While hammering away on a site, I wandered into IE world to do some testing and, like a spade to the face, IE crashed. It kept crashing and crashing. I did some intensive debugging, checking to see if it was: markup, the way the CSS was imported, positioning in the CSS, advanced CSS like h3+p, transparent pngs. None of these were causing the crash. I had narrowed it down to the CSS though so I began going through it chunk by chunk and testing. I got it down to one line:

[code lang=”css”]
div#content-sub fieldset {
background : transparent url(../images/box_tile.gif) 0 0 repeat-y;
border : 1px solid #fff;
padding: 0 20px;}
[/code]

What’s wrong with this… Fuck all I hear you say.

I then narrowed it down to the padding.

What’s wrong with the padding…. Fuck all I hear you say. I removed the padding and it works fine. So in conclusion, don’t use padding ever on anything ever and IE royally sucks ass.

Sadly I can’t link to the site as it’s still on the Dev server.

XList.org
XList is a universal format for representing data in the simple form of a list of items.
Its main purpose is to standardize the way applications and aggregators share and consume lists of items of any kind.
XList is designed to be extensible in order to represent different kinds of data in a standard way.

I never really looked into OPML to deeply but this XList seems to take OPML and extend it to include specifications for different types of media and not just text.

microformats | About microformats
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patters

Everybody else is linking to and talking about them so I figure I might as well help with the pagerank and the spread of yet another bloody buzzword.

I was in a trough in work (don’t tell malarkey) so I took a break and wrote some xslt to get the images from my flickr account. It works in IE but doesn’t work in Firefox as the transformix xslt transformer (in disguise 🙂 ) doesn’t support getting remote xml files in XSLT.
XSLT File

[code lang=”xml”]
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

[/code]

XML File

[code lang=”xml”]
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="index.xslt"?>


[/code]

I tried putting these up on the server for a demo but alas.. another IE bug .. XMl and mime types and temp folder.. ARGHHHH!!

My fetish used to be Firefox extensions (it still is really but only on tuesdays) but I think I have found a new one @ WordPress Plugin Directory. I’ll have to start writing a few too just to keep my urges at a controllable level.

I came across the “Can I change the value of an XSLT variable ?” FAQ yesterday when I fell into the whole XSLT variable scope pothole (again). Worth reading so hopefully it won’t happen you. 🙂

Unobtrusive Javascript
Javascript is a wonderful tool to enhance the usability of web sites. It is the extra layer above the mark-up “what is this text” and the CSS “how should it be displayed”. Javascript adds a new dimension, the “how should this element behave”.

A nice intro into how javscript should be. Jeremy Keith’s speech @ @media inspired the renewed interest in my beloved javascript.

ONLamp.com: Ajax on Rails
Ajax on Rails

.. Stop the buzzword madness pleeeeease

Google Sitemaps Help
Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Juicy Studio: Div Mania
More and more web documents are appearing that consist of nothing more than a collection of div elements. In most cases, better use of CSS selectors could be used to avoid overusing the div element.