Joop on Sugar

Some people say: "Less is more". I like the saying "less is less".

Today this blog went from 14 to 5 categories. In the last year or so the list of categories grew, mostly out of lazyness on my part. So I went through all the posts and tried to look at what I was trying to convey with it. As you can see now, most posts are about something I found on the web. That why there is the Linkdump categorie. I decided that, if the posts consists on nothing more then a link with an little explanation, that's a LinkDump.
Only if I expressed some opinion of my own, the post could have another category.
Next I deleted all categories that had names of specific programming techniques, like PHP or Ruby. All those posts are now in the Programming category. And so on, and so on.

It is still not perfect. I could go over the old posts again to finetune it. But I am happy now with the cleaned up menu on the left. It looks so much better now, doesn't it? ;-)

CSS is great, but anyone who has made pure CSS webdesigns knows browser inconsistencies, and the frustrations to make things work cross-browser. CSS hacks are used alot to deal with this problem, as a last resort. But nobody likes them. CSS hacks are ugly, sometimes even invalid code, and there is a fundamental thing wrong with it. You never know what happens with your design when a newer version of the webbrowser is released.

Last week 37signals, the creators of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp and other inspiring stuff, had an other idea to deal with the problem of browser inconsistencies in rendering CSS: javascript!
Rafael Lima took the idea and created the Javascript code. After you've added the javascript to your webpage, you can do stuff like this in CSS:

.ie .example {
background-color: yellow
}
.gecko .example {
background-color: gray
}
.opera .example {
background-color: green
}
.konqueror .example {
background-color: blue
}
.webkit .example {
background-color: black
}
.example {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
background-color: brown;
}


I haven't had time yet to thoroughly test this script, but in the browers I checked (Mac OS X: Firefox, Safari, Opera) it works as advertised.

So with this new approach we can deal with browser inconsistencies without hacks, and still have valid code! And the beauty of it is: if a browser is not addressed by the javascript, it will render the default CSS style!

If you want to try this yourself, pick up the javascript from:

http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/

Google Labs introduced a certain kind of search yesterday. From their weblog:

Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

I tried it and did a search for my own name. In a standard Google search of my name this weblog is the first result, which is good. But even though this weblog uses webstandards it doesn't come up as first in Google's accessible search. First in the accessible search is my "Share Your OPML" page. Weird.

Update: After writing this peace the order has been shifted. Now the URI of this weblog comes up first in the list of results.

The idea to show result ordered on accessibilty I support strongly. If the 'normal' Google would behave more like this, webmasters are encouraged to make websites accessible. Accessible for anyone and any device. That's the whole idea of webstandards, right?

Humanized is a small company based in Chicago concerned with making the computer experience better. In a weblog post on their website called "No More More Pages?" they address the problem of navigation:

The problem is that every time a user is required to click to the next page, they are pulled from the world of content to the world of navigation: they are no longer thinking about what they are reading, but about about how to get more to read. Because it breaks their train of thought and forces them to stop reading, it gives them the opportunity to leave the site. And a lot of the time, they do.

Is it possible to have more and more content without pagination? Humanized tries out an idea on their RSS reader application. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the effect.