Yearly Archives: 2008

At Last

Tuesday July 22nd 2008

Just having a quick look at the CSS for the new Last FM design to see they’ve made great use of min-width, max-width and an inline css expression to create their pseudo-fluid layout. Those techniques have been in the toolkit for a long time, of course, but it’s only recently that browsers with reliable support have allowed web developers to wield them effectively.

Another excellent point of note is that their submit buttons are proper submit buttons, not some captured usability train wreck in the name of Web 2.0 that fails to work outside of the big three or four browsers. (Yes, Twitter, I’m looking at you.)

It’s good to see a small-ish company like Last FM create clean and usable site with intelligent code, whilst the likes of Yahoo! stumble about making their My Yahoo! pages increasingly unusable on anything other than a PC. Well done to them. 🙂

Linkage: Internationalisation with PHP, Apache & MySQL

Tuesday July 15th 2008

This article posted by Florian Eibeck on setting up php, Apache, and MySQL for dealing with international character sets is a good overview of the groundwork required to support a UTF-8 compliant web app.

As Florian rightly points out, there are non-UTF-8 safe functions lurking in php to upset the apple cart if you’re not aware of them. Although strlen() may not return the right result with double-byte characters, it doesn’t do your content any harm – there are plenty of others that do mangle double-byte content.

From my own experience, once the environment (Apache, MySQL) was set up correctly it’s those unsafe php functions that cause the most grief, both in tracking down the culprits and finding a work around. It is rewarding when it finally comes together, though – there’s something quite cool about seeing all manner of Scandinavian languages sitting on screen alongside Japanese and English in a web app created by your own hand. 🙂

apache, mysql, php, utf-8

Contrast

Sunday July 13th 2008

Having spent the week in London, seamlessly falling back into the old routine of rushing even when I wasn’t in a hurry, the time spent this afternoon in Helensburgh was excruciatingly slow in terms of pace.

I’m sure Henry Rollins once waxed lyrical about people robbing him of valuable seconds of his life due to dithering in front of him in queues. That kind of thing does my head in, too. You’re there for no other reason than to pay for the goods you wish to buy.