A bright eclipse
Most of the Web development I work on is, for good or for worse, using PHP – my natural preference would go to coding in Python, but PHP is what was and is available on the W3C servers, and I’ve become...
View ArticleGenerating HTML documentation from DTD
I consider myself fairly fluent in XML technologies, but there is at least one technology that I have never bothered to fully learn, nor that I am planning to ever fully learn, and this would be XML...
View ArticleDTD comparison
As a follow-up on my toying with DTDs, I added a new Python script to my toolbox this morning: dtd-compare.py allows to compare the vocabularies defined in several DTDs to see which elements and...
View ArticleJQuery, yummy
I have resisted for a long time to use Javascript in my Web projects, for two main reasons: it is relatively painful to write standard-compliant (read DOM-compliant) javascript; I’ve brainwashed myself...
View ArticleMicroblogging
In case it wasn’t clear from the past three entries posted here, I have started to microblog on Identi.ca – the open version of Twitter. I’m still trying to figure out whether I should have my posts...
View ArticleExploring the world of Web video
A colleague of mine recently pointed me to Michael Wesch’s great and inspiring anthropological introduction to YouTube, which made me curious about the use of video as an expression mechanism on the...
View ArticleSynchronizing text and video
After having visited the land of transcription as my first stop in the world of Web video, the next logical step was to look into how this wonderful transcription of my video could be actually shown...
View Articlebeta.w3.org is live!
The long-announced W3C site redesign is finally going live, in beta for the time being, at beta.w3.org. Although I’m far from having been the lead in that project – nobody has even come closed to the...
View ArticleUsing /etc/xml/catalog with org.apache.xml.resolver
I have just reported the bug in the w3c-dtd-xhtml Ubuntu package that had prevented me from using the Apache XML Catalog resolver to use local XHTML DTDs rather than the on-line ones when using the...
View ArticleTimeline in SVGs
I wrote a year ago an XSLT style sheet that can be handy in creating graphical timelines: it takes a simple XML file describing the said timeline, and turns it into an SVG image. The XML file should...
View ArticleNative Apps vs mobile Web
Yesterday night, I was participating to a BarCamp in Sophia-Antipolis (where W3C European offices are located) on the “mobile Internet” theme. Among the topics that were discussed, one theme popped up...
View ArticleDetermining the user’s language in JavaScript
When one wants to use JavaScript to add language-specific content to a page (for instance, for localization), the only cross-browser property available is navigator.language, which unfortunately...
View ArticleUsing the W3C cheatsheet as a “smart bookmark”
One of the users of the W3C cheatsheet (of which a new version was released yesterday including HTML5) reminded me of a nifty feature available in a number of browsers, the so called “smart bookmarks”,...
View ArticleFocusing on HTML forms fields through a link
I inquired earlier today if there was a way to give focus to an HTML form field through a simple link. The reason of my inquiry was that WCAG 2.0 recommends to make it possible for the user [to] easily...
View ArticleMy book on mobile Web design and development
I’ve spent a fair amount of my spare time over the past few months writing a book (in French) on mobile Web design and development, with my colleague François Daoust. The book is now finally...
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