So, 2006 is almost over and it’s time to look ahead at 2007. Will it be an exciting year? No doubt, we have to wait to see just how riveting it can get! I thought I’d go through some notable things that happened in 2006, not just web-related, and scribble down some words about them…
Yes, yes, I know, I’m on parental leave. But of course I have to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas, and if that’s not your thing, at the very least, let me say Happy Holidays!
Friday November 24th, 22:58, our baby girl was born! She weighed 3965 grams and was 50 centimeters tall, and her birth was without complications. Everyone in the family is doing just fine, and Fredrika and the baby got home today from the hospital.
Interestingly enough, she was born in the exact same room as our other daughter Emilia. When we got to the delivery room and was assigned where we should be, we walked into the room and just exclaimed:
Hey, we’ve been here before!
Words can’t express how happy we are over the new addition to our family!
Welcome to this world, baby girl!
Time for Geek Meet again! The next Geek Meet will take place January 11th 18.00 at adocca entertainment here in Stockholm, located at Södermälarstrand 57B, floor 6 (map of the address).
And this time I thought we’d cater to everyones’ interests (well, as many as possible, at least), with a new addition to the concept.
During this week, I’ve encountered some computer problems and I just felt the need to share my frustration. And in all fairness, I have one hate about Apple and one about Microsoft; you decide which one was worst. 🙂
I’m a little late telling you this, but as of lately this web site has been more popular than ever. Part of why a lot of people found their way here was because of my EJ – The only JavaScript library you’ll ever need post; according to one of my statistics tool, the peak was a bit over 4000 unique visitors one day, and according to the other, just below 4000. S0 let’s say 4000 even, ok? 🙂
Either way, I just wanted to thank you all for reading, old readers as well as new ones. I hope to be to your liking for a foreseeable future as well.
Again, thanks!
November 17th I went to see Iron Maiden play in the Globe arena in Stockholm. This was the first of four gigs in Sweden (three of them planned in Stockholm), concerts that sold out as soon as the tickets were released. I though I’d tell you a little about my history with Maiden and also what I though of Friday night.
So, you all have your favorite search engine, right? And probably also the tools/approach you prefer to search with it; for instance, a text field in your favorite web browser, perhaps a web browser toolbar or have it set up through Quicksilver. What I’m interested in, though, is what would make you switch search engine? What would make you use another one?
I thought I’d take on a slightly different approach with this post. I mean, all bloggers try to write about facts, rant or go to other lengths to get their message through. Therefore, in true TV preacher style (imagine someone with James Brown’s personality), let me tell you about Google:
As we all know, web developing can be very tough and nerve-wrecking sometimes. Therefore, I would like to share a picture taken of me last night, the final day of the current iteration in the project I’m working in for the moment.
I love taking and looking at photographs, but I am in no sense a professional photographer; rather the happy amateur! Therefore, I’m constantly on the look-out for better photo management and photo editing tools, making viewing and enhancing images better. As of lately, I’ve been taking Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for some test drives.
The one I definitely prefer and regard in that “war” is definitely Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and wanted to tell and show you some things about it.
Ok, this is apparently a lazy post since it won’t contain much information. Also, as of lately, it seems like I’m just asking you what you think instead of writing a more detailed post, so bear with me; I’ll write more soon where you don’t have to answer all the time! 🙂
Anyway, here goes:
Without expressing my opinions on it, what’s your take on the World Usability Day?
I think that in (almost) every project I work in, when a web page contains one or more form elements, the most common question is: should we set initial focus to the first element in the form when the page has loaded? Heated debates follow, where people argue very convincingly for their view on it.
However, to me it isn’t an easy black or white-question.
Scenario: you run into a problem when coding, or in some other way have a question about, or problem with, a certain application. Let us, for the sake of argument, say that you have no colleagues or friends to ask where you are at the moment, nor through e-mail or over IM. What do you do?
In my case, 9 times out of 10, I search Google. If you’ve encountered a problem, there’s always someone else who has as well; someone who is or has been in the exact spot as you are in right now.
