innerHTML

Encoding Ampersands

jody — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:45:33 +0000

Here’s the W3C recommendation on encoding ampersands:

Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of “&” to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.

From HTML Document Representation.

Moving to HTML 5

jody — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:42:51 +0000

Today I’m making the grand leap of moving, where possible (i.e., when I have time … ha!), over to HTML 5. The future is now.

I was pushed over the edge when I peaked at the code for John Resig’s site. I looked again at the differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4. I looked again at how HTML 5 differs from XHTML. I looked again at the vexing problem of application/xhtml+xml.

And then I looked at an example HTML 5 document:

Example document

Example paragraph

The clouds parted and a Voice said, “Move, little one. Move.”

Looking at Resig’s code, has the charset declared as . The draft says:

Using a meta element with a charset attribute that specifies the encoding as the first element child of the head element. could be used to specify the UTF-8 encoding. This replaces the need for

I ain’t picking on Resig, honest. I follow his lead and I think it’s useful (understatement) to compare his work to what the WHATWG suggests. I’d be curious to know, then, (if he hasn’t already blogged about it), why he retained use of the previous charset declaration. Well, for starters I could guess: it doesn’t harm anything.

Other great ironies: the HTML 5 spec page uses an HTML 4 doctype as does the HTML 5 and 4 differences page. I suppose they’re sticking to W3C recommendations until the HTML 5 draft becomes a recommendation.

And who else is on board? Google (peak at their code). Apple. Microsoft.

Not Crumby

jody — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:13:36 +0000

From Alertbox’s article Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful:

In testing an e-commerce site last month, for example, one user complained: “This is missing a feature to go back to the previous page.”

I found this apparent request for a Back button puzzling, since the button was featured prominently in the browser and the person had easily used it earlier in the test session. Also, for six years, it’s been an established guideline to avoid duplicating browser functionality in the page design.

It quickly became clear, however, that the user wasn’t asking for a duplicate Back button. Elaborating on the previous complaint, she pointed to the place on the page where breadcrumbs typically appear and said she wanted the list of links to higher-level pages.

In other words, the user wanted breadcrumbs. She’d seen them before, but didn’t know what they were called, so she asked for them using words that — if taken literally — would have been easily misinterpreted.

The title of this article is so obvious it sounds like something from The Onion. But, this is from 2007 and it’s likely this user expectation is even more entrenched, and it’s an expectation that a site be useful: that the site have the helpful elements they need to move around. Even if that element reproduces browser functionality, as Nielson notes.

I’ve been building (using JavaScript and for too long), breadcrumb navigation that can work across our Network Tools, so I was happy to come across this as a reminder the work is worth it.

What’s the “28th last day of the month”?

jody — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:14:13 +0000

Good article with good examples of good ways to manage complex interfaces: Managing UI Complexity by Brandon Walkin.

My favorite example might be Microsoft Expression Blend vs Adobe Lightroom.

Some compelling examples are the inspectors in Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Lightroom. While a host of factors are responsible for the Expression Blend inspector looking considerably more complex than the Lightroom inspector, the rough horizontal alignment is certainly a primary one. The horizontal alignment lines have been drawn in red to illustrate the differences.

Looking at the red lines, my first thought: “jebus.”

Zeldman on Writing

jody — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:25:48 +0000

Zeldman has a new article up on writing: Write When Inspired. The mantra: “Write when inspired; rest when tired.” Memorable enough. And popular enough if you read the article’s comments. A few dissenters raise their heads. Not enough do, likely because if you did: fail. A person could ruin their career with one poorly placed comment on Zeldman’s blog. Here’s the comment I left, and it was stolen from Jack London:

“Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.” -Jack London

If you wait to write when inspired, well, you’ll spend time waiting. Why not write while waiting? Makes the waiting less boring.

In short: I read, I disagreed, I was inspired to disagree and that inspiration almost led to a longer mistake than the one quote. He didn’t mean what he was saying, or what I thought he was saying in the mnemonic about inspiration:

“Sorry, perhaps I should have stated explicitly at the top that orderly work habits are a given. I don’t mean sit around for weeks waiting for lightning to strike.”

