So long, and thanks for all the fish!

24ways: Minification: A Christmas Diet

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 05:37:00 +0000

Another excellent entry to 24ways for 6th of December. Gareth Rushgrove writes about the necessity to minify HTML, CSS and Javascript for todays web applications.
With all the added Web 2.0 features these days, minification of HTML, CSS and JS cannot be stressed more! Web applications of today are growing into bigger proportions no only content wise, but also form the point of sourcecode.

Minifying your Javascript files or using preminified versions of your favorite Javascript framework is a must, since like your CSS files, these will be generating alot of bandwidth.

At my workplace we decided to adapt existing minifying methods for CSS and Javascript and tie the minification into the Webserver process, using PHP and Apache mod rewrite rules to both minify and cash CSS and Javascript files. This way we are able to reduce the load on sites generated from these files by manyfold, making YSlow cheer at the small file sizes and less loadtimes.

The Apache mod rewrite rules will pick out CSS and Javascript requests to the server and parse them through our PHP Minifier, which will check for an update to the cashed file and minify the code at the same time. To reduce requests even further we added the possibility to load multiple CSS and Javascript files with less requests, by tying them together, when the browser reads the HTML Source.

24ways - Christmas for Web Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 07:23:00 +0000

Good morning,

Finally a new issue of 24ways :D ! A very nice and complete roundup concerning PNG24 in IE6 and downwards.

Certainly the use for PNG24 in IE through the Alpha filter gets a bit limited and you will have to size the area that contains the transparent PNG accordingly. The Alpha Transperency filters are not of much help either. Usually i end up using “scale” as the sizing method.
Sofar it has proven good and i have been able to provide PNG24 transparency for client projects that way.

I would not start using Javascript to counter the drawbacks though. In my opinion Javascript should only be added to include functionality, but not cripple it, should Javascript not be available. That might sound as if i am talking back from way 1990, but there are still alot of places (hotels, airports, etc.) that do not allow Javascript in their browsers. Usabilty should have priority before anything.

Dear web developers, enjoy your first issue of 24ways:
Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 by Drew McLellan

Safari 3.0.2, finally an (international) Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 20:58:00 +0000

When Safari 3.0b was released for Windows and Max OS X on 12th, June, it was rather a disappointment for the non U.S. residents, since there were problems with displaying fonts. Also there were other issues related to crashes and errors.

If you ask me, at that stage Safari was an Alpha release, disguised as a beta since the release was coordinated with Steve Jobs appearance on WWDC.

Apart from this minor disappointment Safari developer were fast to fix these errors in Safari 3.0.2. Safari renders fast and correctly now. Bookmarks are finally working too. Also there have been enhancements in terms of adjusted keyboard shortcuts and mouse navigation options which Windows users are used to.

What really stands out though is the Web Inspector, which is not present in the distributed release, but in the curent Webkit nightly. Granted, it is yet not as powerful as Firebug on Firefox, but i think since safari is still Beta, we might be seeing some more from that side. Elements can be selected and CSS can be viewed in similar ways to Firebug. KB usage, Display time for loading pages are displayed very neatly in a typical Apple way. Clear, with simple colors and order. I think in this aspect Firebug could learn form Web Inspector. Otherwise Firebug/Firefox are still my personal power tools for web development debugging.

PGP Encryption with Gmail and Firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:07:00 +0000

Now, i haven't ever been using PGP for my e-mails. But recently the question occured with a friend of mine, since he has been using PGP to encrypt his mail since quite a while back and asked me, whether there was a method to do this with Gmail, so i could send him encrypted and signed e-mails and vice versa.

What is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) anyway? Applying the OpenPGP standard one is able to provide cryptographic privacy and authentification for E-Mail. Simply explained it works this way: You provide whoever wants to mail you with a public key, which can be used to garble the mail message, so that it can only be read with your secret key. Your secret key should always remain only in your knowledge.

