Weblogism

Bloody Sunday Inquiry to Hear its Last Witness

Sébastien — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 06:30:00 GMT

After 4 years, the Bloody Sunday inquiry is to hear its last witness today, the 919th. Journalists, politicians (like Martin McGuinness and Edward Heath), members of OIRA and PIRA, soldiers gave evidence and the hearing transcripts, all available on the Internet, are 14 million words long. The report is not expected to be released before the end of December 2004.

Redundancies: Épilogue

Sébastien — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 21:49:00 GMT

I never quite mentioned how it all finished. Very sadly, by all means. The 171 all received their letters telling them to go away (“Well done, thank you and don’t forget to shut the door, will you.”). In my department, we used to be 85. We were cut down to 70, and at the end, with all the people sent somewhere else, we have reached the really amazing figure – for share-holders, that is – of 35. A drastic 40 and odds per cent cut. The consequences are somewhat pathetic: when a course is due, which happens from time to time, I have to print the documents myself, set up the machines and so on. I wonder when I’ll be asked to clean the toilets and to check the IDs at the entrance...

I’ve been lucky “enough” for not leaving. But this all looks like a temporary relief to all those remaining. I think I need a bit of fresh air; I’m flying to Stockholm tomorrow afternoon. I guess I deserve a longer weekend after all the work I’ve done to improve a Struts course. Geez, this all sounds so boring. Probably because it is.

FOUC – Watch your Mouth!

Sébastien — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:34:00 GMT

I was wondering why some sites were adding empty in their (Amongst those, bBlog’s templates I’m working on at the moment)... Nosy person that I am, I quickly stumbled upon BlueRobot which explains what FOUC is (Flash of Unstyled Content, no connection whatsoever with Janet Jackson). You probably have noticed it before without really paying attention to it: the page appears without any style applied and then the style goes into action (For the herd of French-speaking readers that might be willing to know more about FOUC in their mother tongue, go there).

According to BlueRobots, this occurs with IE when the @import rule is used to import styles – even though I’m pretty sure I experienced it while using Mozilla on that very same site, which uses two style sheets: the first one (default one) is applied and the pages look white and then my styles are applied and it all becomes normal.

That solution to that problem is fairly simple, though I’m not quite sure I understand why it works: add a <SCRIPT> or <style> afterwards. And here is my mysterious empty tag entering the scene! Unknown solution to an unknown problem, woaw, it’s been a heck of a day!

The Fox is on Fire

Sébastien — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 15:19:00 GMT

Mozilla Firebird becomes Mozilla Firefox – to be pronounced with a hot spud in the mouth. The logo is quite nice, somewhat reminiscent of the eye of the lizzard, dinosaur, whatever, in small sizes (Cf. the favicon on Firebird, sorry, fox website). It shows a fox wrapped around the globe, the tail on fire. The globe is politically correct enough for not displaying any particular continent or country, but instead some imaginary wonderland on a blue planet. I like that.

Anyway, the animal – we don’t quite know anymore whether it’s a monster, a legendary bird, or a goupil, all those brand faces just induce confusion at the end of the day – provides us with the version 0.8 and the following new features:

A powerful new download manager that makes tracking multiple downloads easier;

Numerous improvements to bookmarks handling [...];
Improved handling of extensions [...];

An easy to use installer for Microsoft Windows users;

A new default theme for Mac OS X users that integrates seamlessly with the OS X desktop environment.

Have a nice trip, you guys.

Disconnected

Sébastien — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 09:34:00 GMT

It’s not until you cannot access freely to the Internet that you realise how much room it takes in your life. I have not posted in here since “last year” just because of that: my modem has just decided to give up when I came back from holidays at the beginning of January. When I came back home, all lights were off and my computer desperately refused to go online. My ISP is that efficient that I’m still waiting for another modem today.

2004 has started in Belfast, where I used my brand new digital camera for the first time. I also got to go to Kilkenny to celebrate this new year with a good pint. All this should be online some day, as soon as I get a connection back. Kilkenny is a really nice place, I must say. We stayed in a lovely B&B, just outside the City Centre and got to see a fair bit of the place, even though it was pretty misty.

Anyway, as soon as everything is back to normal, I should be back to work to provide you with the most useless posts ever. “Just a cause”. And until then, you may have a look to a post I could have written myself, having come across the same problem quite a few times without even trying to solve it. I am also looking at JSF, at the moment, so I might bother you with quite a few remarks about them pretty soon.

If you are more into politics, a quick look there might be worth it.

“’Cause We All Shine On!”

Sébastien — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:17:00 GMT

As blogs are appearing here and there, someone out there decided it was time to give a bit of “humanity” to this cornucopia of faceless sites. And this someone came up with XFN, a way to link to people’s site and specify your connection with those people. This can be done by simply specifying the rel in the <a> tag.

Pretty simple. Let’s take Nidhogg’s blog. If I were to use XFN to show my connections with him, the link would become:

<a href="http://stup.org/blogs/nidhogg" hreflang="en" ¶
title="Yggdrasil: Home of Nidhogg" rel="friend met" accesskey="n">Nidhogg</a>

Let’s imagine for a sec I have a crush on a Tatiana. I link to her blog, specify a rel attribute such as crush friend met. If on her side, she links to my blog with acquaintance met, there might be a chance that our blog-based relationship might not work. On the other hand, should she write that she has a crush on me as well, a web-service could alert us both about our mutual feelings and thus help us start a wonderful story.

Beyond this somewhat flowery picture, the interest of this feature is to go deeper in the linking between weblogs. So far, the existing links define and highlight a common interest (what you talk about interest me, I link to your page to show this interest, like “subscribing to a RSS feed shows a commitment to reading what someone else writes.”*). XFN describes more precisely the “nature” of this link, allowing the reader to know about the relationship between those two blogs – and therefore “analyse” the way information might be exchanged between them. Well, that’s the conclusion I came to, because otherwise, I really can’t think of what use it could be.

