Jeremy Visser

I just came across a post via the Planet Ubuntu. Yup, I blog about Ubuntu every so often. Every post I make about Ubuntu is tagged, and appears in this feed.

I would love to get a better readership, and I certainly would blog much more often, and enjoy it much more if I knew I were writing to more than myself!

The latest Minefield (Firefox trunk nightlies) passes the Acid2 test!

Well, almost. I think because I’m using Luxi Sans as my font, and the current modified copy of Cairo has some botchy hinting code, the chin is slightly deformed. But still, it’s basically all there! Yipee!

I’ve decided to change the mime-type of this site to application/xhtml+xml. It’s a really big change, for those of you that don’t know.

A mime-type is a bit of text that tells the browser what type of file it’s downloading. Normally, when you retrieve a web page, the text/html mime-type is returned. That tells the browser that it’s an HTML page.

Commonly, the text/html mime-type is also returned for XHTML pages. However, it’s better to return the application/xhtml+xml mime-type instead. The application/xhtml+xml tells the browser that it’s an XHTML page and that it should parse the document with an XML parser.

XML parsers are commonly unforgiving when they encounter an error. When a browser encounters a page served with the application/xhtml+xml mime-type, and parses it with an XML parser (as opposed to an SGML or tag soup parser), and finds an error, the browser will simply refuse to display the page.

That can be annoying if you’re trying to view a web page with an error, but it’s great for if you’re a web developer. All the error messages mean that you will find nearly every single error in your site, because your browser will tell you about it. If, back in the 1990s, browsers bombed out when they encountered an error instead of ignoring it, the web would have been a better place.

Well, most of my WordPress plugins have been breaking, because none of the plugin developers seem to test their plugins with the application/xhtml+xml mime-type. Maybe they should start doing that.

I recently started running Beryl off Treviño‘s beryl-svn repository. It includes the new flame effect for closing windows, proper Heliodor support in beryl-manager and a bit better performance.

I’ve been running a Vista theme for glass window borders, and the LiNsta 3 GTK+ theme for the widgets. LiNsta contains a lot of stuff that is very Vista-like in spirit, but not actually something copied from Vista. For example, the menu bars are bluey-greeny in colour, (which matches the Windows Explorer ‘command bar’) but in Vista, toolbars are actually a dull blue-purple colour, with the menubars having a little glossy reflection on them. Nothing interesting, but it’s Vista-like. So, I’ve been modifying LiNsta to be more true to Vista’s authentic style, regardless of whether it actually looks any good.

It’s interesting modifying a GTK+ theme, as I’ve never done it before. It’s surprisingly easy, but maybe that’s due to the fact that LiNsta uses the pixmap engine. (Installable with the gtk2-engines-pixbuf package in Ubuntu.)

I’ve been having fun with cairo-clock!