TechProsaic

Earlier today I clicked on a link to go to some intranet app.  I forgot about it and came back later.  I filled in my user ID and password then clicked login.  Here’s the message I received:

HTTP Status 408 - The time allowed for the login process has been exceeded. If you wish to continue you must either click back twice and re-click the link you requested or close and re-open your browser

I’m sorry, but that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a couple of weeks.  Please, people!  If you have to instruct your users to “click back twice” or “close and re-open your browser”, then you are doing it wrong!  Computers are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.

Jeez!

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Stuff I agree with:
* ajax
* mobile
* fluid layouts
* dom scripting

I do not agree where he states that the “Fisher Price look” is going away. Sometimes you just gotta aim a website at AOL users.

Bold predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition ~ Authentic Boredom
Bold predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition

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I’m so late on this article but hey, if I don’t write about it I’ll forget it.

Global White Space Reset | Left Justified

This is a CSS design techinque whereby you start with “* {padding: 0; margin: 0;}”. This will reset all browsers back to the basics. Then you add some margin and padding back in. The end result should be more consistent appearance of pages across browsers with less reliance on hacks.

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If you look to your right (if you are on my site. If you are reading this via a news aggregator, you probably don’t have anything of mine to the right), you will see a couple of new lists. I’ve added a Wordpress plugins WP-scrobbler which displays the music I’ve played recently, and a few books dislayed from my Reader2 library. Hope you find it interesting.

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I haven’t had much time for web design theory lately, but I have great respect for A List Apart. When I do make time for it, this is one of my must-reads. ALA put an article up on Sep 26th titled Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module. It deals with a proposed solution to the difficulty of flowing text into multiple horizontal columns. Here’s a great picture from the article that explains it very well:

This is all fine and good, but I disagree with the introduction to the article where it states:

While most computer screens are wider than tall, most websites are the exact opposite: longer than wide […] Horizontal space, on the other hand, is quite cheap; we often don’t even know what to do with it.

Wanna konw why I disagree? This totally leaves out small form-factor devices such as PDAs. And I have a perfect example for you. In fact, the PIErony is exquisite. (As in Pocket Internet Explorer.)

Here we have PIE with the “Fit to screen” option disabled:

It doesn’t look all that bad really, however you must scroll left and right to read it, which is HORRIBLE enough on a desktop monitor, but its ten times worse on a 240px wide LCD.

Here the same page with the “fit to screen” option enabled. This is PIE trying its best to fit everything in so that you can read a page without having to scroll sideways. The images are scaled down which helps a lot. Many websites, notably the flexible-layout ones do GREAT with this. Check out ALA:

I scoff at thee, ALA! In case you are curious, here’s a screenshot of my site, not that I wrote the theme myself (it’s a tweaked almost spring). Enjoy:

<angelschanting>

</angelschanting>

Just to show you its not just me:

Amen.

Disclaimer: I think Pocket IE is pretty lame in most respects, simply because its a lowest-common-denominator kind of application. No frills.

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### update 2005-08-01 fixed link ###

http://www.relativelyabsolute.com/articles/focus/

Thank you waybackmachine! Fixed link

An excellent and very elegant hack that allows you to use the :focus pseudo-element in CSS2 for any selector, in MSIE. Right now IE only supports :focus on anchors. The article shows some good examples for styling focused form fields. Also included in the hack is the whatever:hover behaviour since IE has a similar deficiency with this pseudo-element.

Someday I need to use some of these cool techniques on my site.

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(like me) See the slashdot story.

Ok, I’ve spent about 30 min driving IE7 beta 1 around. Did the Acid2 test and browsed through a whole lot of Quirksmode stuff. My conclusion?

It has tabs.

Woo hoo. As far as I can tell they haven’t fixed much with regards to standards compliance. It still fails the Complex Spiral demo for example. To be fair, it is fast. It has popup blocking.

But that’s not what I am interested in. I already have all that. I don’t need another browser, I’m happy with Firefox. What I do want is for the other 90% (and falling) of the world to not drive how the 10% of us idealistic designers create standards-based webpages.

On a related note, the Web Standards Project has an interesting article on the front page talking about their meetings with Microsoft.

Obligatory screenshot:

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Got this comment from BartVB on this post:

I think that’s a really small IFRAME

Yeah, I know. When I first posted the entry, the styles on the <pre> tag caused the text to be really tiny, and it still bled off the right. I changed it so that the text would be larger, but of course now the browser window must be maximized to read everything which I hate. This is due in part because I almost never maximize a window and instead browse at about 900px wide. But another important reason is that I browse from my HP iPAQ h4150 PDA with a QVGA 320×240 screen.

So anyway, I decided to add scrolling to blockquotes. Instead of an IFRAME, I actually use a CSS2 property called overflow. My solution is obviously imperfect though. In this case, the preformatted block was taller than your typical browser window. This made horizontal scrolling extremely awkward since you would have to page down to reach the bar, then page up to see the end of the line, then repeat ad naseum. So I set a height on it. I played around with various values, settling on 5em or something like that. But this strategy is bad because well, its too short for a preformatted block and can be too tall for a short quote, like the one at the beginning of this entry. It clearly must be a different way.

That’s about the time when I lost interest in the problem. I just tried using max-height: 75%, but apparently Firefox doesn’t know that one yet. Wonder when they are going full CSS 2.1 compliant?

I am open to suggestions!

### update ###
Oh almost forgot! Kudos to the random reader whose name I have unfortunately forgotten for pointing out to me just how bad the original blockquote looked.

### update 2 ###
Sorry if you had some comments you submitted which went into limbo over the past few weeks. I accidentally had the ‘notify admin on comments that need moderation’ box unchecked. It’s fixed now.

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Or, users versus developers. Here’s a long reply to an email thread on the flyspray-devel list where I explain my reasons for liking forums better. What do you think?

On 7/14/05, Mac Newbold wrote:
> The model for mailing lists and forums are fundamentally different. A
> mailing list is a push model, where someone sends something to the list

> A forum, on the other hand is a pull model, where someone puts

I think we have all come to a consensus on the topic, so I don't feel
bad for going off topic.   

I agree with the concepts you outline, Mac, but I disagree in that if
implemented well, a web forum is a much better tool all-around.  Maybe
in some projects a complete implementation would include a full
mailing-list-like interface as you say, but I think that will vary
depending on the project and the people.

There are so many reasons that I like forums better, although
obviously I'm not shy on MLs.

- searchable archives
- threaded discussion
- content 'permalinks'
- rich formatting (PHP syntax highlighting anyone?)
- personalities (avatars, post counts, custom titles, etc)
- forum can mesh with rest of the website
- polls
- access control (ACLs)
- pull notifications (browsing by forum, or read/unread status, RSS)
- push notifications (jabber or other IM, RSS notifiers & bots)

A decent mail client will handle your searching, threading, and
notifications, but thats about it.

Gmane does an excellent job for what it is, but it’s really just a
shell to make mailing-lists more usable.  The fact that it exists
supports my reasons for supporting forums above.   

So, I’m not suggesting we change flyspray, I just wanted to rebut your
thoughts.

Incidentally, the forum I have in mind when I cite these features is Unclassified Newsboard.

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Hehe, did a wp-1.5 upgrade. haven’t picked a theme yet. this will have to suffice!

Update

I’ve decided to take “Almost Spring” and turn it into “Almost Fall”. It’s a work-in-progress obviously. I think I’ll put a cool picture at the top, probably space-related again, since that seemed to work well.

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