kaioa.com

Spaaaaaam

Usually spam comments are easy to detect. It's either some canned text (which is used everywhere) or a pile of quickly assembled semi-nonsense sentences generated by a little script (or even a cheap chat AI). That stuff is very easy to identify since it's either blatantly obvious, pure garbage, or completely off-topic.

Just a few minutes ago something different slipped through the recently installed filter. At first glance it looked pretty innocent:

Stealthy spam (in light not-published-yet-pink)

Case in Point

Caching is a very hot topic these days. Aggregation of scripts and style sheets, compression, setting Expires and Last-Modified headers. All of that is about improving loading times and reducing the amount of traffic. It's pretty smart stuff and it works pretty well.

There are always two cases to consider: a user with a non-primed cache and a user with a primed cache. If the cache is primed, the user will need to download far less files, because most of it is already cached. Scripts are the same, style sheets are the same, lots (or even all) images are the same, and maybe even the document itself is the same. Well, that's the deal basically.

Yesterday I noticed something odd, however. I visited some page I visited just the day before and all those images were reloaded. I also observed this on a lot of other websites I visit regularly. Of course I checked the headers and everything looked fine. Pretty odd. Especially if you consider that I already ramped up the cache size to 150mb ages ago.

There shall be structure

Benefits

Hierarchical structures are always rather hard to explain with words alone. You've to identify the key items and then lay out their relation to each other - two at a time. This can take a couple of sentences and you'll also have to carefully check if everything is at the right place.

But it doesn't stop there. The worst part is probably that every user will have to parse your explanation very carefully. Of course that only adds a few seconds to the whole process, but those seconds accumulate. Your thousands (or even millions) of users might have done something more important during that time. They could have picked their nose for example, which is an activity many people enjoy more than reading documentation.

Yes, it's true. Reading documentation is really that exciting. So, we really should try everything possible to make it as quick and pain free as possible.

I can't hear you

Motivation

A few weeks ago someone complained about screencasts being (ab)used as replacement for documentation. I think I saw it somewhere over at reddit or dzone. Well, that rant wasn't all that interesting, really. However, it did point out two real issues: they are useless to the deaf and you lose the advantages of text (searchable, quick scanning etc.). I can't agree more with those bits - it's something that bothered me for ages.

The former can be addressed with subtitles. The latter, however, is more complicated than that. Solving that problem would also solve the issue that screencasts don't really reveal much of their content to search engines. If you put countless hours of work into your screencasts it would be pretty sad if your audience is unable to find them.

Interestingly subtitles are also the solution to this problem. Once they are written (or copy/pasted from the script) you have a complete transcript together with the timing information. With those two pieces (text and time) you can create a transcript where each line can be clicked to seek over to that position.

Whenever you're creating some user interfaces you'll often have to recreate/reinvent some concepts. Things you've seen a zillion times. Usually this isn't much of a problem, but sometimes you forget specific usability details, which can degenerate the user experience quite a bit.

Anders Toxboe's website UI-Patterns.com fills the gap by providing dozens of examples for common UI crafting tasks. Each one is illustrated and explained in detail. Additionally, everything is categorized which makes it easy to find related patterns.

Sums It Up, Really

Back Then

A few months ago I noticed odd hits coming from live.com - hits from searches for very common words such as "about", "content", or "example". My initial thoughts were that live.com is just a bad search engine (and no one should ever use it). Searches for this kind of vague terms shouldn't yield a hit among the first 1000 result pages. It really shouldn't. Well, I decided to ignore it for the time being.

Some weeks later the number of hits from live.com increased - again with the same kind of nonsense queries. After a quick log check I knew they were all coming from the same IP range (65.55.165.*), which resolves to "livebot-65-55-165-*.search.live.com".

Holy sanity, Batman! They really did it.

Now we won't have to opt-out (out of the IE7 mode) and still get the most standards compliant rendering IE is capable of. Having things the way they used to be (or rather supposed to be) is a big relief for me. I'm really glad they didn't went ahead with their insane plan to ruin the web.

They kept the targeting mechanism tho. I still think it's stupid, but that's their problem not mine. ;)

Decisions, decisions...

Legacy Ball Chains

A few weeks ago when Microsoft announced their "opt-in for the default behavior" strategy I was disgusted. Quite frankly I still am. As I see it it's just another scheme to pave the way for more legacy cruft. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disappointed. After all it's what Microsoft always did, but the way they did that - pretending they are doing everyone a favor - was just a bit too annoying. Why can't they do the right thing? Just once.

"Backward compatibility", they say. But wait a minute - don't we already have a tool for that? Yes, we do. Conditional comments (another Internet Explorer specific thing) are used for this kind of things for a couple of years. In a nutshell: you create a website with a good browser (i.e. not IE), and then you work around IE's issues with override style sheets targeting specific IE versions.

The strategy was always to lean forward; fix the issues of the current and previous IE versions and hope that the next one doesn't need extra workarounds. Back when IE7 was released that didn't really work out, because it still had some of IE6's problems and a few new ones on top of that. I should have seen that coming.

Intro

In this week's episode of I hate repeating myself I'll explain how to make Apache send the right headers. With the correct headers SVG and SVGZ can be displayed directly in all browsers which support it.

I'll try to keep it as brief as possible and as detailed as necessary. If there are any questions feel free to ask.

Testing

To check the current situation and to verify the results of our changes we need to know how the desired result should look like.

As you can see the Content-Type headers for SVG and SVGZ are identical, but SVGZ also comes with a Content-Encoding header, which is used by the client to determine how to decode the data.

It's great to see that others share my opinion about IE - especially if it isn't just venting. Bundling IE to Windows and sabotaging web standards as well does indeed inflict massive damages on the industry.

While it's true that there is a benefit (more working hours) for web designers; that money could be better spent elsewhere. E.g. on usability or accessibility improvements. (See Parable of the broken window on Wikipedia for details.)

We're requesting the European commission to make Microsoft respect standards. They should support standards fully in Internet Explorer. That's not the case today.
[...]
Web standards are very important. In order for pages to work across browsers - across platforms - standards must be followed. And today Microsoft is sabotaging the standards. They are not following them. They don't really want the standards to succeed. And that's what we want to change. - Håkon Wium Lie, Opera CTO

It's so awesome I almost shed a tear. ;)

The official stuff:
Press release
Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie comments on Opera's antitrust action (video)
(click the image on that site to download the smaller ~20mb video)
Opera files complaint — an open letter to the Web community