Linked List: July 2, 2004

Friday, 2 July 2004

Ben Hammersley: XHTML Validation Via RSS ★

Ben Hammersley has put together a great tool for automatically checking dynamic pages for validity:

The w3c’s XHTML validation service is tremendously useful, but it’s a pain to be continually checking it for breakages, and then working through the errors when they occur. Their user interface leaves a bit to be desired as well.

Personally, I like nice to-do lists and automatic checking of my pages. So to combine the two, I’ve made a widget to create a XHTML Validation Results RSS feed from any page.

PreFab UI Actions ★

Really interesting new product from Bill Cheeseman and PreFab Software:

With UI Actions, you attach a script to a native Mac OS X application, and the script will be triggered automatically by user actions you specify, such as opening or closing a window, selecting a menu item, editing a text field and many others. An attached script can query the target application for useful information about the user action that triggered it, including a reference to the affected UI element and all of its attributes such as position, size, title, role and value. Using this information, every attached script can draw upon the full capabilities of AppleScript, including Apple’s new GUI Scripting, to amplify and enhance the power of the target application.

Currently in public beta testing.

(Via MDJ 2004.07.02.)

Again, With the Links to Dave Hyatt w/r/t Dashboard ★

Hyatt:

As for many of the animations, fades, slides, etc in the widgets themselves, they simply look so damn cool because of Safari’s rich support for CSS3 used in conjunction with DHTML. Do you know what I talked about at WWDC? Image replacement. Sliding doors. Using opacity to create fade effects. CSS3 text truncation. Web standards. All of which are being used to full effect in Dashboard widgets. Our standards support has grown so rich and our engine has become so smooth at effects that people are constantly mistaking pure JS/DHTML/CSS stuff that people are doing for something fancier. I’ve heard “That’s HTML?!” several times in the past week.

So. Fucking. Cool.