Christian Heilmann

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Archive for February, 2005

Trackback

Sunday, February 20th, 2005

sigh Now that I made sure no “poker” comments get through any longer, they do it with trackback URLs. Hey, if nobody wants to use your site it is maybe because it is not interesting. Gambling is not illegal here in Europe, only in the land of the free!

Conditional loading of large Javascript files

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005

You may sometimes find yourself with big Javascript libraries to include in your documents. Currently I am on a project where one of them is about 1MB big (don’t ask).
Now, I wondered what can be done to only apply these when they are really needed, and the answer, aside from adding an extra page to the process is to add them dynamically via the DOM:


window.onload=function(){
if(!document.getElementById || !document.createElement){return;}
var newjs=document.createElement(‘script’);
newjs.type=’text/javascript’;
newjs.src=’functions.js’;
document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(newjs);
}

This example would only load the file “functions.js” when DOM is available in the browser, older browsers would not load the file.

Internet Explorer 7 ante portas?

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

After us whining and cursing the aged Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft seems to have plans to ship out Internet Explorer 7. Planned only for Windows XP2 users, and not backward compatible to win2k (how could it be without reusing the same engine?) it promises better security but so far there is no word as to the standards compliance of it. More information in Bill Gates’ Keynote delivered this morning. I won’t hold my breath and stay with my Firefox for the time being.

Wonderful article on colour and accessibility

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

I just approved a truly wonderful article on colour and accessibility for evolt.org. Well written, to the point, and with loads of links to dive into.

Hiding from the standards Gestapo

Monday, February 14th, 2005

I just got an email that made me laugh:

Hello there. I just noticed your W3C validation thingy at the bottom of this
page, and I thought “yay, finally someone that takes his work seriously!”. But no…
When I clicked it I noticed that your page hasnt passed the W3C validation at all!
There’s even errors on this contactpage! It’d please me very much if you’d correct
the errors, as it is always nice with well-coded pages, but if you refuse to do so I
must ask you to remove your W3C mark as it is “fake”.

The page is question is onlinetools.org, which hasn’t been updated for almost one and a half years, as I put my energy into writing articles and content editing evolt.org instead.

I wonder now what I should do? Will my girlfriend still love me when he takes away my w3c button? Will I go to hell? Is there any way I can ask for forgiveness?

I am a huge advocate of web standards, and while it is true that you should practise what you preach emails like the one above are just ridiculous. There are thousands of web sites out there that take web standards very seriously indeed, however most of them are blogs and private sites.

If you want to evangelise better web design, then complain to companies when you cannot use their sites or when they totally mess up in a standards compliant browser. Preaching to the converted or going “neener neener” at small mistakes of people who mean well doesn’t help anybody.

Developers understand, CMS vendors and company managers don’t.