Posts for May, 2009

May 29, 2009

Case For C++

C++ has been at the receiving end in recent times about neither being a good low-level language nor being an effective high-level one. It is said that there is no case for C++ in today’s programming world. I agree that with evolution of programming languages, applicability of C++ is narrowing down, but it has still not vanished. [Continue]

May 27, 2009

The Whys Of Requirements Specification

One of the biggest gaps in the requirements discovery and specification, and solution design is formed because the whys are not communicated to the solution developers. The requirements specification usually talks only about what the solution should do. There is nothing that tells them why it is so. [Continue]

May 22, 2009

Universal IE6 CSS

Andy Clarke has a new solution for dealing with IE6 incompatibilities – Universal IE 6 CSS. The idea is to serve simple design with great typography for IE 6, without layout. The Web developer community is trying various approaches to get rid of IE6. [Continue]

May 19, 2009

Facebook Will Accept OpenID

OpenID just got one of its biggest promoters – Facebook. Facebook had joined the OpenID Foundation Board a while back. But unlike other OpenID supporters, Facebook accepts an OpenID to let its member use the site, by becoming a OpenID relying party. [Continue]

May 18, 2009

Microformats Get Flexible With Value Class Pattern

Microformats has introduced a new pattern – the value-class pattern to tackle accessibility and localization problems. The value-class pattern lets you two things – break value of a microformat property into multiple sub-values, and mark specific relevant data using a special class name value. So, now you have multiple options to design your markup for datetime values and keep it accessible and machine readable, as Jeremy Keith illustrates.

May 14, 2009

Open Database Alliance To Fork And Focus On MySQL

There is more than new versions and acquisitions happening in the MySQL world. A vendor-neutral consortium, Open Database Alliance, has been formed to become a hub for all activity related to MySQL. The open source community has been anxious about future of MySQL since Oracle’s aquisition of Sun was announced. [Continue]

May 13, 2009

Google Updates, To Support Microformats

Google has announced a few updates to its search engine during its Searchology event. Google will now support microformats and RDFa to show rich snippets from a web page. Considering that these technologies were developed to extract structured data from web pages, search engines should have adopted them long back, and in fact helped them grow. [Continue]

May 11, 2009

Already Seeing Worst Of Double Standards

We have already started to see the worst of living with more than one standard to do the exact same thing. Excel 2007 SP2’s ODF support has degraded, because it is no longer interoperable. Microsoft, a company, which values backward compatibility over anything else, does not worry about interoperability when implementing ODF support. [Continue]

May 7, 2009

img Or background-image?

How do you decide whether an image should be included as a img element or a background image? As Chris Heilmann explains, if the image is content, it better be part of the markup with img and alternative text. With background images, you have to ensure something else – that a corresponding background colour is seen when images are disabled, otherwise the site is rendered unreadable.

May 6, 2009

About Feeds And Feed Readers

Looks like feeds are popular enough to get criticized. I use feeds regularly to follow people. I think feeds work really well when you use them to follow the people you want to read. [Continue]