So to actually start sending someone encrypted mail, you will need his/her public key and a program that will encrypt th mail using the key. Now in common offline mail clients there are many plug-ins that support PGP, but until late not fo any Webmail applications.

In my search for a way to encrypt Gmail using PGP i found quite some possibilities, but most would use Javascript combiend with the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. This is clumsy though, since the reason for using encryption at all is thwarted, as you have to enter your secret/private key into the browser (Eeek!).

FireGPG to the rescue! This extension will enable the use of PGP to encrypt your E-Mail with Gmail. The extension alone won't do alot though. You will need to install GnuPG on your favorite operating system and also some kind of GUI frontend to create your own public/secret key and add public keys, that you want to mail to. On Linux platforms this is easily done and there are ways for Windows aswell. GnuPG is available for Windows (see "Binaries in the Download section). Winpt is a small frontend for GnuPG.

Why all the bother? Sometimes there are mails, that you don't want others to read, except the recipient. Using PGP is a safe way and about the best thing you will get, short of military grad encryption. It's nice to know, you mail is safe from nosy fingers.

Add from original post:
Apart from my personal investigation this matter has started to gain some little momentum after a post on slashdot (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1439208) and getting a note on lifehacker (http://www.lifehacker.com/software/encryption/-265870.php). The original article on linux.com (http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1643208) goes into detail about how to this on a linux driven machine, but this can be done on both Windows and Max OS X platoforms as well, as you can see on the FireGPG site.

Also FireGPG just turned 0.4.4 with some minor changes. Be sure to pay a visit to the forum if you have any additional requests, bug reports, etc. .

Also there are some things to consider that need improvement:

No inline decryption yet, as soon as you open a message. Can possible cause problems with message threads, since searching for encrypted content takes time. There is a handy "Decrpyt this mail" button, which will launch the decrypted content in a new window.
Large amount of encrypted content take quite longer. Also long content will be clipped in Gmail and so you need to open the message in a new window and mark all the content that you want to decrypt. With short messages this is not the problem, since there is a simple "Decrypt this mail" button at the end in the overview.
No support for sending encrypted mail to multiple recipients, that use PGP.

Celebrate, for Firebug is finally "One dot oh"!

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:02:00 +0000

One of the most indespensible web developer Firefox addons has finally turned to version 1.0. Although it has been running smooth since its beta release, those people who have until now not been using the beta version and have still been hanging about a bit handycapped with 0.4.1 will receive notification via the addons update section of Firefox.

Just to make it clear 0.4.1 and 1.0 of Firebug are 2 completely different worlds and people will be surprised and delighted. I reported on the beta version in a previous blog entry, so i will just line out the main changes with links to the http://www.getfirebug.com site.

So if you have not used Firebug yet, or are still running on beta or 0.4.1 be sure to go and get the latest release and if you can, please support this project, so it can evolve further:
http://www.getfirebug.com/contribute.html

iPhone theme, for your Nokia phone

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 09:08:00 +0000

The fact, that the reproduction of the iPhone icon menu has met many with mails from Apple Lawyers, to cease spreading those, is nothing new. First it sounds a bit far fetched, but actually people are copying UI Interfaces. Still, i think this would be pretty neat advertisement.

Sidestep: I have no clue whether i will have use for an iPhone or not, although it makes me drool. Sofar i am happy with Opera Mini and Gmail App (point your mobile browser at http://gmail.com/app), when it comes to my browsing needs.

Now silly me, started looking for a skin, that would look similar in terms of icons and background for my Nokia 6280 and only came up with some themes that contained the background art, but no icons.

So last night i sat down and did some Photoshop and came down with this nice little theme, created with the Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 2.2, which made me smile. Though i work primarily on Windows XP, i am very fond of the Apple Mac OS X UI and have for a long while been using one of those Mac OS X themes on my Nokia 6280 until today.

Now simply have a look for yourself and tell me what you think. Feel free to share (fixed the link here, since rapid share does not work anymore) this iconic, comical theme, mimicking the the OS X style of icons for the iPhone.
I might do versions in different resolutions later on.

