The guy in charge of doing techie stuff for The Register
emailed me today to say that The Register is now sporting a shiny new RSS 1.0 feed. It validates and everything. Woohoo! Guess I’ll have to find somebody else to pick on now. ;)
Big John: I can’t believe it’s not a table. Specifically, 3 columns, equal height
, using only CSS for positioning. [via Simon]
Marek Prokop: CSS Workshop, including styling <abbr> in IE/Win and W3 buttons without images. [via Zeldman]
Cringley: Life with TiVo. A friend of mine has the DirecTV receiver with built-in TiVo, and three boys. TiVo is a godsend for young children; a single half-hour program can keep them entertained for hours, because they want to watch it over and over. The older two are old enough to remember life before TiVo, but the youngest one has never known TV to work any other way, and is too young to understand why it doesn’t work this way everywhere (like at friends and relatives). As far as he’s concerned, other people don’t have TV; they have some weird contraption that looks like a TV but only plays his shows at certain times, and then only the newest ones, and then only once.
Apparently, all the cool kids using valid XHTML for their blogs have suddenly taken to embedding it directly in their RSS feeds (example, search for “<body” to see what’s going on). Bah. This XML thing, it’s a fad I tell you. It’ll never catch on.
You can name names.
Comment by Joe — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 11:49 am
The attempt at an equal column layout is admirable, but throw in the phrases “repeating pixel graphics” and “I’m looking for a JavaScript fix for this” just turn me off.
When a solution comes along that doesn’t require “special attention” (special attention qualifying as anything other than a box model hack), then I’ll be on board and ready to go.
Comment by Lutero — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 1:41 pm
I’ve developed my own Javascript hack to enforce certain column-height rules for the tableless websites that I produce professionally (yes real, paying clients including a bank and a few government related websites). It seems to work fine, and requires no “special attention” once deployed (single <script> line and a < body onload=”"> event)
Tableless CSS layout has been rocking my world for 6 months now. Don’t use floats for layout though, only absolutely positioned colum-blocks, for accessibility reasons.
Comment by Már Örlygsson — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 3:02 pm
Err… what accessibility reasons?
Comment by Evan — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 4:22 pm
Info on the accessibility reasons:
Dive into Accessibility - Day 10 - Present your main content first: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.html
Interview With Douglas Bowman, re Wired.com tableless redesign:
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/wired-interview/
(see question “Why did you choose positioning over floats?”)
Comment by Már Örlygsson — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 5:09 pm
I can’t believe it’s not a table… I can’t believe it’s using 100% of my CPU time (Phoenix 0.5).
Comment by Gavin — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 5:15 pm
Ahh. But Bowman’s decision depended on A) the fact that he wanted three columns and B) that he didn’t think providing a skip nav was enough. He says as much himself:
“For sites that rely on a left or right column for primary navigation, this content order requirement of float usage may produce desired and advantageous behavior.”
So the lesson is not that floats are bad — they just happened to be bad for Wired given their particular design choices.
Comment by Evan — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 8:15 pm
Hey Mark, I thought you said you were happy with Sam and I as your new overlords of RSS :-)
Comment by Don Box — Tuesday, April 1, 2003 @ 11:28 pm
Evan, you got it right. Those happen to be design choices that I frequently make and/or have to deal with. :-)
Comment by Már Örlygsson — Wednesday, April 2, 2003 @ 11:58 am
Odd.
The Reg had a story up earlier announcing their RSS feed and soliciting feedback — quoting a different RSS URL to the one Mark gives — but it since seems to have disappeared from their front page. A search for “RSS” at the Reg finds the announcement’s headline, but the story itself is 404ed.
Did Mark successfully slashdot them?
I sent them feedback commenting that an RSS feed of “last 10 headlines” is too short for a site that publishes 20+ articles a day…
Comment by James Kew — Wednesday, April 2, 2003 @ 4:56 pm
Thanks for the pointer to Marek’s ABBR hack! It occurred to me that you could use a similar trick to fix IE’s lack of support for Q without messing up your otherwise semantically correct markup with redundant special entities.
Comment by Mr. Farlops — Thursday, April 3, 2003 @ 3:04 am
Can’t believe it’s not a table? Time to blow my own trumpet here…
Now I’m no CSS speed freak, but we’re designing sites like virginbooks, http://www.virginbooks.com/, using CSS and they look BETTER than tables, or chair come to think of it.
Comment by Tom Smith — Saturday, April 5, 2003 @ 2:37 pm