Rodes Web Design & Development

A recent project required that I create a page footer which would stick to the bottom of the browser window if the content didn’t fill the window, but behave normally (i.e. be pushed down by the content) when the content was tall enough.

This footer behaviour is not a new idea; I’ve seen it on a few sites over the years, the most well known probably being version 7 of Shaun Inman’s site. Take a look at the ‘Work’ page with JavaScript enabled, then disabled to see the effect in action. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?

A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one.

 The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Microsoft hopes to back up its refrain that it has a plan to catch Google by showing off some improvements to its Live Search product at a company-sponsored advertising conference later this month.

“We will start to show you the next version of the search,” Chairman Bill Gates said in comments to reporters in Japan on Wednesday, promising that Microsoft had some exciting things up its sleeve. The comments were included in a partial transcript provided by Microsoft.

The spring update is also expected to include new types of vertical search and improvements in overall relevance of search queries, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans. Specifically, Microsoft is expected to add to the shopping-specific search tools that debuted in its Fall 2007 release. Microsoft has also been working on a new look for its Live Search product, which went live this week.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

When Vista was released the chorus of complaints and criticisms quickly grew from a low hum to a near deafening roar. A little more than 4 months since Apple released Leopard and that low hum of discontent has already been amplified to the sound of fingernails being dragged on a chalkboard. So far I have only spoken to one colleague that hasn’t vocally expressed discomfort with the new Mac OS.

Within weeks of Microsoft unleashing Vista on the buying public the issues facing those making the switch from XP to Vista were clear and you could sum them up in a few bullet points:

[Read the rest of this entry...]

In the beginning, there was “mailto:” and it was good (or at least functional to a point). Then Matt Wright graced us with the Perl script we all know as Form Mail for collecting and validating the users input.

Initially FormMail was touted to be a feature-rich, fully-functional send-mail script that would (and did) revolutionize the way websites collected form information and transferred it to the website admins without the need to use the all-to-familiar “mailto:” command that requires a user to add the info in an email.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Mozilla Corp. released the third beta of Firefox 3 Wednesday, eight weeks after it made the last major milestone for its open-source browser, and right on a schedule it set a dozen days ago.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s interface designer, touted additions and enhancements to Beta 3 in a post to the company’s Web site Tuesday, touting several new or enhanced security features, an improved download manager, one-click bookmarking, offline application support, faster page rendering and new progress on plugging the browser’s noted “memory leaks.” [Read the rest of this entry...]

Today the HTML working group published  the first public working draft of HTML 5 — A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML.

Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively.’ An updated draft of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 has also been published to help guide you through the changes.

Now all we need to do is wait until there is a browser that supports it!