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Seriously, is this meaningful in any way whatsoever?

Mark Pilgrim's excellent blog Dive Into Mark has a very comprehensive list of changes to the Webcore rendering engine. The permanent link is here. I'm impressed with how quickly he's managed to list these changes seeing as it only came out today!

One change I've noticed is Safari no longer freezes for a minute when loading certain webpages. Another nice change is that stylesheet change on Dave Hyatt's weblog actually works now. Dave is ironically one of the Safari developers, so it's just as well!!!

Mark Pilgrim's excellent blog Dive Into Mark has a very comprehensive list of changes to the Webcore rendering engine. The permanent link is here. I'm impressed with how quickly he's managed to list these changes seeing as it only came out today!

One change I've noticed is Safari no longer freezes for a minute when loading certain webpages. Another nice change is that stylesheet change on Dave Hyatt's weblog actually works now. Dave is ironically one of the Safari developers, so it's just as well!!!

There is a discussion on this subject at diveintomark right now also. Mark is, for once, dead wrong on an issue. We're trying to set the poor guy straight though...

Now there is no after work, there is no before work, there is no work day, no office, no clock. There is only one long continuous 24-hour day that is always work, always office, and I never punch in and I never punch out.

If you think Safari "beats the pants off" the Mac version of IE in "correctness", you haven't been paying attention. IE for Mac OS X is fully CSS compliant, while Safari is not.

Mark Pilgrim has done an excellent review of Safari and its handling of CSS - I'd suggest you check out if you're having problems, and submit (specific, reproduceable) test cases to Dave Hyatt.

I'll agree that it's a big pain to have yet another browser with a different level of support for CSS (especially since Tantek et al actually did a really good job with Mac IE5's CSS handling), but it is still a beta, and I'm sure that both the KHTML core and Safari teams will work really hard to get bugs ironed out and the standards support increased, so that it'll behave much better on its final release.

Fingers-crossed anyway ;)

Mark Pilgrim has done an excellent review of Safari and its handling of CSS - I'd suggest you check out if you're having problems, and submit (specific, reproduceable) test cases to Dave Hyatt.

I'll agree that it's a big pain to have yet another browser with a different level of support for CSS (especially since Tantek et al actually did a really good job with Mac IE5's CSS handling), but it is still a beta, and I'm sure that both the KHTML core and Safari teams will work really hard to get bugs ironed out and the standards support increased, so that it'll behave much better on its final release.

Fingers-crossed anyway ;)

Here is a big list o'things wrong with Safari. I've been using it all day and love it.

So it will take a while to get through the menus. Who wants to hear [all the stuff at the top of each Slashdot page] while trying to get the news?

This is a reminder that web accessibility isn't just for letting disabled people use your site. Many of the same techniques are useful for letting non-disabled people use your site through a device other than a computer with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and graphical web browser.

The problem of identifying the beginning of the main content of a page is not new to this listen-while-driving application. In 1999, Jim Thatcher of IBM Special Needs Systems called it "the most serious impedement to access to commercial web content". At least one version of JAWS, a screen reader popular among blind users, provides the shortcut INS+ENTER for "move to the next block of text which has no links". That JAWS includes such an unreliable heuristic points to the importance of being able to skip blocks of navigation links.

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines suggest grouping navigation links in a <map> element, and until assistive technologies widely understand <map> as a navigation-link-grouping mechanism, also putting a "skip to main content" link at the top of the page and hiding it from graphical browsers.

Mark Pilgrim recommends trying to put the main content of the page first in the HTML, and describes a "table trick" that allows a navigation sidebar on the left side of a page to come after the main content in the HTML. (If a page uses CSS for layout rather than tables, it should be even easier to put a left sidebar later in the HTML.) For the listen-while-driving application, I imagine that putting the main content first is a more effective technique than the "let users of text browsers skip navigation links" techniques.

By the way, switching to Slashdot's light mode (preview) eliminates some of the junk at the top of Slashdot pages. The faq...hof navigation links are still there, but the OSDN bar, section links, and recent topic links are gone.

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...

supporting blind users is a good idea. After all, google is blind.

Mark Pilgrim, the guy behind Dive Into Accessibility offers some comments on this article, Southwest off the hook in his weblog Dive Into Mark.

Mark Pilgrim, the guy behind Dive Into Accessibility offers some comments on this article, Southwest off the hook in his weblog Dive Into Mark.

Gimme a break. See this link, it has nothing to do with buying rankings.

...available in Mark Pilgrim's blog

Aggie is an open source news aggregator. Basically, you give it the URL to your favorite RSS feeds, it downloads and parses them, and then builds a web page with the headlines. The really nice thing about it is that it supports RSS autodiscovery, so in many cases, you can simply provide the URL to the site itself, and it will find the RSS feed for you.

It does not use the GPL, but its license is considered open source by the OSI definition.

Another caveat is that it is written in C# and thus requires the .NET framework to run, so it isn't portable to other operating systems (not yet, at least). The upside is that the C# source code is fairly easy to follow, even for a dunce like me.

Another excellent free book for Python is Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim. It is available in HTML, PDF, Word 97, Windows Help, plain text, and XML formats.

This book has plenty of examples and pointers to further reading on each subject. It features good layout, use of colors, and typography which makes for easy reading and comprehension.

Barring a genetic or hormonal issue, when you eat, you're taking in calories. Your body burns off some doing its normal metabolic processes, some goes out when you piss and crap, and the rest takes up residence in your fat ass.

The trick is, then, to only consume what you need. Or, less than you need, and your body will eventually relent and burn off some of that fat, and you'll lose weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, time to run up John Walker's(1) bandwidth bill some more, get his name in the papers again, and introduce some more people to The Hacker's Diet.

Available in both North American and European mirrors, The Hacker's Diet takes a practical, pragmatic, engineer's approach to losing weight, and more importantly, maintaining that new weight, both stably and comfortably.

In fact, it even has a section on basic excercise to get you somewhat fit. Not to get you starring in a Bally's Total Fitness commercial. Just able to run up a flight of stairs without passing out. Fit, as in, healthy, instead of fat, as in unhealthy. Gosh, what a concept.

Now we'll do the webblog plug, too. Mark Pilgrim(2) wrote a great writeup of The Hacker's Diet twice, last August and an extended, much more blunt version last October. Here's the October version. Go read it.

Then get off your ass, sit outside, and read the book. Download the PalmOS apps to your Visor, your Clio, or your Zaurus with POSE. And do something about that Mr. Fatty-Fat-Fat nickname.

(1) John Walker, founder of AutoDesk. (2) Mark Pilgrim, that guy who got fired because of his weblog, and who wrote Dive into Python. (3) And why does Slashcode strip out superscript and underscores? Weak.

PyGoogle allows you to access the web API from Python. Download here. Python has no SOAP support in the standard library, but a working SOAP library is included with PyGoogle.

-Mark

Dive Into Python - a free Python book for experienced programmers

PyGoogle allows you to access the web API from Python. Download here. Python has no SOAP support in the standard library, but a working SOAP library is included with PyGoogle.

-Mark

Dive Into Python - a free Python book for experienced programmers