But that’s just me. What do you do?
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of huge JavaScript libraries, an opinion that was probably clear from what I wrote in my EJ – The only JavaScript library you’ll ever need post. Even if they’re written by very competent web developers, they almost always consist of more functions and methods that are necessary.
However, I’d like to take this opportunity to explain the important difference between the two major types of JavaScript libraries: concept and code libraries.
This might sound condemning, but I’m thinking of establishing a weekly award: Web Site Most Likely To Have Been Built By An Intern. It is about large companies targeting a lot of users who, in this day and age, still don’t have any clue about web standards, accessibility or semantics. If, for instance, a web site only works in one web browser (guess which one…) on one platform, something is fundamentally wrong!
Without further ado, let me probably announce this week’s winner: MSN Music.
PS. A little tip: first try it in Internet Explorer on a PC, and then in any other web browser on any platform. DS.
If you like this code, I sincerely recommend that you take a look at the DOMAssistant JavaScript library.
The web is littered with full-blown JavaScript libraries who say they will save your day and make your web development life much easier. You get encouraged to include these “mere 80 kb” libraries that is supposed to be the solution to all your needs, and practically make the web site work by itself. Needless to say, I’m not a big follower of JavaScript libraries,, especially since they almost always include lots of superfluous code, so I thought I’d put together a tiny library with only essential JavaScript functions.
The result of that is EJ – Essential JavaScript.
Saddam Hussein has just been sentenced to death. The trial has taken over a year to complete, with lots of different twists and turns. With no disrespect to people who have been affected by Saddam’s reign, I find the whole situation a joke…
As you might now, I’m both a Mac and Windows user. I primarily use my Mac at home and my PC at work, and one thing that really annoys me is the inability to maximize windows in Mac OS X.
Just before I started blogging I got to know Tommy Olsson, through his now resting blog Autistic Cuckoo. I was impressed with his technical expertise and inspired by his respectful comments and discussions with his readers, and it was something I set up as a goal and role model for my relations with the readers of my web site.
Unfortunately, Tommy doesn’t write anymore on his blog, but he has now made an interesting contribution to SitePoint about HTML.
Say that you’re using a web page and you find the text, the images or the layout in general too small. What do you do? Some web browser makers understand just how important this issue is and some don’t; some have set a good example and some still linger on under the impression that being able to resize text is sufficient.
Who are the good guys here? Microsoft and Opera.
I was thinking about whether to write this post or not, but here it is. I have a confession to make: I have coded naked. No, not at work or amongst other people, so don’t worry… 🙂
To me, a blog with no possibility to comment isn’t a real blog. The web is such a living medium with possibilities for everyone to control their content, give feedback in numerous ways and basically have every web site relation as some kind of dialog with the web site owner.
Then we have the people who blog and doesn’t accept comments…
Have you dabbled with JavaScript for a long time but feel that you don’t really know how to get to the next level? Or are you one of the recent converts that till only recently only knew HTML and CSS, but has come to the realization just how cool and funky things you can achieve with JavaScript?
If you want to get really good at JavaScript and definitely move on to the next level, I have something for you to read.
When you write your CSS code, do you use upper- or lowercase hexadecimal codes? I.e., does it look like this: #F2F2F2 or this: #f2f2f2? Personally, I used to go the uppercase route but has now officially switched to lowercase.
What’s your preference?
Now that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 and the whole web development world is trying to figure out what works in it, and, more importantly, what doesn’t (let’s just not go there right now, ok?), I thought I’d give you some solace to your doubts whether to install it or not on your main Windows machine (most likely you have doubts what will happen to IE 6, which you, unfortunately, still need to test in and cater to, for a long time to come).
When I wrote my post about the Flickr photo service, I promised that I’d review another one within the next week or so. Well, as we all know, time flies but now I’m ready to tell you about a service that I believe have a serious potential to become a Flickr contender.
