ITauthor

I just found the following on a student website: For the CSS padding attribute, IE 6 and Opera 5 pad the bottom of text starting from the baseline. Mozilla 1.2.1 starts padding from the lowest point in the text (for instance, the bottom of a y). This affects the display of the title bar on every page, as Mozilla displays more space at the bottom (with respect to the baseline) than at the top. I haven't researched which implementation is correct, but I chose to have the page render correctly with Mozilla. A (self-discovered) hack in use is to set the height of the box to be less than the text size. I am not sure why this works, but with it IE renders well and Opera doesn't look that bad. I'll give this a try.

I'd forgotten how irritating browser variations can be. I spent some time over the weekend trying to add the finishing touches to my home page. I'm designing it for Mozilla/Firebird and IE6. I don't have the time, nor the inclination, to check it on any other browsers or versions. The problem I'm having is a small but annoying one. IE6 and Firebird display padding differently. When I get the div padding just right in IE, there's no extra space in Firebird. If I get it just right in Firebird, there's far too much spacing in IE. I really want to avoid having to do JavaScript to detect the browser and use a different CSS file accordingly, but I have yet to find an alternative. But after all this time – all these years of browsers behaving differently – you think at least Mozilla and Microsoft could agree to do things the same way!

Cary (one of the Support guys I work with) just told me about a useful Google hack.

In the Google input box enter:
link:<URL>

You get a list of all the pages that Google knows about that contain links to the URL you entered.

I just tried link:www.bbc.co.uk and got 339,000 hits. link:www.itauthor.com gets none (yet!)

I was thinking of writing a Perl script that would work as a spider and check links on a website. Then I thought, yes I could do that, but someone must have done it already.

A search on HotScripts.com for link-checking scripts found: checklinks by James Marshall
http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cl/ (last updated March 26, 2000)

This command-line Perl script parses HTML pages and checks the links (images as well as other HTML pages) and prints the details of any links that return an error.

The script only checks pages on the same host as the script. It won't check remotely hosted pages. You run it from the command line. The usage and options are shown if you run the command checklinks.pl

Here is a typical command:
checklinks.pl -v -I documentation http://www.whatever.xxx/documentation/index.html > checkresults.txt

This checks all links that have "documentation" somewhere in their path (this is specified with the -I flag), starting with the page http://www.whatever.xxx/documentation/index.html and puts all the results in a file called checkresults.txt.

Notes:

1. The -v specifies verbose mode.
2. Because I've restricted the checking to paths containing "documentation it won't check a link on a documentation page called mystuff/web-pages/images/mypic.gif because it doesn't contain the word "documentation". This, therefore, stops the checking spreading to non-documentation pages, but doesn't ensure that all documentation pages are free of broken links.

This works quite nicely and I could adapt it to suit my own requirements, but when I showed a colleague, he said he used Xenu Link Sleuth to check the links on his site. So I went and checked that out.

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I came across the following phrase in some documentation written by a developer: "... can be used to understand the l33t h4x0r 5p33k used in Internet chat rooms." I had no idea what this meant, but an Internet search enlightened me: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A787917 Here's the first paragraph from this article (entitled "An Explanation of l33t Speak"): 'l33t speak' is a unique language because it cannot truly be spoken out loud nor can it successfully be handwritten; it is an Internet-based language reliant on the keyboard. It is, however, simple to learn and has much room for creativity. What a load of rubbish! I came across some sites full of this stuff. As someone whose working life revolves around trying to write clear, concise, accurate and easy to understand text, this stuff is anathema to me.

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In the past few days I haven't been posting because I've been doing lots of work on the Admin Manual I'm working on (long past its original delivery date now), and I've been trying to find an hour or two in the evenings to get the home page for itauthor.com working. I'm nearly there now and will hopefully be able to FTP it up there some time soon, but it involved some JavaScripting, and it's been a while!