July 2005 Archives

If I am lucky, I know just enough about typography to write this article. If the way the article is set appeals to you, you can probably thank your browser, or luck, I am no type expert by any means. I wonder at the artists who create fonts—fontographers and those who know how to use them well—typographers. This post is about how to use certain typographical characters correctly in XHTML documents.

em and en are units of typographical measurement. An em is the size of the letter M. Since type sizes may vary the size of an em is relative to the size of the type. (An em inside of an <h1></h1> is larger than an em in <h2></h2>)

When I first switched to Firefox, one of the things that made me crazy was trying to figure out why my own company home page didn't render exactly as it did in IE. I tried everything and just couldn't resolve some single pixel CSS issues. I decided that rasther than worry about the details, I would fix it in a future release of my site. Most users probably see it in IE, and the Firefox users haven't said anything to me in yet, so maybe they thought it was intentional.

As I write this from Deer Park Alpha 2, I am pleased to report the problem has been resolved. Unfortunately for me, this bit of fourtune comes a bit late as I am about to release a new site where the issue was "worked out". Which is to say, I used a whole different navigation system which doesn't suffer from the same issue.

In case you're wondering, alpha software is in theory even less stable than beta software. It is full of bugs and finding them is part of the purpose of using alpha software. Plus, some of us just like new toys. The weak of heart and those who don't back up their data shouldn't be trying alpha software.

BuzzMachine: Dell Archives I was attracted to this category archive at the Buzzmachine. I have recently had conversations with people in the networking IT profession who have also told me horror stories about doing business with Dell.

I actually have had a few support issues with Dell myself, but I usually let them slide. My issues are never simple and they, by virtue of their size and purchasing power, are severely handicapped in dealing with actual people. Its all a trade off.

Six Apart - ProNet - Make Makes Movable Type Better : Color me blown away by FireFox again... this article from MT ProNet Blog is really only a pointer to something much better, an article called "Make out with FireFox" over at Make: eZine, an O'Reilly Media property.

If you're wondering about the title of this post, read the article, it shows how to install SpellBound, a spell checker, into FireFox to spell check your forms.

Christopher over at the MS IE weblog points out that IEBlog : Windows 2000 moves into Extended Support after June 30th. Similar to what one commenter noticed, most small business users I work with are already switched off of the Windows 2000 desktop platform. I only have a couple more Windows 2000 servers that I am involved with to move over too Windows 2003, or the Longhorn Server, if that is ever released.

I was amused to notice the comment: "that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000". Especially in light of the definition of trivial at the Jargon File.