XHTML was the fad for a while – you were a bad coder if your markup wasn’t valid XHTML. Now it’s fading out. Giorgio Sironi’s recent look at what happened to XHTML got me thinking: What was the point of all this? Why was XHTML useful, or was it?
Bored of Apache/LightHTTPD/etc.? Try Mongrel2
Mongrel is a refreshing approach to web servers. We’re all familiar with the Apache server and many of us have used Lighthttpd and Nginx and maybe some others too. So what makes Mongrel special? It’s language agnostic. It doesn’t have a PHP module, it doesn’t have a Python module, and yet you can still use those languages (and plenty more) …
How to get free publicity by screwing up your friendly URL algorithm
Today I’ll share a fun story with you. Would you like to get free publicity? Go ahead and make a poor friendly URL implementation, like the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, or YLE – the national broadcasting company of Finland – did. YLE had a very naive friendly URL algorithm on their web site. As you may guess, people found out about …
Why your mobile site probably sucks
Mobile phones of today can handle big sites fine. They can handle JavaScript quite well too. Then why is it that I constantly encounter crappy mobile versions of sites? What is it that makes these sites so bad, even though they were obviously designed with small screens in mind? While making a special layout for small screens is a great …
Opera Mobile vs. iPhone Safari Mobile
Lately I’ve had the chance to use an iPhone 3G. As I’ve been considering purchasing the new 3G S, this has been a good opportunity to see if I like the thing, but what I think of the phone itself is a matter of another post – Today, let’s look at its browse and compare it to Opera Mobile, which …
Ajax, high latency and user experience
Most of us probably have used at least one website which bases some major functionality on Ajax. But have you ever used a such site, done something, then moved on to another page, only to come back later to realize what you just did was never saved? What happens to XMLHttpRequests in a high latency situation, and how to deal …
Developing for smaller screens
As of late, I’ve been working on developing a widget that runs on both PCs and mobile phones, for Opera’s X-Widgets Challenge. The widgets for the challenge must work on a QVGA (320×240) screen, and that presents certain challenges. For example, as the size of the widget is so constrained, you need to think what is absolutely necessary – does …
Browser as an OS
It seems as if the browser is becoming easier to understand than other applications for people who don’t know much about computers in general. For example, if an application has a settings dialog and you ask the user to go back or close the dialog, they aren’t always sure what to do – should they press Cancel, OK or the …
Let’s Rickroll MTV Europe Music Awards 2008!
Okay so this is totally off the usual topics I guess, but this is too awesome to let it fail! Rick Astley has somehow managed to get into MTV Europe’s Music Awards 2008 gala in the category Best Act Ever. I suspect /b/ had something to do with this, but… I urge everyone to vote for Rick and tell everyone …
Never trust the user-agent header
Something I just have to share: an entertaining and informative read on the history of the browser user-agent string. I always did wonder why all browsers claim to be Mozilla when they are not… And clearly, the advice given by many JavaScript gurus to never use user-agent sniffing to determine browser capabilities is very good – just look what kind …