* I goddamn know I’ve read that on another blog but I just cannot find which one anymore. Sorry to the original author, I’ll do my best to find him/her back.

.Net: Give Me My ID Back!

Sébastien — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:28:00 GMT

Working as a designer on a .Net project must be hellish, I thought yesterday as I was struggling with label tags. The “official” web-designer was lying sick in his warm bed and I had to do the job on my own. And that’s how I came to design a form with .Net.

The label HTML tag is handy. When used with the for attribute, the normal behaviour is to position the cursor in the associated field when clicking onto the label. The for attribute must contain the id of the associated field to get this behaviour. But the thing is that .Net rewrites the id of the fields to meet its purposes: thus, the id for the text field you initially called “MyTextField” becomes something like “MyWonderfulUserControl_MyTextField”. And the label no longer works.

The same problem occurs when you want to work with JavaScript. When using getElementById, there’s no way you’re going to find your element since its id has changed. The only fix I came up with was to get the elements with getElementsByTagName, and then check if the name contains the original id:

var label = document.getElementsByTagName('label');
for (i = 0 ; i < label.length ; i++)
{
    var tmp = label[i];
    if (tmp.id.indexOf('MonLabel') > -1 ) {
     // do something, silly billy...
    }
}

That being said, I’m no .Net expert, there might be something I am missing there. At the end of the day, the thought of .Net playing with ids leaves me somewhat bemused.

PHP: FTP Recursive rm

Sébastien — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:39:00 GMT

As a contributor of Webmasters-fr.net couldn’t make his recursive FTP rm work, I began to look at the examples provided in the PHP manual... I couldn’t make them work either.

That’s why I ended up rewriting the ftp_rmAll, and it now works fine on my FTP server. I still have to play around to make sure it does work in any situation, but here is the code:

function ftp_rmAll($conn_id,$dst_dir){
	if (!@ftp_chdir($conn_id, $dst_dir)) {
	   die("Couldn't change directory\n");
	}
   $ar_files = ftp_nlist($conn_id, "");
   if (is_array($ar_files)){ // makes sure there are files
       for ($i=0;$i < sizeof($ar_files);$i++){ // for each file
           $st_file = $ar_files[$i];
           // don't care about . and ..
           if ($st_file != '.' && $st_file != '..')
             // check if it is a directory
           if (ftp_size($conn_id, $st_file) == -1){
               ftp_rmAll($conn_id, $st_file); // if so, use recursion
           } else {
               ftp_delete($conn_id, $st_file); // if not, delete the file
           }
       }
   }
   
   ftp_rmdir($conn_id, $dst_dir); // delete empty directories
}

$conn_id      = ftp_connect($ftp_server);
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

ftp_rmAll($conn_id, "/repertoire");

Accept-Language in Firebird

Sébastien — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:55:00 GMT

I was a bit surprised this morning to realise you cannot modify your accept-language settings in the options panel with Firebird. It looks however like a basic feature to be able to tell your browser in which language you would like to view the pages you are calling.

Luckily, Google answered quite politely to my question and brought me to that link (well not quite there, first to the W3C i18n page which was recommending TTLO extension). I immediately deleted that en-us entry which is useless to me and put fr as my first choice as I usually do with my browsers.

I’m quite curious to know the reason behind that: why would Firebird people decide to leave out such a feature which has become essential on today’s Internet? They are obviously not aware of a site like this which automatically displays its homepage in the language specified by the browser (also, on this site, everything you wanted to know about encoding). It’s a bit as if a tour operator decided to send a bunch of French tourists on a trip with an English-speaking guide to visit French monuments. Ridiculous.

Sankta Lucia i Stockholm

Sébastien — Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:35:00 GMT

Spend the 13th of December in Stockholm is something you have to do some day. It is really amazing. I’m just back from there and I must say it’s been one of the most amazing days I’ve spent so far in Sweden. Lucia was a saint from Sicily and was celebrated on the 13th December under the Julian calendar, which happened to be the shortest day of the year and therefore light was coming back from that day on. The fact that her name is close to the word “ljus” (light) in Swedish must be another reason for her popularity in Sweden – she must be the only Catholic saint celebrated in Sweden, as far as I know... Anyway, when you go around in shops, you come across groups of people singing, amongst whom stands a girl dressed in white, with a red belt and a crown of candles on the head. The finest Lucia must have been Ellen who happened to be the one for her company.

I’ve had the chance to go to the Luciakonsert in the Globe which is a huge building for ice hockey matches, and that was simply amazing. Hundreds of kids all carrying a candle and dressed in white entered in the dark, singing Christmas songs and the famous Då i vårt mörka hus, stiger med tända ljus, Sankta Lucia. The acme was the entering of Lucia, carrying a crown with candles and walking till the middle of the stage: really moving. And then dances and more singing with even more light entering the Globe, this all finished with the building of a big virtual Christmas tree made of steel rings onto which all the kids came to lay their candles.

Another thing to do in Sweden is, BTW, go to a ice hockey match, but that’s entirely somthing else and a somewhat different atmosphere!

Wrapping Things Up with JavaScript

Sébastien — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:10:00 GMT

That’s probably no secret for you, but I don’t quite like JavaScript: when it comes to use it, it always feels to me like I’m about to enter a world of deeply-buried secrets, where you have to deal with terrifying creatures which change of behaviour when exposed to any other browser – or magic powder.

However, the way Simon Willison uses JavaScript in this article to just wrap things up and bring the final nice “touches” really makes me enthiusastic.

First, he shows how to use the cite attribute of blockquote to render it as a link – a bit like here on Moz where this attribute appears below the quote itself, but not as a link. Then, he uses JavaScript to switch from one panel to another one. The demo doesn’t seem to be working but the solution he proposes looks quite elegant to me (something I didn’t think I would say about a JS script).

