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January 27, 2004 | View Comments (12) | Category: Whitespace

Summary: Submit questions/topics to Whitespace for your own benefit and that of the community.

I was looking at some web design forums and realized that many of you probably do not frequent them. I also realized that many of the questions asked there are the kinds of questions that you would already have the answers for. Almost everyone has a blog where they can ask a question and if they are lucky they can get a response from it. By some unfortunate incident I seem to generate a decent amount of traffic for this site and therefore my reach may be a little broader than most of my readers. So I figured it wouldn't hurt for anyone who has a question they want answered and hopefully get a quality discussion out of can send it to me and I can post it here. Of course I can't post every question (this isn't a message board :), but if I think the question or topic will draw some interest I will answer it with my views first and then open it up to the audience. If this doesn't work out it doesn't matter because posting will continue on as usual, but I just thought it would be cool to help people who don't have the benefit of a great community like we got here. Please send questions/topics through the contact form and I will keep the comments open here for a day if people wish to enter any questions or topics. That way we could all have a say in what should be discussed.

Also if you ever have any questions in general, please do not hesitate to email me and I will try to help as much as possible. Considering I get a large amount of email now, please do not expect amazing results, but I do help a lot of people everyday it seems.

Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/124

Comments

#1

Some ideas:
- How to Style Google Ads (no idea how the ads work, btw)
- Use of definition list
- Multi-columns stuff with table-less design, i.e. more than four columns
- Scalable vector graphics (SVG)?
- Nice vanilla XHTML vs extra hooks for styling
- Why not enough CSS sites?
- Flash, yes/no?
- Document encoding, e.g. UTF-8
- Use of cite and blockquote tags
- Use of del and ins tags
- Quite a few weblogs (CSS-based) are unpleasant to the eye, why?

Running out of ideas... -_-;;;

Zelnox

#2


How to get quality, standard compliant XHTML out of Frontpage 98.

I have been trying for years, and it just won't work! Someone HAS to have an answer.

:-)

Jeremy Flint (http://www.jeremyflint.com)

#3

Here's a question I have failed to find an answer for:

The correct mimetype for favicons:

type="image/ico"

or

type="image/x-icon" ?

What's the difference? First most people used the former, now I notice a lot of people using the latter.

Don't know whether it's an earthshattering topic for discussion, but there's not much guidance on the web on the subject. Maybe someone has something useful to say on it.

Tone

#4

Jeremy, that unfortunately requires the sacrifice of the user's soul. But the user has already lost his soul by virtue (vice?) of using Frontpage 98, so he hasn't one to sacrifice. Catch 22. :-)

(You could probably do it with the latest version of frontpage, but 98's right up there with Netscape 3's composer. Which is probably the same exact software that runs in the current netscape release, actually.)

JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#5

Yeah.

I was reading the local paper last night and in the little one-page technology section there was an article praising the new frontpage2003. They even mentioned the search feature that you can include in your page!

Tone:
I use image/x-ico because that is what i found when doing research on the supported MIME types:

http://turnpike.net/cgi-bin/Mimes
http://www.mhonarc.org/~ehood/MIME/MIME.html

hope that helps.

Jeremy Flint (http://www.jeremyflint.com)

#6

Zelnox, what would you like to know about UTF-8 and encodings?

dr.u (http://www.drusellers.com)

#7

dr.u:
I'm just curious about what other people use. After reading
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
I use UTF-8.

Zelnox

#8

I use UTF-8 on all of my english sites. It is a good way to future proof things and if I happen to have a foriegn visitor then my input boxes will happily accept it. I also make sure that the db uses unicode so that I can store all of this stuff. Access at times has trouble with this. It really depends on what languages you have installed if you are using Windows. I can't comment on Linux, though I imagine there exist similarities. As far as what Joel talks about I would recommend using UTF-8. If you have the needs then you can try others. Something that I used to find funny was that if you parsed an XML file using XSLT into UTF-16 every letter had e x t r a s p a c e s !

dr.u (http://www.drusellers.com)

#9

If anyone lives in China what encoding do you use?

dr.u (http://www.drusellers.com)

#10

I use "big5" for traditional Chinese, but unicode can be used. Next time I do pages in Chinese I will probably do them in unicode, or at least bite the bullet and learning curve. But most traditional Chinese pages are in big5 at present. And my English ones in iso-8859-1. Are there any benefits to using unicode on English pages? You mention future-proofing, but is there any indication the non-unicode encoding systems will disappear? I can't see that happening, as that would have profound archival implications, given that much of the web isn't in unicode.

Ma Xia (http://www.yijing.btinternet.co.uk/zy1to10.htm)

#11

I wouldn't mind seeing some write ups or discussions on languages like ASP.NET or the .NET framework and their effect on standards compliance. Just a thought.

Bryan (http://www.gamecubecheats.info)

#12

Hmmm, I guess I would need to tidy up on my C# then huh? ;) I am actually working on a little project in ASP.Net and the fact that I can't do any standards design is really biting at me.

Hmmm, I see there could be a deep discussion with regards to unicode and whatnot.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

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