Raible Designs

Make your Flash HTML Standards Compliant

I initially found that the latest issue of A List Apart was published via web-graphics.com and then got this tidbit from Zeldman:

In Issue 154 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: “Flash Satay” by Drew McLellan. "This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML. They said it couldn’t be done. Now it can be. Have your Flash and standards, too." Please note, the ALA server may be slower than normal due to heavy traffic.

The technique involves using the following code:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="c.swf?path=movie.swf" 
	width="400" height="300">
	<param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=movie.swf" />
	<img src="noflash.gif" width="200" height="100" alt="" />
</object>

Where c.swf is a container movie to workaround the fact that IE/Windows doesn’t stream the movie with this code.

Drew McLellan is the author of Dreamweaver MX Web Development and a member of The Web Standards Project’s Dreamweaver Task Force. You can follow the progress of this technique on his site.

WebGraphics also has an interesting post with a list of reasons why ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects - uiweb.com

The First Week

The first week has been awesome! Abbie is the best baby. I have to admit that I don't know many newborns, but from what my friends/family has told me - the first few weeks home with the baby are hell. They said she would be crying all night, we'd have massive sleep deprivation and our lives would be changed for ever. They were right that our lives would be changed forever, but mostly because we're such proud parents and we love our daughter so much. She's been sleeping for 3 hours, waking up, feeding and then falling asleep again. The only time she gets crabby is when Julie goes to bed and it's my turn to take care of her. Then she tries to nurse on me, which doesn't work too well. Thank God for pacifiers - that saves me when I'm trying to convince Abber not to yell at me. I've been getting a full nights sleep every night, but that's because Julie is breastfeeding and gets up every 3 hours to nurse. Soon we'll be filling some extra bottles so I can join in the midnight/3am feedings - that should be fun. You might be seeing some late-night-posts then.

Grammy (Julie's mom) and Aunt Holly (Julie's sister) are in town this weekend, and have given us lots of love by stocking our fridge and changing Abbie's diaper. One of my best friends, Kevin Navarro, also came over last night and cooked us some of the best tostadas I've ever had!

Jabber Journal #1

Inaugural issue of an informal weekly news report devoted to all things Jabber.

DevMX, J2EE 1.4, iBlog and OS X JDK 1.4.1

Mesh on MX told us about DevMX this morning:

I haven't looked at it yet, but it does look interesting, so this post is my own personal bookmark.

Erik tipped us off about the J2EE 1.4 Beta and some good J2EE vs. Petstore articles. After logging into download the 1.4 Beta, I found the feature list and figured I'd let you know:

The platform features complete Web services support through the new JAX-RPC 1.0 API, which supports service endpoints based on servlets and enterprise beans. JAX-RPC 1.0 provides interoperability with Web services based on the WSDL and SOAP protocols. The J2EE 1.4 platform also supports the Web Services for J2EE specification (JSR 109), which defines deployment requirements for Web services and utilizes the JAX-RPC programming model. The J2EE 1.4 platform introduces the J2EE Management 1.0 API, which defines the information model for J2EE management, including standard Management EJB (MEJB). The J2EE Management 1.0 API uses the Java Management Extensions (JMX) and supports standard management protocols, including SNMP, WBEM and CIM. The J2EE 1.4 platform also introduces the J2EE Deployment 1.1 API, which standardizes the deployment of J2EE applications.

The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) includes enhancements to the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages^TM (JSP^TM) technologies. Servlets now support request listeners and enhanced filters. JSP technology has simplified the page and extension development models with the introduction of a simple expression language, tag files, and a simpler tag extension API, among other features. The J2EE Connector Architecture provides incoming resource adapter and Java Message Service (JMS) pluggability. Enhancements to Enterprise JavaBeans^TM (EJB^TM) technology include Web service endpoints, a timer service, and enhancements to EJB QL and message driven beans. The J2EE 1.4 platform also includes enhancements to deployment descriptors, which are now defined using XML Schema.

