Oddly, Furl doesn’t seem to do the best job in reformating their rss feeds to make clean xml. I was wondering why my feeds were broken, so I tried loading the rss feed in a mozilla window where I saw very clear error messages that the xml was not formed correctly. Logging into Furl, I was fairly easily able to change the content to make it compliant. You’d think they’d try to parse stuff better!
Well, ok. That’s kind of a misleading title. This is really just an annoyance about going through yet another round of installs on my zaurus. OZ 3.5.1 just came out and of course, I had to jump on the band wagon.
I’ve been using cacko quite happily. There are some issues with it- no xmms, netfront isn’t the best browser in the world. But there are some nice details. For one, the fonts a readable- I can use the terminal. Under OZ… it isn’t happening. The hot keys under the screen are connected to applications. Under OZ, they aren’t.
Opie seems great. It has more packages than cacko does and has things like firefox and xmms. Ultimately, I think I’d rather run those than the cacko apps. But the thing is, on a device that is basically a pda- it needs to navigate very quickly- I want to be able to access things without work.
Of course, even cacko doesn’t totally fit the bill, but with little details like the function key for magnification and a usb net host functional out of the box… I guess I’m just going to have to restore my backup.
So I’m giving furl a whirl to manage bookmarks. I tried the del.icio.us root, but honestly was not impressed by the interface, so I opted for furl. The problem with furl is that the popup that they use for logging links doesn’t play nice with firefox’s (my standard browser) popup blocker. Figuring there had to be a fix, I found one.
Bascially the deal is that firefox appears to use a standard allow list in the configuration. if you open about:config in a firefox window, you get access to lots of fun stuff. What you’re looking for is the following:
dom.popup_allowed_events
This has a list of items on it: change click dblclick mouseup reset submit. By adding function to the string, I was able to get furl’s popup to play nice. Yea!
Ok, so I’ve been obssessed with css all week. In fact, I’ve been not sleeping at night and thinking about css. Which is sort of bad because I’m not very good at it. I’m sort of going through the process of rethinking all the things I know about tables and applying them to css. Or converting them. Or something. So I made some xml buttons. Just to see what I could do.
So the css looks like this:
[code]
#xml {
background-color: #000000;
border: 1px solid #444444;
width: 110px;
height:12px;
margin-bottom:5px;
}
#xml_label {
border: 1px solid #ffffff;
float:left;
width: 40px;
background-color:#ff6600;
text-align:center;
text-decoration:none;
color:white;
font-weight:bold;
font-size:10px;
height:10px;
}
#xml_text{
height:11px;
padding-top: 1px;
background-color: #ffffff;
font-weight:bold;
font-size: 10px;
color: #000000;
text-align:center;
}
#xml_text a{text-decoration:none;}
[/code]
and then the actual code is this:
[code]
[/code]
Ok, so I’m less happy about it now. While I was very enthusiastic about it yesterday, my cross browser checking of today has made me think abit more critically about it. For one, it breaks under IE5.0 pc, which isn’t such a big deal because that’s less than 6.5% of browsers, it makes me unhappy. I just think things shouldn’t break.
That being said, we’re looking at a solution for an administrative interface. If we are restricting browsers to an administrative only area, is that ok?
Personally, I think that’s reasonable. For one, people who are using the admin side are either the clients or administrators who installed the software. They know what the requirements are, or at least, have a better idea of what they are.
The second question in my mind is what is the baseline for what people should support now- with firefox at 1.0 it seems like that is a resonable design reference for an administration interface. For the public at large, I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m wrong here, but if you’re trying to design additional functionality for clients based on javascript, it seems reasonable to demand that they use a better browser.
So in the process of starting refine some semblence of a GUI for MI, I finally took the time to hunt down some stock icons that can be used to start of building a much cleaner interface. So voila, we’ve got icons. Areadly in svn too.
html area. It’s fantastic. While i’m bummbed that it isn’t 100% cross browser compatible (mac ie and safari) I’ve done some things to it that improve this situation.
For one, we have lots of dynamically generated textareas. I don’t want to fill a page with 20 editors on textareas, so i did some mods to support having a click link to display the editor, as well as checking for mac ie to hide it.
[code]
// this is for the htmlarea wysiwyg editor. this hides it from mac ie and safari
if (((navigator.userAgent.indexOf(”MSIE”) > -1) && (navigator.userAgent.indexOf(”Mac”) > -1) ) || (navigator.userAgent.indexOf(”Safari”) > -1) ) {
var canuseeditor = false;}
else { var canuseeditor = true;}
// write some html out to click on the htmlarea editor
function checkIESafari(textAreaId) {
if (canuseeditor) {
document.write(’‘);
document.write(’
‘);
}
function initEditor(theform) {
// this prevents from multi editors on one form
document.getElementById(’link_’ + theform).onclick=”";
//this builds the editor on to the supplied textarea
editor = new HTMLArea(theform);
— SNIP —
And here’s what I stuck in my page:
checkIESafari(’TheTextaraName);[% proto.description %]
[/code]
