http://blog.dorward.me.uk David Dorward on Life, Technology, and Everything hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://blog.dorward.me.uk/2010/04/06/validating-email-addresses-with-regular-expressions.html 2010-04-06T08:12:15-00:00 <p><a href="http://twitter.com/edent/status/11687784947">Yahoo! can&#8217;t get it right</a> and they are a huge name, why do you think you can?</p> http://blog.dorward.me.uk/2010/03/23/detraining.html 2010-03-23T10:11:00-00:00 <p>My journey into work this morning was hellish, mostly because a central line train &#8220;detrained&#8221;</p> <dl> <dt><a href="http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/detrain?view=uk">detrain</a></dt> <dd> <strong>verb</strong> leave or cause to leave a train.</dd> </dl> <p>I&#8217;m yet to work out how and why a train was a <em>passenger</em>&hellip;</p> http://blog.dorward.me.uk/2010/03/18/consumer-appliances-and-custom-browsers.html 2010-03-18T10:17:28-00:00 <p>I&#8217;m having the joy of writing webpages targeted at consumer appliances. Unfortunately, the vendors of many of these devices have not seen the light and thus failed to grab one of the open source browser engines on the market or go to Opera. Either they are rolling their own, or buying browsers which have never seen a desktop computer.</p> <p>Thanks to a bug in the rendering engine of one major vendor with a name that starts with S, I have to have odd spaces when I make text bold.</p> <pre><code>foo &lt;strong&gt;bar &lt;/strong&gt; baz </code></pre> <p>However, this causes a bug in the browser used by a different vendor (also with a name starting with S) so I&#8217;ve ended up with:</p> <pre><code>[% MACRO sfix BLOCK; IF product.browser.someVendor; %] [% END; END; %] </code></pre> <p>and</p> <pre><code>foo &lt;strong&gt;bar[% sfix %]&lt;/strong&gt; baz </code></pre> <p>Isn&#8217;t that just lovely?</p> <p>Oh, if only I could just target Webkit and Presto!</p> http://blog.dorward.me.uk/2010/03/17/the-personal-touch.html 2010-03-17T11:52:42-00:00 <p>There are job agencies that treat you like a person, and there are job agencies that&hellip;</p> <p><img src="http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzfcxc18621qzwqnm.jpg" alt="Text from +77 7825 (redacted): Free for contract?"/></p> http://blog.dorward.me.uk/2010/02/22/flash-continues-to-suck-possibly-.html 2010-02-22T09:45:22-00:00 <p>A Flash developer on <a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/">the subject of touchscreens</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>The only potential &ldquo;solutions&rdquo; to the mouseover problem are terrible ones:</p> <p>A) The best case: every Flash app on every site is re-thought by its designers and re-coded by its programmers (if they&rsquo;re even still available), just for touchscreens.</p> </blockquote> <p>Really? Are you seriously telling me that <strong>every</strong> Flash application out there is entirely dependent on being able to point the mouse at things without clicking?</p> <p>Even if you ignore touch screens, that still violates <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#keyboard-operation">WCAG 2.0&#160;2.1</a> by being inaccessible to keyboards.</p> <p>I have trouble believing that every single Flash developer is that bad.</p>