Waves of dismay crashing upon the new famous Outlook 2007 HTML support through Word HTML Processor

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:24:00 +0000

Sometimes we wish, we would head back to the old days and do it the way it was done then, and just say "That's just the way it's done", but then we might reconsider.
Not so for Microsoft recently! For whichever reasons that i would like to hear some clarification on, Microsoft has replaced their HTML Rendering engine for Outlook 2007 to the Word HTML Processor, though it used the Internet Explorer rendering engine in its recent versions.

Now why would that make a difference? Well, marketing branches of company websites have ever since it was possible to send HTML E-Mails, been publishing HTML Newsletters with rich HTML content up to the latest standards of CSS 2.1 and so been able to convey all there marketing features not only through the website, but also through colorful, highly designed HTML Newsletters.

With a possible growing distribution of Outlook 2007, those days are over!

Regarding to the specifiations of HTML Rendering in Outlook 2007, read these to Microsoft articles for detailed informations:

msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx
msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
(thankfully rather well documented)

In short this will mean that when you create HTML Newsletters you are back to the basics, since some features will not be supported anymore as detailed in this article:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/
microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/

Short summary of CSS features not supported:

no support for background images
no support for CSS floats and positioning
no support for bullet images on lists
no support for forms, flash and animate GIFs

As can be seen by example of Molly Holzschlag's blog this is already producing waves of dismay throughout the web development community.

Look at the Campaign Monitor site to get a feeling for the impact on HTML Newsletters, by a simple example:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/
microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html

I was ready to scream and loose hair that i don't have anymore, until i started talking to a colleague of mine, after which we came to the conclusion, that this might not be to bad at all, well from the developing point of view, certainly not from the marketing point.

With those downsized CSS features, kicking us back to stone age in terms of HTML Rendering, we are left with the basics, meaning:

Table layouts
Images (not as backgrounds)
styles as tag attributes

Also this will mean that HTML Newsletters can be read by more E-Mail Clients than before and a wider coverage and possible acceptance can be achieved.

What this might also impact, would be a switching of HTML Newsletters to News feeds through RSS, although Outlook 2007 supports that too, but primarly email clients are not used as RSS feed readers nowadays. So go, go RSS!

My personal opinion: HTML was never and should never have been used for E-Mails. So "hurray" from my personal point of view.

With its strong monopoly and still remaining one of the most used operating system, Microsoft is once more rocking parts of the worlds, with small changes :)

Firefox: Editus Externus

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:59:00 +0000

I have been using this extension for quite a while now. What does it do? You can edit browser textareas using an external editor of your choice. As a web developer this has proven indespensible for me and i even waited to upgrade to Firefox 2, until someone came down with an upgraded version of this sweet little addon.
Now with the release of Firefox 2.0.0.1 it was outdated again, and noone has posted a new version yet. Simple things are so easy, so i extracted the whole thing and simply changed the version number in the install.rdf.

Happy to share this with the you through rapidshare: http://rapidshare.com/files/10914171/
editus_externus-0.9.1-fx3.xpi.html

Kudos for this addon go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1195/

Caching? Aint that something that Browsers do?

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 19:29:00 +0000

Well, to some this might be the obvious answer, but actually there is more to caching, than the browser cache. There is more that you can do, as a web developer!

Why is caching important? Because on sites with a wide array of content and many users you will want to deliver information as fast as possible and reuse information that has been accessed or searched for already by other users. Cache file for search query results or other dynamic information can be stored on the sites space and be accessed alot faster than by query or parsing through script languages. Reading a file is still the fastest method around to retrieve information.

There are quite a few ways to implement caching and now there is an interesting option i have found that uses some Apache modules and let the webserver handle caching. Read more about how to use those modules as askapache.com.

Search the official W3C CSS 2.1 Documentation

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:56:00 +0000

Something nice and useful i spotted today. Peter Freitag has launched a documentation shortcut site that has indexed the W3C CSS 2.1 Specification. The usability is increased by a script.aculo.us based auto completion feature.

