As the title says, I will not blog about Safari 3. Certainly not about the one for windows. I have it installed and all, yes it is buggy, yes it is unsafe. But as I saw two of my fellow Happy cloggers, already blog about it, so go see them.

Justin and Arjan. Now that I think about happy clog again, beer anyone?

All fun aside, I think and hope that safari 3 will be used by many people. Not in the least by web developers running windows. They will get the chance to test stuff in safari, so all of your excuses are gone... Hopefully, we will see more websites and applications supporting safari. The most used excuse that I heard a lot, We don't use apple so we can't test it, and nobody else is running it, look at our stats..., is gone.

Quite a while back I wrote about the unobtrusive dynamic select boxes, a wonderfull technique by Bobby van der Sluis (a fellow dutchman and happy clog). I said that I wanted to use them and I have. But after a while I came upon some limitations for use in the real world.
In this post I will describe those limitations and how I changed the code to suit my needs.The original code made use of Id's to identify the dropdowns and placed those Id's in the javascript code. When implementing them, I did so in web applications where the Id is owned by the back end guys. These guys often (think) that they absolutely need them and can not life without the sole ownership of the Id.
Further more, the dependancy of the id's that are hard coded in the javascript set limitations on the html code that I have to produce. And it limits the amount of dynamic selects that I can use on a page to one set. Not that it is necessaryly smart to use a lot of dynamic select boxes in a user interface kinda way.
But if you see the trend of the web these days, with one page applications. The need to include more than one set on a single page is getting more real each day.
So to come to the point, I changed the code to depend not on Id's but on certain classnames. That sets me free to include as much sets as I want in a application.
See the code here

. I did my best to describe what I did in the comments, so read those and try to improve on it. Please let me know what you think...
There are two functions that are needed to make this work, first getElementsByTagName by Jonathan Snook and Robert Nyman and a addition of my own (together with tino loos), GetElementValueFromClassName.
Get the code here

See if you can use it, but believe me, you can use it in more ways than you can think of now.
For instance, use Ajax to fill the dropdowns, to easily drill down into loads of data, without letting your user wait.

technorati tags:javascript, unobtrusive, css, html, internet, ajax

We will have another meeting of the happy clogs, in the King arthur cafe in Utrecht.
See for more information this page.
I wonder what comes out of this one, as a whole lot of discussion happened lately on the mailing list. The group (if there is such a thing) doesn't agree on what we are exactly. Do we act to change the attitude on webstandards in the netherlands or do we drink beer and talk about our work. I for one hope that whatever we do, it always includes beer drinking :).
More serious here, I think that we as a group have not the influence to actively change things in the Netherlands. What we can do is start (or continue) a grass root revolution, that influences people from the bottom up. In my 10+ years of webdevelopment I have had one manager that supported me in my work. All of the changes that I have been able to make, have been made with support of the common developers. And that change includes some real things as the entire dutch police developing applications based on valid html, css and unobtrusive javascript. So don't think that you need to change things from the top down only. Start by showing people what can be done with proper seperation of markup, presentation and behaviour and some (not all) will follow and become fellow standardistas who will continue to support our cause.
I think that this will cause the whole standards movement to gain momentum slowly, but surely.

Maybe it is an idea to form a standardista samurai, like the css one of 'old'. Take a big site, some happy clogs, pizza, beer and convert it to proper code and improve the usability while we are at it.

Any takers?

Thanks to Martin Reuring it finally has happened. Another Happy Clog meeting and this time, with minutes this time. Go and read what Martin, Justin and myself have discussed at the HC wiki..

from martin's blog "This time we try to be serious, beer will off course still be a factor though ;)

a group of people from the dutch web development community (?) are getting together, for some beerdrinking discussion, at the "king arthur cafe" in utrecht, 15.00 28 oktober 2006.
The topics will be:

• De happy clog website
• Webstandards in het onderwijs
• waar staat happy clog voor?
• wat willen we bereiken?
• hoe willen we dat bereiken?
• hoe willen we ons in de toekomst profileren?

See the unofficial wiki for more information, or look at the google group to read what we have been discussing.