This is Google’s picture service: Picasa Web Albums
Recently a minor number of Apple Video iPods were shipped with a virus, namely RavMonE.exe. What do Apple do? Well, blame Microsoft, of course.
With GLT, a side-effect happened in Firefox when using GLT for any link; the status text simply wasn’t shown in the web browser status field. This issue has now been addressed. Just download the new JavaScript file and things should work fine.
Please let me know if you encounter any problems.
When I wrote Looking for a good interface developer? Here’s what to ask to make sure you’ve got the right person, I wasn’t sure if I should reveal the answers to you or just let you do the research yourselves. However, I came to the conclusion that this web site is really about sharing knowledge, and also that some of you might have some good extra input on my answers.
So, here are some answers and links to more information about the questions:
In July this year, Amnesty International published their report Undermining freedom of expression in China – The role of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, where they discuss and analyze these companies values compared to their actual actions (direct PDF link, 32 pages, 504 kb).
For those out there who are interested in statistics, or want to know more about the other readers of this web site, I’ve put together a little overview of the visitors.
It contains information about countries people come from, what platform they’re on and what web browsers they are using.
If you had to choose between being King Arthur or Merlin, which one would you go for? And why?
Are you perhaps looking for a talented interface developer? You’ve heard that web standards and perhaps accessibility is good to have experience with, but you don’t know how to determine the applicants’ experience.
Don’t worry anymore, I’ve put together a check list of what to ask to make sure they’re suitable and in the loop with proper and modern web interface development.
When developing a web site, amongst the initial questions is what level of accessibility one wants for it and what eventual extra measures are needed to achieve that. Sure, if you’re an experienced interface developer, you naturally write semantic HTML, use alt texts and try to avoid making the web site in question JavaScript dependant, and so on.
But, let me tell you something: you can be the best damned interface developer in the world and then still, in the end, you stand there with an inaccessible web site. What happened?
Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I share this feeling with other people. What, you ask, what? I can’t stand how people write smilies…
Season three of Lost has just begun, and episode one is outstanding! The first five minutes probably had me sitting with my jaw dropped, and the “reward” scene had me laughing out loud (don’t worry, there will be no more spoilers here)!
Let me try and speculate here why Lost is so good and what I think about its future.
Last night we had Geek Meet in Stockholm, and we had an amazing turnout! Over 30 people showed up, and to tell you the truth, it was a blast! Many familiar faces but also a lot of new ones that seemed to enjoy themselves.
Changed so it will work fine under https as well in Internet Explorer.
If you like this, you might also be interested in DOMAssistant.
Most people who have worked with JavaScript has cursed the time it takes to apply JavaScript to the document (events, for instance) because you’ve waited for the whole document to load. The problem is that we have relied on the onload event to be triggered and that doesn’t happen until all HTML code and every image and other dependency has loaded. In most cases, we want to have our scripts as soon as the DOM has finished loading and not wait for images and their likes.
Therefore, I have with great interest followed the work of Dean Edwards, together with Matthias Miller and John Resig, and the exciting conclusion they came to in window.onload (again).
I really like the gist of it and the implications it brings, but I wanted to make it more flexible for any number of load events. Therefore I created ELO – Encapsulated Load Object.
First, let me sincerely tell you that I’ve thoroughly read every motivation, and many of them were outstanding! You are really smart and funny people, and you all deserve one iPod Shuffle each (no, it’s not going to happen :-)! Thank you for all your wonderful contributions!
In the end, I went for something simple and a bit philosophical, and would proudly like to announce Barry Allison and his motivation the winner of this contest. Congratulations Barry!
Ok, here’s the deal. For the next couple of days I will be very busy, so I don’t find it likely that I will be able to find the time to write. But don’t worry, I think I’ve found a way to make it up to you: a contest!
Are you a fairly skilled web developer? Get enough money to make ends meet, maybe have some benefits kicked in too? You’re content with life in general and is a nice person?
You know what? I think it’s time for you to give something back.
