Category: tech

Richard McManus comments on the now legendary HTML tables vs. CSS layout debate. Web designers should use CSS layouts instead of hacking tables together. Sure, tables are easier to understand and set up, but CSS is easier to change, easier to migrate to new formats (think portable devices), and makes more logical sense.

TABLE is an ugly hack, back when there was no real way to display column layouts on the web. Their intuitive nature is probably why they replaced frames as the way to place content adjacent to each other.

So really, both camps are right. Either implementation is transparent to the user, so they shouldn’t care. But developers should care. CSS will make your jobs easier.

There are some reasons for sticking to tables, however:

• support for Netscape 4.7: Sadly, it’s still around, especially inside companies.
• workaround for IE’s multiple CSS bugs
• you are too lazy/too busy to concentrate on laying out a CSS layout, and this web job is just a one-time deal.

I had the pleasure of participating in the Bell Sympatico/MSN Market Trial for the past four months. In a partnership with MS, Bell plans to integrate the MSN portal and MSN 8 software into Sympatico.ca and broadband services.

I got the impression that the MSN software is going to be an value-added service you have to pay extra for, like the current firewall and anti-virus add-on packages. I also got a free mousepad out of it. 🙂

MSN 8 is basically an Internet Explorer tarted up to look like AOL, although the result is much more pleasing to the eye. Menus have a translucent glass effect on them. The program actually greets you by your first name everytime you log in. The masterwork, however, is the MSN Dashboard, a vertical sidebar that displays the time, a photo slide show, Inbox, favourite links, stocks, etc. It’s a smart idea that will also appear in Longhorn, and the inspiration for the freeware program Codename: Dashboard.

One feature I do not like – the clumsy integration of MSN Messenger. It installs itself without permission. It sets itself to load on Windows startup, without permission. When I disable that option, it starts up with MSN 8 without my permission. It cannot be terminated while MSN 8 is in memory. While MSN 8 is on, it becomes redundant with contacts appearing in its own native window plus the MSN Dashboard.

Furthermore, when I exit MSN 8, it does not close down. I try not use MSN Messenger (admittedly, its audio and webcam features are nice) as I find its “in your face” nature not very pleasant.

In partnership with IBM, The Supreme Council of Antiquities and Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage have unveiled their online multimedia masterpiece, Eternal Egypt. The site is also available in wireless phone and PDA formats, features text-to-speech commentaries, and 3D views of famous monuments and sites, such as Giza and Luxor.

For budding Egyptologists, I also recommend the Theban Mapping Project, a Flash site developed by the American University in Cairo to map out the Valley of the Kings.

Eternal Egypt runs on DB2 over Linux. The TBM runs on Access over Windows 2000. However, both sites hope to preserve the past through technology.

CSI is usually a show that takes delight in being as accurate as possible in its portrayal of forensic science, but the CSI:Miami episode I saw last night, “Big Brother”, had some awful flubs. Aside from the requisite cheesy Bejeweled-like graphical interface of “Grave Robber”, a fictitious file recovery program, and a bizarre looking command line ping program (that helpfully tells its user that an IP is spoofed with a blinking red “Forged” indicator), they also showed two malformed IP addresses.

The IP addresses went something like this: 301.101.28.1108. All valid network addresses must have their first octet between 0 and 223; “301” is way out of this range. As for “1108” at the end there, let’s just say only a number between 1 and 254 is valid.

But then they may have done this on purpose. In the same way that all fictitious phone numbers on TV have NPAs of 555, the producers felt they need fictitious IP addresses too.

Azhar writes a succinct summary of the open source movement:

“Open source has at least three benefits for conventional enterprises. First, it creates new wealth and new businesses, such as the Linux-based consultancy Red Hat, which now has an annual turnover of $100m. Second, it stops companies reinventing the wheel in areas of open source research, and thus releases time and money for more fruitful activity. Third, open source’s decentralised methods may, as we have seen, produce results otherwise unobtainable.”

Open source, at first glance to the grizzled business analyst, is counter-intuitive. How can you sell any milk if you give the cow away for free? In the press, the open source movement has been compared to everything from hippie communes to Communism, with a touch of mocking, damning praise.

But open source makes its money in consultancy and support. The cow may be free, but the farmhands and milking machines cost extra. Open sources licenses also encourage participation; enhancements or alterations to the common source code are often released back into the community. With this “pay it forward” scheme, thousands of coders contribute to the good of the code. With so many people looking at the code, bugs are detected and squashed quickly. New versions are released very rapidly. The Mozilla project, for instance, releases a new test build of its popular browser software every night.

It has caught the attention of a few companies. Companies like, oh, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.

Silverlotus had been meaning to pick up a CueCat for cheap on eBay. Turns out that people have hacked them and provided all sorts of new interesting uses for them. For example, she could have used a CueCat to scan in her book collection to a database (but she ended up doing it by hand).

As somewhat an extension of the same concept, there’s an interesting project in the works at Microsoft Research: Aura, or Advanced User Resource Annotation. The primary goal of this technology is to allow users of mobile devices to assign snippets of data to physical objects, and provide this info on the Internet. In other words, creating the ultimate hyperlink (or Smart Tag if you prefer), and bridging the virtual and physical worlds.

