June 2008 Entries
I recently had a chance to answer a few questions for
Nathan Smith of
Godbit, and he has
posted the interview. Thanks for your patience, Nathan.
This entry was written on June 29th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with godbit, nathansmith, interview, and sonspring
"A Web designer who cannot craft quality, functional Web pages is a liability and unprepared for the profession." (
via). Great article by Andy Rutledge packed with great advice to the aspiring web designer. This is not just from a
making things pretty perspective, he touches all bases from design, business and marketing. While sounding harsh in some areas, I think he hits the nail on the head.
This entry was written on June 26th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with andyrutledge, designview, professional, and webdesigner
"Basecamp intentionally allows HTML (and JavaScript) because many of our users find great value in being able to use that. We’re full aware that this allows for XSS attacks, but Basecamp is based on the notion of trusted parties. You should only allow people into the system that you believe won’t hack your system (just as you should only invite people into your office that you don’t believe will steal from you).
If this was a public system, it would definitely be different. You can’t have a public forum today without carefully dealing with XSS issues."
This is a response from Sarah Hatter in response to the discovery of an XSS vulnerability in Basecamp. I like her response, in conjunction with DHH who states:
"If your friend becomes a foe, you can revoke their account and change your login credentials. Just like you would simply not let them into your office.
In the 3+ years we’ve operated Basecamp, we’ve never had a single such case occur, though. So it doesn’t seem like it’s a big problem. And I know many of our customers would scream murder if we removed the option to use HTML in their messages, as they’ve become accustomed to over the past 3+ years."
This is part of their Getting Real approach to things, and, while I am normally strict when it comes to security aspects, this makes perfect sense.
This entry was written on June 26th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with basecamp, xss, and security
"[...] Until these issues are resolved the BBC semantic markup standards have been updated to prevent the use of non-human-readable text in abbreviations." (
via)
This entry was written on June 23rd, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with microformats, html, and semantics
Jonathan Snook recently released his blog plugin, appropriately called Snogs. He did a great job working with some great spam prevention techniques and it has been ported as a Rails Plugin. Thanks to both Jonathan and Russell for the nice work.
This entry was written on June 19th, 2008. It was filed under Programming. It was tagged with snogs, jonathansnook, snook, rails, ruby, plugins, russellnorris, and luckysneaks
"The short and sweet reason is simply this: XHTML offers no compelling advantage — to me — over HTML, but even if it did it would also offer increased complexity and uncertainty that make it unappealing to me." (via)
I share the same reasoning as to why I prefer HTML to XHTML. No need to argue it, really, it's a personal preference and I will never use the supposed advantages. I already have other tools to do those jobs with plain HTML.
This entry was written on June 18th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with html and xhtml
"Reviews for my new book, Web Form Design, are starting to appear. One of the first comes from Will Evans, Principal User Experience Architect at Semantic Foundry..." (
via)
This entry was written on June 14th, 2008. It was tagged with lukew, formdesign, and interactiondesign
"The general situation here is:
there are many instances where making element content link to other content via HTML requires clumsy structures, and others where it is basically impossible." (
via)
This entry was written on June 13th, 2008. It was tagged with ericmeyer, html, html5, and href
"In light of yesterday’s introduction of iPhone 3G, I remain convinced the mobile web’s future is incredibly promising. So, for the remaining lot of you whom are still holding out to to embrace the mobile web, I’m offering special discount pricing on my book, Mobile Web Design." (
via)
This entry was written on June 10th, 2008. It was tagged with cameronmoll, mobilewebdesign, webdesign, mobile, html, css, and xhtml
Simon Willison responds to the question,
is it ok to require JavaScript? I would agree with him at this point. I think bigger applications make it seem
impossible to build sites without JavaScript, but it isn't the case in all circumstances. As Simon states, with proper planning in mind, it is easy to build an application that doesn't require JavaScript. So do people simply skip this planning phase and push the
You must have JavaScript enabled to view this site message?
This entry was written on June 10th, 2008. It was tagged with javascript, simonwillison, unobtrusive, and progressiveenhancement
"If it’s important, it should be in the content. It shouldn’t be generated." (
via)
This entry was written on June 10th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with ericmeyer, css, contentgeneration, and quotations
"So long as the end user finds value in what we build, it doesn’t matter. My process is my process. Yours is yours. Lets talk, but leave the heavies at the door please." Amen, Colly. (
via)
This entry was written on June 6th, 2008. It was filed under Bookmarked. It was tagged with collylogic, simoncollison, html, javascript, css, and workprocess
"Without getting too carried away, it's clear that names are important. If our clients, and we ourselves think about our email campaigns as 'blasts', big one way transfers from us to them, we'll be tempted to act in ways we never would in a real conversation." (
via)
"Because labels within fields need to go away when people are entering their answer into an input field, the context for the answer is gone. So if you suddenly forget what question you’re answering, tough luck—the label is nowhere to be found." (
via)