I find myself trying to do something simple: making an image 100% opaque when in a div that is set to 80% so that the background shows through (a little) on the div but doesn’t interfere with the image.
I’d demonstrate here, only it turns out to be impossible. Not with the latest CSS, and not with any current browser. What might help is a jQuery plugin called Transify (easy to find). It’s not 100% compatible with my case, but close enough to be worth a bit of exploration.
Since proper opacity controls for backgrounds wont appear until some future incarnation of CSS3, for now we have to resort to hacks involving semi-transparent PNGs, Z-axis hackery, floating layers, etc. Actually, [click title to read more…]
In recent months, new priorities have taken me away from active participation in W3C, but a decade working with the standards body does engender some habits, such as keeping an eye on spec evolution. The W3C TPAC meetings (in which I had significant roles down the years) is a great opportunity to get an overview of the state of Web specifications. The one that most people will be looking at these days is HTML 5, and as always, TPAC doesn’t disappoint.
If all you want to know is “when will HTML 5 be finished?” then according to the information presented at TPAC, mid-2012 is the earliest time you will see a Candidate Recommendation. That estimate stretches to the end of [click title to read more…]
June has been an interesting month for Internet technology. We kicked off with the big IPv6 experiment, which thankfully seems to have been successful. IPv6 is available as standard in most personal computers, servers and recent network equipment. It’s not so prevalent in home routers, and it’s anyone’s guess how much support there is in mobile devices. Around the same time, Apple announced iCloud as somewhere to store your stuff. It would seem that Apple are getting a lot of traction with their technology and service announcements, though there are also some emerging trends to counter this, such as the growing adoption of HTML5 to create applications, as the recent Financial Times application demonstrates (see below). There’s still plenty of [click title to read more…]
Firefox 4 is a memory hog. Over a period of a few hours, its memory consumption rose to approx 2Gb, at which point it became completely unresponsive. Since I needed to maintain a session for testing, it was very annoying that I had to kill the Firefox process. If this keeps up, I might have to use a different browser for testing.
With the task manager running, and Firefox active but doing absolutely nothing, the memory consumption grows by a few K every second. Such a pity. FF4 had a lot of promise, but I think we are going to see lots of complaints from users over the next few weeks. All of these issues should have been spotted and [click title to read more…]
Having done this many times already, here’s a quick recipe for putting Subversion (with Apache) on a fresh install of CentOS 5.5. It assumes you will put your repositories into /var/svn/repositories, the user credentials are held in /var/svn/passwords, you will have a user called testuser and an initial blank repository called myrepos. I’ll also assume your server is called svn.example.com. The procedure also opens port 80 in the iptables firewall. Edit the details to suit your own requirements:
# yum install httpd subversion mod_dav_svn # mkdir -p /var/svn/repositories # chown -R apache:apache /var/svn # chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/svn # htpasswd -c /var/svn/passwords testuser * enter password for 'testuser' (twice) # vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf Changes: * Uncomment the <Location> config [click title to read more...]