Aquarionics

First, my foot is bleeding. Both my feet are bleeding. In many ways, this is my own stupid fault, but since I walked half an hour to the bus-stop this morning, and my new socks (With penguins on them) now have unattractive dark brown spots on them also. I hope there arn’t any sharks following the penguins.

Second, Mark has been playing, and now his 404 pages do exactly what mine do, only – natually – in a cooler and obviously far better way. But, because of his decision to pass XHTML1.1 headers to Mozilla, and the fact his page isn’t well-formed XML at the moment (Didn’t close a

) I can’t link to the article, because I can’t read his weblog unless I load up IE, and IE on this laptop isn’t set up with proxies or anything. I find this amusing. The “Broken in Moz” thing, more than the “IE not set up” thing.

I’ve been reading Hixie‘s Perfect Weblog specs, and disagreeing. Well, obviously validating markup is good. But most of all is the fact that it specifically says that if a page isn’t well formed, it’s broken. An example? Dive Into Mark is currently broken in Moz. So is this page which hixie linked to in his Perfect Weblog speech.

Aquarionics validates as HTML4 Trans. It doesn’t validate as Strict because the search form isn’t right (which I will fix), and the Blogsnob code contains a border=0 attribute (which I can’t fix). It doesn’t validate as XHTML1 because I now have almost nine hundred articles in the archives, most of which were written with EditPlus, which capitalises HTML tags by default. I’m vaugely interested in what he would say about the markup here (I’m probably going to submit it, merely for educational value while I’m doing the generation code for Epistula), but I’m not going to follow the world into XHTML until I split off the old archives or something.

14 princibles of polite programming

The article discusses how people will like your program more if it’s polite. Not just that it says “Please” “Thank you” and “Sorry”, but that it actually predicts what you want next, tells you want it’s doing, and will generally be /nice/.

It’s something we don’t see enough of, really. There are few examples of actually helpful programs out there (The first version of Afphrid was praised for it’s helpfullness. Not sure about this version, nobody’s mentioned it), a good example would be Sam & Mark‘s RSS Validator, which tells you clearly what’s wrong and where to fix it. If any program or software I write can be described as both Useful and Friendly, I’ll be happy.

I’ll be even happier if it’s described as Bug Free :-)

Aquarionics Immitates NTK Immitating life Immitating Onion Immitated by Mad Magazine.

ccooke – my housemate – has updated his diary. Life just got terribly, terribly complicated. Twice.

Simon wants a way of saying “This person has more information on this” in a link. Aquarius doesn’t think this needs XML, or a defined format at all. I agree. My solution to this is currently being worked into Epistula, and is this: Crossreferences.

You may have noticed (You may not have done) that my “Pingbacks” box has been renamed “Crossreference”, this is going to become more relivant as I start putting in my Referer tracking, categories, and linking systems, because all of them just get more entries in the Crossreference box (I’m currently using pingback internally for when I mention posts within posts). It needs no technology, just a place in the design for that kind of thing.