This might be useful to solve one problem I encounter while writing in here. When I type in the links for an article I cite, I always give a value to the accesskey attribute. The problem is that a) I don’t display it (useless, then), and b) I often type the same keys since in a blog, you don’t quite have the choice. The solution for that is going to be JavaScript one, I feel it!

And the Winner Is... Who?!

Sébastien — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:01:00 GMT

Peter Canavan, BBC’s sports personality of the year, that’d be a great laugh – reading Slugger O’Toole’s readers comments on the subject is already a good one. Exit Jonny Wilkinson (gnark gnark gnark). That’s what people in Ireland are trying to do thanks to an email praising the Tyrone captain who won the All-Ireland Gaelic football games. In this email, the authors ask to vote for him on the BBC website so that he becomes 2003 BBC’s sports personality – probably also to remind the English that you don’t need to dial an international code to call Belfast...

That’d be hilarious if it were to happen because people in London just don’t have a clue of who the heck Peter Canavan may be. According to Ellen and confirmed by the Guardian article, it already happened earlier this year as an Irish rebel song, A Nation Once Again was elected the world’s favourite song.

Fed Up with All This Messy Code

Sébastien — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 09:15:00 GMT

Time for Code Review... It’s Christmas

Coding in PHP is dead easy. Any 3-year-old kid can play with it and connect to a database and display data. Coding in a clean manner is a totally different story. The problem is obviously not PHP-related for it has been a conundrum since the developer is a developer. However, PHP, as any script-like language makes messy coding straightforward, not to say a rule. I’ve been taking a look to the code I’ve written in the past weeks because of my recent experience with Spip – of which I will talk below – and geez, how awful that is. Here’s me, preaching all around the place: “Don’t tie application logic and its presentation together or thou shall roast in hell in terrible pains, you crappy crap thing!” and as soon as I open any editor to type in some PHP code, I just don’t care anymore.

Why a Template Engine?

But those recent discoveries about my way of coding in PHP led me to nose around for some proper answer. I’m a big fan of templating because I think it is the answer to the eternal problem of developers and designers working hand-in-hand together. Developers don’t give a damn about design (I’m a bit ashamed to say I’m amongst those ones: when I code something at work, I really don’t bother about the look since there is someone in charge for that) and don’t want to have anything with HMTL, and designers can’t read (and don’t want to) any line of code. The results are sometimes dreadful: the styles are either not applied anymore or modified in an ugly way, or the code doesn’t work anymore because the designer deleted some code without realising it. Time lost, time lost and time lost (yes, thrice).

Tough Times with Spip

Those thoughts about my own code were inspired by another programme, though: Spip. On the road to W3C validation, Spip is always on the way. Spip has in fact its own template engine to generate the pages of a site. So far, so good. Except that:

Spip still produces HMTL tags on the application logic side, tieing together presentation and contents. Those tags include old tags such as <br> (without /), <font> (yuuuuuk).
Spip template engine is really straightforward, not to say simplistic. The aim is to provide the webmaster with a reduced but easily-usable Spip tags. One drawback of this is that anyone willing to extend this template with his own functions just suffers, bigtime. Another problem which, at first glance, mightn’t look that bad, is that those tags are in French, with no way to customize them since they are hard-coded. Which makes of Spip a franco-français tool, even though documentation has been translated.
Spip administration interface does not use this template engine. And when you take a quick look at the code, you just close the file immediately because it’s just a nightmare. It is impossible to maintain, impossible to improve, impossible to extend. Well, it is, of course, but it would be a real pain in the ass, because functions are just written anywhere, sometimes several times and the presentation (with its cornucopia of <font> *sigh*) is scattered in different files, amongst the request processing lines of code. As a result, you just cannot customize the administration interface. Maybe that’s the goal they were looking for (which would be even worse).

Smarty

This is the bitter analysis which led me to take an insightful glance at my own way of coding. And this brings me to Smarty. I had heard zillions trillions of times of Smarty without really taking a look at it. But I am working at the moment with bBlog, a weblog tool written in PHP, which uses Smarty. The results are terrific: a code which is crystal-clear, easily extensible, easily maintanable. I’ve added my own functions with no pain and customized my pages very easily thanks to Smarty templates. And those pages validate.

Smarty has one strong point: you can call PHP functions within the template. One might say this goes the wrong way on the path to application logic/presentation separation. But no. There is a a big difference between removing all the code from HMTL and separating application logic and presentation since you still need to process a list of data to display them. This has nothing to do with business logic and yet it requires code which would be closer to presentation layer. That’s why it is an excellent thing that Smarty allows PHP functions calls within the templates.

The drawback is that Smarty is really a big big thing and you have to be patient to master it properly. It is also a bit complicated to put a programme together with it. But you are quickly awarded for using a template engine: you know where to modify what, you can modify your site layout without touching a single character in your application logic code, you can easily add new functions to your site, etc. All the time you’ve “lost” learning how to use it is paid back darn quickly. Today, I really think that there’s no way I could do without it anymore.

Smaller Letters to Save Paper

Sébastien — Sat, 06 Dec 2003 11:55:00 GMT

That’s the idea a Karin Torstensson Hirsmark came up with to save about 10% of the paper costs: reduce the size of letters.

“Stadsdirektör Karin Torstensson Hirsmark fick en idé att om man skrev med mindre bokstäver på alla kommunala papper så skulle kommunen spara upp emot tio procent av papperskostnaderna”
Stadsdirektör Karin Torstensson Hirsmark got the idea that if people wrote with smaller letters on every communal papers, the commune would save up to ten percent of the paper costs.

Grand idea, wasn’t it? The problem was... that the politicians couldn’t read the documents any more – they were just damn too small to read. Everything just went back to normal size because of that. Funny isn’t it? (I found that link on Typographi.ca)

About SMIL

Sébastien — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:55:00 GMT

As I went recently onto RTÉ website, I found out that the streams had a .smil extension – and Real Player had no trouble opening it. A bit baffled, I realised that cybercodeur.net had released a brief article about SMIL. SMIL (pronounce “smile”) which “allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 2.0, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen” (W3C). SMIL is an XML-like language allowing to position media contents as well as synchronizing them.

