BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Architecture is endlessly appealing to me. Houses, in particular, capture my imagination because they are so primal in their utility: They provide us with a safe place to sleep, eat, store food, and raise young’uns.

For the last 90 years in America, home architecture has been dominated by profiteering companies looking to churn out cheaper products for higher margins. Market demand and time constraints are generally at odds with innovation and creativity, and this is precisely why qualified architects are only responsible for a small fraction of American homes.

On one hand, this sucks because it means that most houses in America were conceived and built by people who truly don’t know a damn thing about the art of designing a home.

On the other hand, this extreme suckage has made it easier to spot the really good stuff—the houses designed by architects who had a purpose and thoughtful motive behind every last structural detail.

A cursory review of the architects and designers who shaped an emerging, twentieth century America will no doubt reveal classic names like Wright, Neutra, Eichler, Eames, Nelson, van der Rohe, and Saarinen. These artisans—real experts, you know?—are all associated with the most inspired period of design in American history: The mid-century modern era.

When I decided to buy a house in 2009, I went on an all-out mission to find the perfect mid-century modern (MCM) home in Austin. After an exhausting three-month search, I managed to score a classic MCM that does everything right:

• At first glance, the home appears to be oddly situated on the lot, but closer inspection reveals that it’s built on the same axis as the four cardinal directions!
• Extra-tall windows bring in natural light and also serve to unite the house with the surrounding land.
• The flat roof, extended easements, huge windows, and indoor/outdoor feel are all characteristic of my favorite branch of MCM architecture that can be traced back to Richard Neutra.
• Just look at the place—it’s sexy as hell :D

Finally, I’d like to shout out a huge thank-you to Nick Reese, whose badass camera setup and editing skillz made this video possible!

One thing that is rather common, especially on websites whose content is not in English, is URLs that contain unencoded characters such as space, å, ä, or ö. While this works most of the time it can cause problems.

Looking at RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, characters that are allowed to be used unencoded in URLs are either reserved or unreserved. The unreserved characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. The reserved characters are used as delimiters and are :, /, ?, #, [, ], @, !, $, &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, ;, and =.

In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.

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Posted in Browsers, Quick Tips, Usability, Web Standards.

Enlightening 1.5 hour interview on Adobe, stolen iPhone 4, and more. Most interesting was the confession that work began first on the iPad almost 10 years ago. Later, it was shelved temporarily when they realized the touch screen would make a killer phone.

Another impressive demo from simurai (Safari only right now).

I’ve written a few articles about techniques that use JavaScript to open new browser windows, the most recent one being Opening new windows with JavaScript, version 1.2. A very quick summary of my reason for using JavaScript is that it enables me to use strict HTML 4.01 and XHTML doctypes, which do not allow the target attribute.

By using JavaScript to open new windows I can still use validation as a quality assurance tool when working with HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 without having to manually filter out the errors caused by target attributes or downgrading to a Transitional doctype. (I’m aware that the target attribute is allowed in HTML5, so eventually this will all be completely unnecessary.)

Let it be known that I am by no means a proponent of opening new windows, quite the contrary. As a user I find new windows a nuisance, and since there are several well-known accessibility and usability problems related to opening new windows I always recommend leaving end users in control.

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Posted in Accessibility, JavaScript, Usability.