Posts from 2006

After a short evening walk, Tantek and Kat and Carolyn and I arrived at 219 West in Austin, Texas for the WestCiv gathering.  The crowd inside was quite loud and densely packed, saturated with so many Web geeks that it was threatening to precipitate a site right onto the carpet.

Just as we got close to some people we knew, a staff member appeared at our elbows.  “I’m very sorry, folks, but this is a 21-and-over establishment,” he said with a distinct lack of sorrow.

So if you wondered where we were, or happened to spot us in the 90 second window before we left, or I walked past you without interacting and never got back to you… that’s why.  We weren’t blowing you off; we just ran afoul of an odd local custom.

As a result, we’ll be absent from the vast majority of the evening gatherings at SXSW.  Hope all you kids have fun.  We’ll be hanging out with the other grown-ups and getting some sleep.

• No Kidding was published on Saturday, March 11th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been eleven replies.

So tomorrow I head out to SXSW along with most of the rest of the industry, just like everybody else.  There are, as usual, about two dozen sessions I want to see, all of which conflict with each other.  I’ll be on three panels, two Sunday and one Monday (as listed over at Complex Spiral), and will be doing book signings on Sunday around lunch time.  There will be a bookstore there, but if you already have a book of mine, bring that too.

Only a few days after I return from SXSW, I’ll be shipping out again for MIX06 in Las Vegas.  They’ve been running a “Remix MIX” design competition in the spirit of the CSS Zen Garden, and I’ve consented to be one of the judges.  I’m actually looking forward to MIX for a whole bunch of reasons, but at the top of the heap has to be a chance to try out IE7 and talk to the team members in person.  That’s three-quarters of the reason I’m going.  Also, I’m curious about Microsoft’s “Atlas” framework for AJAX development, but that’s more of a bonus reason.

Besides, if you look deeply enough, you discover there are really only two “scenarios” (a.k.a. tracks) at the conference:

• Next Generation Browsing Experience
• Beyond the Browser

Yeah, I think I’d like to know what they’re thinking.  So off to Vegas I go, once I’m back from Texas.

Yee haw.

• Southwest Twice was published on Thursday, March 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

I don’t think I can say this without sounding smug, so I’ll just say it: this is what I was talking about.  If you went ahead and tried to hack your site so it worked in the previous beta, I’m sorry, but I tried to warn you.

It’s also why I said CSS hacks weren’t necessarily dead yet, or even likely to cause real problems, because there’s every chance that IE7 will be close to being another Firefox (in the standards-support and layout-behavior senses).  We can’t be sure of that yet, of course, but the results described by Molly are pointing in that direction.

Sure, we’d like to see a hack-free Web, but that point will not come until a few years after IE7 finally ships.  No, that’s wrong: we’ll never have a hack-free Web.  But we might reach a time where cross-browser presentation has become not only commonplace, but subconsciously assumed, like our current expectation that a browser will know how to handle hyperlinks.

• IE7 Revs Up was published on Saturday, March 4th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Once was lost, now is found: “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps” has been resurrected from the Great Bit Bucket Beyond and given new life on Mozilla.org.  In fact, it looks like just about all the technical articles written by me and the other members of TEDS are available.  Look through the full list of CSS articles, for example.  You can dig into any number of topic areas from the main page of the Documentation section.  (Scroll down to the “Mozilla Developer Center Contents” headline.)

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available.  Not now, anyway.  Perhaps one day that too will change.

• DevEdge Content Returns was published on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the History, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been six replies.

It only took most of a year for this to happen, but WP-Gatekeeper 1.5 RC5 is now available.  The only change is that it will now auto-add the challenge to any standard WordPress 1.5 install from the moment you activate the plugin.  Before now, this auto-insertion wasn’t working on any WordPress install that had gzipping turned on, as many do.  A heap of thanks to Jeremy Dunck, who first identified the problem; and Andy Skelton, who showed me how to solve it.

