BenMeadowcroft.com

Apr 20th: Back from Holiday! Yes I've been away in Cyprus for a short while, there was some great weather while I was over there and some excellent historical sites to visit. There was also some fun to be had as well as can be seen in the photographs below.

I've received a few emails from my contact form where people have asked me something but then forgot to include their email! If you ask me a question make sure you include your email address. I have cleared up my contact form a bit so it should be harder to forget now.

In other news the Vera font 1.10 has been released. Hopefully this will lead to further improvements in the quality of freely available fonts. They are truetype fonts so they can be used with most modern operating systems that I know of, windows users can use them but they are distributed in a compressed format, I got the tar.gzip format, so they will have to use something like winzip to access them. thanks to Russell Beatie for pointing these fonts out.

Apr 8th: Lorem Ipsum Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Jan 25th: Liberal Parsing. There has been some activity recently regarding liberally parsing incorrect data. Mark Pilgrim released an article on Oreilly that talked about liberal parsing of RSS[additional comments]. At the same time I came across a pointer on usenet to a masters thesis on the parsing of incorrect HTML [PDF version, also in PS format].

So now you've read all that you can see what my point is.

You can't? Ok I'll explain then, the masters thesis presents an analysis of the number of incorrectly written HTML sites out there, from a representative sample of 2.4 million URI's [harvested from DMOZ], 14.5 thousand were valid, or 0.7%. I've included a data table based on the results of the analysis below. Luckily RSS isn't in as bad a state as HTML, is it? Will the trend towards more liberal parsers lead to more authors not learning about RSS and just crudely hacking it together as happens with HTML at present? Does RSS need that ability to be hacked like HTML can be in order to gain wider acceptance?

PS I've just worked out a few bugs in my weblog RSS feed, enjoy.