I’m sure someone’s posted about this already, but here goes anyway.

I was going through my RSS feeds, got to Cidoc, and clicked through a couple of articles.

One of the first told me about the Scottish Arts Council’s logo, brand and such-like. The very next one told me about Quark’s new logo and identity.

It’s fresh, inviting, and open says Quark. I can just imagine the response at SAC: Maybe it is, but it’s exactly the same bloody logo as ours!

I had a bit of geek pleasure this week. I took an in-house web-application and tidied it’s output up. What was once a pile of tag-soup junk is now clean, accessible, sentatically correct, valid HTML. This was relatively easy, once I’d got my head around the way the app works. It’s quite nice now – but it sits on our intranet, so you’ll never get to see it unless you happen to work in the same place I do.

Then I got cocky. I thought If I can do that for that app, why can’t I do it for this ever so slightly more complex one?

So I started looking at the source files. Holy crap! It looks like the code was written by a gibbon jumping up and down on the keyboard! As soon as I started trying to tidy it up, things got squelchy. Undo, undo undo! Put it back exactly how it was! Phew. Making that one look nice is going to be an interesting experience.

Still, I think it’s worth doing, even if it’s “just” an in-house intranet application. Your in-house customers are just as important as the outside ones. If you don’t keep them happy, the products and services that they produce for outside customers won’t be as good. Keeping the interface and the code clean and accessible means that it’ll be nicer for user’s to interact with. What’s more, it’ll be easier for the next set of programmers and designers to work with next time around.

Oh my. Lost is a bit good isn’t it? I’ve just reached the end of Season 1. Yes, I know downloading the whole series at once is cheating.

I won’t spoil it for everybody else – we’ve still got about another five months of it on TV over here. Suffice it to say that I really need to see Season 2, right about now.

I’m currently working my way through a sample chapter Sitepoint‘s DHTML Utopia book – partly to see if I want to buy the book, and partly because I’m trying to get my head around event listeners. I got some way through the chapter, testing my work in Firefox as I went, and it was all going swimmingly.

What happens in Internet Explorer then?, thinks I. Precisely nowt. It was at this point that my colleagues looked around to see what the swearing was all about. From the book:

Naturally, making events work cross-browser is not as easy as just following the DOM standard. Internet Explorer doesn’t implement the DOM Events model very well. Instead, it offers a proprietary and different way to hook up event listeners and gain access to event data.

What’s the point in having a standard if the most popular sodding browser is going to completely ignore it!?

Luckily, the book explains ways around Internet Explorer’s Javascript deficiencies in a calm and friendly manner (e.g. This is inconvenient but not catastrophic; it just means that you have to take different actions for different browsers.). It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy the book, simply because it’ll help dig me out of some big holes.

WARNING IE USERS! STROBE EFFECTS LIKELY!

So, I decided to try applying the lessons learned to one of my own projects. It was all going fine, up until I went to test it in IE. This time, the scripts were working perfectly. No, IE had to find some other way of buggering it up. Now, every time an event was fired, IE decided to re-load all of the background images in the elements effected. Flickerytastic dude! Does this mean I have to put an epilepsy warning up on the page? I navigate away, click ‘back’ and all is fine again.

A bit of googling, asking around on mailing lists, and tearing out of my fast-greying hair reveals that are two ways of fixing the problem:

1. Get every single one of your visitors using Internet Explorer, AOL, or indeed anything else that uses the IE engine, to alter their Internet Options: Go to Temporary Internet Files, then Settings, then choose Automatic. Realistically, that’s not going to happen is it?
2. Get your server to add the Cache-control header to the images on your server. Doing this works differently for different servers: ASP.net Resources has the fix for IIS, Dean Edwards has the fix for Apache. If you’re using something else you’ll have to rely on google.

It’s really frustrating that every time I try to do almost anything on the web, Internet Explorer jumps in front of me and holds up an enourmous stop sign. It’s good in a way, in that it forces me to find an acceptable way around the problem. I just wish finding that answer didn’t usually double the time it takes to complete a project. If IE7 really has improved as much as Microsoft say it has, I can’t wait for it to arrive. It’s just a pity that IE5, 5.5 and 6 will continue to linger for as long as they inevitably will.

Just going through my old text messages and came across this one from Alice, my sister. I’ve been reluctant to delete it for some reason.

SMS From: Alice Mob
07.07.2005    11:04
Oliver they are
blowing up london
the whole of zone
one is shut. im ok
though. im in 
selfridges wierdly
people are still
shopping! Alice x

It was quite a relief to get that message, I can tell you. Quite insightful too. Despite all the chaos going on outside, these people were trapped in huge department store. What else were they going to do?

Hello Abigail. Yes, you, in the pink.

Your big brother (that’ll be me) has been spectacularly useless, and failed to get you anything nice for your birthday (that’s today, as I’m sure you’re aware).

This could be something to do with not having a clue what you’d like. He thought about another game for the ‘cube but he would appear to have already bought you all the good ones. The he thought about a CD, but what does an Abbie listen to, if anything? The chocolate, sweets and book/music/beer token options all seem like a bit of a cop-out.

It could also be down to sheer disorganisation on his part.

No doubt he’ll give you a call later and see if you know what you’d like [1]), have a think, buy something and put it in the post. Maybe he’ll come and visit you at some point in the near future? He can’t plan his life beyond tomorrow so who knows when that might be…

Anyway, he hopes you’re having a good one and that you’ll forgive his uselessness – you really ought to be used to it by now!

[1] The reader might be interested to know that this question usually results in an “erm…” or something very very expensive indeed.