Bill's Diversifying Blog - Programming

Browser Compatibility Survey

nospam@example.com (William Robinson) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 13:06:40 +0000

Geek Web Bit

I was just thinking today of making a website that would test various functionalities of browsers from surfers in a survey style. I am not aware of anything else like this. The use being to collect data on what features are supported in what browsers.

The most obvious use case from a general surfer's point of view is that they are provided a series of questions (or maybe a random selection if there are a lot) just showing a preview image or animation of what should happen and then the same example in HTML/DOM/JavaScript/CSS to see how well it is rendered. Then the user submits the form the results are all submitted and logged along with their user agent.

Another possibility, could be automated tests. These would be easier on the user, but tougher on the developer.

From the developer's point of view, this could provide interesting statistics on what is supported and what works in the most browsers. If there was an automated submission process for code examples, this would also be good. So mainly i'm thinking a server side storage of all this stuff, serving up the simplest possible pages to get the job done with the complexity in the javascript/css/html that the developer uploads.

I was talking about his with guido_w on freenode in #javascript, he pointed me at his javascript unit testing project, hypertest.

Other bit

Ok I just got a call from the job agency... so I have some work. Now and for the rest of the week. Woot, I guess.

10 line python web server

nospam@example.com (William Robinson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I've been in windows quite a bit recently and I have moved all of my site from self-hosting to Tadas' dedicated machine in Texas. In Linux, I have set up a redirect to robinson.mine.nu, but in windows, I didn't want to install apache just to do this. After scouting around for small programs just for redirecting, I gave up and made my own in Python. All it does is a simple redirect-permanent to my new hostname from whatever path is requested. It has a 5MB memory footprint when running.

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Two karm patches accepted!

nospam@example.com (William Robinson) — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:02:28 +0100

I have returned from our trip to Brighton today in my parents' battered old peugeot to find a flurry of kde bug tracker activity. It seems that the two patches I submitted for bugs 87651 and 91732 were sufficient for committing to the KDE subversion repository. So I am most happy with this. I got some lovely messages in response to these fixes. Also, as strange chance would have it, within about an hour of returning, the small patch I submitted to the kde-addons kicker-applet mediacontrol, to add support for mpd was accepted, even though it still has some blocking issues. I think the implied rewrite I would do on it was enough for metz to have faith in me and my patch series. Which is very nice. So I am happy Appreciation!

Novel fix for Internet Explorer PNG transparency problem.

nospam@example.com (William Robinson) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:11:18 +0100

I just came up with what I believe is a nice little fix to the Microsoft Internet Explorer problem of not supporting transparent images. Using this PHP function...
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Karm patches

nospam@example.com (William Robinson) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 18:47:40 +0100

This afternoon, I have been working on Karm. I believe that I have fixed two bugs (91732 and 87651) and a wishlist item (50112). I don't know whether they will be applied or even appreciated. I don't seem to have a very high success rate submitting patches. So I figured if I submitted them all seperately, I might stand a better chance. Heh.