Meta-activities

Abstract

During the last few weeks I have made some tweaks to the site which I note here.

I write so much about this site it would seem to have a prominent place in my activities, but then, if not here, where else should I mention it? Without further apology, my tinkerings over the last week have produced the following:

  1. An update to my side-scrolling scripts and improvement to the drop-down menu to be keyboard-accessible.

  2. Fixing of all the cross-browser issues. This is excepting Internet Exporer, which persists in misparsing my well-formed XML, despite all the hacks I can find. Absurd.

  3. Much better page caching system behind the scenes.

  4. Plenty of XSLT tweaks to neaten up the DocBook output.

As a response to feedback (from the SRCF folk), I should like to comment on the mess that is XML whitespace. The situation is that text nodes with only whitespace have application-defined semantics, meaning that they may or may not be important. In HTML, it is insignificant except surrounding inline-displayed elements (which could be anything once styled). Some tools, like pretty-printers, act with complete disregard to what the data my represent and insert whitespace all over the place; others act conservatively and leave it untouched. The latter is the correct option for any tool, and XSLT has a very clear and helpful model for handling whitespace, letting you use control where necessary and helpfully avoiding adding it. So, in response to criticism that my site is unreadable using ‘view source’, my answer is that life is too short to worry about using tools which could break spacing around punctuation for example. If you want to read the code I output, then Opera, Chrome, Firefox 4, and even IE ship with a console that lets you view a neat tree. Use it.