The Zero Room

Truckloads of gratitude, of the falling to one's knees and weeping kind, are due to Andrew Clover for his excellent JavaScript patch for Internet Eexplorer's buggy background image behaviour. I can't tell you how often this is going to save what's left of my sanity.

Jeremy Keith has a nice article up on A List Apart called "Behavioural Separation". Sounds like a psychiatric disorder, but he's actually talking about separating structure, presentation, and behaviour in web pages. He has some tips on using CSS effeciently, and more importantly on applying JavaScript event handlers to elements via the DOM after the page has loaded, rather than by embedding them in your document markup. Really cool stuff.

Via a talk by Cameron Adams, I came across a new semi-serious buzzword that actually deserves to spread: Hijax.

Coined by Jeremy Keith, Hijax uses a technique called progressive enhancement thus:

The OpenDocument juggernaut rolls on, with the announcement that the OpenDocument format is now an ISO/IEC standard.  The decision about which format to trust for storing your documents is now even easier.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier astutely declares that "We need a shared blog format".  I couldn't agree more. In fact, I think his argument generalises to cover any conceivable category of software, although the problem is particularly acute in the area of web applications.

In another of the increasingly frequent "no-brainer" migrations to the OpenDocument format, the National Archives is adopting OpenDocument for preserving electronic documents.  What distinguishes this migration from others is that in this instance, the organisation adopting OpenDocument is, by it's nature, not the author of most of the documents it works with.