All posts by Lachlan Hunt

Job Log Revised

Personal

After receiving some feedback for my previous Job Log both in the comments, and from talking to people that read it, I decided to explain a little better, now that I have a clearer head, exactly what I’m looking for in a job. It is, of course, bad practice to change an entry that has already received comments so I am posting this update on the subject that explains things better

I’m looking for a job as a web developer. I want to work for a company that is as keen on standards compliant coding and accessibility of the web as I am, or at least one to whom I can demonstrate the validity of this point of view. I am dubious about the harmful .NET technology which appears to blatantly produce invalid code and seems to be directed largely towards entrenching dependence on Internet Explorer and other non-compliant Microsoft products at the expense of the rest of the world.

Searching and applying for a job is much about finding a company that needs my talents. It seems to be difficult to find a company whose site shows that they care about validation and standards compliance, so finding an employer who might be impressed by my skills in this area is big challenge.

My dilemma is that far too many decisions seem to be based on marketing or financial reasons rather than what coding is valid, and what is the right thing to do. My challenge is to demonstrate to a potential employer that an effective, valid and accessible site can be produced without compromising their financial imperatives. I want to make a difference; to improve the quality, usability, and accessibility of the web as a whole – I am not in this to make a quick buck, as many appear to be, I just want to make a reasonable living and perform a valuable service at the same time. I realise how idealistic that sounds, and I have been told on many occasions that I have a lot to learn and that I must accept reality.

Comment Styling

Style

I’ve just spent some time to apply some better styles to the comments in my blogs. If you take a look at a previous post with some comments or leave some here, you will see the following changes:

  • Added background colours and hover styles to the comments.
  • Added rounded corners for Gecko based browsers or any UA that support’s CSS3’s ‘border-radius‘ property.
  • Added Additional highlight for comments from myself.

The additional highlight for comments from me was a little bit of a challenge to work out how to do. I realised that all comments from contain me contain a link to my blogger profile. So, I was able to use that as a hook for the styles:

.comment-author a[href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/3043458"] {
    background: #BECFFB;
    margin: -1em 0 .5em -1em;
    padding: 1em 1em .5em;
    -moz-border-radius: 10px;
    border-radius: 10px;
}

As a result, it only works for browsers that support the attribute selector (at least Firefox and Opera¬), and I could only apply the additional style to the one element. So, it’s quite a small addition, but it’s enough to highlight my comments with a darker blue box around my name.

Are these styles visually appealing? Can you suggest any improvements? What do you think of the way I highlighted my comments? Let me know what you think, and I’ll fix up the styles based on your comments, if necessary.

World’s Greatest CMS

Projects, Server-Side

Work is beginning on the world’s best ever, open-source CMS! Charl van Niekerk has had the idea for a while to write an open source, general purpose CMS that not only produces valid content by default, but ensures that all content written is valid. Some of the basic validation requirements for the system should include:

  • Well formed, including properly encoded entities and proper nesting and closing of elements.
  • Valid according to DOCTYPE.
  • Valid character encodings. No windows-1252 characters in the range 0×80 to 0×9F for documents declared as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or any other character encoding – they are control characters. The default, and highly recommended character encoding should be UTF-8.

Basically, the system should not allow invalid content under any circumstances, including from reader comments. It should use a real validator, not a linter which are quite often misleading or totally incorrect.

These are just a few of the basic requirements that I would like to see. Anne van Kesteren has written a much more complete list of requirements for the perfect weblog system which we will be referencing a lot, but some of it may be overkill.

So, this project is just getting started and, AFAIK, will be run through Source Forge. If you have any questions, ideas about system requirements or want to get involved, you can contact either myself or Charl van Niekerk. It’s his project, I’m just helping out, but we want as many people who are willing and able to get involved. So let’s make this happen, and let’s build the best CMS ever!