Our broadband was switched on this morning, and for 256 it is nice and fast.
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XHTML and Domino
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.
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‘Budget’ airlines
I’ve just booked a flight to Sydney. I decided to fly Qantas, although there wasn’t much in it. Pacific Blue (who are Virgin by any other name) are a so-called ‘budget’ airline, but only worked out to be about ten bucks cheaper than Qantas or Air New Zealand. I choose Qantas over Air New Zealand only because the flight to Sydney was at a more convenient time (Air New Zealand had pretty much sold out of their cheapo seats except on their 6am flight). And while Virgin have better planes (brand new 767’s where as Qantas/Air New Zealand only fly 737’s from Wellington) I’d have to pay for booze and food on Virgin – so it was a no brainer.
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Fog
There is a freaky fog rolling into the harbour at the moment. It has swallowed up the entire far side of the harbour and it is getting denser.
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Accessibility with Domino web sites
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!
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IBM and the Linux desktop
Found at the Web Standards Project, the tale of the well intentioned IBM Linux desktop challenge.
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Changes
If you’re nerdy enough to check the source code of this site you will have noticed some changes in the last few days. This warrants proper explanation, and I’ll provide that over the next few days. In the meantime, if you notice any ‘funny stuff’ on the site, let me know .
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Amazon job notice, circa 1994
Found via kottke, a post from Jeff Bezos looking for developers for Amazon …!!
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HTML element madness
After a quick brush up on my html element attributes by having a look at the W3 Schools html element list, I made a few discoveries. There are several areas that I need to revisit, mostly related to forms.
I also found an alternative to W3 Schools html reference at www.htmlref.com.
Some things I learnt:
There are elements that have only a subtle difference from one another. For instance, abbr and acronym. One is for abbreviations (say wgtn instead of Wellington), the other for acronyms (WCC instead of Wellington City Council). I couldn’t help wondering if it was really necessary to have both.
Likewise, q is similar to blockquote, but more straight-forward in that the former is a short quote and the latter is a long quote.
The head element has an attribute ‘profile’. Profile points to a URL containing a meta data profile. I could not find a concise explanation of this – although the best description is in the HTML spec itself. If you have a practical example, let me know.
And I discovered the joys of the dir attribute. Freaking great!
