All posts by Lachlan Hunt

DNS Issues

Server-Side

Over the past 14 hours, since about 2004-10-29T00:00+10:00, this site was experiencing severe technical difficulties. Some of you may have noticed that the Atom feeds were reported as invalid by your feed reader, or received a 307 Temporary Redirect to a page explaining some technical difficulties; or, depending on when you visited, noticed that none of the pages were styled and contained errors about include directives. If any of you that took a look at the source, you would have noticed a disastrous frameset document I discussed earlier, that is used forward requests. However, all it does is use a single frame to mask the real URI from the location bar.

The problem was in fact that the domain name servers had been reset to those of my previous domain registrar, and hence was reaching the wrong web host A WHOIS indicated that the name servers were set to:

Name Server: ns3.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 209.126.193.12 
Name Server: ns4.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 69.10.134.206

After I contacted my current host, iiNet, this morning, within a few hours they promptly re-delegated the name servers to the correct ones, and restored my site for full working order. However, it’s an issue that should never have occurred. I was asked by iiNet to contact Bottle Domains to ensure this doesn’t happen again, as they believed it must have been them that reclaimed the servers. However the response from Bottle Domains indicated that it would not have been them as they do not control the domain. So, basically, I don’t have a clue what caused it, nor any guarantee that it won’t happen again. I just hope it doesn’t.

Don’t Support IE

Accessibility, Microsoft, User Agents

Recently, Charl van Niekerk posted his comments about dumping IE, and I totally agree with everything he said. This site does not, and will not support IE until such time as IE supports the standards – like that will ever happen!. If you haven’t already, fire up IE and take a look at this site. You should notice that it degrades somewhat gracefully. The content is fully accessible, though it’s not quite as visually appealing as it is in Firefox and Opera.

Here are my reasons, especially for web developers like myself, to stop supporting IE and allow websites to noticably degrade in IE and other older browsers. Most have already totally given up on Netscape 4.x, so it’s about time we did the same for IE.

The target audience for developer sites like this is, of course, web developers. If web developers start to find that the resources they need to learn and improve their skills do not work in IE, they will be forced to use alternative browsers. Of course, many developers like us already know about the plethora of bugs and serious lack of standards complaince in IE, but as can be seen by the stats at W3Schools, around 70% of web developers (well, of those that are just learning) still use IE. It is these developers that we need to convert to better alternative browsers, and the sooner the better.

By converting the developers, they will learn more about standards compliant, and interoperable code. They will notice the severe flaws in IE’s implementation. They will be forced to make sites that work properly in non-IE browsers, since they’ll be using one themselves. As more sites adopt standards, and stop locking out non-IE browsers, we will have a better chance of taking back the web!

The Firefox community may be aiming for a 10% market share within 12 months among the general population, but among web developers we need to work harder. I want to aim to completely reverse those stats on W3Schools. Let’s aim for 70% market share for non-IE browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Omni-Web and Mosaic (just kidding), etc… So join us! Remove the countless IE hacks from your stylesheet, except the ones that are absolutely necessary to maintain accessibility. Indeed, there is even a single hack in my stylesheet that simply prevents the menu overlapping the main content. Let’s send a message to those that build the sites! Let’s give them a reason to switch!

The Farmshed

Personal

Yesterday, it seems that the site I spent about the last 4 months developing, The Farmshed, went live! The old disastrous site is thankfully gone, but the new site isn’t without it’s share of problems. The markup is quite semantic, but not totally pure. There is a single layout table used to achieve the 3 column layout, but I was forced to implement that for reasons beyond anyone’s control – Internet Exploder! Most of the site validates. In fact all of the pages I worked on while I was there do validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but sadly, several of the pages created after I left do not.

On one of the pages, he seems to have made one of the most bewildering errors I’ve ever seen. A mailto: link has been written like this.

<a mailto:customerservice@thefarmshed.com.au.invalid>Customer
    Service</a>

Obviously, it should be:

<a href="mailto:customerservice@thefarmshed.com.au.invalid">Customer
    Service</a>

However, it’s no-longer my problem, I just hope it gets fixed. (The e-mail was munged with .invalid to prevent spammers finding it)

Other than the bewildering validation errors, and some relatively minor UTF-8 encoding problems due to the configuration of the database (that will hopefully be fixed in the near future), the server has its own problems also. Visiting the URI, http://www.thefarmshed.com.au/, redirects to the IP address of the server. This is obviously a temporary measure until the DNS records are set up properly, but it’s the method of redirection that I find odd. The HTTP request and response headers contain the following:

http://www.thefarmshed.com.au/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.thefarmshed.com.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1 StumbleUpon/1.998
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-au,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 301 Error
Location: http://61.95.30.11/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 135

Notice the 301 response code! A 301 is supposed to be HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently. Firstly, I don’t understand why the poorly configured Microsoft IIS HTTP server is sending an invalid response, and secondly, I don’t understand why it would be trying to send a Moved Permanently response. Ideally, it should be sending a 302 Found (for HTTP 1.1), or at least the HTTP 1.0 name: 302 Moved Temporarily. Oh well, I guess that’s either the result of using an inferior Microsoft server, or the fact it has not been configured properly.

I think that’s enough problems that I need to point out, my purpose is not to criticise his mistakes, but to point out what needs to be looked into. Overall, I would have to say that I’m relatively proud of the work I did for The Farmshed, I certainly did make a difference towards the quality of the site. It is much better than the vast majority of the web, but it could be better. I never expected the site to be perfect as soon as it launced, though I did try my best to achieve that – there were, unfortunately, some factors beyond my control that prevented that.

Some of the good things in the site include the almost complete use of CSS for layout and presentation (except for the single table mentioned earlier). The whole menu is a pure CSS menu, backed up with an IE-only script. It works perfectly in Firefox and IE, but there seems to be some minor bugs with Opera, but it does work. I believe it does work in Safari, but neither Safari, nor sadly, Opera were tested in during development – just Firefox, and occasionally IE. There were originally skip-links at the top, but I was ordered to remove them, despite my objections. All the images have reasonable alt text and the site is fairly accessible to non-visual browsers. Unfortunatly, the whole site is locked up, you have to be a member to access anything. I objected, but it was a corporate/marketing decision I had to accept.

As I said once before, working at The Farmshed was a learning experience, and I certainly have gained some invaluable experience, both good a bad. I’m happy to have worked on creating such a high quality site, but I’m happier to be moving on to something better.