Laurabelle's Blog

Check this out: a webform with a text box labeled For administrative use only! This is what Maurice Green would call manumation. Somebody doesn't quite get it.

Today I looked at my UW student site and saw that it was the wrong color. It was supposed to turn red and green on Christmas day, but I'd made a typo, so the change happened in the second month of the year, rather than the twelfth. Oops. This is especially embarrassing because there is [...]

It looks like Internet Explorer is getting better. To the right is a screenshot of what my site looks like in a fully standards-compliant browser, namely Firebird. Below is what it looks like in Internet Explorer. Much to my surprise, IE6 now appears to support the display:inline property-value combination, which I use to format some [...]

Google is the theme of the week in my Information Retrieval Systems class, so we've been reading some cool stuff about Google, especially this review of Google and a corresponding page about Google inconsistencies and bugs. It's really interesting to realize the limitations on Google's searching capabilities, especially Boolean operators, truncation, and wildcards, in light [...]

Evidently Safari doesn't understand descendant selectors. This is exceedingly annoying, because my stylesheets depend heavily on descendent selectors. The particularly problematic effect that this causes is due to my choice of a default text and link color which is the same as one of my background colors. When the appropriate descendant selector doesn't kick in, [...]

I've been using XHTML for quite a while, maybe a year and a half or so. All that time, I've been serving it as text/html, mostly because I didn't know any better. Knowing nothing of XML at the time, I assumed that XHTML was the future and that of course I should use it. However, [...]

Look at this first. Then look at this. Aquarionics looks exactly like Caveat Lector! This is both shocking (because I was afraid my link had behaved unexpectedly at first) and really really cool, because Aquarion says he had to alter surprisingly little to make Dorothea's design work (although it looks slightly funky for me, but [...]

Generally I do my best to make sure that my web pages are accessible in a wide variety of browsers. However, occasionally when a modern browser neglects to support some bit of HTML or CSS, I make a conscious decision to leave it be, and possibly to make people more aware of the suckiness of [...]

Today I noticed another weird user-agent in my access logs: 67.83.186.136 - - [02/Feb/2003:22:19:10 +0000] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 200 7937 "-" "Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8862" 67.83.186.136 - - [02/Feb/2003:22:19:10 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 27162 "-" "Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8862" This is weird because there doesn't seem to be much consensus about what [...]

This evening I helped out at an ASIS&T workshop on beginning HTML. Basically the workshop went over the basic structure of an HTML document and a couple of concepts such as paragraphs, links, lists, and images. (The final page everyone created looked something like this example.) I, being the perfectionist that I am, had some [...]