Anne van Kesteren: Weblog 4.2

Weblog on W3C, WHATWG, HTML, CSS, DOM, XML, HTTP and more.

A list of links from last week

Last week I’ve done some major backend changes which will eventually pay off. At least, that was the intention behind making them. Somewhere in the future I’ll highlight what changes I made, et cetera.

Sunday is link day. This Sunday is, at least. (Disclaimer: links can be from before last week.)

Communicating Effectively with Users - Part One
You might want to invest some time in this. Websites with this problem are probably the result of quickly being implemented without asking for feedback from the client on the particular aspects of the site or asking feedback in general…
R.I.P. RSS
RSS is dead
I think this is a good thing. Downside is that Atom is not yet an official standard and subject to change. Arguments against this movement are generally that it is up to the user. While it’s nice that a user can choose; please. Users shouldn’t have to care about this for a bit. Feeds should be transparent to them, completely. If you want to give the user control, feed them with HTML 4.01 if desired. Also, there are a lot of versions of RSS, are you offering all eleven variants of them? Are you offering CDF as well? RSS 3.0? ESF? Ok, so one person actually does that.
CSS Outlines
The first tests with outline are created. Another five years untill the first good looking CSS tricks become widespread.
Principles of visibility and human friendliness
Good semantics are visible. Right?
hCard Creator
Thanks! Might be useful some day.
Mobile CSS vs. Mobile Version
Seriously, images that are hidden through CSS ought not to be loaded. Every device that does otherwise has a bug.
Just one slider, but not so simple
Usable interfaces are important. You should give the user a minimum amount of options.
AJAX Debugging with Greasemonkey
Very nice! Not much to say about this one…
Unobtrusive dynamic select boxes
I like the way how the class attribute is used here. I wonder though if it wouldn’t be better if you had a single select box by default and make a second one with javascript. You group on the class attribute value and generate the ‘first select box’ from the values that differ. That way users who have javascript disabled don’t have the disadvantage of having two select boxes of which one doesn’t actually function as expected.
Ajax reconsidered
Why Ajax had no uptake in 1997.
Markup Guide
Although the guide in general is quite nice there is a bug in it. I already pointed this out in the comments and in private e-mail, but I didn’t really get any satisfactory response. The problem is the example of the definition list. As HTML 4.01 clearly defines a DT element folowing another DT element (making it its sibling) shares the same definition or definitions. A DT element is never undefined.
Div Mania
div elements are the new <table>. Also: Any time a div is the answer, there’s a hole in HTML.
Tiger Adoption Rate
That’s quite fast!

5th June 2005

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Comments

  1. Nice list of interesting articles. Thanks.

    Permalink · 2005-06-05 19:55:14 · Jero

  2. Very interesting and helpfull.

    Permalink · 2005-06-05 21:27:56 · Richard Acosta

  3. I already pointed this out in the comments and in private e-mail, but I didn’t really get any satisfactory response.

    The wording was changed in response to your original comment, and even more so just now to further clarify.

    Permalink · 2005-06-06 01:07:47 · Dave S.

  4. RE: RSS is dead - Seems like just another war of formats to me. For the supporters of Atom to win, they have to: 1. have Atom made a standard, and 2. Persuade everybody else that it's the only acceptable format - looks like the situation with browser wars, etc... We have seen many examples of how fruitless this can be.

    Permalink · 2005-06-06 20:24:38 · Pet Computer

  5. As I’m passionate about feeds I’ll try to respond. It’s not really a war of formats as most of the people behind Atom would have loved to clean up RSS 2.0. Taking along the good bits and specifying the bad a bit better and publish an IETF RSS 2.1 draft. However, as Dave Winer thought RSS was perfect as it was that didn’t happen and so Atom came into picture.

    RSS is like the HTML people created back in ’95. Atom is like XHTML 2.0. As pointed out above, a HTML5 solution wasn’t possible thanks to the ‘owner’ of RSS 2.0.

    Permalink · 2005-06-07 20:02:15 · Anne

  6. As one of those killing RSS in any version, I would like to state that it's first a question of usability, secondly a choice of "most suitable format" - I don't publish rich media content, like podcasts, and thus wouldn't need any "enclosures".

    Permalink · 2005-06-08 08:37:30 · Arve Bersvendsen

  7. Arguments against this movement are generally that it is up to the user. While it's nice that a user can choose; please. Users shouldn't have to care about this for a bit. Feeds should be transparent to them, completely. If you want to give the user control, feed them with HTML 4.01 if desired. Also, there are a lot of versions of RSS, are you offering all eleven variants of them? Are you offering CDF as well? RSS 3.0? ESF?

    Point taken. :)

    Permalink · 2005-06-08 10:43:54 · Mathias Bynens

  8. Any time a div is the answer, there’s a hole in HTML.

    It's right. Any. Why DIV (and uselessest SPAN) was included in XHTML 2.0? Especially because SECTION exists for riched content.

    Permalink · 2005-06-13 03:16:57 · V

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