Don’t call me DOM

One of the users of the W3C cheatsheet (of which a new version was released yesterday including HTML5) reminded me of a nifty feature available in a number of browsers, the so called “smart bookmarks”, and how they could be used with the cheatsheet.

A smart bookmark is basically a bookmark where a part of the URL can be replaced by a user entered string; depending on the browser, this smart bookmark can then be invoked with a said string to bring you directly to a specific page (often, a search result).  Read more... (147 words, estimated 35 secs reading time)

When one wants to use JavaScript to add language-specific content to a page (for instance, for localization), the only cross-browser property available is navigator.language, which unfortunately represents the browser’s language, not the user’s preferred language — that browsers often make configurable.

This makes navigator.language pretty much inappropriate as a base for a solid localization effort.

While the browser sends the preferred language with each request to any server through the Accept-Language HTTP header, the client-side JavaScript engine doesn’t have access to the value of that header, and so cannot even try to parse it to determine the user’s preferred language.  Read more... (265 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

Yesterday night, I was participating to a BarCamp in Sophia-Antipolis (where W3C European offices are located) on the “mobile Internet” theme.

Among the topics that were discussed, one theme popped up in several of the sessions I took part to: the differences between “native” mobile applications and mobile Web sites, in particular to answer the question that a number of people asked on which path they should choose for their content or service.  Read more... (1096 words, estimated 4:23 mins reading time)