Too busy for a full braindump. Again, things have been piling up. At least I know that I won’t have a shortage of things to talk about. I wonder how I went for several months without writing any stuff down. Was it better or worse? I can’t really tell now.

I’ve found quite a lot of stuff I’d like to go back to and explore more fully when I have the time (umm, probably never, *sigh*): saila.com, langreiter.com, www.e7l3.com, Mike’s Blog, developer-x.com, afongen, Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog, webgraphics, info-arch.org, IAwiki, memes.net, shawn.michael.miller, noise between stations

Browser thoughts: I don’t really use IE much anymore, except for or Blogger, and for creating shortcut .url files with illegal file characters in the titles (really, what a lame Mozilla bug), and since I never feel like going through the Java rigamorole. Oh, and how can I forget, to find stupid CSS bugs.

I inlined some ie5mac style changes, so that should work. I have a feeling I’ll be sniffing browsers until the cows come home to get this working. I’ll be treating this page as a test for production level code, I suppose…

Lars Pind says Goodbye ArsDigita.

You know, CSS really needs to have a ‘browser implementations type’ attribute like the media-type attribute. Then we wouldn’t need to figure out convoluted hacks (and use them for years and years) to support some software-weenie’s brain-fart.

It’s too bad that correctness gets such short shrift in the browser world. Browser makers treat what their products as simply some consumer product, but really, it’s also a development platform. I don’t even want to imagine counting up the number of man-hours expended by web designers and developers in working around browser bugs, especially the CSS ones (ahh the ironies).

To work around the IE6 bug I made use of phpSniff and it’s handy dandy search function [ $phpSniff->is('b:ie6') ] and then hacked a few rules in until it worked. I have a feeling that as I review my design with various browsers, that’s just what I’ll end up doing for each one. So much for CSS simplifying web developers lives. (Come on, who really thought would happen?)

Hmm, apparently this page still renders slowly w/ the interlacing GIFs in IE. I’ll be optimizing / working on the style switcher sometime this week.

dune dweebs invade the desert planet /. 😉

Sometimes, I’m really envious of flash wizards. They get to spend their time doing design with the full knowledge that their stuff will work on 85%+ of the audience, and if it shows up at all, it’ll show up correctly. No rendering bugs, no dependencies. Maybe Macromedia will succeed where DHTML has not.

Of course, Flash has it’s own challenges to overcome, but these are design issues primarily, not bug hunts that leave you no better than you were in 1997.

I drew up this new design a few weeks ago, but I’ve been sitting on it for a while working out some kinks. Currently, it has some big problems with what seems to be an IE6 bug. I’ve stabilized my HTML with this design, so my next few redesigns shouldn’t require anything but style changes (also makes creating alternate style switching possible).

Anyway, this is my idea of getting something a little less stark up and running. I’ve also for the most part switched off of using the style transparencies. Maybe the .GIF effects will render faster.

The voice navigation on the MXP100 MP3 player seems like an interesting idea, but still a bit clunky. I doubt you’d do actually be able to do much better navigation than with the iPod’s wheel. Ideally, you’d simply want a way to simply sort/skip around by id3 tags and playlists. Of course, what really makes the MXP100 nonviable is the DRM, apparently non-removable microdrive, and slow USB connection – all of which could have easily been made non-issues.

Here’s a pretty rad Trillian Log Viewer. I was thinking about doing some ICQ .DAT conversions and our friend google turned up icq2xml (surpisingly good translation). Now as soon as XML logging gets set up in Trillian, things will be perfect.