I found a fairly old (1999) but good tutorial written by Hervé Foucher; on the website there is also a viewer called “Soja”. Anyway, SMIL is already a few years old but it begins to get out. It has to fight against Flash and SVG... The thing is, SMIL looks pretty close to HTML and that is a good thing: it will allow webmasters, who might not have the sufficient skills (even though it is kind of easy to create Flash animations) nor the money to pay for Flash tools, to go multimedia.

To read more about SMIL: A Realist's SMIL Manifesto part I and part II.

The Scary Stuff of the Week

Sébastien — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 19:41:00 GMT

If you’re from Northern Ireland, here’s something to remind you for whom you voted on Thursday:

Spooky, eeh*? The Sunday Mirror states it quite well:

The burning question now, of course, is where does the process go from here? The British government needs to be supportive of the pro-agreement parties, particularly the SDLP, which has been left out in the cold in recent months and paid for the snub at the ballot box. What it or the Irish government cannot afford to do, however, is ignore the disillusionment within unionism.

Here are a few facts about your man, just for the craic.

*’m talking about the tie, of course.

Blogging Without Knowing

Sébastien — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 20:55:00 GMT

As I was preparing a few posts about blogs, it suddenly occurred to me that a while ago, back in 1999, as I was about to move to Sweden, I was already writing something which was more or less a blog – I’m not even sure the term had been coined at that time... The aim was back then to let my friends know what I was up to.

At first, I was struggling to put the whole lot online: I had to copy a template I had written, write the message in it, get the previous page, update the link and put both of them online. There was also a link on the main page which was leading to the latest page. When I got pissed off with all this, I wrote a Java programme generating the new page from the text I had typed in a Swing application and updating the previous page as well as the main page. It also calculated the number of days since my arrival there to display it in the message. But I had to put those pages online via FTP anyway... That was not a wonderful system but it was still a great improvement to me.

Funny to read this again, looking back at the time I spent in Gothenburg. I’m pretty sure anyone who’s gone there to spend a year as an exchange student might appreciate it as well. And that’s why blogs are so interesting, at the end of the day: people can share their everyday life. Even though it may look somewhat boring because it’s very personal, there is always something in there which might interest someone else. That’s a the great thing about blogs.

Have You Not Seen This Typeface Yet?

Sébastien — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 11:15:00 GMT

I was in Stockholm two weeks ago and I could see that Helvetica™ was splashed everywhere around the place there too, just like here in Paris. For those who are not quite aware of how present Helvetica is in Paris, here is its look as it appears in its light version on Linotype web site:

More obvious, the French will go here and see what I am talking about. The plane lovers will have a look at American Airlines, Lufthansa or Bombardier Aerospace – and I’ve just found Air France on-board magazine whose title (magazine, funly enough) and article look like it too*.

Helvetica was designed by Max Medinger in 1956 – though A Type Primer by John Kane mentions 1954 – and has become one of the most used typefaces since then. Quite easy to spot thanks to its typical ‘a’ and ‘Q’ as well as spot on the ‘i’, I came across it in Stockholm quite a few times: on ads for banks, mobile phones, clothes... Anything really. A bit like here: this morning I was wandering around in La Défense and realised the signage was typeset in Helvetica.

Even though Helvetica is used a lot, the general opinion about it is quite similar to the one given by Pelle Anderson from A4 quoting one of his interviewees answering to the question “If you had to live with only one typeface till the rest of your life, which one would you choose?”:

En annan av de tillfrågade kommenterade att om han tvingades att bara använda Helvetica skulla han begå självmord. Ändå är Times och Helvetica världens mest använda typsnitt, synbarligen utan självmordensepidemier bland formgivare.
“Another interviewee replied that if he were to use only Helvetica, he would commit suicide. Although Times and Helvetica are the most used typefaces, there’s obviously no suicide epidemy amongst the designers.”

Typographers usually don’t like Helvetica. Too big a counter, too high a x-height, I guess. But the biggest problem of Helvetica is its use. It is everywhere you look and it tends to become a bit boring – just like its competitor, Arial. How come, then, even though people all say it’s used far too much it still appears every now and then? Well, the letterforms are plain and don’t convey any significant feeling and that’s why it’s used and in any field. It lacks of real identity and therefore corresponds to any. I’m pretty sure as Christmas is approaching that brand new ads will appear – showing one more time Helvetica’s success.

* I’m still no expert and I might be wrong. I’m just trying to learn on my own by reading books and observing...

Rewriting Slashdot with Web Standards

Sébastien — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 08:44:00 GMT

A List Apart has issued an article about rewriting Slashdot with XHTML and CSS standards. It is pretty interesting because it is very much a case study about how to convert an existing web site into a validating site.

Thus, menus were converted everywhere, tables for layout have been replaced by divs, a CSS style sheey has been applied and the result is pretty stunning:

Savings per page without caching the CSS file: ~2KB per request

Savings per page with caching the CSS file: ~9KB per request

Though a few KB doesn't sound like a lot of bandwidth, let’s add it up. Slashdot states that they serve 50 million pages in a month. When you break down the figures, that’s ~1,612,900 pages per day or ~18 pages per second. Bandwidth savings are as follows:

Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth

Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth

The result can be seen here, as well as this page with the same XHTML code with a brand new CSS style sheet – uugh, ugly titles, though.

Pretty interesting because it shows the process for rewriting pages to convert them:

Clean the code by removing the useless tags as well as deprecated ones;
List’em all: “Essentially, anything that there was more than two of was put it into a list, for example: login, sections, help, stories, about, services, etc.”
Give structure to the document by using headers (<hn>);
Organise the layout thanks to boxes (<div>) by
a) grouping semantically the contents and
b) positioning them;
Add the final designing bits, such as pictures, fonts, colours, etc.

