Webmonkey stopped producing new content in the early 2000s and was sold by Wired to Lycos, I think, but much of the old content remained, such as the special characters reference, which I consult occasionally. Now the site has been re-purchased by Wired, which has decided to re-publish the tutorials on a wiki. That’s probably the best approach if you can’t spare the staff to manage the old content, but the historian in me is bothered that Thau’s JavaScript tutorial is gone, replaced by something generic. Why couldn’t Webmonkey have kept the old articles intact, perhaps with a notice suggesting that a piece might be outdated and a link to the new wiki? That’s sort of what PPK does at Quirksmode; he separates articles into “active” and “archived.” I’m sure we can live without knowing how to code for Netscape Navigator 4, but it’s good to remember where we’ve come from, to remember how and why things have changed since then.

However, Webmonkey promises to start creating new content relevant to today’s web, and that will be good news for those starting into web development.

PPK’s contest itself ended up falling flat, as even the winner, John Resig (who later created the jQuery library), later repudiated it himself. That’s probably because PPK’s contest requirements were like asking for all three of good, fast, and cheap.

So seven years later, there’s no widely-adopted replacement to the original addEvent that:

1. Is short
2. Maintains the this scope in IE
3. Has a corresponding removeEvent

The various libraries do a good job of 2 and 3, but not 1, and since I often find myself needing 1 and 2 but not 3, I came up with my own good-enough version of addEvent:

It’s short, which is just what I need when I’m trying to keep the JavaScript size low. (Whenever size isn’t so much of an issue, such as on the administrative side of a website, I’m more likely to use a library which will have a much more robust way of assigning events to objects.) And my addEvent also makes this refer to object in question, even for IE.

The idea is to emphasize that styling on the web–particularly, that done with CSS, or “cascading style sheets”–should be separate from the structure, or markup. In part, one should separate style from content because a number of people and services read your site without styling: people who have disabilities, search engine spiders, etc. It’s also much easier to change styling if it’s not mixed up with the structure of the content.

Even better would be if my phone could just switch to Wi-Fi and make VoIP calls whenever possible.

But all these things involve involve giving the customer more and better choices, something cellular phone manufacturers and service providers seem reluctant to do.

“In Austria, they are saying that mobile broadband will pass fixed broadband this year. It’s already growing faster, and in Sweden, the most popular phone is a USB modem,” said Bergendahl, who was the keynote speaker at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

As more people start using mobile broadband, hot spots will no longer be needed. “Hot spots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era,” said Bergendahl.

The last couple of weeks I was doing a lot of traveling, and I ended up needing to connect to the Internet where there wasn’t any broadband available. So for the first time I tethered my phone to the laptop as a USB modem and “dialed” in to my cellular company’s data network using PPP. It was surprisingly fast (near DSL speeds), and also very reliable, staying up for hours. It won’t replace WiFi for large bandwidth uses, but it turned out to be a great supplement when I needed it.

The first image shows a screenshot of the problem: the title of the post is drooping into the post. Usually when you see something like this, it means that the containing element has not been cleared. There are a number of ways to clear an element: a popular fix these days uses a pseudo class; the classic approach has been to put a cleared element within the same element as the floating element, but after it. Neither fix works for this bug.

Thankfully, I found a demonstration of a similar problem with IE 7. Apparently if the element containing the floating element has a set height or a maximum height, it confuses IE 7. According to the standard, a browser should obey the CSS height of the element (and IE 7 does—good job!—unlike IE 6). But every cleared element after the floater should be pushed down, not overlapped, by the floater.

The solution is to remove the height assignment from the container element, if you can. In my case, for another part of the site experiencing the same problem, I needed the element to have enough height to show a background image. The solution was to use the min-height property, which doesn’t trigger the bug.

The final image shows what it should look like, as rendered by Firefox.

That’s what I saw when I went to pay my bill at Comcast.com, something I’ve done several times before. I do have Flash—it just happens to be Flash 7, the highest version Adobe has yet released for Linux.

The problem with making your website depend on proprietary technology, such as a particular version of Flash, is that you exclude all those who don’t have access to that proprietary technology. Because Flash is a closed-source Adobe technology, we have to rely on Adobe to let us view it. In contrast, most of the web uses open communication protocols. If you don’t like your web browser, you’re free to design your own or use one of a number of open-source browsers.

Obviously some sites like YouTube need to require Flash or another proprietary technology. However, none of the reasons a typical customer would access Comcast.com requires Flash: reading news, finding customer support information, paying bills, etc., can all be done using HTML. So why does a major company, which is in the Internet-providing business, have a needlessly exclusive website?

Google is known for hiring geniuses, and this is a brilliant move: they have successfully prevented all the people who both care enough about Google to visit a garage and don’t know how to use search engines, from visiting the house.

Our good buddies at IDG News Service report that the failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some Web surfers in the northeast section of the U.S. today, making several Web sites, including Google, inaccessible.

The server failure caused connectivity problems for a “few hours,” said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. By late Tuesday, the broadband provider had rerouted traffic to other servers, she said.

An undetermined number of Google users who subscribe to Comcast’s broadband service “experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time,” a Google spokesman told IDG News via e-mail.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the spokesman wrote.

The server was knocked offline because of a hardware failure, Russo said. She couldn’t exactly how many Web pages were unavailable to Comcast users. The problems were “very isolated, very random,” she added.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the Google spokesman wrote.

Postings in discussion groups and blogs seems to indicate the problem hit the northeastern part of the U.S. the hardest, specifically Boston.

This wasn’t the case out here in San Francisco, where I Googled all day long without problems.

Could you go a day without Google?

The outage included this blog, and it was strange in that it affected only sites that require cookies. So for example, I could search Google, but I couldn’t check Gmail; I could view my blog but not log in. How could a DNS server failure do that?