About QuirksMode.org in general.
Part of Content.
| Redesign | Validation drive |
The QuirksMode.org DNS entry did not work for about 55 hours, from Sunday 27th around 15:00 to midnight on Wednesday 30th. This is by far the longest time my site has ever been offline since it started (under a different name) in 1998. I’m not happy about it, but the matter was beyond my control.
In December I held a QuirksMode reader survey on Urtak. It had 69 questions, and about 59,000 answers were given by about 1,100 respondents. A few weeks back I published part 1 of my survey. Here’s the next few findings.
In December I held a QuirksMode reader survey on Urtak. It had 69 questions, and about 55,000 answers were given by about 1,100 respondents. Here’s a partial summary of the findings.
If you’re bored during the holidays I encourage you to take my poll; it’ll help me understand who my audience is. Please answer as many or few questions as you like; although I’d like to ask you to answer at least 15 to 20 or so.
OK, it’s time for an experiment. I created a reader poll about QuirksMode, your testing habits as a web developer, and your devices.
At the end of December I turned off comments for the QuirksBlog. As far as I’m concerned they’ll stay turned off forever, except when I actually want to ask a question.
I didn’t take this decision, the decision took itself while I looked on musingly. The time has come, and I give up a little bit of good stuff in order to get rid of a serious annoyance as well as comment spam.
13 April 2009
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| in Conferences, Site
6 comments
(closed)
I’m pleased to announce that Google has graciously agreed to sponsor my work on my compatibility tables. We’ve entered an agreement for this year; after that we’ll see what happens.
Therefore, if you go to the compatibility tables now, you’ll see a tasteful little sponsor bar at the bottom of every page with a well-known logo in it.
Almost exactly eight years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman wrote To Hell With Bad Browsers, in which he implored web developers to start ignoring Netscape 4 because its standard support sucked majorly. Yesterday several large Norwegian sites placed a warning against IE6 on their pages.
Web developers from all over the world are following this initiative with interest. To Hell With Bad Browsers is obviously in for a remake.
Just now I added an IE6 warning to QuirksMode.org (not that my visitors need any; this site probably has the most browser-savvy audience in the world). I also wrote an upgrade page that attempts to explain the problem and its solution to end users.
Lately, my Technorati page shows more and more odd links to my site on pages like this. The "Online Casinos News Life Luxury Reports" link at the bottom links to this site.
Can anyone explain why spammers think this is a good idea? I don't mind having a bit of extra traffic, but for the life of me I can't understand why spammers want this, too. This site is not an Online Casinos News Life Luxury Reports, after all.
Maybe I can make a lot of money with this. If people want to gamble online, I'm more than willing to accept their money. Maybe I should write a Texas Hold-em script. In fact, I think I did exactly that a few years back. Let's see if I can find the script.
Any clarification is welcome.
Recently Google released the very handy Webmaster Tools app, with which you can see how many links to pages there are, plus quite a few other goodies. This allowed me to create a Top Ten list of the most popular pages on this site, as measured by incoming links.
6 February 2007
Permalink
| in Content, Redesign, XMLHTTP
4 comments
(closed)
I added a new page about importing the site navigation on all QuirksMode.org pages. The page is mostly about why I do what I do, and less about the how (besides, technically it's quite easy). The site navigation is a perfect example of what Jeremy calls Hijax.
I also put my trusty XMLHttpRequest functions online for future reference. No explanations on this page; I already treated them in section 10A of the book.
I implemented a Preferences page on which you can indicate your preferences for several QuirksMode.org features.
I promised to go into more detail about the redesign; here's the first installment in which I talk about some aspects of the CSS.
As you can see on this page, the QuirksMode.org redesign has gone live. It's not quite ready yet; right now I estimate that it's about 95% finished, but the remaining 5% will take a lot of time to implement, and therefore I decided to go live now instead of waiting another few weeks.