About Comic Sans...

Sébastien — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 20:48:00 GMT

Read on the French list dealing with typography (managed by the Irisa) and posted by Dr Ph. Michel:

Petite erreur vue sur une présentation PowerPoint à un congrès : le mot « traitement » abrégé en « ttt », le tout en Comic Sans MS, (police à la mode visiblement) et répété au début de chaque ligne : comme le « t » dans cette police est en forme de croix, tout cela donnait un effet de cimetière militaire, dans une présentation de cancérologie…

Indeed (too lazy to translate, actually). :-)

AIWA

Sébastien — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:08:00 GMT

Speak Up and Armin Vit pleased me today as they published an article about AIWA new logo.

I was strolling along some day in the metro in Paris when I noticed this big ad with a fairly illegible logo. A bit stunned, I had to give a second look to finally spot “Aiwa.” My first thought was that it was pretty unfortunate that one couldn’t even read the name of the brand. And then I though that it was pretty ugly.

The following day, the topic came up in this conversation on one of my favourite forums, Typophile’s. The general opinion was somwhat close to mine. Some of Sony’s logos where shown by Jay Fraser showing the trend in Sony, ligature-wise. All in all, they can hardly be read at all. And yes, I thought it was AIVA.

Three conclusions for myself:

I’m not as tasteless as I first thought I was: the general opinion of Typophile’s as well as Speak Up’s experts seems to be mine
Still loooots to learn from people like Typophile’s members
Christmas is getting close, I’d better hurry up to buy presies, otherwise it’s going to be the usual rush to find anything at the last minute.

The Mummy-Compliant Blogger Survival Kit

Sébastien — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 14:38:00 GMT

This article should be called “How to Prevent Your Mom From Reading Your Blog,” but it is called instead “What to Do When Your Mom Discovers Your Blog.” It’s all Blogger-oriented but some of the bits in there are true for any blog. You wouldn’t want your mother discover your true self, would you?

Use a Pseudonym

That is a proper advice. I think it shouldn’t be limited to blogs, though. If you care for your privacy, I think you should use pseudonyms as much as you can – my favourite being sébastien, after some long time of thorough analysis. It is indeed very easy via Google (and I made the experience with people I know – everybody has, I’m sure) to spot the interests of someone – that is, if this someone is active on the Internet. Scary how sometimes you cannot quite forget you’ve been involved in things such as LaTeX...

Go Multi-Lingual

This leaves with me with a dreadful dilemma: do I want my mother or my girlfriend to understand what I write? In any case, Ellen would understand either French or English. I may as well write in English. And that’s fine with me, English is gibberish to my Mom. She’d be so ashamed to read about what her son is really into, after all.

Search and Destroy Modify

Righteo: “use a Mom-friendly language.”

Pull a Tony Pierce

I don’t quite know who the hell your man may be. But the thing is: put on a disclaimer pretending that nothing you write is true. There you go, Weblogism’s new disclaimer: nothing in here is quite true. You probably noticed the sub-title “Wild imaginings...” There you go, son.

Go to the Source...

...And remove your site from Google. Who would be foolish enough to do that?! That’d be like cutting your arms off, wouldn’t it?

Tomorrow, Marquee All Over the Place

Sébastien — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 08:19:00 GMT

Mozilla supports <marquee>

I thought we were finished with the <marquee> tag. Not quite. As I am working on the re-design of a forum, I realised with horror that on the existing one, the news were displayed with a marquee tag. And that Mozilla supported it. It therefore means that such a page can be fully seen and appreciated, which is quite spooky, really.

After a bit of researching, I came across this. Soon, we’ll be allowed to prove our bad taste to the world and still validate.

Work Around (the Clock)

As I already pointed out yesterday the use of user style sheets to fight ad banners, I found on mozilla.weebeastie.net a way to disable this horrible spinning:

marquee {
	-moz-binding: none;
	overflow: auto;
	display: block;
}

I also decided t’was time to finish with blinking as well. I then added:

blink {
	text-decoration: none;
}

Now, the Oh Pointy Bird page looks more Andy Warhol-ish...

I’ve then fixed my personal problems, but this leaves me with a new one: how to do as ugly as the <marquee> tag with standard XHTML and JavaScript? I’m afraid I’m too lazy – and too respectful for the people who might decide to view any of my sites – to either write it or look for it... I guess I’ll wait until CSS3 is out... *sigh*

Off With Their Heads... Ads!

Sébastien — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:04:00 GMT

I had never been quite aware of how much a nuisance ads on the net could be. Of course, pop-up windows used to piss me off and then Mozilla came around and fixed that.

It wasn’t until today as I was chatting away with pierre that I realised how much I had grown accustomed to ad banners: they were part of the landscape, just still there and nothing to think of. Yet they were sometimes quite a pain in the ass, especially when they are big Flash animations or pictures right in the middle of the text. I know this sounds like I’m coming from another planet, discovering that only now. But if you look around you, people don’t bother: they simply accept the fact that ads are part of the Net.

Once again, CSS along with Mozilla appears to be the panacea in that matter. I found a user style sheet on the Web, placed it under:

C:\Documents and profiles\<myname>\Application Data\¶
Mozilla\Profiles\default\<whatever>.slt\chrome

and when I restarted my browser, I experienced a totally new way of surfing: an ad-free one. And it’s only at that moment that one realises how irritating ads can be. As I’m a bit of an extremist, I even added the following:

embed[classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"]

to the long list in order to hide Flash bits as well.

When you have a look at the user style sheet, it is only possible because Mozilla respects so much CSS standards. Thus, a selector such as *[href*="arandomdomain.net"] only works in browsers which try to get close to the W3C recommandation.

