Fragmented Development

First of all, let me disappoint you by starting off with a disclaimer: This probably won't be as funny as it could be. If you're looking for ha has, check out PinkDot [slashdot.org]; a new, softer, pinker, more unicorn-laden side of the News for Nerds.

Alright, back on topic. I downloaded the latest Opera [opera.com] browser, Opera 9.0 Preview 2. After it was all installed and I was presented with the familiar Opera browser window (not too many UI changes on the surface), I loaded up one of my pages. I was absolutely astounded.

I have always been an Opera browser fan, due to it's excellent code rendering and devotion to web standards. But this new edition seems to have climbed into my brain to borrow my view on how pages should be rendered. I loaded up the Warren County [www.co.warren.ny.us] site, and found it perfectly rendered to my intents. Opera 8.X had goofed my accessibility bar on the top by adding a margin out of nowhere, but Opera 9 rendered it snug to the edges of the browser window. In fact, everything looked just as I invisioned when I was designing it. Opera even agreed with me on a CSS issue I had dealt with; there's a CSS fudge I had to add in there to make a page element show up correctly in all major browsers. Opera 9 took that, and rendered the fudge just as I imagine it should have been rendered. It offset the element to reflect the CSS I added, and rendered it correctly when I took it out. On a rainy Saturday, that really makes me smile.

I've been using the IE 7 Beta as well, and it astounds me how far it has to go and how little has changed. Shiny tabs and a few band-aids on glaring rendering issues do not a new browser make. Opera has always been ahead of the pack in my opinion, and I've noticed that the other [mozilla.com] browsers [microsoft.com/ie] tend to take note of Opera's innovations, even if it takes a while. Opera's new rendering changes give me hope that web design as a whole will, someday, become less of an exercise in patience.

I've been getting IIS worker process errors lately. I can't really track them down to a certain page or a specific recurring time of the day, and it's driving me crazy. As a last resort, I re-enabled logging on the main Warren County site. It turns out that I still have quite a bit to learn about a server administrator: I should have been doing this for months.

As I gazed into the depths of the logs, a startling set of records caught my attention. While I wasn't able to find any reason for the errors in the IIS worker process, I was able to find several attempts to hack our server. A particular IP address (83.16.187.6, if you're one of those vengeance-types) showed up several times, trying to access applications we didn't have. Not only that, but they were trying to send some very suspicious requests to our server for those applications, requests that probably have been covered in security bulletins and the like. And that was just the beginning.

Through the logs, I found that a lot of other people are trying to get our "favicon.ico" file for some reason ('favicon.ico' is that customizeable icon that appears next to the title of a page). We don't have one, so they're pretty much out of luck, but I may just add one now that I know something's requesting it. I found an IP address for the Albany NY Public Safety Internal Site. I found exactly why it's good to have WebDAV disabled. I found that on March 11, I did something that screwed up our web template and two people tried to use a stylesheet named "null". If you're reading this and you're one of the two people... well, shucks. Sorry about that.

I've often wondered why so many administrators preach about the importance of reviewing logs, why so many intelligent people would scan through the thousands and thousands of lines of meaningless access requests, and now I've successfully cornered several dead incoming links that have been evading me for months and possibly been alerted to malicious attempts to deface our site. Well, christen me converted.

It's been a rough week, but my overdue discovery of the DOM Inspector built-into Firefox may have just made my day.

For those of you still struggling with the cryptic subtle ways of the HTML DOM, this is for you. I've recently been trying to come up with an accessible, unobtrusive collapse/expand script that takes advantage of the DOM structure to do it's dirty work. After dabbling with recursive Javascript functions, I soon realized that I was in so far over my head that I could barely see daylight. After pushing the script aside for a few days, I decided to bring up the DOM inspector to see if it would shed any light into the problems I was encountering.

