I'd like to propose that web designers around the world spend one day this year browsing the web with JavaScript disabled. I'm tentatively calling this "International No Javascript UseR Experience Day" or INJURED for short. A few weeks ago, a reader of my blog complained that all they saw was a blank screen. As Liz Conlan pointed out, my CSS was making the whole page invisible. My WordPress…
Continue reading →
How much checking do we perform that our code is running as intended? I found a curious bug this weekend, which made me think about some of the assumptions that we use when programming. Imagine sorting an array using JavaScript. var arr = [10, 5, 66, 8, 1, 3]; arr.sort(); So far, so normal. Create an array of numbers, then sort that array. The result should always be [1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 66]. …
Continue reading →
In 2009, Kosso and I petitioned Twitter to allow us to search for Tweets by their "in reply to" ID. The idea was that developers could created a properly threaded view of conversations. Of course, Twitter being ultra-responsive to developers, did absolutely nothing. Skip three years into the future, and App.net is providing all the API goodness that Twitter doesn't. This means that we can…
Continue reading →
Ahhhh! The BBC. Shining bastion of purity in a sea of commercial malaise. Nothing can spoil its lustre. Well, for those of us in the UK. For the poor sods who find themselves living in the wilderness of ROW (Rest Of World) this is their BBC experience... BBC With Adverts The reasons for me seeing this are rather complex and involve VPNs and a co-located BES. Regardless, what's this advert…
Continue reading →