Live Journals look exactly like they do on LJ itself by including the following in my CSS.

#content a[href^="http://www.livejournal.com/users/"] {
  background-image: url('http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

Still Gecko only obviously, due to the use of the CSS 3 selector.

What I should do is cobble something together in WP that automatically converts <lj user="foo"> into an appropriate HTML link complete with icon. This is the sort of thing that Live Press was supposed to do but (a) I could never get it working and (b) it hasn’t been upgraded to Word Press 1.5. Time to brush up on my PHP and get hacking.

pink_weasel has got a very nasty cold - terrible hacking cough, shivering one moment, sweating the next, the full works. Most likely she caught it in Paris. Nasty French germs.

Job interview today. Arranged at a fair gallop (first heard about the job on Tuesday), and likely to be quite a bit of competition so not getting our hopes up. It hits all the marks - good salary, good location, large audience, commitment to standards and accessibility, chance to develop new skills. Let’s see if I can avoid putting my foot in it.

Happy St Patrick’s day to any Irish readers. Celebrate today because come Saturday we’ll be wiping the smiles off your faces…

Bourbon

Congratulations! You’re 127 proof, with specific scores in beer (100) , wine (150), and liquor (86).

Screw all that namby-pamby chick stuff, you’re going straight for the bottle and a shot glass! It’ll take more than a few shots of Wild Turkey or 99 Bananas before you start seeing pink elephants. You know how to handle your alcohol, and yourself at parties.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 46% on proof
	You scored higher than 93% on beer index
	You scored higher than 99% on wine index
	You scored higher than 91% on liquor index

Link: The Alcohol Knowledge Test written by hoppersplit on Ok Cupid

Hmm, my less than 100% score on beer is down to questions like “You’re at a sports bar with your buddies. From which tap do you order a draft?” which is meaningless on this side of the Atlantic.

Let’s get this straight – here we have someone who argues passionately about standards in various public fora but he now says that his sites don’t validate? Sounds like a hypocrite.

Let me explain. Of course my sites, such as my home page, my blog and my hobby sites all validate. What I’m talking about are the sites that populate my CV. Why do none of them validate?

Mostly I blame other people.

I hand over a perfectly validating template and then an ASP coder or a web editor starts shoving all sorts of crap in there. They mix up XHTML and HTML syntax in the same document, they don’t encode ampersands, they forget alt attributes, the nest elements incorrectly, they don’t understand character sets. So after a few months all the pages have been hacked about and nothing validates anymore.

So what am I to do when a job spec asks for examples of validating web sites?

As regular readers will know I have a love-hate relationship with recruitment consultants but mostly I love them for the slightly befuddled little muppets they are. Most mean well and try hard to do a job that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. But sometimes you get one who’s just unbelievable.

I won’t give his name or the name of the company he works for but they don’t seem very professional (they use .org.uk domain name for a business, and their web site proudly displays the “well done you’ve set up your web space” message) and the following exchange really says it all.

He called me on Friday when I was out of town at my grandfather’s funeral. He left a message on the answer phone but, and he does actually get some credit for this, actually listened to the outgoing message including the bit where I ask people to e-mail me. Hence this first e-mail:

Steve could you contact me regarding and excellent web developer / designer role I have on.

I picked this up on Friday evening via webmail and responded:

Sounds interesting, though I am solely a developer and not at all a designer. I’m away from home at the moment attending a family fruneral, so if you need to speak to me on the phone then I’m afraid I’m not available until Monday afternoon, but you can call me then on 020 8XXX XXXX. But feel free to send any details or questions you may have to this e-mail address and I’ll let you know what I think.

Note that I clearly say that I’m available on Monday afternoon.

He calls on Monday morning when I’m out (meeting with a very friendly and organised recruitment consultant), Lettice takes the call and tells him that I’ll be back in the afternoon.

I’m in all afternoon, from twelve noon to quarter past six. No call. I then go out to the pub for an investment club meeting. He calls sometime between then and when Lettice gets home at just before ten o’clock. This guy had been told twice to call in the afternoon and he hadn’t bothered even once in that six hour window.

Why hadn’t I called him? Because he hadn’t done anything to make it worth the cost of a national rate phone call. He hadn’t given me any details of the job (and as he had described it as a slash designer position it probably wasn’t right for me anyway), I’d already spent a fair chunk of my day talking to recruitment consultants and I had paying work to be getting on with. “Please call me, I have something that might interest you” is simply spam, and not very good spam at that.

Now I had been in the pub so this may have been a bit strong, but:

I said I would be in to speak to you on Monday afternoon. You called
once in the morning and once in the evening. Do you have something worth discussing with me or are you just playing silly buggers?

Yeah Steve I did have something worth speaking to you about but since you
cant even return a message, pick up a phone or communicate in a normal way I don’t fancy your chances much of getting through any interview stage let alone the one I had for you.

Oh, so he wants to play?

This from the man who can’t even understand the what the word “afternoon” means? Never mind.

I have 4 other guys in for that position all better than you.

they wanted 5 for a interview day.

hence why I wanted you.

Even if I had been hasty or overly forthright with my previous messages, we now see this guy’s true colours. He had other candidates who were better than me? He just wanted a fifth to make up the numbers?

Sounds like you only wanted some poor schmuck to round out your numbers. Sounds like I had a lucky escape then. Thank you for being honest with me at the end.

I have recruitment consultants phoning and e-mailling me daily; I’ve been using recruitment consultants, as both candidate and employer, for ten years; I have to sort the wheat from the chaff just the same as you have to with candidates. Those that make the effort to fit in around their candidates’ and clients’ schedules, who are honest and open up front, and who make an effort to match candidates and positions correctly, they make the grade, those that don’t, don’t.

But if you actually want to play fair, just send the job details so I can review them and judge whether I’m suitable. Or call me at the times I said I would be available to speak. In fact I’m going to be working from home all day today so you can call any time you like.

No response. But I have had another consultant contact me with a very nice sounding role. You win some, you lose some.

Wales are running away with it. Four tries in less than half an hour. And they’re making it look easy.

This grew out of a discussion regarding .ICO files and CSS on alt.html. Now, I made some mistakes in my off-the-cuff suggestion there (I used [att|=val] rather than the correct (and, annoyingly, CSS3) selector [att^=val]. After switching to the correct selector I realised that, even allowing for the simplification supplied by Toby Inkster, this would be Gecko only for now. But it is a nice trick anyway.

In essence what it does is insert a site’s favicon before any link to that site. As CSS doesn’t parse the value of att() it can’t be done on a generic level (it could be done with JavaScript but raises a number of other issues) but it can be done for sites that you link to frequently.

#content a[href^='http://groups-beta.google'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.google.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://www.imdb.com'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://www.amazon.co.uk'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.amazon.co.uk/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://en.wikipedia'] {
  background-image: url('http://en.wikipedia.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}