30 August 2006
Permalink
| in Conferences, Redesign
8 comments
(closed)
Although I'm almost ready with the promised redesign of QuirksMode.org, I'm nonetheless going to postpone it. There are two reasons:
As I think I said before, I am working on a redesign. In fact, I've been working on it for months, on and off, when the book permitted. Now that the book is ready I have more time to spend on it, and it's coming on nicely. (Oh, and before you ask, the frames will go. They've done their duty and I don't need them any more.)
Currently I'm going through all content pages and updating them; and since these updates go live the minute I finish them, I thought I'd give you an overview of what I'm doing.
From today, Friday 28 July, until next Wednesday, 2 August, I'll be in the countryside where there is no Internet. This site is therefore closed in that period; anything that needs my personal intervention will have to wait until next Thursday.
The commenting system has been restored on QuirksBlog and the Bug Report thanks to Joost Diepenmaat. I closed them off for this entry (I don't see much value in comments about the commenting system), but I have turned them on on my book announcement page so that you can congratulate me.
Update: The contact form has been restored, too. I don't promise to answer quickly, but I will answer eventually.
Right now chaos rules on QuirksMode.org, and I'd like to apologize for it. To name but a few things: comments are disabled, I'm at least one month behind with Bug Report entries, and the contact form has been closed down for months.
First the good news: this will change. I want to go back to the situation where QuirksMode is a normal, well maintained blog/resource site. Then the bad news: it might be another month before something actually happens.
Nakedness sweeps the Web thanks to Dustin Diaz. I myself definitely decline to go without a modest bit of garment, so the navigation and logo frames will remain styled, as well as the content pages. In order to support the Cause I did disable my homepage's style sheets.
The idea was to catch those bits of markup that don't degrade too well without CSS, and as you can see there are a few on my homepage. These will be fixed in the continuously upcoming redesign.
Update: styles restored. I felt too naked without them.
Well, I'm back from all my holidays. My throat problems are mostly over, although I still don't have hot water in my house. Even so I'll start working again tomorrow, and I've spent a large part of the weekend in catching up on QuirksMode.org related matters.
Thursday night I returned from a relaxing holiday in Greece. I'd planned to do some work on Friday, before leaving for the countryside again on Monday.
Unfortunately Friday was a rather disastrous day. My central heating unit, which also provides my hot water, suddenly began expelling flames when I turned it on, and a hurriedly fetched mechanic told me it cannot be used any more due to the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. No hot water, no showers, no shave.
Then the dirty, nearly windless air prevailing here in Amsterdam started working on my nose and throat, and right now I'm taking tea with honey, orange juice, and more such medicines in an attempt to stave off a cold.
All this means that I'm going to extend my holiday silence considerably. I'm disastrously behind on all jobs except for comment approval, but that's not going to change in the near future. No replies to the 200 or so mails still waiting for me.
If you need me, sorry, you'll have to have more patience; my unavailability has been extended for at least another week.
Today I leave for a two week holiday in Greece. As usual I won't touch a computer while I'm over there, so everything that requires my personal intervention will have to wait until at least Friday 19 August.
I'll be only patchily available during the rest of August, and I don't take any new job, no matter how small, paid or volunteer, before 5 September.
See you all later.
Regular visitors may have noticed that my homepage has changed a bit in the past few days. The old one was too cluttered and contained too much information. Besides, it didn't have any space left for the new Elsewhere on the 'Net feature. So I significantly revised my main blog pages and the content they deliver to the homepage.
Like my recently started validation drive, the homepage restructuring is just one aspect of the full-fledged QuirksMode.org redesign I'm planning. Besides, the redesign set me thinking about separation of structue and content.
29 June 2005
<wbr />
Permalink
| in Content, Validation drive
10 comments
(closed)
I just updated the Quirks mode and strict mode page. I added a bit about the "almost strict mode" and test pages for font sizes in TDs.
