The title says it all.

If you have Google Web Accelerator installed on your machine, it’s best for you to not to use any web apps that incorporate destructive links, as you might find out one day that you’ve removed page content, left groups you intentionally joined, deleted users on your site etc – the list could go on.

Background

Straight from the horses mouth:-

“Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.”

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Essentially, it prefetches pages to cache by spidering links that present on the page your viewing at a given time. So this begs the question – what links are, and aren’t prefetchable? Well, Googles Support pages on the matter state that in line with the HTTP 1.1 spec, “‘the GET method is defined as a Safe Method which “SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval.’ In practice, Google Web Accelerator does not prefetch links which have query parameters (i.e. have a “?” in the URL) and encrypted pages (i.e. URL starting with https://).”

In v1.0 we could directly target it as it identified its requests with a “X-moz: prefetch” header, however apparently in v2.0, the header has dissapeared. Having said that, it’s slightly strange that Google haven’t updated their pages to reflect the apparent changes in v2.0

Although I have no first-hand experience of this, it was highlighted to me (cheers Mark) when I was implementing the UI for a past project.

I’ll let you read through a number of useful comments on the subject submitted by readers… I’m off to bed.

I was browsing the Guardian newspaper a couple of months ago (I meant to publish this post a couple of days after reading the article) and came across an article entitled, “Internet Explorer aims to embrace the web again“, so decided to take a closer look. Admittedly it was the first time I had read the Technology section of the Guardian, and considering the mainstream format that a lot of broadsheets have, was pleasantly surprised to find the article went into somewhat more depth than I had expect it would do.

As you can read if you visit the link, the article starts off by explaining what Acid2 is and the hype at Mix08 surrounding IE8. What I found particularly interesting in the article was a single comment from Eric Meyer; it reads, “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be very, very promising…”. He does actually mention that he’s “never had any inside track” from the IE guys, and granted, his comments did come before MS released a document outlining planned CSS support in the IE8 final release (which I talk more about in a recent post), but still…

So, I’ve come back from a five week break in which I’ve managed to do almost all of the things that I wanted to do in that time; I got myself into shape again (kind of) by going out on my bike every day, went to a few Unis (DMU Leicester, Kent, Bristol & Manchester) to visit a few mates, finished watching all seven series of The Sopranos and played a fair amount of GTA IV.

Also during my time off I was approached by an old acqaintance from Teachers TV, who has persuaded me to take up a position as Senior ID on a fairly large-scale project in Reading; unfortunately, I can’t really say anymore than that at the moment!

A couple of weeks ago I attended the first day of @Media London (too hungover from the end of day drinking for the second). It was great to finally put faces to names (and amusing avatars); from CSS3.Info, I met both Peter and David, and the party after the first was a great chance to meet a few new faces. It was great to meet Lachlan Hunt and speak to him after his and James Graham’s informative talk on HTML5. After we drank the bar dry, a few of us went onto a small Italian restaurant (complete with it’s own real-life take of a Sopranos scene) across the river, where I had a chance to chat to John Resig along with a few others.

At the conference there were a couple of developers from the BBC who talked about the new sites design (homepage in particular) in more detail. One interesting piece of news that came from their talk was that they decided to build themselves a bespoke JS library from the ground up due to the vast array of browsers that they have to support (apparently FF 1.3 is particularly troublesome with JQuery). From what I recollect, they were mentioning that it might be released within the next couple of months.

So sorry guys for the lack of posts within the last few weeks, but promise you’ll see a lot more activity from now on

I’ve recently decided to take a break from web development probably for a couple of months. One of the reasons for this is that I’m starting to feel very burnt-out (I haven’t had a break for more than a month in three years), and the time has come to get a change of scenery for my own sanity!

