Jahr: 2004

Kendall Grant Clark starts a new column on XML.com, called „Hacking the Library“: „That’s the curious space I and others like me inhabit today: Digital, but not purely digital; analog, but not only analog. We live in the space between these two, in the space carved out by their now haphazard, now principled mixture. It…

Kimbro Staken introduces Syncato (which was developed by him) on XML.com: „To many people, weblogs are simply a way to post their writing to the Web. For me weblogs are a personal data repository where you can store all kinds of information that you want to make publicly available. This includes, of course, writing, but…

„MOZiE is an extremely light-weight, free Windows application that allows web designers the ability to compare page rendering in Mozilla and Internet Explorer by embedding Gecko — via the Mozilla ActiveX control — in an HTML page that sits above an iframe displaying MSHTML-rendering, running as an HTA.“

Eric M. Burke: „What I have not seen, however, is a good system for preventing stale documentation. The concept is pretty simple. Provide an RSS feed for the least recently modified pages on your web site. Or maybe configure several parameters such as how many page views pages get, how many people link to those…

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: „Here are just few examples of the BMW 745i’s clueless interaction design: * Response times are incredibly slow. Each time you select something, you must wait several seconds for the next screen to appear. It’s common to ridicule German engineers for their ignorance of customer needs, but no hardcore engineer should ever…

Sam Ruby: „One key problem that we identified was the wiki syntax – both from a learning curve point of view and from a wiki tool lock-in perspective. It would be really nice if we could define a unified inport/export syntax that tools can use, either to PUT data to a wiki, or to migrate…

Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima on beautiful URLs: „Keep them short and sweet. Avoid punctuation in file names. Use lower case and try to address case sensitivity issues. Do not expose technology via directory names. Plan for host name typos. Plan for domain name typos. Support multiple domain forms. Add guessable entry point URLs.…

The WACT (Web Application Component Toolkit) wiki on PHP application design concerns: „PHP does not enforce the notion that everything is an object. Successful PHP applications mix both procedural and object oriented logic. Developers from Java background, for example, often begin by writing a class „Object“ then extended it with all classes. That’s already overhead…

Fascinating: VisualScript. (I love their floor plan scenario.) „By generating XML from a diagram, VisualScript makes it easy to collaborate with other developers and even non-experts. Instead of decoding long lines of script, you can discuss a process or a problem using simple visual metaphors rooted in the real world. Code can be encapsulated in…

NewsFactor article: Will PHP 5 Live Up to Its Billing? „PHP, the open-source scripting language popular in Web applications, is undergoing major renovations. The new version, PHP 5, already has appeared in three public betas and will be in a fourth beta shortly. The development team is aiming for May 2004 availability. PHP 5 promises…