Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

I want this shirt for X-mas

I just read on the A9 Developer Blog the other day that the new version of the A9 Toolbar (which I can’t use because it doesn’t support Mozilla Firefox 1.5b1, let alone the nightly) now supports SiteInfo! This is such a neat idea. I couldn’t wait to install the new version of Oxygen, which fixes the problem I was having with my hosting company’s ftp server forcing my temporary switch to EngInSite, and start marking up my site’s navigation structure. More people need to start doing this. I’m a big supporter of copious amounts of machine-readable metadata. This is a very good thing to do. Forget the fact that almost nobody has the A9 Toolbar, how long before we start to see other sites reading this information? This is great for accessibility. If every page on your site has a collection of links to every other important place on your site in a place that’s consistent across every site they visit, it makes it a lot easier for your users to get to where they need to be.

Since no one commented on my previous post about the dangers of MIME types, (if any,) I went ahead and did it anyway. You can now add ?mimetype=type to view that page served with a different mimetype. So now, if you are running Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, you can go to: http://www.kronkltd.net/wp/?p=720&mimetype=application/xhtml%2Bxml and see what I was trying to do.

Note: The character ‘+’ gets translated to a space in url’s, so in order to specify a mime-type such as application/xhtml+xml, you have to replace the ‘+’ with a ‘%2B’.

Recently, Microsoft announced that they will be releasing IE7 earlier than expected. It seems that the ever-increasing number of Firefox users has really started to make Bill sweat. I see this as a good thing. Now is the chance for Microsoft to reclaim some of it’s name. Originally, it was going to be Longhorn only, but they have decided to open it up to users of XP-SP2. It does nothing for the many people not using XP, but it’s a start.

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What would happen if Google put a simple link to Mozilla Firefox on the front page of their search engine?

(inspired by this article)