This is the website of Svend Tofte residing in Copenhagen Denmark. Web developer since 1999 and life-long nerd devotee. Currently working with ASP.NET and related Microsoft technologies, and obstensibly a student at the University of Copenhagen.
Japan, 2008
Date string formatting is very brutal in JavaScript, which probably has the worst built in library in relation to the distribution this language sees. So a long time ago I whipped up a script file, for doing just this. I always though PHP’s date function looked very nice, so I decided to model my function upon that.
… and the mediocre content they provide? I’m especially tired of the high ranking they (still) get in google. I go to hit google with “PlaceHolder asp.net”, and w3schools is the second hit. If you go read their page it has barely 3 lines regarding this control (highlighted with red outline), the remaining details are simply aggregate data, or advertising (outlined with green, doesn’t include all the further ads you’d see if you had scrolled down).
w3schools “3 lines of documentation” regarding the ASP.NET PlaceHolder class.
I mean, this is a total joke. When did w3schools start out? 2000? They became popular with their concise CSS properties listings back in the day. But seriously, it’s like this site is frozen in time. Their CSS reference point is 2.0 from 1998 (not that a mere properties reference would list much different from 2.0 and 2.1, but there are some minor additions.) I would prefer they would work on updating their CSS reference instead of wasting time on ASP.NET.
I guess I think of many things as arrogant. I guess it also strikes me as somewhat arrogant that visitors to my site should somehow be interested in whatever random links I might have, especially when they are so generics as to be included in “blogrolls”, or whatever the term seems to be.
There’s enough “interesting link sites” services out there there’s just no need to attempt to present down my perhaps 4-5 daily site checks as somehow unique. They aren’t. I check the old new thing now and then. I read Computerworld.dk to get a view of how the landscape of the danish commercial software scene. I wish I was cool and spent alot of time on Lambda the Ultimate, but I’m not, so I just visit it every few weeks and poke around.
Overall it just seems like we’re building paths to everywhere. But it’s nice to arrive as well. And I guess I wish for this site to be a destination for some people (and maybe helpful as well). Feel free to hit your back button now!
It’s good to know that within 1 day of returning to any amount of CSS work, Internet Explorer can still baffle me. Maybe I’m missing something here, but seems that if a small tag (yes, let the damnations begin, but it was mostly due to the WordPress default template using it, that I came across it) does not include some trailing whitespace, it receives a little extra padding.
Rendering oddity with small tags with no trailing whitespace.
The HTML code used validates, should you wish to inspect it yourself. The “CSS1Compat” mode is merely to ensure we’re in “standards mode”.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
<head><title>wth ie</title>
<style type="text/css">
h2{
background-color:red;
margin-bottom:0;}
.wth {
background-color:green;
margin-top:0;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h2>foo</h2> <small class="wth"> b ar </small>
<h2>foo</h2> <small class="wth"> b az</small>
<hr/>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write(document.compatMode);
</script>
</body>
</html>
You’ll notice I remove all margin on the elements. And indeed, the first header h2 and small does render correctly. But the second gets a 2 pixel margin added for … who knows what reason.
A couple of years ago, I added a page to my old site on an “easy” fix for emulating max-width behavior in Internet Explorer, by utilizing a powerful IE5 feature called dynamix properties/expressions.
Briefly, these expressions allow a web author to hook script expressions into the dynamic nature of HTML elements. The natural events of the page (onresize, onclick, onmouseover and so on) causing these expressions to be re-evaluated whenever content could possibly reflow. The effect is naturally very powerful.
Riding high on the technology wave of the last millenium, I’ve finally gotten around to getting an actual genuine blog. I spent about a week tweaking the WordPress platform, look and code to make it appear more or less like my old site.
My old site had a very article “centric” look, and I’m not entirely sure I managed to translate that look and feel over to a more snippet oriented 2 column classic blog format. But mostly because this new software just contains so many more pages then my old did. So still lots of stuff to do; I need to get around to looking at making some nice URLs, instead of these horrible ?id=213 URL fragments that floats around. The site probably doesn’t validate. And overall need to check that the site works in all it’s little niches …
Oh, and if you’re looking for the old stuff, the content is in all the usual places, haven’t deleted any content, and until such a time as I get the old front page index and possibly content ported over (still not sure how to handle that), here’s a link to the old index page.
And this makes for my … 8th or so iteration of my site, which has lived on this domain since 2001, and on a few others for a few years before that. And I wish to send my gratitude to my friend Lasse, for providing great hosting ever since my former domain went defunct in late 2002.
But anyway. I’m very happy to finally have a blog and having it gotten launched tonight.