Archive for the 'HTML' Category

Software systems as big balls of mud

Friday, July 25th, 2008

You are what you wear
And you wear the scars.
There are no mirrors
In your house of cards.
Your world is decaying
But you don’t understand…
—The Dark

The critical point to remember about Software Systems as Big Balls
of Mud,
is that it is not an anti-pattern. The statement that applying top-down practices to software results in a Big Ball of Mud is an affirmation that

  1. We always have a working system
  2. We are mostly able to satisfy most requirements
  3. We are almost always able to satisfy critical requirements

In addition, the points stated above are our benchmark for adopting any new process and its inherent risks. We can (and will)
ask in all seriousness, is this solution more robust than a big ball of mud? Successful advocacy always seems to require
answering this question.

Slides

Here is a presentation of some of the ideas in BBM. It is basically a bunch of quotations from the papers mentioned here and a few others. I had intended to write a paper around the ideas presented here, but later realized running Selenium regressions required me to write down the same ideas, albeit in a more pragmatic language ;)

See also

The Selfish Class, also by Foot & Yoder

HTML Validation

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Today I wanted to know how to get the functionality of the HTML validator Firefox extension. The extension has two modes: Tidy and SGML parser. Each of these modes reports differently on the HTML under test. Both reports can be useful (I’m not going to get into the differences here).

Specifically, I wanted to be able to generate either a Tidy or an SGML parser report from the command line. And I wanted to be able to run my report for any public Web page.

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Authoring accessible Web content

Monday, December 4th, 2006

This began as a post for the JAG internal wiki. After I’d gone to all the trouble of looking everything up and spelling it right, I thought it would be worthwhile to mirror the post here.

Here are a couple of basic pointers for building Acessible Web sites. I generally am interested in Accessibility, because it’s part of the Semantic Web vision. When I come across a relevant article, I tag it with accessibility. But I became especially interested after the National Federation for the Blind sued Target, basically because Target refused to add ALT tags to their images.

In no particular order, here’s list of core techniques:
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