Every time a new web site is to be designed; every time I open a magazine about building web pages; every customer I meet. It’s always there, the ridiculous question:
How big monitors do people have nowadays?
I very rarely use the term Web 2.0 because to me it’s almost every time about misused to create a non-existent hype, a company’s excuse for creating an inaccessible AJAX web site and other similar things. With that said, I recommend reading Paul Scriven’s two articles:
Apparently Opera’s claim to support document.all in conjunction with not mimicking it exactly like IE led to some problems in Opera 9 when I use my getElementsByAttribute function. Thanks to Ash Searle who tipped me about this and also explained what the problem was. The code in the JavaScript file to download has been updated.
Also, Harmen asked an interesting question about nested elements with the title attribute. It didn’t work initially, but now I’ve updated the GLT JavaScript file with support for that as well.
I did some thinking how to address the faulty technical implementation in IE to display values in the alt attribute as a tooltip, and if I should suppress it on images that have a title attribute as well. I decided to implement a setting for it and then it’s up to you to choose. The GLT JavaScript file now contains one more setting: suppressAltTooltipsInIE : true.
I’ve done a very minor change to the event handling to cover up for a bug in IE’s garbage collector (something I hear will be addressed automatically in IE 7). In 99,9% of the cases you won’t notice any difference, but if you use it in a very advanced web site/web application it might make things better and less resource intensive.
Just as Chris commented, the script didn’t consider if the custom tooltip would disappear if it was positioned too far to the right. It is now updated with a fix for this.
A side-effect happened in Firefox when using GLT for any link; the status text wasn’t shown in the web browser status field. This issue has now been addressed.
Just as Jordan Ambra pointed out to me, there were cases when you could mouse out from the element just when the GLT element was shown, and making it stick and not fade out. This was just because of a tiny typo by me in the code, but it has now been fixed.
Bob pointed out a typo of me in the code, where the result was that you couldn’t turn off the fading in through the fadeInTitle property. The code has been updated and can be downloaded in the GLT web page.
Added an extra check to prevent any eventual error that occurred when hovering a GLT element in the middle of the loading of the page.
As of lately it seems like I’m giving you a new JavaScript library every second day. But don’t worry, I will be fairly busy in the upcoming months so this one is probably the last one for a while. 🙂
Anyway, tooltips in a web page, maybe more commonly known as what will be displayed when using the title attribute on an element, have some shortcomings that I wanted to address.
I could just stack argument after argument why using frames when designing a web page is a bad idea, but frankly, I’m too lazy to do it once again. Let’s turn this around:
Why would anyone see the need to use frames nowadays?
I use a PC with Windows at work and a Mac with Mac OS X at home and I like them both. They each have their distinct benefits but also shortcomings. What does annoy me in the computer market is when one company, no matter which company it is, gets such a monopoly that it can basically do or produce anything and the end users have no choice but to happily get into line and accept it.
So, therefore I urge: Let Mac OS X Free!
I’ve done a very minor change to the event handling to cover up for a bug in IE’s garbage collector (something I hear will be addressed automatically in IE 7). In 99,9% of the cases you won’t notice any difference, but if you use it in a very advanced web site/web application it might make things better and less resource intensive.
When I added the lightbox-like feature to JaS I was talking to my friend Teddy Zetterlund explaining how it worked. His response was:
I know a lot of situations that this could be useful in then.
I agreed with him and have now created the mother of all focusing scripts: FaT – Focus At This! 🙂
A friend of mine using JaS said that he sometimes had the scenario that he wanted to load all the images but then preload a certain tag, hence initially hiding all the pictures that doesn’t match that criteria. I though it was a simple task so I created an add-on script for those interested.
Lately, and especially evident in the beginning of the summer after the @media conference, people proclaimed that the war of web standards is won and that we should move on to focus on other things. Let me please say that the war is so far from over.
Have you ever had the need/wish for WordPress to deliver HTML instead of XHTML in your blog? And if yes, then having no idea how to control the default XHTML tags generated in comments and its likes? Fret no more!