Xah Web Dev Blog Archive 2012-03
updated: HTML Table, colgroup, col
updated: HTML5 Page Article Tag and Page Structure Tags
New discovery. Contrary to the austere and stern W3C spec, if you have a id tag with value “ααα”, it passes W3C validator as valid!. See: W3C HTML Validator Invalid . [2020-08-09 addendum. that's because i was using HTML5 DTD, and HTML5 allows that, but not HTML4]
Spamlicious: Buy Twitter Followers
List of HTML Self-Closing Tags
CSS: How Large is a CSS Pixel?
CSS junk is when a site has tons of CSS piled up and half of it is not used.
Google Plus Page Account: How to View a Post in Your Personal Account
if you are running Google Plus pages, often you see a interesting post and you want to comment/share, but you want to do that with your personal account, not your page account. How to do that?
Copy the URL, example
https://plus.google.com/b/113859563190964307534/113666291948192249820/posts/dLAu3fiKbKv
remove the first sequence of digits, to get
https://plus.google.com/b/113666291948192249820/posts/dLAu3fiKbKv
Paste in a new tab. That's it.
Google's Defunct Projects: Google Health, Google PowerMeter
Google Health (2008 to 2011). This is envisioned to be a centralized health records system, but nobody wants to use it.
Google PowerMeter (2009 to 2011). This is a software that lets you view your energy use. First, you need to install a Smart meter. Then, this is hooked up to Google somehow, so you could view your meter usage on a Google site, with nice charts.
A normal meter just records your usage, and periodically someone comes to check it and bill you. Smart meter differ from normal meter in that it can record hourly usage and communicate that automatically, to the utility company or to you. So, the data can be analyzed and visualized, almost in real-time.
For a in-depth article of Google's closed-down projects, but very much biased and dramatized, see:
- Google's Mounting Trash Pile By Mary Jander. At
http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=240386&print=yes
When's Google Gonna be as Hateful as Facebook?
Google is really getting on people's nerves in past 2 years.
When someone adds you back, you got this message:
xyz added you back.
She wants to hear from you: start sharing with her and comment on her posts.
Instead of a factual notice, Google gratuitously added “She wants to hear from you”.
I suppose this is part of Search Plus Your World going forcefully down our throats. When is Google Plus gonna become like faaking Facebook?
Dillo Web Browser: Cave-Dwelling Hackers Crawling Out of the Woodwork
Discovered Dillo, a basic browser.
LOL.
it's funny. Often, in the elite programing community (meaning: not your typical “i code to earn bread” but more of the “i love coding and am superior” hacker types. (the types that slave on slashdot, reddit, hackernews all day.)), you often have a living-in-a-cave phenomenon. You'll often encounter programers crawling out of the woodwork, with obscure and impractical ideas. Dillo is a good example. (other examples are many emacs heads)
let's look at Dillo. So, what is it? Quote from Wikipedia.
Dillo is a minimalistic web browser particularly intended for older or slower computers and embedded systems. It supports only plain HTML/XHTML (with basic CSS rendering) and images over HTTP; scripting is ignored entirely. Dillo is available for Linux, BSD, Solaris, DOS / FreeDOS and Mac OS X. Due to its small size, it is the browser of choice in several space-conscious Linux distributions. Released under the GNU General Public License, Dillo is free software.
that's like a lol. Who will actually find it useful?
this is year 2012. Sure, there are still people on modem and using computers that's 10 years old. But first of all, how many such people exist? probably less than 1/100000 of the internet users.
ok, so if we consider people on modem with old computers, where their computer can't view youtube etc. There's text based browsers such as lynx. Also, they could just use any of {Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE} with JavaScript turned off. With JavaScript turned off, web browsing is FAST.
of the modem using poor slobs, if they are not tech savvy, they would never know about Dillo or the like anyway, and would never go downloading it even if told so. And if they DO know tech, they'd know how to turn off JavaScript in Firefox, with practical result probably a magnitude better than Dillo.
Webkit Bug: Pre Display Table Space characters Not Rendered
Browser User Agent Strings 2012
it's interesting. On my BlackBerry PlayBook, the browser is actually Safari. The User Agent string is this:
• BlackBerry PlayBook tablet Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 2.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/535.8.+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.2.0.0 Safari/535.8.+ • Safari (on Windows) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.54.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.4 Safari/534.54.16 • Google Chrome (on Windows) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.79 Safari/535.11 • Internet Explorer 9 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0) • Firefox (on Windows) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2 • Opera (on Windows) Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.61
Why James Whittaker left Google
Someone wrote:
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
[Why I left Google By James Whittaker. At
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx]
who is he?
Update: Unicode Font Comparison: Arial Unicode MS vs DejaVu Sans
Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon 📺
Email Scam on Gmail
Incredible. Got this email scam, who pretends to be from Google, but gmail filter didn't catch it. Here's the content:
Gmail imtops@google-lerts.cc 6:44 AM (33 minutes ago) to info.support Dear Account User, Your account security requires verification. To keep your account security active: http://accounts.google.com Sincerely, Email Disclaimer
That Google URL above actually points to this: http://www.mobila.be/wp-content/themes/concise/scripts/cache/GG.htm
See also: Web Spam, Scam, SEO
iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Zoom: Pixel Dimension, Resolution, Density
Modern Tablet Computer Features
Blogger Traffic Surge Due to UI Change?
I stopped blogging in Jan 28th, and started in Feb 29th, and changed my blogger interface from a static template to blogger's new dynamic template on March 5th.
For reasons unknown to me, my blogger traffic is about 8 times more starting on March 5th.
Is it due to the dynamic UI?
[Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the world By A Googler. At http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/09/dynamic-views-seven-new-ways-to-share.html , accessed on 2012-03-09 ]
web design color idiocy continued: Update: Web Design: Say No to Gray Text on White Background
Web Design, Minimal Window Width