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“He talks to himself sometimes because he’s the only one who understands what he’s saying.”

Archive for the 'Browsers' category

Tags, Clouds and Operas

June 28th 2005, 12:42 pm | Browsers | CSS | WWW

Looking over the Technorati redesign as plugged by Eric Meyer (same old stuff – nice CSS but fixed width design, fixed font sizes in IE, breaks with only a couple of font size increases in FireFox, minor validation errors) I saw that the Tags page didn’t display properly in Opera 8.01.

The relative frequency of the tags are indicated via nested <em> elements with a CSS style font-size: 1.03em to produce the increased size.

But Opera screws up and rounds the font sizes down. I’ve written up a description of the bug and submitted a bug report to Opera.

Until Opera and/or Technorati do something about this issue there’s a quick fix that Opera users can apply. As Technorati includes id="technorati" on the <body> tag it’s relatively easy to add
#technorati .heatmap em {font-size: 1.06em !important;}
to a user stylesheet and restore the tag coloud to its full glory. The exact size value needed will vary depending on your particular default and minimum font size values.

Moving away from the Opera bug we’re still left with the larger issue. What’s the best way to (a) mark-up and (b) indicate relative importance in various media.

As far as the mark-up goes HTML doesn’t offer us that many options and <em> is probably the best choice. Things are slightly confused by the presence of <strong> – how does strong emphasis relate to multiple levels of emphasis created via nested <em> elements?

By default browsers don’t change their output for nested <em>s so there’s no way short of viewing the source for the user to see the level of importance. For graphical media increasing the font size is one possibility but even when Opera’s shortcomings are ignored this might break down (consider mobile devices for example). In non-graphical media the font-size is meaningless.

Volume or pitch are options in aural media but don’t make for an easy listening experience (this sort of tag cloud is designed for visual skimming and doesn’t really work the same way when listened to linearly; but if a listener chooses to listen to it they should get the same information as the reader, via some means or other).

The best solution I can think of would be to add title attributes to each tag giving the relative level of importance. So a tag surrounded with four levels of <em>s would have title="Level Four" or something similar.

Whilst not ideal (and maybe tag clouds aren’t such a good idea) this does have the advantage that it brings together mark-up, styling and metadata (the <em> elements, the font-sizing and the titles) to reinforce the same message. The message. Ah, that’s the real problem. The relative popularity of the various tags is the message and the message should be in the data not in anything else. But that means turning the funky tag cloud into a boring table. :-(

The Vikings are heading for America!

April 25th 2005, 8:41 pm | Browsers | The World

Well two of them.

Proof, not that it was needed, that (a) CEOs say stupid things and (b) Opera Software are cool people.

Stuff happens

April 18th 2005, 7:39 pm | Browsers | My Life | WWW

So first day at the new job. No computer for most of the day. Bit of a problem in my line of work.

Anyway the day was enlivened by the news that Adobe has bought Macromedia. I’m very glad it was that way round because of the two I much prefer Adobe - I prefer the user interface on their software and they have a web site that actually works. But what does this merger mean?

For developers and designers it means that sooner or later some of the tools they use will be dropped. The clear favourite to be shown the door is Freehand which simply doesn’t have anywhere near the market share of Illustrater. But how will Fireworks and Image Ready be handled? Fireworks is far more popular than Image Ready but Image Ready is fully integrated with Photoshop which is much more popular, and does a lot more, than Fireworks. GoLive and Dreamweaver is another interesting match up. A product that combines the best of both would be ideal. But at the end of the day I’m not sure this merger will make a huge difference to developers.

For users there’s a potential nightmare on the horizon. Can you imagine a Flash movie embedded in an Acrobat document, or vice versa? The two most widely used (and abused) proprietary formats on the web are now controlled by the same company. Let’s see what happens.

Better news is that Opera 8 is officially released tomorrow.

