Archive for March, 2008.
Mar 30 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 4 comments
This brief tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of the Google Charts API, but no knowledge of the new map chart type. This tutorial will cover all of the required and optional Charts API parameters for the map chart type and will culminate in displaying a US map of red states and blue states.
Producing the base map
To produce our base map using the Google Charts API requires a URL similar to the following one:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x200&cht=t&chtm=usa&chd=s:_
Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 28 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
The latest version of the Google Charts API released 18 March 2008 includes thematic maps and our old Tufte favorite, sparklines!
Hopefully, I'll have a chance to play around with them this weekend(!) and put together a more substantial post then.
Mar 28 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 3 comments
As promised at last night's NY Web Standards meetup, this morning I tested to see if IE 8 would recognize IE 7 conditional comments when set to render in IE 7 standards mode. The unfortunate answer is no. You can review the test here: http://themechanism.com/barkode/demos-tutorials/ie8-version-targeting.php
Aside—I installed Safari 3.1 (525.13) on my PC (Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1) this morning and, for the first time in months, it runs!
Mar 27 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 2 comments
Sorry for posting two Chris Heilmann reblogs in such short succession (I know, I know, like a poor man's RSS reader), but not only is his stuff so good, I wanted to reference this in tonight's NY Web Standards meetup.
From "The struggle for web standards—my presentation for Coder's Saturday in Montreal" on Wait till I come! by Chris Heilmann, published on 22 March 2008 at 7:24 PM.
Mar 27 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
In anticipation of tonight's NY Web Standards meetup, I present this trenchant criticism from Joel Spolsky on Microsoft's decision to not make IE8 behave like IE7 by default:
The idealists rejoiced. Hundreds of them descended on the IE blog to actually say nice things about Microsoft for the first times in their lives.
I looked at my watch.
Tick, tick, tick.
Within a matter of seconds, you started to see people on the forums showing up like this one:
I have downloaded IE 8 and with it some bugs. Some of my websites like "HP" are very difficult to read as the whole page is very very small… The speed of my Internet has also been reduced on some occasions. Whe [sic] I use Google Maps, there are overlays everywhere, enough so it makes it ackward [sic] to use!
Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She's your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, "It has bugs and I can't see my sites." They don't give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic "standard" that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don't want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
From "Martian Headsets" on Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky, my favorite new blog on software development and the internet. So far, I find everything on here very well-written, reasoned, and developed into coherent essays (long is good!)
