Håvard Pedersen

Today I stumbled upon an article by Lachlan Hunt which lists some of the problems with using XHTML for webpages. After having read through it, I was nearly ready to reimplement my XHTML pages in HTML... The main cause for this was IE's lack of support for application/xhtml+xml content. It won't render it, but instead provides you with a standard download dialog. Serving XHTML as text/html, like most people do nowadays is actually fooling older user agents (like IE) to treat the page as good ole' HTML. But there were a lot of other issues with XHTML I didn't like the sound of either.

This would actually make my employer have to use HTML Transitional, since some of the ad serving is done using <iframe>, which isn't allowed in the strict doctypes. You can read more on the differences between strict and transitional markup here. I might be arrogant, but HTML4 Transitional sounds a bit too nineties for me to accept, even if it is an acknowledged standard.

Luckily, the XHTML specs states that text/html is ok to use for XHTML documents, and they even included a thorough appendix on how to make sure your XHTML document renders correctly in browsers that treat it like HTML. Very good reading, and it contained several implications I weren't aware of!

Edit 1: There's an article over at workingwith.me.uk about sending mime headers depending on what the user agent supports. Highly recommended reading. Works like a charm here. Though I was a bit shocked to notice that W3C's validator doesn't send the correct ACCEPT-headers.

Edit 2: W3C has a table with the definitive overview of contenttypes for the differenct specs.

Edit 3: The code from www.workingwith.me.uk har some bugs if a browser explicitly states it does NOT want application/xhtml+xml. I rewrote my handling using some code from www.autisticcuckoo.net which seems to work more reliably (setting Q to 1 as default).

Lately I've done some research for free (as in beer) development environments, both for web and Java. The result was, to put it blunt, a huge disappointment. What actually disappointed me more, was the horrible pricing for commercial solutions with no "personal use only" licenses available.

The "can do everything known to man but is like removing a lash in the eye with a shovel"-approach would ofcourse be Eclipse or Netbeans, but after using them for a couple of days you loose all faith in using Java for creating large desktop applications. They're essentially large and fancy texteditors with the possibility of launching external compilers. Why this task should need to require the good half of my 1 GB RAM is totally beyond me... Add to this a startup-time that matches that of the OS itself, and your productivity probably needs to be picked up from the floor by the time you're ready to do some actual programming.

For smaller things I've found myself using Notepad++ lately, and while it lacks a lot of automation it's still the best Notepad replacement I've seen, so I advice you to give it a try none the less. But I was stilling missing some things in order to use it as a full IDE so I set out to test the competition. My wishlist went something like this:

• Extendable
• Open-source and actively developed
• Syntax highlighting
• Project- or filebrowser panel
• Some sort of context-sensitive lookup
• FTP support for web development
• Shortcuts for build/run/preview
• Should support the languages I use most (XML, Java, JSP (this one's surprisingly rare!), PHP, HTML, CSS, JS and ideally Python)
• Subversion support

I don't think I'm particularily picky, so why were there so few programs that managed to fill half of these? I have no idea myself, but the only one that fitted the bill for me was PSpad. It supports a ton of languages, but lets you define compilators, run commands and preview commands for each one yourself. The only things missing from my list are opensource (it's closed but still freeware) and SVN support. But SVN updating isn't something you do continously anyway, so TortoiseSVN does the job fine for now. In addition you get macro support, chm-file help integration, class browser for several languages, integration against TopStyle CSS editor, direct FTP edit, template library, hex edit, export with highlight to RTF or HTML, HTML processor (tidy up or just compress), internal webbrowser and more. This one is truly my recommended download of the day!

I've tried several programs to help diagnose diskspace usage. All of them were stand-alone apps that scanned a specied folder and it's subfolders, giving you various views over disk usage (folder trees, piecharts and in some cases weird block-diagrams). But today I stumbled upon Folder Size, a superb solution. What it basically does is add a system service that keeps track of folder sizes on request (with caching and change notifications) together with a new column in Explorer called "Folder Size", which behaves like the normal size column except that it also adds the total size of folders (instead of the blank space the normal size column displays). This explanation might look a bit messy, but just click the link and look at the screenshot!