Broken Links

Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston

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August 2008 Archives - 2/2 - Broken Links Archive

Visualising search relevance with Google charts

Some search engines, particularly on content management systems, give a percentage figure for the relevance of a result to your search term. When viewing a lot of results on a page, the figures can tend to run into one another and be hard to quickly distinguish.

This was the case with a client site I’m building using CMS Made Simple at the moment, and the results page suffered from a lack of clarity. Thinking of a way to simplify the page, I remembered the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” and hit upon the idea of using Google’s Chart API to replace the figures:

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An alternative suggestion for web fonts licensing

Following the recent push by Microsoft and Ascender to revive the EOT format for web fonts, debate has raged over the pros and cons of the two main alternatives: embedding and linking. Richard Rutter came up with the idea to license fonts on a monthly payment basis, with the font being served from the supplier’s server (or a trusted alternative).

I think there are a number of potential problems of practicality with that approach, many of which have been raised in the comments. As a contribution to the debate, I would like to offer the following suggestion:

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Newer

Aside

For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.

One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.

[#] 3 Comments . More Asides.

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