Additionally there is a Plug-in for Firefox that will add cssdocs.org to your search engine favorites, making this a very handy and fast to use tool, when you are looking for attributes of a specific CSS element.

So if you are a web developer be sure to bookmark http://www.cssdocs.org and if you happen to use Firefox as your preferred developing browser get a hold of the Plug-in (from the page take the link at the top, reading "CSS Documentation") aswell.

Firebug 1.0 Beta (public)

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:12:00 +0000

Rejoice of fellow DOM tree viewers, CSS stylesheet editors and HTML tag diggers! Firebug 1.0 Beta is finally available and oh my it is a tool i will never want to miss. Combining DOM Inspector, Javascript Debugger and HTML structure viewer all in one, while beiing able to change any values on the fly or debugging your bugged javascript.

Main features:

Apart from Firebug beiing available for Firefox there is also a "Lite" Version for IE, Opera and Safari! Integrating Firebug in this way is a little bit "clumsy" though since you have to add a javascript reference into the page you want to debug. Can still be of use, should you be in a location where Firefox is not available or you are not allowed to install extensions.

24 ways tingleing to Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 10:09:00 +0000

Once again, in followup to the first successful and funny approach of 24 ways, to bring witty CSS and Javascript examples to us, until Christmas day to us, 24 ways starts off again.

The examples given are mostly out of the natural you might want to look for, but definitely give new ideas for future development. People come up with some many different ways to use the tools given to them to model the web.

Make the wait until Christmas a bit shorter. For any webdevelopers not having a "Adventkalender" at home, this is the perfect replacement :D

jQuery a different script.aculo.us

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 09:47:00 +0000

jQuery appears like a lightweight script assortment for visual appearances tweaks similar to those of script.aculo.us . The approach is a bit different in execution, since it follows a sort of chains of commands principle. The documentation and examples cover a wide range and further investigation will reveal if its up there with script.aculo.us or not. I for one like to see a different flavor of these new generation effects arising. A little competition and learning from each other never hurt.

Another way to push some simple stuff, that was previously done with Flash, to Javascript :)

script.aculo.us 1.7 beta

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 07:10:00 +0000

With the Web 2.0 waves finally washing up more than small treasures on the digital shores, Effect.morph will cling to the beach with release script.aculo.us 1.7. Finally what once was the success of Flash is coming to the world without plug-ins, tweening and morphing of text and visual elements by changing the CSS sequentially between different states.

At work i have been using script.aculo.us for a few projects now, one that was supposed to imitate a little flash application as far as possible with script.aculo.us . The success was settled at 95%. Nevertheless making out a visual difference is hard and i was delighted to see an application that came up to the design motion tweening effects of flash, while still remaining searchable, content selectable and valid HTML/XHTML.
On my team we are trying out many of the nice elements possible with script.aculo.us on smaller projects to get to know its uses and then start to push the border further to see what can be done with the big fish. My smile grows wider with each step.

So suck it up Flash, your days are not over, but there is new code on your turf that does not only appeal to a brilliant design, but also to brilliant code and a world with a few less constraints. Yes, script.aculo.us is about freedom. Though i would like to quote Public Enemy with “Don’t believe the hype!”, i would like you to give it a chance and when you have tasted enough, you will want more.

Good night from a world with a few more worthwhile choices.

Get a snoop at Firebug 1.0

noreply@blogger.com (Melianor) — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:56:00 +0000

As my first post, i would like to point out Firebug, a Firefox extension. In short you can track your Javascript, CSS, HTML easily with this tool, through a console, debugger and inspector.

Now Firebug is nearing its completion for version 1.0 with a wide array of new features, where you will be able to take more action, modifying HTML, CSS, Javascript on the fly. So the soon to be released 1.0 will be a great step forward for this nifty tool. Have a look for yourself at http://www.getfirebug.com/

Current working version for Firefox 2.0 and lower can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/ .