For those who joined the party in the long silence since RC4, Gatekeeper is a WordPress plugin that lets you manage a series of challenge/response pairs.  The default challenge is “What color is an orange?” (correct response: “orange”), though you should definitely disable that one and add your own.  This helps stymie spambots, though of course it is easily defeated by a manual spammer—and they do exist—and it can do nothing to stop trackback spam.  I actually stopped using Gatekeeper on meyerweb when I installed Akismet, which may be good enough for most people.  For those who can’t or won’t run Akismet, though, Gatekeeper is a decent alternative.

Gatekeeper is technically a CAPTCHA, but it is a fully accessible CAPTCHA, as it uses no images.  It’s also highly configurable, allowing you to add as many challenges as you like and then rotating between them randomly.  I know of a few sites that are quite happy with Gatekeeper, and recently caught wind of a Django implementation of the same concept.

So it’s there and ready for use by those who are interested.  If I haven’t heard about any bugs within the next month or so, I’ll strip off the RC designation and go with 1.5 final.  And about time, too.

Note to WordPress 2.0.x users: I have no idea if WP-Gatekeeper 1.5 will work in WP2.  It may.  Then again, it may not.  I’d be interested to know either way.

• Gatekeeper 1.5 rc5 was published on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Tools and WordPress categories.
• There have been five replies.

The alpha 2 release of S5 1.2 is now available (177KB ZIP file; also available for previewing in the testbed).  There isn’t any major change here, but I did add some notable enhancements to the notes window.  These are:

• On any slide with incrementals, an indicator of incremental progress will appear in square brackets next to the overall slide show progress on the title line.  It’s a little crude, I admit, but it serves the purpose well enough.
• Clicking on the title of either the Elapsed Time or Remaining Time counters will “minimize” them.  Click a minimized title to maximize the box.  The actual minimum and maximum effects are purely CSS-driven, hooked onto a collapsed class name.  I’m still pondering the best way to handle this feature, so the class name may change, as for that matter may the mechanism by which one can min/max the boxes.  Suggestions are welcome.
• Keypresses and clicks are passed from the note window back to the slide show.  In other words, the slide show fully is fully operable from either the slide show window or the notes window.  The only difference is that the notes window doesn’t have the navigation links and popup navigation menu (said difference to disappear in a future release).

That’s it.  In the process, though, I uncovered a bug that shows up in Safari 1.3.1 and 2.0, where it’s ignoring the show-first feature for incrementals.  I’m going to assume that the problem lies in the getIncrementals() function, though of course I could be wrong.  If anyone can spot the error and provide a fix, I’d be grateful.

Update 2 Mar 06: in addition to the Safari problem, I’ve discovered that IE/Win doesn’t seem to share event information between windows.  Thus, if you try to run the slide show from the notes window, errors get thrown.  I managed to fix this in clicker() by adding a test for notes-window events, but trap() has a very different structure and I’m not sure how to fix it.  Thus the testbed in IE/Win currently lets you advance the slide show from the notes window by clicking the mouse button, but keyboard navigation throws an error.  If anyone can tell me how to get around this, even with a pointer to a good article on passing events from one window to another, I’d be very grateful.

• S5 1.2a2 was published on Monday, February 27th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Not long after noon this past Tuesday, my grandmother Constance died at the age of 98.  She was my father’s mother, the last of my grandparents to die.  At this point, if I were to start with me and trace the tree diagrams of my mother’s and father’s families all the way back to their root elements, my only living ancestor is my father.

It is always sad when a loved one dies, but it’s what she wanted, and I respect that decision without reservation.  Her health and physical abilities had deteriorated greatly, and she was tired in a way that I cannot hope to comprehend.  She had seen her children grow up and have their own children, and then become grandparents of their own.  Her life had been long, her joys and sorrows beyond counting.  She was ready to call an end.  In many ways, she had been ever since losing her husband a little over three years ago.

Tomorrow we go to join the gathering family.  I think Grammy would have wanted nothing else but that: the family together, forming a great circle of strength and love in which each of us can shelter.

• A Grand Lady was published on Friday, February 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

In keeping with Molly‘s recent conversations with comment spam, I present to you a back-handed compliment (or is it?) that I found in my moderation queue:

A great site where one can enjoy the thought of a great mind long departed. Cheers for the good work!

Wow.  Harsh.

• Comment Spam Quips was published on Monday, February 20th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been nine replies.