The sidebar says that there are 25 posts in November. But 5 of those are the automated weekly posts of Twitter updates. And 2, including this one, were actually written a week into December and backdated.
Not good. Worse than last year in fact. I fail at blogging. 
The + sign is valid in the local part of an email address. Please fix the validation on your sign up form.
From now on I’m going to keep track of sites to which I’ve had to send a variation of the above message. There are only two reasons for disallowing it: technical incompetence and a failure to read the RFCs; or malice in not wanting users to identify spammers or sellers of email addresses to spammers by disallowing tagged email addresses.
Yesterday I was doing a YoGov survey (referral link in case anyone fancies signing up) and got a question which asked me to list as many web browsers as I could. I think I may have been near the tip of the long tail on that one – I wonder if anyone else included Amaya?
Last night I bumped into someone I was at college with on Borough High Street. I knew his first name straight away, but it took me twelve hours to remember his last name. And then five minutes to find him on facebook…
The online, social, networked, web 2.0 world hasn’t completely eliminated the need for human memory
Anyone got some recommendations for hosting? (“Network Failure” was a trending topic on Twitter this morning for a good reason.)
I need to host this blog, another WordPress powered site, a MediaWiki powered site, some basic PHP pages and some static pages across 4 domains.
Microsoft have announced that there will be an Internet Explorer 9 (not a big surprise) and have given an early indication as to what it may include.
Headline features – faster with better standards support (in both cases playing catch up with Gecko, WebKit, Opera, etc.) and hardware accelerated graphics and font rendering which is something new and will improve the speed and quality of rendering across all sites not just ones that add new code.
No word yet on a release schedule, my personal guess would be late 2010 or early 2011 but as it’s Microsoft that could be well off.
One thing that concerns me is that the uptake by consumers may be slow. IE7 was the first release in five years and also shipped as part of Vista and IE8 ships as part of Windows 8 so users buying new machines got them automatically. With no new operating system the take up of IE9 may be slower.
We have an web application at work that’s used by thirty or so people, many of whom are non-technical. The application runs in the browser window and is a mixture of standard HTML forms and Java applets.
The most comment “it doesn’t work” message I get from users is caused when the application displays this message:
Unspecified error invoking method or accessing property “showWindow”
The pop-up blocker built into Internet Explorer seems not to like Java applets trying to launch new browser windows. It blocks these by default even though they are “requested” by the user via a click and not launched automatically by a sneaky script. I guess IE can’t or won’t work out what’s happened inside the applet before it calls out to create a new window.
Not once have the users noticed the yellow bar at the top of their browser window informing them that a pop-up has been blocked.
I can see the problem for browser producers – if you make the notification too prominent it becomes as annoying as the pop-up would have been; if you make it too subtle it goes unnoticed when the pop-up needs to be noticed.
Compounding the issue is that Internet Explorer seems to maintain three separate lists of trusted/permitted sites for privacy (i.e. cookies), security, and pop-ups. Would a master list of trusted sites with the ability to fine tune options on a site-by-site basis as an advanced option be easier to use? Or is the interface just leading me to the wrong conclusion? Oh well, maybe IE9 will streamline things.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the Google Toolbar’s pop-up blocker…
Part 1 of a few.
It seems that everyone has started talking about HTML5. I’ve recently converted sfsfw.org (still a work in progress) to HTML5 (ditto) and built a microsite at work in the language.
So, what parts of the brave new world am I embracing?
<!DOCTYPE html>, well that will save a few bytes per page. I’ve never tried to type a doctype from memory before, I’ve always cut and pasted from another project or from an authoritative source, but now I might just type it, saving a few seconds. I can’t help feeling that the lack of versioning information is a making a problem for the future (and let’s not get into the related area of all the things that HTML doctypes do/mean in comparison with what SGML or XML doctypes are meant to mean…).
<meta charset="utf-8" />, again that will save a few bytes on those pages where I bother to include a meta tag rather than just trusting to the HTTP header (and I know why the belt and braces approach is useful, so long as they both tell the same story).
<section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside> and <nav>. These are rather cool. Not immediataly earth shaking but they make code cleaner and debugging easier – less often will I be staring at </div></div></div></div> and wondering whether my current problem is caused by having too few or too many closing div tags.
number, tel, email, url are already being used in several forms on visitlondon.com and it makes me smile ‘cos me and a handful of other Opera users get to see the benefit right now. I think these will be my favourite part of the new spec for some time to come.
There’s a lot more to HTML5. This isn’t meant to be a tutorial, just some personal observations and use cases. I’ll try to delve a bit deeper into how I’m using these pieces of code and why I’m using these but not others in future posts.
Reasons to love the joined-up-interweb: musicians you love telling you about new musicians they love, with YouTube vids embedded, etc.
Tanita Tikaram recommends Marina and the Diamonds‘ I am Not a Robot
November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?
Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we’re hoping to buy (in a sort of “look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor” kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn’t.
Like last year, I’ll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.
And I’ll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo’s progress.
Finally I’ll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.