Theodicius

Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Customizing Safari Reader

Filed under: General,Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 11:14 am

OK, so the new Safari (version 5) is out, and it includes a “reader” feature that’s been taking some heat.

The complaints are justified — what it does to links is insufficient for some vision-impaired users, and justified text looks horrible without good hypenation, which Safari doesn’t do, just to name the two most obvious.

But that can be fixed.
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Missing the Point

Filed under: General,Web Design— arlen@ 12:10 am

Giorgio Sironi writes about (among other things)his first experience with Rails over at Web Builder Zone:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
end

Oh thanks, now I’m enlightened. No fields, no scope, no getters or setters. What is going on here? Where is the business logic?

It’s a common enough reaction from Rails newcomers, but it completely misses the point.

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Frameworks over CMS’s

Filed under: General,Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 12:34 pm

I gave a presentation recently at Web414 that promoted the idea that frameworks were the future of web development. The presentation didn’t go well (It started its slide downhill when I realized too late there would be no way to show my slides. I switched to a more interactive, discussion-oriented presentation, which of course I hadn’t properly prepared for, which in turn only contributed to a further slide.) Still, it served to clarify a little more my thinking on the subject. (Half the reason to make presentations at your local user’s group is to help you view a subject from a different perspective; think of them as “code reviews for your mind.”)

The fundamental point I was making, that the future of web development lies with web application frameworks and not in traditional CMS’s, relies on two rather finely drawn (I cheerfully admit) lines.

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Bad Behavior and Arrogance

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 7:29 pm

How far can you reach when someone’s behavior becomes offensive? Is guilt by association ever permissable?

Robert Vining, newly minted chief spokesman and admin for All Together As A Whole is finding that out, right now. He writes about it in this blog post.

I’ve been there, Robert. You made the right choice.

In a nutshell, he was told he was going to be removed from helping with the joomla.org forums unless, now that he’s in charge, he bans an individual from an unaffiliated website. (It says “independent” in the tagline, in case you’re easily confused.)
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Lies and Marketing

Filed under: General,Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 11:57 pm

Lee Brimelow made this wonderful post ridiculing the iPad’s lack of flash. Only one problem with it.

It’s a lie.

And that’s a problem. Apparently, he made those wonderful claims of his without ever once checking the reality of them. Most of those sites that supposedly don’t show anything, actually do. As this set of screen captures shows.
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