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Very cold and windy today. Woke up with it around 8 degrees and it just went down from there. -1 was the coldest I saw on a thermometer.

Snow on the ground, not a lot except in drifts. Not enough to shovel but enough for several plow visits.

The first full day of fall was appropriately cold, not getting above mid 50s and being wet and windy. Continue reading post "#3510"

I went on a pretty last minute camping trip this weekend. Continue reading post "Camping Trip November 2020"

In versions of PHP before 5, constructors were functions with the same name as their class. PHP 5 introduced the __construct() unified name, and has deprecated the old style in PHP 7. Cogneato still has code remnants from long ago, with the old style. I recently worked on improving the compatibility of our old code with PHP 7. Continue reading post "PHP: Fallback for old constructor style"

I decided to start up my old cell phone, a Motorola Droid 2. Continue reading post "#2452"

Looking at a page discussing the code of the first web browser (WorldWideWeb), I noticed a line designating port 2784 as OLD_TCP_PORT. After looking into it a bit more, I determined that this was the port used for the web until port 80 was officially designated in January of 1992. Continue reading post "2784, the first HTTP port"

I recently added support for HTTP 0.9 to my site. I have access to no browsers that use that protocol, and it's highly unlikely that anybody is visiting sites with one. Why support it then? It's not that hard (for me), and it fits with the progressive enhancement related concept that all browsers should be able to use the most basic functionality of a website that they are capable of.

Crazy Mac IE 5 bugs with the HTML class attribute: If you have a space after any class in the attribute, it will treat any CSS class selector that contains that string at its beginning as a match for the element. Continue reading post "IE 5 Mac class attribute with space bug"

gah: frozen water pipe [Update when="2016-02-15T01:35:53-05:00"]Solved…

Progressive enhancement is a development strategy meant to provide older and / or less capable browsers with a working website while providing the more capable with a rich, full experience. It is often presented as a set of layers of support, with HTML at its base, then CSS added to that for styles, then JavaScript for advanced behavior. With this, it's often posited that a well-crafted HTML experience can be used by any browser. However, for really old browsers from the early web, the new web provides many things that can make pages difficult to read, functionality unusable, or even entire sites inaccessible.

Today, I'm going to go back as far as I reasonably can in terms of browser support, to the second web browser ever made, and the first widely supported one, Line Mode Browser. I can't look at the first, WorldWideWeb, because it was only made for NextStep and, as far as I can tell, isn't accessible for me to test with. Line Mode is though. It was open-source by the w3c and kept available. I was able to get it with MacPorts with the 'libwww' package (run as www on the command line).

Line Mode was based on WorldWideWeb, and in fact was less featured, so it is likely to have any issues WorldWideWeb has and more. I will look at some issues that Line Mode has with modern web pages, and provide some solutions that will improve the abilities of even the oldest browsers to use a page.

My former roommate/bandmate had mentioned a few months back that geocities (was…