Jeroen Sangers

So many things to do, and only 24 hours in a day. I guess everybody sometimes has the feeling that too many things lie around unfinished.

For me, these are some small, usually technical, things as fixing the stylesheet of this site so the menu appears on the right place in IE, converting this site to PHP (so I can degrade pages to XHTML1.0 for IE), fix the light in the stairway, reading hundreds of pages I have bookmarked lately, look for a new computer for my in-laws, build a wireless network at home, put the latest Link on the Fimcap site, paint our front door, learn how to use ZOPE for future use for Fimcap, install freeBSD on my laptop…

Looking at this list, I wonder where all my time is going. Lets see: 9 hours sleeping, 9 hours working, 1.5 hours household (cooking, cleaning, ironing), 2.5 quality time (hours drinking beers on a terrace, watching TV on the sofa, reading the newspaper), 1 hour taking care about myself (eating & shower)… that leaves me 1 hour each day to be productive! I definitely need more hours in a day.

A good holiday is a holiday without internet connection. I had a quite good holiday, so you haven’t read any news from me lately. I did connect to the internet once in a while, but that was only to fix the computer of my parents and to install Mozilla Firebird (if you’re learning to surf the internet, you better do it right). I won’t bother you with my holiday stories, since we didn’t do that much. I was happy to see my friends and family again, and for those that I could not meet: sorry, maybe next time better.

For them moment I have plenty of things to arrange, so I won’t fix the menu bar on this site to work with IE and probably I won’t write a lot neither. That’s all for the moment, I better continue processing my overly full inbox…

I use this site a lot for testing out things. You could say that this site is Forever under construction. Today I have been testing again, and as a result, it looks more horrible in Internet Explorer. And since I am going on holidays, I am not going to fix it until next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have been working on the menu. The whole page header is situated inside a <div>, with an inline ordered list with bottom border as menu. Until today, I did nothing to position the menu, which resulted that the menu walked outside the header if you changed the font size. Not too beautiful…

So today I relatively positioned the header, and specified an absolute position of the menu, so it is always at the border of the containing positioned element, the header.

It solves the problem perfectly, but not in IE. I tested the new stylesheet in IE6, and the menu appeared at the bottom of the screen instead of the bottom of the header. I don’t know yet why IE is behaving like this, but promise to look further into it next week.

Braintags is also available in WML format, so you can read your favourite 😉 site using your WAP enabled telephone. Just point your telephone to http://wap.braintags.com/.

As this is the first time I tried to create something in WML, it surely is full with mistakes. Just let me know, so I can change it and learn something more.

If you are creating (X)HTML code, you always have to make sure that you use the right elements to specify the meaning of certain parts of the text. After that you can use stylesheets to determine how these parts will look. This is what they call the semantics of the text.

A lot of web designers abuse tags to accomplish a certain look. If they want a bigger text, they use the <h2> element, while the text is not a header at all, if they want to indent a text, they use <blockquote>, even though they are not quoting. I won’t go into detail why this is a bad thing, there are plenty of resources explaining this better than I could. But a lot of designers like me who try to do it correctly still make some mistakes. Today I realised that my pages have two semantically errors:

For my navigation lists, I use—as many other sites—unordered lists ( <ul><li>XXX</li></ul>). But my navigation links do have an order! My archive links are ordered chronological, so the correct thing would be to use the ordered list (<ol><li>XXX</li></ol>) instead.

By default, an ordered list is shown with numbers in front of each item, but it is very easy to remove them, just as I removed the bullets from my unordered navigation lists. I have seen many sites doing this wrong, and most examples of you will find on internet also use unordered lists.

Another thing I thought about today is that when I display trackbacks (comments on another site about my text) I am quoting another site. Therefore, I should be using the <blockquote> element (or <q>). I have looked around at other sites, but nowhere have I found trackbacks marked up as quotes.

You might think that these are minor issues, but since I am rewriting my templates anyway, I better do it right, not?

You might already have noticed it: I added some advertisements to this site.

Since now I am paying a hosting provider to host this site, I thought that I might try to get back at least some of the money I spend for it.

The advertisements are related to the contents of the page, so I only added them the pages of the individual items. This makes the chance bigger that they may actually be useful for my visitors as well.

I decided to give it a try for about two months; if I notice at that moment that they are not working, I will remove them.

People using a modern browser won’t see the advertisements, since the advertisement script does not work when the page is processed ad XML.

One more week to go, and we have our second short vacation of this year!!!

After going to Croatia in July, we will visit the good ol’ Netherlands this time. From September 9 until 16 you will have a bigger than normal chance of seeing us in the north of Europe.

We didn’t make an exact planning of what we are going to do, but we have made two short lists.

One with some practical things I have to arrange, and one with some places we want to visit. The first list has to be followed, and the second list will almost surely change on a day-by-day basis.

The moment I changed the looks of this site, I also changed the version of the code used for these pages.

My site is now made up in XHTML version 1.1. I only forgot to change one thing.

I did change some elements to their new variants, and of course I included the right DTD. But my pages were still served to your browser with the text/html MIME type, while the specification tells me that I should serve my pages as application/xhtml+xml.

The specification is quite clear in this, but as usual the reality is more complicated. I could simple change the file extensions to .xhtml, which are automatically send with the right MIME type. But at this moment a lot of browsers (including IE6) are not able to handle this kind of documents.

So I need to distinguish browsers that can handle application/xhtml+xml from those that cannot handle it. Fortunately, most browsers send a list of MIME types they can handle each time they request a file from the server; so all I have to do is look at this list, and change the MIME type for modern browsers.

Therefore I added the following lines to my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml+xml RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml+xml\s;\sq=0 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} HTTP/1.1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !photos.braintags.com RewriteRule .* - [T=application/xhtml+xml]

The first line looks whether the MIME type is in the accepted list of the browser.

The second lines looks whether it does not have q=0 (q stands for quality), which means that the browser does not want to use this MIME type.

The third line limits the requests to .html files only, since we do not want to change the MIME type for images, stylesheets and other files.

The fourth line limits the requests to HTTP version 1.1.

The fifth line excludes my photo pages, since I haven’t updated them to XHTML1.1 yet.

And the last line finally specifies the right MIME type for requests that satisfy all conditions above.

Throught the wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I was able to visit my old site again.

My biggest proud of that site was the big list of all the CD’s I own. So here it is, the list of March 12, 2001!