crazed monkey

One of my biggest beefs with working with HTML and CSS was that the separation of content and style had not gone far enough. One still had to consider the structure of the document in terms of element ordering. For instance, when writing a white-paper one would have to decide whether to place the table of contents before the summary within the HTML and not within the associated CSS. To change the ordering after the fact, one would have to change the content, not the associated style.

This styling issue is fixed somewhat with CSS3 and the introduction of the move-to property within the Generated and Replaced Content Module (via Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog). This is what I envisioned as a solution to the above problem except that one cannot move elements to anywhere in the document. One is instead restricted to moving elements to later within the document. I’d like to know why this restriction exists. I suppose the ability to move elements to anywhere within a document would degrade rendering performance, but surely that is an implementation detail. A browser could either choose to render the image and move elements on the fly or wait until all content is received before moving elements around. Still, it’s a step in the right direction towards the nirvana of complete separation of content and style.

Posted on May 20th, 2003 in computers, internet - 1 Comment »

The Globe And Mail has redesigned its site. I dislike it, mostly because it makes me feel as if I am viewing the site while squashed into a tiny box. A fixed width for content is never cool. The site redesign frustrates the whole online news experience, which is not to say that the previous design was any better. However, this new design leaves me feeling even more confined.

As if reading The Globe And Mail wasn’t frustrating enough, the redesign has introduced yet another URL format and has broken all old links. Each URL is still preceded by “servlet”, but now “/story” is appended to that instead of “/ArticleNews”. Why not just eliminate the “servlet” part as nobody but their server cares? A simple Apache rewrite rule could handle that and make the links that much easier to handle. Even though they’ve changed the format of their URLs, they are still not very human readable. At least it’s a far cry from their original parameter-separated nonsense. Now that was horrid.

Now the question is, should I try and update my links to The Globe And Mail? Even links found in entries posted this past Wednesday are broken.

Posted on February 14th, 2003 in computers, internet - 1 Comment »

Electronic Frontier Canada has returned after a two-year hiatus. EFC’s purpose is to ensure that the principles embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remain protected as new computing, communications, and information technologies are introduced into Canadian society.

Jeffrey Shallit, EFC vice-president, cites lack of time as the main reason for EFC’s absence. The EFC web page is currently being updated, with a weblog format to be introduced shortly. The mailing lists, however, are not currently back online and are in need of an experienced maintainer. If you would like to offer assistance to the EFC, please contact them by email or by mail.

Posted on February 6th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Photojunkie: Send a kid to camp. If you live in Toronto, New York City or are going to SXSW in Austin, and want some quality shots of yourself, look no further. To fund his trip to SXSW, Rannie is offering some affordable portrait packages. Get pictures for your website, your Christmas cards, your portfolio, or your CD covers if you’re a musician. Where else are you going to find a deal like this? Visit Rannie’s photo gallery for sample shots.

Posted on January 28th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Dive Into Mark: New news aggregator for Windows. Following Mark’s lead, I started using Syndirella for my news feeds. I was using AmphetaDesk before, which was OK once I installed the outliner plugin but it still wasn’t up to scratch.

Among other things, AmphetaDesk lacked a liberal RSS parser, RSS auto-discovery and support for item-level dates, all of which can be found within Syndirella. Syndirella’s best feature, however, has to be the built-in scraper which allows you to syndicate sites which refuse to provide an RSS feed. I have successfully configured several HTML-only feeds for syndication in this manner.

These features come at a price, however, as Syndirella requires the Microsoft .NET framework, a 20MB download. Still, even with its bugs it’s probably the best Windows-based news aggregator out there.

Update: Morbus Iff, AmphetaDesk’s author, has gracefully addressed the above three feature points. It seems as though many of my gripes are related to the outliner plugin and not necessarily AmphetaDesk itself, which is ironic since the outliner plugin made AmphetaDesk a much more enjoyable experience overall. Although AmphetaDesk supports auto-discovery, it does so through a bookmarklet (essentially a “Subscribe” toolbar button) and not when entering a URL in the “Add a Channel” page. Syndirella makes no such distinction, and even invisibly searches Syndic8.com for a feed when it cannot find one linked in the HTML, as per Mark Pilgrim’s RSS locator wishlist.

Even with Morbus’ helpful information, I’m still sticking with Syndirella for now. Having an aggregator application in which I can easily navigate to new items (by pressing the spacebar) is so much faster than any browser-based alternative. This doesn’t apply solely to AmphetaDesk as I used Radio Userland’s aggregator for a month, and it was the same way. However, as I mentioned to Morbus over ICQ, AmphetaDesk was quite nice in combination with tabs and gestures in Mozilla.

Posted on January 21st, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »