New RIFERS blogs entries from Maarten Stolte in category webdesign

Conversations with the X/HTML 5 team

2007-02-28T10:51:00+0100

There is an interesting interview with the X/HTML 5 team overhere.
The things I'm most hoping for will end up in the final spec are the improved input elements and the datagrid, but that might be because for those two I can most clearly envision how they will improve my work as a webdeveloper (less client side scripting needed, hurray!). It would not surprise me that in the end the things that mean less to me now will change the web most, like the vague activex component some company from Redmond introduced for their Outlook webclient, which now is the foundation to AJAX.

Help; Can I see what rendering mode Internet Explorer uses?

2007-01-26T09:24:58+0100

I'm trying to build sites that will work in both Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and in more standards compliant browsers. It helps alot if Internet Explorer is not using Quirks mode for those sites, but I can't find where I can see what mode it uses, and thus I'm never really sure about the mode it has chosen to render.
Does anyone know how I could find that out?

W3C helping (?)to standardise AJAX

2006-04-12T14:10:36+0200

The W3C is going to try and help standardise AJAX, see The XMLHttpRequest Object, W3C Working Draft 05 April 2006 I really hope that it'll work, and with Anne van Kesteren doing the groundwork I feel almost confident, but as with other W3C or in general, commitee driven developement, we'll have to wait and see. update: I just noticed MSFT is not in the authors section yet, that wont help. Did you know they *invented* the damned thing in the first place?

Great Javascripting

2006-03-13T14:23:07+0100

Now, why aren't more people using this great javascript? I mean, buttons that *resize* depending on how long the *scrolling* text is, it is so 1996 that it must be the in thing today!

Web design and standards

2006-01-09T16:49:24+0100

Hi,

it's been a while, I promise to blog some more in 2006, a happy new year to you all btw :-)

The things I want to point you to today are of a webdesign nature.

First there is the Web Standards Group, a site with a great mailinglist and other resources for web builders who are determined to making the web work, for everyone.

The mailinglist that belongs to the webstandardsgroup has a cool weekly mail called 'light reading', featuring some links that are well, light reading about webdesign. That list has now also been archived on the web.

Lastly I would like to point out that the very excellent webdeveloper extention for Firefox has been released in a 1.0 version. Whilst your on that site, you also want to install the useragent switcher to avoid the 'only for IE' crap that some 'webdevelopers' force upon you .

More Ajax groupware lovelyness

2005-09-09T09:47:32+0200

Where the last time I was amazed to see the lovely calendar the Hula project has coming up, I now found http://www.zimbra.com/ , which has a complete groupware project too, with a very interactive interface. Check out the flash demo, ignore the buzz words and look at the neat tricks they pull. This is certainly Web 5.0 (yes, you heard it here first )

Hula calendar code available in SVN

2005-08-27T08:49:20+0200

The code for the web calendar I linked to before is available now, info in this blog: http://www.lyricswithoutmelody.org/archives/000276.html
Test it, submit bugs in the hula bugzilla!

Great Hula web calendar interface

2005-08-22T14:52:57+0200

Hula is getting a new web interface, and it kicks ass, as this (flash) demo shows: http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html
Can't wait to check out the javascript and CSS that powers all that AJAX interaction and css fades. Pay attention to the sides of the calendar, where it kinda disapears using probably a layer with a transparent gif or png.

UPDATE: there is a new movie, showing that it already looks even nicer:
http://primates.ximian.com/~gasman/hulavideo.html

Hell freezing over ... or..

2005-07-05T15:22:48+0200

On http://webstandards.org/press/releases/archive/2005/07/05/ it says 'WaSP to Collaborate with Microsoft to Promote Web Standards'.
I'm a bit in doubt as to how I should interpret this, is it Microsoft wanting to do the right thing, or is it about Microsoft pushing W3C web standards as a reaction to the WhatWG (http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/) forces?
There are confusing times ahead, as developers are on the one hand moving more and more towards standards, but the standards are being spread over several standard defining camps, in this case the WhatWG and the W3C camps. Microsoft in itself used to be able to define standards too, is this maybe also a sign of them loosing the power to define standards on their own, and now wanting to focus on being an excellent implementer of commonly accepted standards.
As you see, these things are all still rather unstructured in my head, comments are welcomed therefore

Mozilla Seamonkey

2005-07-04T10:08:26+0200

The Mozilla guys have created a new subproject called 'Seamonkey' to continue the suite of apps that was Mozilla. Personally I don't need the bloat, and I think that with Firefox and Thunderbird being well integrated in the various OS's and thus also integrated with eachother, its not really needed. But if people want to continue building this, and spend time on it, they are free to do so.
They should however, being a prominent place on the Internet where web designers come, show how to make a nice header. The image i've linked into this article is not a screenshot from a non-aliased desktop, no, its the background image found on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ :

Not White

2005-06-24T12:17:53+0200

I have a Firefox webbrowser on Linux, which uses several non-default parts of the gtk family. The end result is that the default page background color is not white, and not all sites set their backgrounds to the right colors, as can be seen on http://datadevil.demon.nl/notwhite.png .
Please set your background color, no matter if it looks ok in IE ...

Don't click it and JS

2005-06-16T14:47:42+0200

There is this great experimental site which has a navigation fully based on mouse movement. Navigating it means mostly just moving the mouse around, but there are also some gestures involved. It works fine, but I'm not sure it'll work for each site, and not sure how it'll work for people with a disability. The url is http://www.dontclick.it/.
I also have been reading an article from Brendan on his blog; http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/ . It is about the history, and more importantly the future of JS (or JavaScript or ECMAscript or whatever). It's a nice article, explaining how some of the weird things in the language came about, and where he sees it positioned in Web thats moving to or is already 2.0.

Dutch government writes own DDOS script

2005-06-06T12:26:50+0200

The dutch govt. has a new website to check if your new-to-be moped hasn't been stolen. Whilst this is a great initiative, it'd be even nicer if they hadn't made the site into a self DDos'ing site. Check it out in Firefox to see what i mean, but don't let the window be open for too long, that'd be hard on their server
The url is http://www.ishetgeenplaatje.nl/default_mac.aspx

Act as you teach

2005-05-28T08:09:55+0200

When looking for CSS tricks, apart from the very anoying semi content that is about.com *, one often bumps into very nicely designed sites, giving you tips for free, or even have complete articles online about XHTML.
The busy webdesigner who has too little time to search for the right article might consider taking a course, but if you take it at this Network University you might want to reconsider.
Their page is really ugly, which might be ok if they went for the retro '94 web look, but their site doesn't even validate as XHTML!

* not linking there because it'll only help their position in google