A Reading Roundup
I thought I’d do something that I don’t do very often and talk specifically about other blogs I’ve been reading.
Well, I’ve been enjoying hearing about Bruce Lawson’s Holiday In Cambodia (& Thailand), as well as the fact that he threw in a Dead Kennedys reference. Nice one, Bruce. I did wonder idly whether he’d appeared in any films while he was over there, having previously been entertained by his appearance as a Bollywood extra — and even more entertained by the hordes of people wanting advice on how to break into Bollywood films when all Bruce did was reply to an advert…
…and somewhere between entertained, bemused and seriously concerned by the people who seem unable to realise that Bruce is extracting the michael. And seemingly are too busy firing vitriolic abuse in his direction to spell things correctly, capitalise things correctly or use punctuation.
It kinda reminds me of something to be honest…
And then, from a web standardsy point of view, I recently came across (via the a bit of the old googling and Roger’s site) something about using the object element instead of the iframe element, to allow you to inject code from one web page into another — in such a way that it played nice with Internet Explorer too.
Although there were still two problems: any ‘injected’ code must come from the same domain (fine for my purposes, but possibly not for a googleads type of thing) and because it’s effectively treated as a frame anyway, any links within it will only actually open within the object area instead of the whole page, unless you use the somewhat deprecated target="_top".
Bugger.
Obviously, if it was target="_blank" you could get around this with javascript because the fallback position would be that the link opens in the same window. In this case, that’s not the case and the fallback position is that the link opens in a minute area of the window, so that’s a non-starter.
So if I want to switch to using object in this particular way, I’ve got to either bite the bullet and switch to using a Transitional DOCTYPE (which I don’t want to do), or I can stick with Strict but accept that the code rendered to the client wouldn’t actually validate (although rather sneakily the code rendered to validators would, it appears).
Of the two options, despite being a standardista in favour of validity and in favour of not using deprecated things, I’m minded to take the second option, because if you’re prepared to inject deprecated/framset elements into the DOM of a Strict page via Javascript — as Roger himself does for his GoogleAds — then I don’t really think that using the deprecated target="_top" in the ‘injected’ HTML is any worse.
Because primarily, the point is to make the stuff so that it’s usable by people in various sets of circumstances. This adds a feature, and although technically the feature should be added via the behavioural layer of javascript, it will be inaccessible in a non-javascript supporting browser. This, to me is one of them cases that the WCAG Working Group were on about when they said:
It is also possible in certain situations to enhance accessibility through the use of markup that is not part of the specification.WCAG Working Group
…which was their reason for dropping ‘validity’ as a requirement from WCAG 2.0.
I’ve also been glancing at my cousin’s site, where rather disturbingly I’ve discovered his gym shows semi-pornographic videos. I just hope it’s not just his wrist that’s getting the exercise.
Also, he’s been up to the North-East himself recently, calling in to Beamish Museum, which I’ve not been to for a couple of years (in fact, I’m not sure if we’ve been since we had the kids). Beamish is basically a large, open air museum which is effectively a historical recreation of a North-Eastern coal mine and North-Eastern pit villages from around the turn of the century (I seem to recall depending on where you are on the site, the time period ranges from about 1880 to 1920). We really ought to go, though. It’s got a farm, a tram you can ride on, and I imagine the kids would love that…
I’ve also been wondering whether my old mucker Dan has run out of things to blether on about, as his average posting rate has declined to something like twice per month (usually on the same day). Similarly, Nicky hasn’t posted since the 13th of August, and a similar thing also appears to be true of Punkchip, who hasn’t posted anything new since April, although she’s had a remarkably cheeky spammer on her @Media 2005 post:
hello, my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq [removed] or write me [removed], i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you
The sheer cheek of it is impressive. “Link to me and I’ll ask people not to spam you”. Right, like I imagine that’s bound to be effective. I’ll put up a counter-offer though: send me £5 cash and I’ll wish really hard that you don’t get bothered by spammers any more.
But the fact that neither Dan nor Emma have updated their sites much recently reminded me of an internal debate (briefly externalised on AccessifyForum way back in 2005) at about the time I was setting up this blog in the first place. I had considered whether — like a lot of other people in the web design/standards field — I should talk pretty much exclusively about web design on my blog, or whether it should be everything that interested me.
In the end, it was probably Newcastle United that swung it to ‘everything’. I knew I’d have to say something about them from time to time, so it wasn’t just going to contain web-standards and stuff. Initially I worried whether this would “dilute” my website in some people’s eyes, but I’m not too bothered about this any more. It’s my site, I’m the one paying for it, I’m the one writing it, so it will jolly well be about whatever I jolly well want to write about.
I’d rather have a scatter-gun, eclectic website where I can bang on about whatever’s in my head at the moment than feel I’m restricted only to talking about certain things, and not to be able to update my site unless I can think of something relating to web design…
And it’s obviously pleasing some of you: after all I’ve had (apparently) 1,700 unique visitors to the site today, and from looking at the statistics in a little more detail, it appears that while about 900 of them were probably bots, that still leaves 800 unique human visitors. Today. Wow. Hello everyone…
But before I go I’ve got to give a couple of other sites a mention too: Joe Dolson has been evangelising thinking, and while he’s been applying that mostly to web standards it’s a fascinating concept. Next time you find yourself disagreeing with someone, try looking at it from their point of view. As an intellectual exercise, can you convince yourself that they are right? What is more important to you — defending your previously held opinion, or working out what is actually the case?
And the other one is Jaybee. It’s been a while since I’d visited Jaybee’s site, partly because she’s another who doesn’t update it very often, and partly because after being somewhat unsympathetic to people who live on a floodplain getting rather … damp … I felt a little bit embarrassed when she then posted about her flooding experience. Oops. Still, I’ll just pretend I never mentioned anything and she’ll never catch on (*whistles nonchalantly*).
But when I looked at her site earlier on I discovered a fantastic new post, full of words that ought to be in the dictionary. Here’s a couple — follow the link back for the rest of ‘em:
- Decafalon
- The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you
- Karmageddon
- It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer
Hello. I am 
Well umm thanks for the backlink
What can I say. Yes I have been remiss in updating the blog. Floods, work and life just got in the way. I’ll try to do better.
As to the flood and building on flood plains I heartily agree with you, no need for whoops.
Our house is at least 500 years old and built halfway up a hill so the river running past the front door came as something of a surprise to say the least but, those who were very badly hit have just bought new homes built on a flood plain right next to the river. There were lots of local mutterings at the time about fools and money but 2000 people seem to have ignored common sense and moved in. They’ve now moved out again and are waiting for their insurance companies and builders.