Petit Bourgeois

In an attempt to better document my data persistence framework PointComma, I have written a conceptual introduction. Hopefully, this document will make clear what PointComma does or doesn't do, and then how.

Have you checked out the SAIL site lately? The publicity desk's posts are really nice, and we even added a RSS feed (in Dutch). Good job, people, I'm really happy with the results--and I hear that SAIL is happy too, so... let's keep it up!

Now that was a clever title. The SAIL Amsterdam 2005 site now has got a Vandaag op SAIL (today at SAIL) section, featuring the production of a redaction of 8 people covering the various parts of the event. I will bet at the PTA every day during SAIL, making sure that the web site runs smoothly.

By the way, kudos to Tiscali Business who's hosting the site: in the first 15 days of August, the site generated 175 GB of traffic, for about 200.000 visits, and the platform still looks pretty strong. I have promised Bart Meyers 200.000 visitors in one day, I hope to reach that number on Thursday...

On the SAIL site, the English version (translated by Bernard) has launched yesterday, as well as the interactive area map.

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Just got a thank-you note from SAIL! Lekker!

The web site of SAIL Amsterdam 2005 has launched today. Some technical issues remain (I'm considering re-introducing MySQL 3 compatibility in PointComma...), but the site is live and fast (although we haven't configured the caching system yet), I'm happy with it. We still have quite a bit of work ahead, until and including the event (17-22 August).

Très vite fait aujourd'hui, le site du collectif Sauvons l'Europe, avec système de signature de la pétition un peu sécurisé.

The new web site of cross-border, b2b debt-collection agency International Advisers, produced by Splandigo, has launched today.

Really don't have time to comment, but do check out om-manimani, the travelling notebook of Gaku's brother.

We've completed a new version of the course page of the RINO site, with several dates blocks. To improve legibility, they are not all displayed (when you have both CSS and JavaScript installed). However, in order to maintain a high level of accessibility, we want to offer both the possibility of having anchors to navigate within dates, and a system that is as unobstrusive and unsurprising as possible.

So we've got a bulleted list of dates, and one block for each date with a bit of detail. The list comes first, with each item clickable, triggering (with JS+CSS) the display of the appropriate block.

This actually required us to tweak the default behavior of the HTML link element. When you click on a date link with CSS and JS enabled, the date block is displayed, without any other changes to the page's position, nor to the URL. This is achieved through adding a return false to the onclick event. However, if you haven't got CSS or JS, all blocks being displayed by default, so clicking on the link must make you jump down to the appropriate block: it's a simple anchor.

Without JS enabled, it's simple: the href property of the links is an anchor, so it simply works. When you've got CSS disabled, and JS enabled, on the other hand, it's a little more tricky.

The solution I found was to check the height of an element hidden using CSS. Typically, these are navigation tools used to skip the navigation bar when you're using a non-CSS browser. They are assigned a class which specifies the following rule: display: none;.

The interesting property is their offsetHeight: when display: none; is honored (i.e. when CSS are used), the offsetHeight is 0. So the piece of javascript which used to say return false; is replaced by return (testObj.offsetHeight > 0); with textObj the paragraph that should be hidden.

The page then remains very user-friendly, no matter which combination of CSS and JS is used (yes+yes, yes+no, no+yes, no+no).

Demo soon online.