Category Archives: Web

Simon Wilson linked to an improved on a nice multi-part form built with css. It looks great, it’s fast, but I see one other major problem: validation.
For the server to validate the input it must check all the input when the form is completely filled out. The browser can do initial testing using Javascript but that’s not to be relied on.
If I understand the code (and I haven’t tested this myself), if errors in validation occur then the server will have to probably redirect to the anchor for the first page with an error.
I’d like to take a look at this technique myself later..

Argh! Had a fix a problem on one of our sites – users were complaining that some of our content wasn’t showing. On testing, nobody in the office could find anything wrong. All the code used is several months old and has worked well in that time. This thread explains a bit more about the changes in IE6, and the requirement for a “Compact Privacy Policy” on your site.

I’d love to give Thunderbird a spin for a few days but there’s a problem. It doesn’t support the Maildir format!
Currently I’m very happy with Kmail and lots of my mail folders are in Maildir format. I’ve over 1GB of mail (yes Mark, I still keep almost all my mail!) so having an easy way of exporting it to another format is important.
There is a feature request in the Mozilla bug database but it hasn’t seen any developer attention in a few months. 🙁
I could always start from scratch again with Thunderbird. Copy over the contents of my inbox and archive the really old mail in a tar ball. hmm. Nah, the last time I moved mail clients it was to move from the Netscape 4.7 client (used for years) to Kmail. I don’t know that there’s as much of a reason to move from Kmail now. (Well, besides the fact that I don’t use any other KDE application!)
Before you think, “He’s going to write a script to convert those formats!” No, I have too many plenty of other ways to scratch an itch!
I’ll let this one up to someone else.

A new release of Mozilla Firebird is out! I’ve been using the XFT/GTK2 builds available elsewhere for the past week or so and I’m well impressed by stability recently. The one major bug I found, (as did everyone else it seems), was the auto-complete bug, and that’s certainly been fixed. I’m rushing out the door, but search my blog for ‘xft’ to find the download site for those nice looking nightly builds.

I’m now using the latest nightly GTK2/XFT build of Mozilla/Firebird that I linked to before and it’s very, very nice!
I did use an earlier build of this before but for some reason started using these ones instead.
The latest nightly build is a *lot* more responsive than the one I just moved from! 🙂

Builds of Mozilla Firebird are available here, built with xft support for anti-aliased fonts.
He has builds for RH8+9, Slackware 9, Debian Unstable, and Suse. Great!

Hmm, must take a look at this build of Moz FB. As it uses GTK2 the GUI’ll be anti-aliased too!

Does this editor work in Mozilla Firebird for you? The textarea fails to appear on my machine..

This is a sample chapter from the new web design book “Don’t Make Me Think”. – “How we really use the Web”.
People scan pages, not read.. good reading.