9elements, who are totally awesome btw., released an impressive HTML5 Canvas demo yesterday:

HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.

Take a look at http://9elements.com/io/?p=153

A certain type of camera straps has become popular recently. These straps are worn diagonally over your chest and allow the camera to slide freely on the strap. If you’re not shooting, the camera rests on your hip, doesn’t strain your neck and leaves both your hands free. If you need it, you can grab the camera quickly, without strangling yourself with the strap.

Two products are build after this principle: the R-Strap and the Sun Sniper. Both have two big disadvantages though.

First, they attach to the tripod mount of your camera using a special screw. The tripod mount is not build for stress like this! Having the camera dangle and bounce from a strap attached there might very well destroy it. Further, the screw can come loose if the camera twists around. Both products take measures against this, but a certain risk remains. Second, both straps are pretty expensive at around 50€

In this post I’ll give instructions on how to build such a strap by yourself with material for 12€. This strap not only works similarly to its 50€ brothers but is of very high quality as well and can be trusted with heavy equipment.

(Sorry, content in german only for this post)

Ende 2007 habe ich bei 9elements einen Crashkurs zu Ruby on Rails gegeben. Da mich inzwischen schon mehrere Leute gefragt haben ob ich die Folien nicht mal rausgeben möchte, tue ich das jetzt. Die Folien sind absichtlich so gestaltet, dass sie auch ausserhalb des Vortrags als Nachschlagewerk für Ruby dienen können. Der Rails-Teil ist ein wenig arg knapp gehalten und kann vor allem einen groben Überblick in den Aufbau des Frameworks geben.

Ruby & Rails Extremcrashkurs (PDF-Link) v1.0 27.03.09

Today Smashing Magazine published an article I wrote last week about Ruby on Rails. Instead of just doing another tutorial, I gave a rough overview of how Rails works, together with a lot of praise of the language and the framework.

I tried to spark interest in Rails and Ruby and judging from the first comments I think it worked :)

The text released today is only the first part, covering just enough Ruby to understand the second part coming out next week. If you like the article, please digg it or promote it on reddit/delicious/slashdot.

Thanks to a nice patch from Kevin Valdek rest_in_place now comes in three flavours:

Prototype, jQuery and mootools.

He also was so kind to improve the included testapp a little.

Please check out the changes at http://github.com/janv/rest_in_place/tree/master and on the project page.

Convenience vs. validity

Regarding the project page.

In itself it’s kinda pointless since it contains nothing more than the readme which you can also see in all its glory over at github. But it’s invaluable for feedback through the comments. Wincent Colaiuta posted a remark about the standards compliance of the custom attributes RIP uses, which I have to admit is kinda valid:

Haven’t looked at the code yet, but I like the idea very much.

The only problem is those non-standard attributes that you’re jamming into the divs and spans are not valid HTML (well, I admit, I only checked them with an XHTML validator; I don’t actually know if they’d be considered valid for any particular other version of HTML or XHTML).

For me that’s a bit of a show-stopper, as I don’t want my pages spitting out validation errors if anyone feeds them into a validator.

Other than that, looks like a great idea though.

However it also kinda isn’t.

I replied:

I understand your concern but let’s be honest for a minute ;)

These additional attributes might be undefined in XHTML but are syntactically correct and will just be ignored by browsers. They provide a very convenient and concise way of specifying how to edit the fields. They pose no actual harm to a user’s browsing experience. Neither directly (in the form of malfunctions) nor indirectly (like what the widespread use of really ill-formed HTML did to web development in the past).

As a computer scientist I understand the desire for absolute correctness. But as an actual application developer, my users are my target audience, not fellow nerds who like feed my pages into validators (no offense). A little pragmatism can’t hurt once in a while if you want to get things done.

Is this a case of correctness for the sake of correctness? Or were it little steps like this what led us to the browser wars and IE6? Should REST in Place give up convenience for the sake of correctness? How do others deal with inofficial attributes. I know a lot of people and a lot of situations where they saved developers a lot of time and headache.