Recent report on J2EE vs .NET Relies on "Highly Flawed Methodology" says BEA.
Benchmark Bust-Up: The Middleware Company Responds.

It looks like Rickard might be published in the next issue of JDJ.

"To Do" this weekend:

Download and see if iBlog works with Roller. Recommendation via Russell and Dave Winer. Hmmm, after looking at Dave's iBlog sites, it appears to be software to run a blog, not post to one. My I-don't-need-this filter has kicked into effect.

Download and install JDK 1.4.1 Developer Preview 5 for Mac OS X. Tip o' the hat to Erik. A needed update considering the last 1.4.1 release didn't even run Tomcat for me.

Rick Salsa has a new look!

Rick - I dig your new theme. I'm guessing you got your ideas from Blue Robot's Layout Reservoir. I've gotten many ideas and stylesheets from Rob's site - very helpful it is. Your theme is really nice on the eyes - nice job!

Web Standards and Flash

Zeldman writes:

Your site complies with web standards 'til you embed Flash—at which point your page becomes invalid and your XHTML starts retaining water. It’s a common problem to which there has never been a solution. Soon there will be. The next issue of A List Apart will publish a technique allowing designers to embed Flash movies while adhering to W3C specs and eliminating code bloat. No, really. Watch this space.

Very cool! I've done a little flash development, but in recent years I've had a friend, James Stark (no blog), do the flash work I get. He's such an awesome animator that he could probably do the Toy Story movie in flash. He's really that good! I'll try to get some of his recent work to show you. If anyone needs Flash work done, let me know.

RSS Validator doesn't accept relative links?!

I discovered that the RSS Validator does not accept relative links in weblog entries. Hmmm, I guess we have to work on our URL-expander in Roller for RSS Feeds. A while back, I found that relative links where a problem in NetNewsWire as well. In my opinion, aggregators should be able to handle some type of base element, like <base href="..." /> in HTML and resolve links from that.

Updated Roller and Tomcat

I upgraded Roller to 0.9.7-dev and Tomcat to 4.0.6 (from 4.0.4). Everything appears to have gone smoothly - let me know if I missed something. Also, Roller appears to be incredibly stable since I changed my <session-timeout> (in web.xml) setting from 3600 to 30 minutes. I guess Tomcat can't handle a session timeout of 2.5 days very well!

Download WebLogic JRockit™ 8.0 Beta on November 11

From my Inbox this morning, Subject: BEA Product News - November 2002.

Designed for server-side enterprise Java applications, BEA WebLogic JRockit, will be supporting the latest J2SE release 1.4.1.  WebLogic JRockit 8.0 Beta noticeably improves the startup time for server-side Java applications, and it enables easier debugging and profiling of Java applications through support for both JVMPI and JVMDI.  Additionally, JRockit 8.0 Beta introduces support for Intel® Itanium® 2 servers on both Microsoft® Windows® .NET ES and Red Hat® Linux® Advanced Server.

The WebLogic JRockit 8.0 Beta will be available for download on November 11.   More info >>

Weblog Validator

For anyone who attempts to maintain a valid XHTML site, you know that it's a fair amount of work to make sure your site is valid all the time - especially if you're linking to other sites. You learn to hate ampersands (&). To solve this problem in Roller, I think we need a validator built into the posting of new content. It'd be a sweet feature, maybe we can start with a dirty URL cleaner such as the Hivelogic URL Cleaner. Further comments on this topic can be found at web-graphics.com. Interesting tidbit from Dave:

If you are using XHTML (and you should be!) you could try to incorporate my JavaScript XML parser. You’d have to tweak it to wrap the post in a fake "root" element, but then it could tell whether or not the particular post is well-formed XML. It could not, however, tell you whether or not your post is valid (i.e. conforms to a particular DOCENGINE), but it would catch things like misplaced ampersands, unknown entities, tags that aren’t closed, etc.

Better yet, if you use IE for your posts, you could do the same thing using its built-in XML parser.