You can walk into a bookstore, scan the ISBN of a book, and pull up price comparisons, reviews, or blog postings on that book. Or a museum can embed Bluetooth transmitters around the property, and you can use your wireless PDA can lock on to these broadcasts, retrieve audio commentary off the Internet, and use it as a virtual tour guide.

Right now, there are concentrating on just using barcodes as frames of reference. The neat thing is, they have left the method of cataloging flexible. In the future, one could append data on items with RFID tags, vehicle identification numbers, magnetic strips, or GPS coordinates.

MS isn’t the only one working on “bridging” technologies, however. Sem@code works in the same principle, but uses special pictograms you can take shots of from a camera-equipped cellphone. The nTag lets you gather information from fellow nTag wearers via infra-red.

Intriguely, Project AURA’s final goal is to be able to “study emergent individual and group behaviors associated with the ability to digital tag objects and places.” Just as long as they don’t study these behaviours to secretly spam people with advertising.

I don’t believe it…of all the things Firefox 0.8 brings to the table, such as next-generation browser features and phenomenal page rendering speed, all people can talk about is the friggin’ name…just let it go!

Like it’s daddy, the Mozilla Application Suite (aka “Seamonkey”), the Firefox standalone browser sports enhanced features such as tabbed browsing, popup window controls, advertisement blocking, and excellent web development tools such as the DOM Inspector and JavaScript Debugger. However, it fits all these goodies in a package in half the size, and with a simplified, more user-friendly interface.

While the plans to eventually replace the monolithic Application suite with the standalone Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client are currently up in the air, it is definitely a good indication of innovations yet to come from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox 0.8 hints at a new level of professionalism within the Foundation with its sharp graphics and user-focused design.

Contrast the efforts of the Red Lizard with those of its major competitor. On the day of Firefox 0.8’s release, the chief security officer of Microsoft UK had claimed IE is “the most secure browser”…because they have patched up so many security flaws in it. By extension, the Ford Pinto must be the safest car of all time, since they recalled so many of those lemons. It is even more ironic consider the security flaw in question, the “URL spoofing flaw” that allows malicious websites to masquerade as benign sites in the browser’s status bar, took MS two months to fix. Not only did Mozilla and Firefox suffer from a slightly less serious version of this same flaw, developers had released patched beta versions (called “nightly builds”) for public download within 48 hours.

“In open source software development,” Steve Garrity wrote, “the usual reply to any requests, suggestions, or criticisms is the classic refrain: ‘Where

Moneris (the guys in Canada that provides the services to your favourite retailer so you can pay with your credit and debit cards) are migrating their x.25 IP network to Bell Enterprise Group’s IP VPNe network, which uses Cisco MPLS technology. VPNe is a good thing because it will let Moneris to finely tune their bandwidth, set classes of service for different kinds of traffic, and basically get a more consistent, secure and reliable connection.

Moneris is used by a lot of big name retailers; everytime you swipe your card at places such as Shoppers Drug Mart, Staples, or Future Shop, you’re using Moneris. These clients can also migrate to VPNe, and seamlessly link up to Moneris’s private VPNe network through an Extranet VPN connection to exchange – and control the flow of – data easier. They will also still support their cheaper, dialup network for smaller shops.

So Juice picked up a Nokia 6100 in Asia, unlocked it, and ported it to Rogers AT&T’s GSM network.

First problem: he paid $300 US for this phone. Certainly it’s a small colour phone, but Canada has many very fine phones of that calibre available (such as my new Samsung A500 from Bell Mobility), and at much lower prices to boot.

Second problem: He sat on it. Broke the LCD screen.

The warranty is probably only good in Asia, and even if it wasn’t, it is probably void because it is unlocked. Rogers won’t accept it since it is not a Rogers supported phone. And LCD screens, being the unavoidably fragile things they are, are usually not covered by warranties anyway.

Juice says only the screen doesn’t work, so he’ll keep using the phone. I imagine he will cancel the Call Display feature.

While discussing the strictness of XML parsers Hyatt points out the sad reality of HTML rendering: “The #1 reason that HTML pages render incorrectly in alternate browsers is because of differences in error handling and recovery.”

Specifically, IE is very lax in dealing with badly-coded HTML. IE also abides by its own versions of HTML and CSS standards. The result: websites that don’t work right in anything except IE for Windows.

Why is that a problem, you say? After all, IE Win has 90% of the market – they’re the de facto standard, right?

De facto standards are fine when there aren’t any other standards to work with – but there are. This was not always the case – in the early untamed days of the web, Netscape introduced its own proprietary tags (such as FONT, BLINK and LAYER) and standards when the W3C, the web’s standards body, dragged its feet. During the browser wars, Microsoft just mimiced Netscape’s example. Even today, you’ll see pages stating, “Best viewed in Such-and-Such browser”.

Today, the W3C have clear outlined standards for HTML, CSS, and XML. Most other browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Mozilla and Konqueror follow these standards. (Aside: Opera straddles the fence between W3C-ness and IE-ness, making it particularily quirky to work with.)

If you run a site of commerce, why bar entry to Netscape 7 users or people with Macs? You’ve just lost 10% of your potential customer base.

In the end, open standards promote choice. Why lock everyone into a single software product that only runs on a single platform?

In other news, apparently some folks in Norway actually liked the old Silentblue “Blue Plaster” design …