After fiddling with a few of the displays, I hit the jackpot: the "Object: Javascript Object" view. Spread out before me were all the options and attributes I was trying to utilize. FirstChild properties, nodeType attributes, it was all there. All waiting for me to utilize like a magical bag of reagents.

Instead of writing the script, I instantly blogged about it. Of course. But now it's back to work, and hopefully I will have an accessible script to show soon. Stay tuned, kids.

To help increase the useability of the Warren County web site, I've been looking into accessible JavaScript. We currently use some expand/collapse scripts, and they're real hokey. The function calls are hard-coded into the links, and expanding them is akin to taping on the additional code with duct tape. Due to my anal, perfectionist approach to this sort of thing, these scripts simply have to go.

With purely honorable intentions, I jumped face-first into the world of accessible JavaScript and promptly drowned. From what I can see, no one has a definitive answer to this problem. There are some great things going on, with You should've been @media being one of the better ones in my opinion. However, what we're lacking is an answer. I've looked into DOM scripting, with events and functions littering each page I come across. Still, I've yet to find a good solid place to jump off from, and I think that will be the status quo for the next few months.

This is the kind of place I want to be, the kind of situation that makes me enjoy web design. Programming for an environment as volatile as the web is a great challenge, especially with the evils at work and the hurdles that must be overcome. Creating something that a distractable 15-year-old wants to use that will also provide the same services for a grandmother with cataracts is a task worthy of any programmer. Things like accessible JavaScript are simply ways to persevere and make a name for yourself.

Recently, I've been able to make a layout for Warren County that is too good to be true. It is completely standards compliant (xHTML 1.0 Strict, even!), very accessible (passes automatic verification on Sec. 508 and others) and still looks half good. It also works on all major browsers, degrades beautifully on those that don't support CSS, and only has some minor hiccups on browsers that have... "misguided" CSS support. It's taken tons and tons of work, and I just about peed my pants when I finished it. To a web designer, this is a thing of beauty. This is what we strive for.

This is the equivalent of balancing an elephant on your chin.

This is also why most people are not standardized or accessible. Designing a good web site should not be this hard! As far as I know, Warren County will be the only county in New York State whose websites meet these criteria, and it has been mandated in the state for years. Even the state web site does not meet these criteria.

Until the state of the Internet changes, I can't seriously recommend people get into web design as a profession. It's a terrible thing to say, but web design is less of a programming skill and more of a hacking technique, and until that changes it's a extremely unstable world to walk in. We can only hope that future developments will make designing web sites les of a hassle and more of an enjoyable practice.

The Board of Supervisors believe that I should be updating the site more often, and despite my great excuses, they are right.

Even though I would like nothing more than to do nothing but web design, it's kinda scary to have the much higher-ups light your posterior ablaze. The sudden scrutinizing attention sure does bring to light all your insecurities, and all of the ways I waste time.

...Speaking of which, writing in this blog using the Dvorak layout probably shouldn't be a high priority...

Recently, the 'boss' came to me with a mission; Microsoft Sharepoint. Investigate, dissemenate, procreate, whatever. We needed to know what it was, what it did, and if it will take care of our information flow issues. So it began.

Sharepoint is one way Microsoft can provide you with an intranet for your organization. It's almost completely web-based, and mixes in some AJAX-like functionality that allows you to manage everything. Of course, most of the AJAX elements only function properly if you're using the big blue 'e', but the site as a whole does work on versions of IE, Netscape, and even Mozilla 1.4 and higher. I'm using Firefox 1.5, and it seems to work just fine sans the administrative functions. If I need to change the site, I usually just load up the Sharepoint site in an IE tab.

TIDBIT: if you do a lot of development work, and abhor keeping two or more browsers open, try the IE Tab extension for Firefox.

So overall, considering that Sharepoint Services is offered as a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 (As long as you already own a copy of SQL 2000), it's not that bad of a service. Definitely worth a glance if you're trying to get an intranet up and running quick-and-dirty style.