The Fields of Athenry

Sébastien — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 20:46:00 GMT

For those who know me, they also know how much I can’t help but mentioning Ireland from time to time. For those ones, I apologise in advance for spamming the Stup weblog digest with such an article.

Yesterday (Sunday), I watched Ireland being crushed by France (Ireland’s Call was probably not loud enough, the Irish didn’t even bother to come onto the pitch. Or did they?) in the rugby World-Cup quarter-final – not that I’m fond of sport; that was rather a matter of showing who the boss is to my girlfriend.

I watched it on French TV, unlike other matches. And I must admit the comments were quite a laugh. They started by talking about The Fields of Athenry. Fair enough, good idea, the French don’t know their left from their right and keep thinking Dublin is a few miles away from Liverpool. Well, a wee bit of researching before hand would have been great. First, your man mentioned it as being called Ze Fields of Atenree (Well, had I not been there, I would probably be still saying it this way). Then, he told the story: a mother crying the deporting of her son to Australia during the Great Famine. Everybody damn knows that it’s not his mother, but his wife! The song tells the story of Michael, who had to steal Trevelyan’s corn to feed his child, arrested and about to be exiled to Australia. The story goes that Lord Trevelyan had imported corn from America to struggle against the famine. It appeared that the corn was to be milled. People, starving to death, still saw it as corn, and broke into the stores. Some were arrested and deported to Australia.

It has become one of the Glasgow Celtic anthems, and whatever people might say, it has a political twist to it, even though the song could be sung by any poor people from Ireland to England.

Anyway, the waffling carried on until the so-called Irish “national” anthem, Ireland’s Call. Not quite, though. Oh, I came across this. Wonder this time whether to laugh or cry.

After a (long) while, Ireland finally managed to find their way and scored a try (I heard the sign-posts to the the try-line were written in Irish...), started the Loooow Liiiie the Fields... and the speaker said: “And they’re playing some celtic song!” Quite so. A song called The Fields of Athenry...

Non-breakable Space Story

Sébastien — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 20:23:00 GMT

I’m quite fond of this new fashion, that is, displaying the language of a page after the link. This can be done by using the content property generating, well, err... content in that manner:

a[hreflang]:after {
content:" ["attr(hreflang)"]"; 
}

What I was a bit frustrated by was that this text between brackets was sometimes sent back to a new line, which is, IMVHO, a bit of a disgrace, typographically speaking – or maybe it’s just another French national sport, caring for the line breaks. English-speaking people don’t even bother thinking of where to hyphen a word.

Browsing through the W3C recommandation, I found out that you were allowed to put Unicode-coded escape sequences. That just suited my needs; my code looks now something like:

a[hreflang]:after {
content:"\A0["attr(hreflang)"]"; 
}

As far as I can see, it works just fine. With Mozilla, that is.

Don’t Shoot the Ambulance, Verdana’s driving

Sébastien — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 18:31:00 GMT

I don’t quite understand why so many people keep complaining about Verdana. It has helped many a designer to create their design.

Down the Garden to Have A Fair Look

Since I keep reading rants about Verdana, I had to make sure: I went onto csszengarden.com to lead a survey in order to know what typefaces were used... csszengarden.com has become a somewhat good reference in web-designing when dealing with CSS (because apparently the anti-Verdana fight on this field). I browsed through the contributions, one by one, looked for the font used, and at what sizes. And there is no doubt. Verdana is still on the lead:

Use of fonts in CSS Zen Garden
Font name	Number of Uses
Verdana	21
Georgia	13
Arial	12
Times / Times New Roman	4*
Trebuchet MS	3
Tahoma	3
Geneva	1
Lucida Grande	1
Courier	1

*(1 using browser default settings)

A good surprise, the designs made with Times in very tiny sizes do look good: see #41 and #45.

The survey in itself has been quite a laborious task: spotting the font used is damn easy; but then, when you want to find the sizes used, you sometimes to go through a whole lot before finding what you want. The “style” of size-setting range from “0.65em/1.3em” to “10px/1.4em” via “13px/140%.” Very often, I didn’t even bother finding the size, that was just too tedious a task.

What’s Wrong with Verdana, then?

The anti-Verdana are right: it’s not available on every system. It is very often not present on Linux platforms and the replacement font is in majority Arial. The problem is that a 75%-reduced Verdana looks fine. An Arial doesn’t.

The real problem, then, really is the size. I found some time ago a good article about that in The Noodle Incident, from which I excerpted this below:

“So I want two things from a text sizing method: that it present my choice across the main browsers, but still be resizeable to respect people's needs and different hardware.”

I think alike.

A Linux user is quite entitled to complain to see tiny characters. But somehow, the Web designer chose some fonts – because it suited his website design, main audience, etc. As far as he’s concerned, his task is to provide ways to resize the size of the text if the reader feels the need to increase it.

The Linux user (let’s carry on with this example) has then several ways to work around this issue:

find Verdana somewhere;
write a user stylesheet which will replace the designer’s one (just about its role: overriding the designer’s choices);
resize the text.

I know this sounds terribly against accessible sites. The thing is the font problem is a never-ending story. Unless a universal font is created, both easy to read in small sizes and pleasing to the eye, no proper solution can be found but using Arial or Helvetica. But you know what? I don’t have Helvetica on my computer. That being said, Microsoft tried to create those fonts: they’re called Verdana and Georgia (by Matthew Carter & Tom Rickner). I can’t think of any similar success.

What’s Wrong with Arial, then?

For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Arial).

For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Verdana).

There’s no need to be an expert to say that Verdana in the example above is much more legible than Arial because it’s wider for roughly the same x-height (l’œil, in French). By the way, it would have been just about the right place to use font-size-adjust, wouldn’t it?

National Novel Writing Month

Sébastien — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 06:03:00 GMT

Here we go! I’ve decided I’d be part of the craic, even though the crazy goal of reaching 50,000 words in a month is quite head-spining. I’m afraid I’ll have to leave everything else aside to write my novel...

