Rantings, mostly…

OK, admittedly I have not kept up with the blog like I should.  Well, it is a failure in the greatest sense of the word.  I have never claimed that it was anything other than that.

Luckily I have been busy with MANY of my own projects and school, so I don’t quite yet feel like killing myself.  Not to mention that beautiful family of mine.

Anyway, what has spawned my rant this time is a WPDFD (Web Page Design for Designers) article entitled, “Web Design Success Story.”

It goes on to say that “many of the good attributes of good web design can be found on the web site of” SamataMason.  Then it rambles on about a few non-solid facts, in fact, not even facts in my opinion.

“The elements of text blocks and image float on a gray background and
can be readily brought up on either a small or large monitor without
having to scroll left/right or top/bottom.”

Um… no.  On a 640×480 resolution the site is completely unusable.  OK, not completely but at least 10-15% of the right side is missing.

The site DOES have a fairly unique composition, but so what?  That fact makes it a successful “web design” firm?

How about the fact their site relies entirely on Flash?  Or that the text is utterly unreadable and the text cannot be modified to suit the user.  Make a site inaccessible to text readers and those with disabilities is NOT a successful Web design firm, I don’t care what anyone says.

Oh wait… I forgot, along with the fact that ugly purses can sell for hundreds of dollars so can Web pages be designed for only the most elitist and moronic of clients.  I think it might be the same mentality as women who wear shoes that kill their feet, models that starve themselves because anorexia looks sexy to sickos, top designers, and homosexuals.

Does this mean I am never going to have an uber-successful Web design company or work for one?  Beats the hell out of me but I refuse to design sites that way… well, unless I get paid tons of bucks.  But I won’t go down fighting, I will claim that an accessible Web site can easily be had by all.

For the browsers that can do it, spoon feed them all of that tiny-text shite.  For the browsers that cannot or do not want this… give them a nice textual representation.

Now THAT sounds like a good Web design firm.  Hire me.

But now there’s no excuse!  Download YSlow for Firebug to get a ton of additional detailed information about performance issues in your Web pages.

You need Firebug, for Firefox, but it’s well worth it to make the chance if you aren’t already using a real browser.

That’s right, Opera 9.5 codenamed “Kestrel” is finally here.  Currently only available as a nightly build, its release is imminent.

It is also the first browser to date that supports all CSS1, 2, and 3.

*glares at Safari and Firefox*

Why don’t you guys fully support CSS2 yet?  Opera is making you guys look bad.  You might wanna’ hurry up.

I just ran across a post by David Flanagan, wherein he mentions that Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, XP in this case, doesn’t agree with its own understanding of global objects, namely the Window object.

The code he illustrates that does not behave as expected is:


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(window.event == window.event);
}


For some strange reason, Internet Explorer believes this comparison is false.  To fix this behavior, or rather, *tell* Internet Explorer how it should behave I propose resolution.  You can achieve resolution in one of two ways.


var we = window.event;
alert(we == we); // true in IE

*OR*


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(!!window.event == !!window.event);
}


It should be mentioned, that the double NOT’s first create a Boolean conversion, returning the opposite (logical NOT), then reverses what was returned.  I forgot exactly who coined this particular use, but it was first made apparent to me by a very talented gentleman by the name of “RobG” in the comp.lang.javascript newsgroup.

This process is however called normalization, well, not in a database-sense, but anyway… see “A double use of the ! operator…”

*OR*


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(Boolean(window.event) == Boolean(window.event));
}


“Um, but you said 2 methods, toe.”  Right, I know.  But the last method is doing the same as the second method, only much cleaner and technically faster.

Granted, as Mr. Flanagan explains, “This probably does not have any impact on real-world code.”  But nonetheless quirky, well, rather downright stupid oddities in one of the most mainstream browsers (sadly) is an oddity that all JavaScript developers should be aware of.

For years now WestCiv has been an industry leader in teaching web standards and great software that supports that paradigm.

Now they are offering free versions of their self-paced courses.  The current course focuses on CSS1.

I highly suggest to anyone wanting to become familiar with CSS1, and in a standard, tried-and-true way, to check the course out.

http://www.westciv.com/courses/free/index.html

Be quick about it though, because the courses expire.  As of this post they are on week 1, and I have no clue when that “week” ends.