Archive for June, 2002

Validate this!

Sunday, June 30th, 2002

You know how when you were a kid, and you had to clean your room on a sunny day when you would rather be outside, so you just cleaned it by stuffing everything under the bed or in the closet, where Mom wouldn’t see it? After all, if she doesn’t see it, she doesn’t have […]

A third validator

Sunday, June 30th, 2002

I’m not sure how I missed it, but there’s actually a third validator, along with the W3C and WDG/htmlhelp.com validators: Page Valet offers builtin accessibility checking (WCAG A – AAA or Section 508), a variety of more-convenient-than-W3C output formats (including errors highlighted within the source, alongside it, or a cool if imperfect javascript WYSIWYG display). […]

Plugins overshadowed by TrackBack

Sunday, June 30th, 2002

Overshadowed by the buzz over TrackBack (at least for me) is another new feature with incredible potential: plugins let you write your own MT tags. Want a tag that displays the number of unread messages in your mailbox? Just write it. Want a container tag for categories that combines and, or, and not? Just write […]

A pox on validation’s house

Saturday, June 29th, 2002

I would dearly love to gather up everyone who has ever attempted to teach English composition to anyone now involved in XHMTL/XML/DTD spec writing, so that I could give them all a medal for their efforts, and then shoot them all for their miserable failure to achieve anything resembling results. In order to make a […]

A better AmphetaDesk autosubscribe bookmarklet

Saturday, June 29th, 2002

From Perceive Designs, a better autosubscribe bookmarklet for AmphetaDesk: rather than just subscribe you to the first <link type=”application/rss+xml> it finds, it asks you about each link of type ‘application/rss+xml’ or ‘text/xml’ or ‘text/x-opml’.

Mozilla embraces textareas?

Friday, June 28th, 2002

Fantastic news, if it works out. Marcus says a patch has been checked in to allow Mozilla to tell javascript what’s selected in a textarea. Not only is that good in terms of allowing bold/italic/link buttons to work cross-browser for things like weblog posting forms, it also gives me some hope for the other longterm […]

Why RSS? Part 2.

Wednesday, June 26th, 2002

Yet another reason to get in the habit of using an RSS reader: I don’t go to the Movable Type main page very often, but like deus_x, I’m subscribed to the RSS feed so I don’t have to remember to hit the main page to find out what’s new. And in case I haven’t already […]

MT 2.2

Wednesday, June 26th, 2002

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to 2.2 we go… More later, right now I’m just putting my hacks back in, and having to rewrite several. <later>Clearly, the big thing for this release is TrackBack, a sort of automated referrer/link-back system which pings other TrackBack-enabled weblogs when you post something that refers to a post or category […]

Accessible spam-proofing

Wednesday, June 26th, 2002

Jonathon asks if writing the mailto link with javascript is necessary, when his email address is entity-encoded. I’m afraid that it’s a question of whether a kitten is better hidden with its head under the couch or under a blanket: if its rump is still sticking out, it doesn’t much matter. The problem with most […]

Whoa. Scary.

Tuesday, June 25th, 2002

Bill points to a RealAudio stream of the title track from the new Bruce Springsteen album The Rising, but with my delightful dialup connection, once I navigated my way through the maze of “Upgrade your RealPlayer now, damn you” dialogs, it mostly sounded like it was recorded inside a big tin can, with Clarence pounding […]