Liudvikas Bukys

A few CSS tricks from A List Apart, e.g.:

If your site serves all browsers (and most of our sites do), you can write a text message explaining why the buttons don’t work in 4.0 and older browsers. Use a CSS class such as the one below to hide the message from compliant browsers:

.hidden { display: none; }

Include the Style Sheet rule in a secondary, “sophisticated” Style Sheet. Then hide the sophisticated Style Sheet from 4.0 browsers by using the @import linking method.

Compliant browsers will parse the imported Style Sheet and hide the message; cruddy browsers will display the message. You can see this in action by visiting zeldman.com with a compliant browser and then re–visiting with, oh, say, Netscape Navigator 4.

If you feel like doing even more work, you can use CSS to hide the buttons themselves from 4.0 and older browsers by placing the buttons in an invisible DIV and then over–riding the invisibility with a more specific CSS–2 rule in your @import Style Sheet. But in so doing, you’ll miss the chance to gently evangelize browser upgrades by tantalizing your readers with functionality their current browser fails to support.

Ben Adida: Why Not MySQL? (for the OpenACS Project)

NOTE: This Document was written in May 2000. Thus, it is outdated and does not represent the latest data concerning MySQL. I will attempt to find time to rewrite this with more current information soon (August 10th, 2001)

If what you want is raw, fast storage, use a filesystem. If you want to share it among multiple boxes, use NFS. If you want simple reliability against simplistic failure, use mirroring. Want a SQL interface to it all? Use MySQL.

Now, if what you want is data storage that guarantees a certain number of invariants in your data set, that allows for complex operations on this data without ever violating those constraints, that isolates simultaneous users from each other’s partial work, and that recovers smoothly from just about any kind of failure, then get your self a real RDBMS. Yes, it will be slower than the MySQL file system. Just like TCP is slower than UDP, while providing better service guarantees.

Fog Creek President Michael Pryor figured out a brilliant trick which makes it so that you see new topics, and topics that have followups you haven’t read, in blue. If you’ve read the entire topic, it will be purple. And it’s all done without keeping any state on the server.

Here’s one of those good ideas you’re glad someone else implemented. “When you find a page on the web whose address is too long to paste into an email or other document, you can use our free service to generate a shorter, simpler address.” Let’s give it a try. Here’s a pointer to Stewart Alsop’s article on Fortune through the shorterlink service.   [Scripting News]

Clay Shirky: Web Services: It’s So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work

That high-pitched sound you hear is the Web Services hype machine revving up, as words like “revolution’ and “paradigm” begin making their regularly scheduled appearance in the press and white papers, where we are promised a Shiny New World of on-the-fly software creation.

The hype is happening just as practical applications for XML-structured data beginning to appear. Web Services can reduce the effort and quicken the process of creating standards between developers or businesses which want to work together, an important if somewhat modest improvement in the Internet’s plumbing.

Unfortunately, though, Web Services are being sold not only as improved plumbing but also as a way to create fantastic new software, seamlessly and automatically connecting any two business processes or applications anywhere on the network as if by magic.

[Scripting News]

BEA under attack from IBM. What firepower has it got? [The Register]

Scoble: Does your Intranet suck?  [Scripting News]

Gartner, quoted in News.Com: “With the emergence of the Nimda worm — the latest in a long series to attack Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) and other software — Gartner believes it’s time for businesses with Web applications to start investigating less vulnerable Web server products.”  [Scripting News]

Sjoerd: “Beyond JS is a Javascript library that lets you write Javascript unlike anything you’ve ever written.” [Scripting News]

Hotmail vulnerable to JavaScript exploit. Security sent to ObLiviON
JavaScript embedded in “From:” header [The Register]