Archives - Internet

Here's an issue thats really bugged me as a web developer for so long. But not only me. You'll find numerous instances of where developers have ranted and criticised the diversity of rendering engines that are available. IE5, IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Netscape are the main ones that come to mind, and each one is uniquely different. Sure, thats fine when it comes to functionality and UI of the program, but does it also have to extend to the way Hyper Text Markup Language is rendered in each browser?

Like everyone else, I grabbed the 2.0 release of Firefox yesterday. I won't regurgitate all the neat stuff about it, but I will point out this one very useful feature: if you accidentally close a tab you can bring it back from the netherworld by hitting Shift+Cmd+T (on a Mac) or Shift+Ctrl+T (on Windows).

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is theplayground@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it theplayground+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to theplayground+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

Now, I should say that I believe in Web standards, of which validation is only part and an often over-emphasised part; but validation is still important for standards, and the things I've seen written against it are rather silly.

Google has quickly become one of the most well known words in the world and is used by millions daily, including myself. Google (and many other search engines) has the ability not only to search on keywords, but also using a more "database-ish" query language to really narrow down your search results. Below is a summary of a few of the most useful lesser known features. Note: in the examples, replace theplayground.ws with your own domain.

This made me laugh. ..... A lot.

KILL FIREFOX

To sum it up: "IE 6 is a piece of shit and thus FireFox kicked its ass. IE 7 will be the best broswer on the planet period and we will all fall down and worship its creator for being kind enough to bestow it upon us. FireFox thus, is doomed like the heathen pig-dog that it is. Oh, and IE 7 will have these new cool things called tabs."

Digg and Del.icio.us are great tools to discover interesting content on the web which has been curated by the crowd. Since then, we have had newer tools like Clipmarks and eClips emerge, and have become useful part of our digital lives. Maybe it is time to add StumbleUpon, a web discovery extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser, to the list of these web-curators. For past three weeks, I have been seeing a steady increase in the number of referrers being sent to this site by Stumble Upon. I am sure others are experiencing similar kind of "traffic" referrals.

The World Wide Web had over 800 million pages as of 1998 - just think of how many millions more have been added since that time. Searching the Web can be challenging and time-consuming, so it is important to use a good search engine to help you quickly reach the information you are seeking.