Not that I’ve used it for several years now, but I’m still interested in Notes/Domino. The Vowe bloggers have a few posts about the new version.

The shiny new second beta of Lotus Domino 8 is out now.

Done it! The site is now XHTML 1.0 transitional. I wimped out of going the whole hog to 1.1 but I will give that a go when I understand it better. Syntactically it’s not much different from XHTML 1.0, but the MIME type is application/xhtml+xml instead of plain old text/html which apparently has implications of some sort. There are still a few things missing (most notable the search) but I should be back to normal in the next week or so.

UPDATED: Back to HTML 4.01 Transitional….
I read these two articles and realised that I would be misusing XHTML and that HTML was really what this site needed. And although I dislike ‘browser-sniffers’, I may consider checking the UA and serving XHTML with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml to Mozilla and friends and text/html to everything else. Or I might just stick to HTML - it does the job for this simple site just fine.

Oh yeah - and thanks again to Ferdy for his excellent article on doing this stuff in Domino.

The search box is back after a short holiday. Why did it go? When I hacked rejigged the way Domino served the pages I found that the search page wouldn’t work any more - I got a “HTTP Web Server: Application Exception - Documents treated as HTML cannot be edited” error. After guessing likely URLs I still couldn’t get it working so back to the less than perfect but usable current search page.

I rebuilt it using Jake’s most excellent article. However, the nasty work around I’ve resorted to to get this working is to leave the search page as it was: unpleasant, un-accessible, quirks-mode HTML. But at least the search is there in the meantime.

If you’ve checked the source-code lately you’ll see that it is now actually properly HTML compliant and accessible. I found this great article at Ferdy Christant’s excellent site. It explains a simple method for creating pages that allow you to control the HTML instead of Domino - so that there’s a full doc-type, no deprecated attributes in the body element, and so on. There are a few things I’ve yet to work around, but nothing too major.

You may have noticed that the search box has gone - I’m re-writing that part of the site and it will return soon; and likewise, the permalinks have also taken a temporary hiatus, but they’ll also be back soon.

Good on ya Ferdy - you’re a legend!

20 years of Lotus Notes

This new Domino server I’ve just moved to is amazing. It is sooooo fast - like a real web server. Things are looking up.

What does this picture say?

in the ever so slightly antiquated version 6.

OR

b) File-Maker Pro apps can REALLY suck. S U C K. We just got one at work. Could be sloppy programming; I don’t know for sure, but when you can’t tab between fields (because the ‘tab’ key closes a window or something ludicrous) Notes/Domino quirks seem like award winning advances in GUI design.

OR

c)Noam Chomsky emailed me! Check out the ‘Who’ column. Well, HE didn’t email me, one of his assistants did. But hey - it puts a smile on my dial!

this quote from Big Al is interesting - it has been about three years since Lotus released R5. “Lotus’ goal going forward will be to release major Lotus/Domino upgrades every 18 to 24 months.” The full article is here

Lotus actually made Notes/Domino 6 ‘Gold’ yesterday, but today is the official release date for the new version of Lotus Notes/Domino 6 from IBM (or whatever the fuck they’re calling it). It probably means I will have to redesign the site and update my certification too….