17 November 2009
Today, I noticed while I was using Google today (which is a website some of you may of heard of), and I noticed they jazzed up where the URL is normally listed:
I don’t know whether to puke or have a seizure. I liked having the URL there. But then again, the URL is meaningless to 99% of users, because people like to put their head in the sand and create absolutely useless URLs. I’m looking at you, Dell and HP. And a whole lot more.
So yeah, probably a usability improvement. And you can click on the little segments. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s ’cause I’m a power user that looks at URLs. And if I really want to, I can always just hover over the link to get the URL anyway.
I wonder how it works. XML Sitemaps, maybe?
Update: Google has written about it. Looks like they analyse anything that looks like breadcrumbs. Too bad it’s not standardised, and they don’t actually tell you how to do it.
Tagged: aargh, Google, musings, web | 1 Comment »
4 July 2008
You know XFN — the XHTML Friends Network? The one where you add relationship info into anchor tags, like so:
<a href="http://jeremy.visser.name/" rel="friend met">Jeremy Visser</a>
It’s interesting to wonder what the future of it is. The cool thing about XFN is that it has the capability to be a decentralised social network. Facebook, MySpace, and the like, are centralised social networking sites, where you have to “register” in order to “add/invite friends”, “keep in touch”, etc.
I must confess that I am part of Facebook. In particular, I like the Friend Wheel application, which displays a graphical layout of the connections between your friends, rather like this:
(No, you’re not getting a bigger version.)
Facebook should not be necessary to do that. Though pretty much all XFN is is [sic] some attributes tacked on to a link (like rel="friend met"), it has the same power. A person could write a web service that downloads a web page of your choice (like your own page that has XFN-enabled links to your friends), scans the page for XFN relationships, then scans your friends’ pages for relationships, and displays a friend wheel just like the above.
This is all possible without a central authority like Facebook juggling all the relationships itself. The question is, however, why isn’t it done this way?
I think I know a couple of answers to this myself, but I am interested in some feedback on other peoples’ opinions. Is there a magic bullet we have we can use to promote the use of XFN, and put a nail in the coffin for centralised social networking websites?
Tagged: web, xfn | 1 Comment »
29 June 2008
Internet Explorer has been holding the web back for more than a decade and a half, and here’s yet more evidence to prove it.
When serving HTML as XML (forming XHTML), it opens up a whole range of new embedding possibilities, thanks to XML namespaces. I have created a mockup of embedding an SVG inside an XHTML document, and manipulating the text in the SVG with JavaScript.
Why not check it out? (Works on Firefox 3.0. Would probably look kooky in Firefox 2.0, and Internet Explorer users are totally screwed.)
Don’t bother validating it. It won’t validate, but that’s because it’s even too advanced for W3C’s validator. Take that. 
This would have been possible a long time ago if not for Microsoft crippling Internet Explorer so much so that it is still unable to display properly served XHTML documents. (XHTML was published in 1999, so that means we have been waiting 9 years to be able to do this for the masses, and are still waiting. Anyone know if IE8 will support this?)
Tagged: html, javascript, svg, web | 4 Comments »
25 May 2008
Wikipedia has realised it’s the 21st century, IE6 is no longer the most important browser in the world, and updated their logo to be an alpha-blended PNG, rather than the shaggy aliased monster they had before.
Tagged: graphics, web | 5 Comments »
