Yahoo and the Seven Network have combined to create a new ninemsn clone: Yahoo7. They’ve done well and created a site that is a CSS-based layout (ie no tables except for tabular data). It looks nice too, nicer I would say, than ninemsn. I think this site may actually manage to pull my homepage away from Google Personal Homepage. Y7 doesn’t compete for customisation, but it’s got more personality, and personality goes a long way. There’s some good use of DHTML/AJAX, not overwhelming and showy, just used as it should be, i.e. to make things easier to use. I particularly like the little scrollable news box (but just swiped from the news.com.au site) and the customisable local weather widget.

All very nice, but can someone please tell me why, after all the effort of creating a great CSS-based site, you would go ahead and not specify a content-type and put the DOCTYPE tag in wrong?

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I’ve now downloaded a copy of Movable Type 3.12, and so I’ve worked out how to add the insert & delete buttons to it too. See the update on the prior post. Still very simple, involving the same two files.

For those who came in late, this is to add two buttons to the Movable Type editing page, to allow you to mark text as inserted or deleted as needed. Read the whole post for a full run-down of the idea.

<shamelessplug>Also, you may be interested in my idea for using CSS to display document revisions clearly: Part 1, Part 2</shamelessplug>

Following on from last timelast time.

Next comes the javascript. This script is "borrowed" from Paul Sowden’s excellent article on A List Apart, Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets. Here’s the script:

function setActiveStyleSheet(title) {
var i, a, main;
for(i=0; (a = document.getElementsByTagName("link")[i]); i++) {
if(a.getAttribute(”rel”).indexOf(”style”) != -1
&& a.getAttribute(”title”)) {
a.disabled = true;
if(a.getAttribute(”title”) == title) a.disabled = false;
}
}
}

You’ll need to include this on any page you want this to work on, either in script tags in the page, or in an externally linked javascript file.

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Following on from the last post on adding inserted and deleted tags to Movable Type (or at least adding automation for them), I was having a bit more of a think about how to display that information on a site. While searching for info about online readability, I came across this thread on the WebAIM Forums from last year:

At present, there is no markup that you could use to indicate changes in any reliable way, except for mere insertions such as new material added. (And even for that only if it is not necessary to indicate it as inserted, since <ins> is not consistently supported, and even then probably with a style sheet rule that tries to make the rendering better. Internet Explorer uses underlining for <ins>, and this tends to create confusion with links. It’s probably best to use CSS to remove the underlining and to add a coloured dashed bottom border, or something.)

There’s a serious argument against <del>, <strike>, and text-decoration: line-through especially in situations where the “work”: the line through feature very often has the effect of making the text almost impossible or very difficult to read. Besides, although the line through probably conveys the idea of deletion to most people, many of us will be puzzled by the question what this really means. Is the user expected to read, or to be able to read, what has been deleted? If it has been deleted, why is it there at all?

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Updated for MT 3.1

If a blog, or any online publication for that matter, is going to have any sort of decent reputation, the author(s) must have the integrity to publicly correct any incorrect information that they’ve published. We all make mistakes, whether they be typos or actual factual errors, and it is often necessary to re-edit or change the content on our sites. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of the web over traditional print media. There is no need to publish an errata list, you can simply modify the original.

However, it is also important to acknowledge the mistake and not just silently update the text and act as if the change had always been there. If the change is simply correcting a misspelling, this may be alright, but for correcting factual errors, it must be stated that a change has occurred, as people may quote you before the change, and you will be making them out to be liars. Also, it’s simply a matter of integrity to publicly state "I made a mistake, I have now corrected it"

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The W3C have released an FAQ for XHTML, and the 6^th working draft of the new XHTML2 specification. [via Slashdot]

There’s not a lot of new stuff in the FAQ, mostly just answering criticisms and legacy questions about implementing XHTML, but one question was interesting: Is <img> being replaced by <object> in XHTML2?.

No. <img> is being replaced in XHTML2, but by something else (although you could use <object> if you wanted).

The design of <img> has many problems in HTML:

• It has no fallback possibilities, so that if you use an image of type PNG for instance, and the browser can’t handle that type, the only alternative is to use the alt text. This fact has hampered the adoption of PNG images, which in many ways are better than GIF and JPG, since people have continued to use the lowest-common denominator format, to ensure that everyone can see the images.
• The alt text cannot be marked up, so that if it gets used, you just get the plain text.
• It is possible to include a longdesc link to a description of the image, to help people who cannot see, but it is seldom implemented.

What XHTML2 does is say that all images are equivalent to some piece of content; it does this by allowing you to put a src attribute on any element at all. What this says is: if the image is available, and the browser can process it, use it, otherwise use the content of the element. For instance:
<p src="/map.png">Exit from the station, turn left, go straight on to <strong>High Street</strong>, and turn right</p>

…

(The rest of the answer has to do with having fall-back images and using content negotiation.)

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