Well, so far, I’ve written... em... let me count... 4 words. But a thrilling start, I can tell you!

Libération’s New Layout

Sébastien — Sun, 02 Nov 2003 23:05:00 GMT

The French paper Libération changed its layout on October 13th. I had not had the occasion to take a look at it, but on Friday, I just couldn’t resist: I had to buy it just to see...

Well, first thought, “here we go, another paper which tried to get a trendy look, website-like,” which, in my eyes, is a somewhat negative thought. Sans-serif fonts have invaded the pages (a bit too much for my humble tastes), Minion has been given up (I really love the ‘Q’, ‘j’ and ‘y’ in this typeface) and replaced by something thicker with an ugly ‘3’ and lots of fantasy typefaces. I am also going to miss Matrix Script which I had got used to...

Then I saw the headers and sighed... Le Monde has no reason to worry yet. The whole thingy looks like it’s been done to please the young reader – quite okay with me, except that it seems to me that I’m not in the target – and to keep an eye on the Internet. Well, just a slight detail: there’s no hyper-text link in a paper... But, hey, they managed to insert a review for a porn on DVD.

One good thing, though, the Gotham font, by the Hoefler Type Foundry, looks quite good in any size, especially the Gotham Condensed Book and Medium characters.

The Scribe and the Longhorn

Sébastien — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 08:35:00 GMT

Microsoft is really teasing us with Longhorn and I am really getting impatient. I must say I was not really enthiusastic about Microsoft products so far, influenced by hearsay as well as the “Big Willy” position of MS. That being said, having worked with .Net for quite a while, I think it’s getting in the right direction. I’ve worked for quite a while with Java and I think I’m rather objective when I write such a thing. Of course, there are some drawbacks which can be very painful, but it really gets easy to have things up and running.

Anyway, back to the point, Longhorn has thought of typography. It provides through XAML in Avalon elements to support “quality typographic presentation to the user.” The Typography class gathers properties to provide typographic features, such as StandardLigatures.

The whole lot is based on OpenType, developed jointly by Adobe and MS in a cross-platform perspective – OpenType fonts can be used on Mac. It is based on Unicode, thus providing a greater support for world’s languages and ligatures and real small-caps.

With such a support, the question is: will it be used in its full strength? I cannot imagine developers, who are not even aware of the existence of ligatures in this world, getting worried about ligatures or small-caps. They are the ones today who don’t even see there’s something wrong with a quote such as “ ' ”.

On the Edge, Staring at the Bottom

Sébastien — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 11:40:00 GMT

People now begin to stare at each other with suspicion and every strange move is immediately interpreted: the figure has just been dropped as a bombshell, confirming all the rumours which were running wildly through the halls. The grapevine has once again proved its strength and accuracy.

171. Kind of figures you hear everyday on the news which tended to sound as remote and boring as a war on the other side of the planet. But when you start to consider you might be the 1 in 171, you start to wonder. And to shake.

Next, names will appear on a sheet of paper, or at the top of a somewhat brief email. People will start receive their letter thanking them for their valuable contribution (“Well done, but better do it elsewhere, now, you’d be so kind”) and the lengthy process of finding a new job will begin rather soon.

The question now? Well... Who?

Spammers Find their Way Through Blogs

Sébastien — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:52:00 GMT

Spammers had quickly found their way through our mailbox. Then came anti-spam tools appeared, allowing the Goods to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today, as blogs quickly spread, spammers follow the trend and post their “insightful” contributions onto this new type of sites, adding their insidious messages in the list of comments. Movable Type, the very popular publishing system, is badly hit and has recently published an article praising Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin, also mentioned on Luke Hutteman’s blog, SharpReader’s author.

Forums like phpBB are also hit as has been le Sauna: extraneous subscribers were appearing lately, all with email addresses whose domain was “mail.ru” and linking to a website proposing interesting products such as pregnancy tests. The answer was rather simple but not perfect: ban every user whose email address finishes with “mail.ru”. The door is still open to any other spammer to come and try to subscribe to the forum. Luckily enough, those users cannot post messages without their profile being validated before hand.

As an active member of “Cut spammers’ balls off” association, I can only applaude to Jay Allen’s move, even though I don’t use Movable Type (yet) and encourage any move in that direction.

Typographical Orgasm

Sébastien — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 11:23:00 GMT

Since I’ve begun this blog, I keep wondering who the f*** would be interested in the constant spilling of topics only interesting for their author. Well, at least, I am, and that’s more than enough. Let’s say this blog’s fate is to become my scribbling pad to which I’ll refer when I need my notes...

I’ve just had a typographical orgasm. That’s something rather violent but really good: the reactions subsequently go from “Waaoowww!” to “How come I didn’t come across such an idea before?” That’s what has just happened to me as I was browsing through typographi.ca: my wanderings led me to Speak Up and the feeling overcame me immediately.

First contact: “Waaoowww!” Plain, whitespace is given back its proper rights, pictures don’t deface the whole lot but fit in there just perfectly, light textual contents – note for myself : 11px/18px in Georgia – easily readable and enjoyable thanks to the magnificent and well-thought layout – traditionnal 3-column layout. The typeface for the titling looks grand in small sizes: I wonder what this one is... Its caps version looks stylish for the title. And the fleurons (Is that the name?) are just lovely.

Conclusion, still for myself: keep learning, you little crap, you might get to something like that some day!

Brand New Look for “A List Apart”

Sébastien — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 07:23:00 GMT

A List Apart is “back” with a brand new design, according to CYBERCodeur.net! Terrific!

To be frank now, I’ve never heard of it since I’m only beginning to deepen XHTML and CSS matters with a real shovel, but as the whole community seems to shake with excitement, I had to follow the great lumpen of people *where the author starts to feel embarrassed*.

