philwilson.org

Question:

Given ten divs all with float:left one after the other (let’s call each div “box”), all inside a containing div (which we’ll call “boxholder”, they won’t be displayed as such due to the floats taking the boxes out of the normal flow.

In order to make the boxholder expand to the size of its contents, you can put another box at the end with clear:left.

Is this the only way to make the boxes sit visually within boxholder?

Screenshots of what the boxes look like without the final empty div:
IE screenshot and Mozilla screenshot

via Danny comes a link to an article which in turn links to the Getty Thesuarus of Geographic Names. Sounds a bit tedious, but fortunately for all those who want to add accurate GeoURL data to their webpages and don’t have GPS systems available to them, this site could be the answer.

Type in your city and country, or use the popups to select where you mean, and get the co-ordinates back! Easy Peasy.

(Of course, for those in the UK, we can always use the more accurate MultiMap, which shows the co-ordinates under “Map Information”, although I’m not sure it always did so)

I know how involved Edd Dumbill is in the FOAF community, but I’d never taken the time out to read the FOAF section of his website.

I’m glad I finally did; his three tutorials: Adding people into the FOAF web, Digitally signing FOAF files and Limiting who can read a FOAF file are excellent beginners tutorials, just like I was after yesterday.

We had to make a decision at work the other day as to whether a site we were making should be able to support people with 800×600 monitors. I said no, that no-one used this resolution any more, that 1024 was the norm, and we should go with that (most websites we do support both of course, but there were special considerations with this one).

I was wrong.

A quick look at the monitor resolution stats for May 2003 shows that the largest proportion of users, 44%, were still using 800×600 displays. I was shocked.

It also rates the cumulative number of users using IE to be at 94%. I was not shocked.

Although allegedly, thecounter.com tracked around 38 million visitors in May, and 350 million in April. I can’t help but be suspicious. Do these sorts of numbers really exist? is thecounter.com really used that widely? Answers on a postcard.

In yesterday’s ramble about Netscape, I suggested that a Mozilla browser needed to be branded to make any decent headway onto home users’ desktops.

Anil Dash has floated the idea that this branding should be done by Google, and Simon Willison has also posted about it.

I really think this would be an excellent move. Obviously the main stumbling block would be the business model to base this around, but as Anil suggests, built-in hooks to Google services and ads could do this.

But would people use “The Google Browser”? What on earth would it be marketed as? Googlezilla? What a mouthful!

It’s about time the information about FOAF was pulled together. There’s quite a bit of it, but it’s spread over the web, with no guarantee of everything pointing to everything else. Gathering it all together on a website (not a wiki, and the foaflog is slightly too developer-centric) is something that really needs to be tackled (as Marc Canter has been calling for on the rdfweb-dev mailing list). Fortunately someone’s made a go at doing just that:

Example FOAF website

It links to the specs, the tools, the foaflog, pulls together articles posted on disparate weblogs all to make one big excellent FOAF resource. The design is slightly too garish and the text line-spacing slightly too tight for me, but I can live with this. A few contributed “beginners” articles and this would be excellent.

Keeping to the web theme, mozilla.org has a new site, designed to be more appealing to end users instead of developers. It’s OK, but will be a hell of a lot better once the “What Is The Mozilla Foundation?” box has gone. Also, it’s particularly strange that the website of one of the most standards-compliant browsers was designed with tables, luckily Tom Gilder comes to the rescue with a version of the site just in CSS – mozilla.org take note! (side note: Tom also has a really nice line in “CSS3 quickies”, like wavy underlining and the ::outside element. For those who can’t be bothered to trudge through the CSS3 draft (although if you like this kind of thing, and I do, it’s very interesting), this is great stuff.

The Good, the Bad and the Partially Frozen

The Web Fridge Project

Netscape is dead. Everyone’s shouting it from the rooftops, and if it wasn’t such a major thing I’d assume it was covered well enough in other places.

Comments like this though, just make me worry. Netscape closing is a big, big deal. Whether people like it or not, or think that it makes sense or not, Netscape is the name the public identifies with. It’s the name managers and support staff in I.T. companies know. Nobody outside of the web development or open source worlds knows what Mozilla is. Really. They know even less what Phoenix was, Firebird is, or will be (Mozilla again, I believe).

Netscape provided a good base for distributing Mozilla by virtue of being a company that people had heard of, one that they trusted to provide a usable application. You mention “open source” or try and explain who writes Mozilla to a normal person, and they’ll think it’s shit. “What? Made by some guys in their free time? How good can that be?” I honestly don’t see this changing unless Mozilla is licensed by or used in another, branded product.

I have a lot of computer literate friends (i.e. people who aren’t developers of some sort), like techs, and people who like to think they’re computer literate (like sales and support staff – none of them care about Mozilla, even if they know about it. Whenever I try and evangelise, they just say “Yeah, but I like Internet Explorer”. Despite all its horrendous faults, which are so obvious to all the web developers, IE is “good enough” software. It works, it’s easy to use – why should a normal person move from that?

The first thing one of our designers at work said when I mentioned the Netscape closure was “But that’s good isn’t it? Now you’ve only got to support IE”, and that is exactly the attitude of anyone outside of the web dev and OS communities.

Firebird is Mozilla’s best chance of success and market penetration – a low weight, fast, standards compliant web browser, but if it doesn’t a) settle on a name and b) get to 1.0 c) get an official installer (as opposed to the unofficial installer ) soon, then it’ll have scuppered its own chances.

I love the fact that on the front page of the new mozilla.org is a quote by Joel Spolsky – if you read the whole article he goes on to say:

Now, if you’re a programmer at AOL working on Mozilla, and you like your job, you might want to think about what it’s going to take to make your happy little division actually useful to AOL so you aren’t jettisonned. … Yo, Netscape employees! … Wake up.

Second only in editors’ dreams to Lord Lucan riding in on Shergar and carrying Diana’s secret love child comes today’s tabloid front page (via 2lmc via davblog ):

Popstar secret sex romp with glamour model! American GI pervert snatches child! etc.

Can weblogs change polictics?

Only as much as Ben Elton’s relentlessly scathing commentaries are widely regarded to have brought about the ultimate downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I tend to disagree with a lot of what Don Park says, but the other day he wrote that Blogs will fade away within two years, and to me, this seems perfectly obvious. Blogs are just websites; before “blogging” took off as an entity in its own right, with a thousand different applications specifically tailored to writing them, people were still updating their websites with personal thoughts on a daily basis. The weblogging tools just make that easier. Hell, some of them have even actually managed to lower the barrier to entry by abstracting away the need to go anywhere near HTML. But lets not get carried away with the difference between weblogs and websites, weblogs are just free and simple CMS systems for the masses.