My tasks for my time off are as follows:-

1. Get super fit like I was a couple of years ago before a little thing called ‘work’ came along.
2. Go visit my mates who are at uni
3. Do some local voluntary work; I really want working with people who aren’t as fortunate as me to give me a more rounded view on life, ‘cos I kind of take life a bit for granted at the mo, but I want that to change…

Note to spammers – I can understand you’re eager to post your unrelated links on my posts, but please can you refrain from doing so for the next couple of months? I won’t constantly be at my desk like I’ve been up until now, so will be unable to remove them as quickly – thanks!

So finally, please don’t expect many (if not any) new posts to appear on the site – I wish you all well, and hopefully see you all back here in a couple of months!

Following on from the recent CSS WG F2F where issues relating to the concept were either resolved or noted, and from some email correspondence with Dave Hyatt, I’ve carried out an update to the article.
CSS3 ‘box-sizing’ article

A recent post on CSS3.Info regarding the CSS WG F2F in San Diego nicely sums up resolutions relating to possible up-coming CSS features.

Two resolutions that the post doesn’t mention however, are to do with the public disclosure of dialogue within the Working Group relating specifically to IRC log’s and meeting minutes.

It was decided that from now on the WG’s minutes and also IRC logs will be made public; there was also talk about opening up process-related discussions into a new public mailing list, although this has apparently been put on the back burner for the moment.

What I feel this does show is that the WG are listening to what people are wanting and have made their workings more transparent, which is great news.

Here are the first minutes

Just noticed this…

….and this font-size inconsistency (Safari 3.1 overlaying FF 2.0.0.12), both in OSX

Look’s like a couple of regression bugs as they certainly weren’t there in 3.0- think I’ll need to come up with a test case or two.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Yahoo will start indexing Microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN types.

It’s great to see one of the big players shape up and start to implement this relatively new technology, and it would be great to see the other major SE’s follow suit soon. What with IE8’s ‘microformats-to-all’ push with it’s Web Slices feature based on hAtom (although it does use it’s own top-level concept on top of hAtom),

Although I don’t really have time at the moment to get into a full-on Microformats chit-chat, I did however find this article on SitePoint authored by David Peterson that goes into some depth as to why it might be better to use RDFA rather that Microformats in this particular environment.

Anyway, it’s a joy to see that we’re one more step forward to a semantic web!

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera – Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead – a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

However this is not why I felt tearful.

MS decided to publish an article which details planned CSS support in the final release of IE8, which put a complete dampener on the day that I read it.

As I thought right from the start of talk of it’s release, CSS3 support is extremely disappointing, which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of features of CSS3. Well done Dean and the rest of the IE team- you’ve come up with yet another inferior browser.

which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of the fundamental layout-specific features of CSS3.

I’ve written a basic overview of the article. It mentions:-

• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo classes
• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo elements
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Backgrounds and Borders module (no multiple backgrounds, background-size etc)
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Color module (no RGBA, opacity etc)
• SOME support for Level 3 of Text module
• MINOR support for Basic UI module. Hardly surprising as the module currently has no owner, and there is no test suite Nice though to see that they’ve implemented box-sizing even though it’s with their own prefix.
• NO support for Multi-Column module.
• NO Media Query support

Before the announcement went public, I took it as a given that IE would HAVE to pass Acid2; looking back, it would have been simply astonishing if it hadn’t. But, now vendors are focusing on Acid3, which makes its predecessor completely redundant- with this in mind, there was absolutely no reason why the IE8 Acid2 pass story should have been as big as it was.

Whilst carrying out some further QA, I’ve noticed at least one regression bug that has creeped in and in the process of notifying the guys at IE

23/03/08

I promised to bump this post, didn’t I? As I simply don’t have the scope to focus on IE8’s (many) bugs, I though I’d let these guys do it:-

• A pretty comprehensive list
• IE8 now has it’s very own little page at css-discuss

16/03/08

• html element padding – specifying a padding value (more than null) on html element has no effect (Test Case); corrected behaviour visible in IE7 and IE6.