Nice design but the fact that I’m not a big fan of MS Trebuchet tends to spoil the ecstasy I should feel. The colours are however harmonious, with a painting-like banner and a logo which is really really well done: the typeface is just perfect, conveying modernity as well as rigour and plainness, reflecting the spirit of XHTML and CSS.

I’m no expert to comment the contents as a Dave Shea might do, but I’m somewhat pleased to see a “Typography” section. And dead pleased to see that Dean Allen, whom I’ve already mentioned within this mess, has contributed to it, since his site is still a reference to my eyes.

Read Regular, a New Typeface for Dyslexics

Sébastien — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 11:33:00 GMT

A Dutchwoman, Natascha Frensch, has released a new typeface designed to be read by people with dyslexia and called Read Regular.

Based on the accentuating of differences between letters dyslexics tend to confuse, Read Regular proposes a different shape for letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’ instead of flipping the ‘b’ to get a ‘d’ and uses large openings for letters like ‘a’ and ‘o’. Ascenders and descenders are extended and no serif is added to prevent the reader from visually “closing” the shapes. It also uses a relatively large hinting to create space around the letters, especially for Read Space.

The PDF presenting the font shows an example of Read Regular typeset in 10.4 and 8.4: the result is quite nice and certainly more pleasant than Comic Sans, which was regarded as a good candidate for typesetting texts for dyslexics, because of its assymetrical shapes.

The next step will be to make this typeface widely available so that it can be used on websites, for example: I’m pretty sure it would look very good on screen. It would be interesting to know if Natascha Frensch has made tests in web pages... I’d be one of the first to use Read Regular, that’s for sure!

Thank God for SharpReader!

Sébastien — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 06:51:00 GMT

I’m kind of reading-addicted. Everything which can be read will be read, as my voracious eyes wander around in the desperate hope of finding anything! I often have to yell them back.

In this struggle to keep my eyes steady but fed, RSS appeared to me as the panacea when I discovered it onto Textism, a site I keep coming onto because of its spirit, pleasantness, plainness (those two last ones are somewhat related)... and just a ’cause!

But so far, I was using an ugly Java application called RSSViewer... I really cannot figure out why it has to be so bad-looking. It kind of works *cough* *cough*, why not use this working *cough* *cough again* programme as a basis to write a somewhat more attractive application?? I just simply cannot get it. I’d do it myself if I had the time to do so, but, well, thank you but no, thank you.

Anyway, I was a bit fed up to see a DOS console being launched every time my computer started, so I began to search for... something else. And I came across SharpReader which simply does it. And nicely. And quickly. I shall order my troups to build a statue to Luke Hutteman, who wrote this programme in .Net. Now, my crave for info is going to be satisfied in a wonderful and simple way.

Comparison of Popular Fonts Online

Sébastien — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 08:44:00 GMT

I’ve been looking for such a study for quite a while and I finally came across this one, which begins to be old craíc (2 years-old): Usability News.

Legibility

In this study, though effective reading times are not any different according to fonts, the perceived legibility is best with Courier, Comic, Verdana, Georgia and Times. Surprisingly, there is no difference serif vs. sans serif, even if it has to be pointed out that the tests have been done with the same size for fonts (12 points).

Personality and Elegance

Fonts such as Bradley and Corsivia are the fonts perceived as conveying ‘personality,’ leaving Times far behind, probably because lots of sites were still typeset in Times at that time. Comic, strikingly follows right behind, and is regarded as the most “fun and youthful”: righteo, that’s its aim, even if this font tends to unfortunately spread like a bad joke on serious websites.

Even more puzzling is the fact that Courier gives a somewhat business-like appearance to a website, together with Times. Whereas this is easily understandable for Times, Courier’s perception is rather hard to figure out.

General Preference

And the winner is... Verdana! No wonder. On screen, it does look better than any other font. Next follow Arial and Comic, two other sans. Sans serifs do not alias like serifs on screen and do appear much nicer. And the 4th one is Georgia, which does look good on screen two and is spreading quickly on new websites. Georgia being the first serif font, we have the classic pairs in today’s design, Verdana and Georgia, or Arial and Georgia.

Those two fonts, Verdana and Georgia have been designed by Matthew Carter and Tom Rickner specifically for the Web. Verdana has indeed very round letter-forms, along with a somewhat large inter-letter spacing that makes it an easy font to read. Georgia is announced by Microsoft as being the “serifed counterpart of Verdana” and therefore works damn well with it.

However, I really should think of carrying these tests myself, as recommanded by the article. Maybe wait until WebFonts is coming out to really have a genuine overview of what users want. And need.

The Font With My Name

Sébastien — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:33:00 GMT

A font that carries my name: here’s the news to make my day. It can be seen on Storm Type Foundry Web site, pismolijna.cz.

Five different weights, each with italics, small caps along with italics. The font is authored by František Štorm and is very pleasing to the eye. It also provides a fair amount of arrows, certainly as a tribute to the way the saint carrying the same name died as a martyr.

Those characters are going to join the already fantastic family Serapion II.

How to Scare Your Employees’ Pants Off

Sébastien — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 07:46:00 GMT

The method to make a company go from bad to worse is somewhat straightforward. First things first, spread rumours implying that the company loses money. Loads of it. That way, employees who have worked hard will feel relieved to see that their efforts are useless: whatever the amount of work, money won’t get in.

Next, send random people, that no one knows, in the offices to take measures. Order them to remain silent. They just look, try to spot the network plugs, look again, nod thoughtfully and mutter: “We’ll put the machines there.” “There” being the place where you’re sitting right now, the atmosphere thereby created will be all the more tensed. In the following hours, rumours will spread even better and people will gather, being non-productive and puzzled. And a bit scared as well.

The chairman must then send an email to all employees, letting dangle in the air that redundancies are expected according to the Board meeting. Write also that you cannot say anything, just mention redundancies. That’s all. The effect will be tremendous: people will shit their pants off and stop working.

The method does work. It’s somewhat smelly around here today...