Fast Browser, Slow Browser

March 17th 2005, 10:12 am | Browsers

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?

Funky CSS stuff for Gecko browsers

March 13th 2005, 3:14 pm | Blogs | Browsers | CSS

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;
}

Opera 8 beta 2

March 13th 2005, 1:30 pm | Browsers

Installed the latest beta version of Opera this morning.

Things I like

  • fieldset elements are now fully stylable – hence the WP create/edit post page is no longer all over the place.
  • Feeds are much better handled – as well as supporting RSS Atom is now supported. The Feed interface has also been separated from the mail/usenet interface.
  • User Interface has had a revamp and feels more posished and less cramped.

Things I don’t like

  • The icon for a newsfeed associated with a web page is the letters “RSS”, even when the feed is Atom. Firefox made the same mistake and it was widely discussed at the time. Mozilla changed it to the current icon. Why is Opera repeating someone else’s mistake?
  • Some of the keyboard shortcuts have either been broken or changed and not documented properly. CTRL+G should toggle bewteen Author and User modes but instead brings up the Search box. SHIFT+G should load images but instead toggles between Author and User modes. G should cycle through the three image display modes but instead does nothing.

Things to look forward to in 2005

January 1st 2005, 8:55 pm | Browsers | Doctor Who | Films | The World | Wedding
  1. I’m marrying Lettice
  2. Doctor Who is back on TV in March
  3. The market share of Internet Explorer will continue to fall
  4. Serenity hits the cinemas in the autumn
  5. The fun of watching our beloved political classes go mental in a general election

Decisions

November 2nd 2004, 12:45 pm | Browsers | My Life

Dreamweaver vs Studio

As I have a bit of money in the bank I want to upgrade some of the software I use. First on the list is an upgrade from Dreamweaver MX to Dreamweaver MX 2004. But should I just upgrade DW or should I go the whole hog and upgrade to the full Studio suite? Flash would mainly be used just to produce sIFR objects; Fireworks I hate but some people I work with like to provide designs in Fireworks format; Freehand and Cold Fusion might see a little use but probably not much. So it doesn’t sound like a good use of that extra £250. But, I can’t seem to just rule it out.

DVDs vs VHS

Until now I’ve been good. I haven’t bought anything on DVD that I already own on VHS. Sure the quality’s better and there can be some nice extras. But, there are so many things that I don’t already own that it just doesn’t make sense to buy the same thing again. (On a similar note, I haven’t replaced very many of my old casettes with CDs either, but my musical taste has changed somewhat over the years so this isn’t really an issue.)

But DVDs take a lot less space than tapes. For example, I have the whole run of Blakes 7 on VHS and at a very spacious two episodes per tape that adds up to twenty six tapes. The new DVD box sets would contain thirteen episodes in a box the size of just two tapes. That’s a space saving of more than three-to-one.

Opera vs Firefox

I moved from Netscape to Opera back in 1998. In the intervening years no other browser has come close to suiting my needs as well as Opera does. Firefox comes close, very close. This is going to be a tough one.

From A(dvets) to B(rowsers)

August 24th 2004, 10:41 am | Browsers

I’m probably not the first person to think this, but is advertising in Opera worth it?

The only people who see the ads are those who don’t pay the $39 to purchase the ad-free version.

Okay, okay, I know that people have different priorities and that someone who dosn’t spend that money on a web browser may spend it on something else instead. And indeed there are some users who buy the full version but keep the ads switched on as they like them.

Presumably this last group mostly keep the Google text ads switched on as these -

  • Take up far less GUI real-estate than the banner ads
  • Provide ads related to the contents of the page being viewed

The Google text ads are drawn from the same database as the AdSense boxes that people can include on their pages. But when you visit a page with AdSense enabled page you don’t always get the same ads in the two locations.

On the subject of AdSense, the following one line of CSS in a user stylesheet will hide them entirely:
iframe[name="google_ads_frame"] { display: none;}

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