I also found one new problem in the validation drive: most of my large compatibility tables liberally use the <wbr /> tag, which is invalid. I acknowledge the problem, I will note it in the validation texts, I will remove all other validation errors, but right now I'm not going to do anything more.
Like custom attributes, the <wbr /> tag requires some more thought. As my research shows, this tag is the least bad alternative for adding soft word breaks to pages; and the compatibility tables badly need soft word breaks.
27 June 2005
Permalink
| in Redesign, Validation drive
57 comments
(closed)
A few readers may have spotted the delicate gray text that appeared at the very bottom of my homepage last Saturday. It says "Valid XHTML 1.0". These few readers may even have drawn the correct conclusion: QuirksMode has started moving in the direction of valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Note: "moving in the direction of". For reasons I explain below this site will never be 100% valid, but I have decided to make an effort and see what happens next.
Besides, my content pages are long, long overdue for a cleanup, and I'm going to combine this sanitation with the switch to XHTML. Unfortunately the very first static page I edited gave raise to a fundamental question that I don't have an answer to. Therefore I submit one aspect of the maintenance of QuirksMode.org to a reader vote.
Today I leave for London to attend the @media 2005 conference. I will return home on Sunday. During that time this site is effectively closed: anything that needs my personal approval, as well as any mails I have to answer, will have to wait until next week.
Hope to see some of you at the conference, or maybe at Saturday's JavaScript get-together.
Just now I implemented a 1500 characters maximum length for all comments on my QuirksBlog and Bug Report. Part of this reworking is a script that politely alerts the user when he exceeds this limit. I already discussed such a script in general terms in my JavaScript Triggers article on A List Apart, and of course I added a page that explains the script for all curious JavaScripters.
Right now I have a large writing job (not a book, unfortunately), and it takes rather more time that I thought it would. Since I'm working on it almost every waking hour, I'm getting a bit tired of writing. That's the reason I'm not posting any blog items right now, and I'm afraid this situation will continue throughout March.
I'm getting increasingly mystified by comments like this:
<a href="http://ssszcwyqwer.com/">oosgqx</a> poiuyt http://ghjklkpgaiequgo/
What is the point of these comments? Are they an extremely subtle sort of spam? If so, what's the purpose? The domain ssszcwyqwer.com doesn't exist, so generating traffic or a high search engine ranking for it doesn't make sense.
I understand spammers. I understand people who leave stupid comments. I don't understand people who leave incomprehensible comments.
I thought I'd give you the current visitor stats for this site, gathered through the Reinvigorate system. Of course these figures are only valid for this site, and should never under any circumstance be used for any other site.
Aside from the new domain name, the main reason I embarked on the QuirksMode.org project was that my old sites were becoming a nightmare to maintain and a mess to navigate. Rigorous information restructuring solved these problems nicely, but now that I've added two blogs to my site the problem is returning. Besides, I'm having difficulties making Movable Type do what I want.
As I promised a month ago, I have finally added the QuirksBlog to my site. It'll serve as my personal blog, not only for announcing new pages on this site and articles on other sites, but also for commenting on the web developers' world in general. In addition to this proud announcement, I'd like to give a general overview of where QuirksMode.org currently stands.
As I promised almost a month ago, I now proudly present the Bug Report system. Started as a simple sidebar on this page, the system aims to gather, explain and discuss any CSS or JavaScript browser bug.
I almost, but not quite, forgot that today is this site's first anniversary. Exactly one year ago I was very glad to finally publish it and put an end to an increasingly interminable development phase.
New feature on my site: the Bug Report.
I'm back in business, after a restful and relaxing holiday in Greece, a major network breakdown, a long weekend in the countryside, and lots of sipping alcoholic beverages on sunny terraces.
I've even done a few minor updates today:
createAttribute(). See the
W3C DOM Core tables - Attributes under createAttribute().document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'div{margin:0px;}'"); syntax
is the correct one for Explorer Windows. I didn't test this one.This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer.
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