Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.

In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..

Recently i’ve been using Bloglines news aggregator to subscribe to all the RSS/RDF enabled websites which I visit regularly. This has completely changed my browsing habits. Bloglines works in much the same way as an email inbox - you can see which sites have been updated from a list in the left pane.

So now rather than trawling through bookmarks and tabs only to find that a site hasn’t been updated since I last looked, I only visit sites that have new content.

Depending on how the RSS has been set-up you either get a list of new headlines, a list of new headlines and summaries or in some cases the whole article. Whichever way, clicking the title will take you straight to the article on the actual site.

From Overcaffeinated

Linux based media appliance running LinDVD was demonstrated at Linux World Tradeshow last week.

(source:New Scientist)

and other enterprise features.

Also see http://www.mysql.com/press/release_2004_02.html.

mySQL is already popular, but lack of stored procedure support has previously hindered adoption by many.

I’ve refrained from sticking one of those Tick! I’m a good brownie because this page is valid XHTML! badges on hypothecate (or any site i’ve ever done for that matter) because of a couple of reasons:-

1. Valid today, full of dirty tag soup tomorrow
It’s happened to me numerous times, I make sure that the page templates validate, then I or someone else inadvertently inserts some invalid code. This is because virtually everything I build is driven by some kind of content management system, making it much easier to add invalid code faster and more conveniently than a hand coded site. I’ve been reading this morning about a lot of fuss over a similar issue at diveintomark

2. It looks rubbish
The W3C provided badges are ugly, theres no escaping it. Some people have created more subtle alternative versions, but it still looks rubbish to have this sort of information on the front page of a website. I would suggest maybe putting this info as comments in the source code if necessary, but isn’t that what the doctype tag is for? (Machines and humans should be able to deduce what the document is from that tag).

For what it’s worth, the front page of Hypothecate didn’t validate when I checked it this morning because I had accidentally left an unencoded ampersand in somewhere and I had cut and paste the HTML image link for w.bloggar from the w.bloggar website (missing ALT attribute). It took all of 30 seconds to rectify and at time of writing it now validates, but i haven’t had the urge to give myself a badge about it. (Note that the ugly little orange xml badge at the bottom of the page is actually link to the XML feed for this site, nothing to do with validation)

been thinking about this before:-

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/15/slugs

The idea is to have URLs which make sense and do not contain file extensions. This is a nice user friendly way of doing things, and it also helps if you intend to change platforms technologies at a later date or maybe integrate more than one technology into a single site.

Some publishing systems such as the excellent Plone (Portal and CMS based on the Zope server content management framework) do this by default as web pages are actually objects rather than files sitting on the file system (well actually you can have both, but I won’t go into it here).

Most of my commercial work is Microsoft ASP based, and I dont have the luxury of using some of the methods described above, especially when I don’t have direct access to the server configuration (e.g. if the site is hosted on a shared host), so I have to experiment with the best way to do this.

On one ASP based CMS I built, I went to the laborious lengths of giving it the ability to create a new folder for every page to give the site the appearance of having a file extension free structure. It works fine but the code crunching needed to get the system to to create and maintain a replica structure via FTP on the live site is by no means ideal - there are pages of code needed to track changes and make sure the system tidies up after itself when a page is moved etc.

One other method I have experimented with is that of the custom error page. Before I describe it, it is a fairly ugly "hack" and makes server logs virtually useless, so custom logging and reporting is required if you go down this route. It also increases server load, and you need a host who will allow you to have a custom error page.

I won’t go into detail here but the basic principle is that all unknown URL requests are sent to a custom error page (404 error page), which is in the form of an ASP. The page contains server side code to read the query string (which will contain the requested URL) and redirect to the appropriate "real" page, either by looking it up in a database or by some type of consistent naming convention. As I say, ugly. This method also makes it difficult to use querystrings.

A similar technique is to use an extension such as isapi rewrite to read incoming URL’s and redirect as appropriate, using regular expressions to extract data from the incoming URL.

This must be a joke surely? - college students paid to wear temporary tattoos on their foreheads. I suppose it makes a change to the widespread practice of paying a fortune to advertise companys like Gap and Nike on your clothes and shoes.

On the way to work yesterday I could smell burning rubber and then the the battery light came on on my dashboard. I took a look under the bonnet and noticed that my fan belt had disappeared. (The fan belt doesn’t actually drive the fan, but the terminology remains from old engines where it would have done).

The fan belt actually drives the alternator which charges the cars battery, so without it eventually your car electrics will drain the battery, your headlights will get dim, you will probably get some misfiring and the car will stop working, possibly leaving you without even hazard lights. Therefore replace it immediately.

You would get the same symptoms (battery light, dim headlights, misfiring) if the alternator has become disconnected, blown a fuse or just expired.

iMode sites are basically HTML cHTML (compact HTML - a subset of HTML) websites designed specifically for cellphone web browsers - I didn’t realise how widespread they were, but is dominant in Japan because it is used by NTT Docomo.

In fact on closer inspection it seems to have been started by DoCoMo as a service, which goes way beyond just cHTML to incorporate Java and Flash based multimedia.

The first one I found was this one Googe Imode. Very useful, I was chuffed to find that it works (very slowly and expensively) on mobile internet explorer on my ancient sony cellphone.

The UK and US mobile internet market seems to be fairly oblivious to the potential of this, probably because of the WAP overhype, wheras Mobile internet use is more common than desktop internet access in Japan. Hmm deja vu

Update: mobile internet more popular than ever in UK

Also on this subject I was reading over at the register, about a move to Macromedia from Microsoft by Juha Christensen making flash lite an even more serious contender as a software product for mobile phones (has already been adopted by Docomo)