I’ll admit that’s how I read his article: the simple mnemonic shaped how I read the rest. My brain threw in an “only.” Write “only” when inspired. In his defense, that was my “only” and the phrase oversimplifies what he understands to be more complex. His comments evince that. Part of my misunderstanding could have been that I’m not a thoughtful reader. He writes for a certain kind of reader, the one with orderly work habits and one who is thoughtful and drinks up words: “I write for a thoughtful reader, who reads at moderate speed, drinking in the words and getting what is said and what doesn’t need to be said.” I read that and I said to myself: Whu-whu-what? Senator, you’re no John Keats. Your rifts are missing some ore. But whoa, Jody, whoa …

Let’s roll back the clock, roll back the clock on my misunderstanding and let’s extrapolate unhelpfully. I think, or I hypothesize, or I guess that something similar happened to Zeldman: he was inspired to write about the mnemonic, like I was inspired to write about my misunderstanding, and then he didn’t get the words out right, like I’m likely doing now. He meant a certain type of writer and he was writing for a certain type for reader, things the post itself don’t make explicit. A re-read and revision might have told him: if we write for readers (”You are writing for readers, a duty as sacred, in its way, as parenting”), he’d know all readers don’t or can’t have orderly work habits (what does “orderly” mean in this context? I have method to my madness), and he’d know all readers don’t drink in words (a metaphor used in religious writings–from Tibetan texts to Jonathan Edwards descriptions of congregations). I drink in Wallace Stevens, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Ellman. But, I’m not sure I really drink them. I read them.

I can say this: Zeldman’s article inspired me to write and I’m not in the writing mood. I’m not going to do my best work in this post because, well, Zeldman is right: “we do our best work when healthy, rested, refreshed, alert, and eager to do the job for its own sake.” Yet how often are we healthy, rested, refreshed, alert and eager–all at once? That’s a rhetorical question which probably says more about me than it should. I’m charging ahead anyway, health and rest and refreshment be damned.

Whatever the case, thanks to Zeldman I was inspired and I wrote.

Tangent 1: In a fit of bigheadedness, I noticed validation errors on his site a while ago and twittered about it. I hope he didn’t think it was “catching him in a mistake.” I can only hope enough people care about my code to validate it for me.

Tanget 2: Damn it. I forgot the inverted pyramid (see the Web Style Guide and Nielson’s site). Given that pyramid I wouldn’t have placed a mnemonic like that at the beginning. But what do I know? I’ve only been writing since … longer than I’ll admit and I have fewer Amazon entries than Zeldman. I wouldn’t have used a mnemonic either. But mnemonics are useful. Sometimes.

Caching Tutorial

jody — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:40:50 +0000

Nice tutorial by Mark Nottingham (mnot.net) on web caches: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/.

Response Times

jody — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:07:46 +0000

I don’t always agree with him, but these are helpful guidelines for web page response times: Response Times: The Three Important Limits.

At work we’ve been building on a web application (a phrase Nielson doesn’t like) for over a year and we’ve been trying to reduce the loadtime of a particular page—it’s a page showing, for lack of a better description, a lot of information. Previously it took close to 8 seconds to load the page. Now we’re down to about 2-3 seconds depending on the browser.

One day it’ll be 0.0001 seconds. Mwa-ha-ha.

Anchorage and Pseudo-Anchorage

jody — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:59:04 +0000

I have what a former professor of mine called fear of the “fraud squad.” Today’s example: if someone looking at my CSS asked me to articulate the difference between a and a with the :link pseudo-class, i.e., a:link, could I explain the difference? Or would I throw out a useless definition and then hear the fraud squad busting through my office windows from their black helicopters?

I couldn’t articulate the difference but can now. The venerable W3C states that browsers use :link and :visited to distinguish between links that have not or have been visited. Also, these pseudo-classes are mutually exclusive. So, what’s true for a:link will never be true for a:visited, and vice versa, but if you define a style for a, it will be true for both.

About pseudo-classes: a layman’s definition of a pseudo-class is hard to find, but 456 Berea Street has a blog entry on pseudo-classes that’s helpful.

If you were wondering …

jody — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:47:17 +0000

http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/

$( ‘#white_house’ ).addClass( ‘validates jquery’ );

jody — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:43:37 +0000

I was pleased to see that whitehouse.gov passes W3C XHTML validation and uses jQuery.