Membranophonist’s Ramblings

If installed on your system, this text should be displayed in Futura Condensed, a nice sans-serif. If you are looking at this page in Firefox or Opera on OS X, it appears in that face. Safari and the latest nightly build of WebKit (13244) use the standard Futura. Setting font-stretch: condensed; has no effect.

Filed as WebKit bug #7709.

Bruce Tognazzini’s 10 Most Persistent Bugs list has a few markup problems:

1. Use of tables for layout.
2. Not using ordered list markup to order a list.
3. Not providing alt text for list enumeration images.

I was bored.

Comments? Suggestions?

Since all but one of the default admin menu titles start with a different letter, a simple Access Key system could be set up:

Links and Logout are the only problem.

I easily saw how to set this up for the My Profile page, but I’m not familiar enough with PHP to attempt it with the others.

An interesting presentation by Brendan Eich (seems to require a Gecko-based browser for proper layout and navigation) discussing some possible future directions for the Mozilla project.

What I’d like to see

• Out-of-the-box SVG support

SVG is too cool to be languishing the way it is. I’d have some spiffy graphics on my weblog if SVG were supported by anything other than custom builds of Mozilla and/or Firefox! The potential for graphically rich, but bandwidth-friendly content could be realized by SVG.

• Better native UI integration

I love the speed and extensibility of Firefox, but it just doesn’t feel right under OS X. The XUL-based Gecko browsers fit a bit better with GNOME, but the native GTK+ browsers such as Epiphany and Galeon still have a more integrated, organic feel. In my experience, they feel even less natural when using KDE.

• Easier XUL for next-generation cross-platform Web apps

Beat Microsoft to the punch by allowing any platform (not just those running Longhorn) to run applications designed to deliver custom functions and services over a network. There are a few out there, but I guess most developers either don’t know about XUL or find it too difficult to use. Perhaps team up with major e-commerce sites to provide a custom shopping app written in XUL… Break us out of the browser - it’s really not the best interface for many things.

Given Microsoft’s direction with WVG and Indigo, I have a real concern that they will divide the Internet and its next-gen services into Those Who Use Longhorn and Those Who Do Not. By providing great tools for authoring connected applications and content, the Mozilla organization can help maintain the openness of the Internet.

My homey Brian is now a happy Firebird user. I showed him the handy Google search field and added the tab button to his toolbar. Why this isn’t in there by default is somewhat perplexing given how tabbed browsing is touted as one of the big reasons to switch from the mangler of web pages known as Internet Explorer. Hiding the feature away in the menus doesn’t make sense. Surely they can afford the space for the “New Tab” button?

While visiting his girlfriend, Brian installed Firebird on her laptop, but she isn’t using it because she says it is slower than IE. Hmm. I wonder if she was referring to starting up or actual page rendering. Because it is so deeply integrated in the system, IE spawns new browser windows very quickly, but I don’t think it is faster at page rendering.

I also installed Firebird on my father’s Windows laptop. He is glad to be rid of the pop-ups his co-workers are still dealing with.

I continue to be amazed with computer users coping skills - I go nuts if I use a browser that doesn’t have pop-up control built-in. Yes, I know about the free Google Toolbar. It is very nice of Google to fix Microsoft’s software for them.

It appears that Safari does not support the text-decoration property within a span that is set to display: none until hovered (on which it is set to display: block, a la Eric Meyer’s css/edge).

I’ll post the files which revealed this issue in a day or two.

I also have seen some problems with the word-spacing property, which is supported, according to the MacEdition CSS2 support table.