Raible Designs

RSS Relative Links

Yeah, what he said!

I've invalidated my RSS feed by including relative URL references inside some of the IMG tags. Question: if I am required to include a LINK element in my RSS feed, is there a reason RSS aggregators can't use it to resolve relative links? The $REMOTE_HOST or equivalent? Given that people have been using relative URLs in pages for years, I'd expect RSS tools to be a bit more flexible in this regard. I mean, browsers can handle relative URIs, right?

Scott holds a lot more clout than I do in the web world - I'll be surprised if his post doesn't cause waves. He'll also show you how to parse your site's XML feed with CSS and the DOM.

Cool Comments

Scott Andrew points us to Joe Hewitt's weblog. He's got a sweet commenting UI that I'd love to see in Roller.

Because I'm always looking for new ways to exploit browser technology for some new marginally useful purpose, check out my new commenting UI! I make Movable Type output comments to XML files, load them through script, and turn them into HTML in this webpage for your commenting convenience.

Also, the comments form is inline with the page and is submitted without reloading the entire page. Woop-dee-freakin-doo.

Very cool! Hopefully there'll be some code soon we can modify for Roller.

Opera 7 Beta Available

Finally, it's here, revamped from the rendering engine and up. Opera 7 Beta is smaller and faster than before, offering you a whole range of new features to make you more productive on the Web. [ Read More | Screenshot ]

Installing now...

What's your site's content size?

This site is 29.18% text context. Apparently, the rest is markup. Found via web-graphics.com.

The tool (wittingly called getContentSize) apparently does not include images or attached CSS, or javascript in it's analysis. I believe that considering it measures my total page size as 51131 bytes, where Phoenix tells me it's 55270 bytes. What it doesn't tell you is that I have around 250 (yes 250!) links on this site, and since it doesn't count those as text (<a href> is markup), I think I've done pretty well. Here are some interesting statistics for other sites (and lots of markup with little text):

Photo Albums Redux

Remember this post? I wrote about how much I liked Michael's photo album software. Well, lo and behold, he heard me and sent this e-mail:

Matt,

Hi, and thanks for the mention on your site. =)

My photo album stuff was a reworking in PHP of some other photo album/gallery things I'd seen. Of course everyone is looking for something specific, and I was no different, so I decided I needed to make one with what I wanted. That meant it also had to be XHTML and CSS compliant, and I decided on an all CSS layout for ease of updating (that, and I love CSS, heh).

It's basically a three-tiered approach, with thumbnails, medium-sized images and hi-res versions. It's just one main file in a root directory, and a CSS file, title file, and optional pic info/annotation file in each photo directory. Since the program uses the CSS file in each directory, I can create a different layout for each album. I did a couple of minor changes in some of them just to show that they don't all have to look the same.

What it doesn't do:

Currently it does not do any real image handling such as creating thumbnails. I do all the image editing manually and compile a directory of photos (with their respective subdirectories) and just upload it. The program sees the directory automatically.

Also currently, you have to have all 3 versions of photos. I haven't incorporated an option to replace thumnails with text links, or to use/not use hi-res images.

I plan on putting some of these things in before making the whole thing freely available for public consumption, but if you'd like a copy of it as it is, I'd be happy to send it along with a brief intro on how to use it.

Again, thanks for the mention and the kind words.

Take care.

--michael

I responded to his e-mail and I now have this software in my Inbox - what a guy, eh? Thanks Michael! Now if I can only find the time to experiment and (possibly) implement.

kdub's log

There's a blog over at freeroller.net that is using a slightly altered x2 theme. X stands for XHTML and 2 stands for 2 columns (I contributed this theme to Roller, so that's how I know). Anyway, the writer, kdub, seems to like what I'm serving.

Great stuff from Raible Matt Raible is a great guy. I have been reading his weblog for a few months and he has been covering OS X, Roller, Struts, HTML/CSS, and Java which works well with my tastes. I need to congradulate him on his new daughter!

Thanks for the Abbie love - now it's your turn kdub - tell us about yourself. We want to hear about you, the person, not just your interests.

Launch of DMXzone.

From my Inbox: We are proud to announce the launch of DMXzone. DMXzone is a merger between UDzone, MXzone and DWzone! This is one of the first HTML-ed e-mails I've received where they used CSS instead of <font> tags everywhere.

Cool Menus How To

Scott Andrew provides us some DHTML Menu love - using a little DOM action and <ul>'s. The beauty of these is that they will work just fine in older browsers - just like a regular list.

Dave Lindquist has taken this same basic concept one step further with these awesome DHTML menus. Both the dropdown and expandable tree variations are simple lists built with 100% valid XHTML. CSS and DOM scripting are added to extend the functionality. Dave even goes so far as to use ACCESSKEY attributes to make parts of the menu accessible via keyboard shortcuts. The result is a more widely accessible menu that doesn't sacrifice the whiz-bang functionality of DHTML. Try turning off the CSS rules (with a handy "Toggle CSS" bookmarklet) while viewing the menu demos and you'll see a plain, fully-accessible list. Better yet, run it through Delorie's LynxViewer to get an idea of how a non-graphical browser would handle it. Sweet.

IE5/Mac CSS Hints

Apple has published a list of CSS bugs and workarounds for IE5 on the Mac. Read if you need.

Good CSS Designs

Scott Andrew lists his favorite CSS Designs and also points out some great CSS templates. This site got its original CSS inspiration from glish.com and I've also used Blue Robot's techniques on my current project.