BANJAX Web Design, Belfast, Northern Ireland

While registering for a click-use licence on the UK OPSI website I was presented with this gem, see if you can spot the mistake:

<p>
  <p>We publish a list of Licence Holders on our
    website. However, to comply with data protection
    legislation we do not show details of private
    individuals without their consent.</p>
  <label class='checkbox' for='listpublic'>Please tick
    the box if you have no objections to your name and
    address details appearing on our website:</label>
  <input class='checkbox' type='checkbox'
    name='listpublic' id='listpublic' checked='checked'
    disabled='disabled' />
</p>

The input to opt out of being listed, and thus be compliant with the UK Data Protection Act, has the disabled attribute, which disables the use of the checkbox completely. You're signed up whether you like it or not.

Let's see what the W3C HTML spec says about use of the disabled attribute:

"In contexts where user input is either undesirable or irrelevant, it is important to be able to disable a control or render it read-only..."

Genius. :)

by Stephen Stewart
18-Jun-08

Looking at the server logs for Banjax.com we've got some nice linky love from the likes of bestwebgallery.com, cssmania.com, webcreme.com, screenfluent.com, www.cssleak.com & www.mostinspired.com. So it seems only fair to return the favour, thanks everyone!

If you're interested, when I say I looked at the server logs this is what I mean:

awk -F\" '($2 ~ /GET \/ /){ print $4 }' \ 
banjax.com-access.log \
| awk -F\/ '{ print $1,$2,$3 }' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Which returns something like this:

   1742 http:  cssmania.com
    861 http:  www.webcreme.com
    676 -  
    195 http:  webcreme.com
     88 http:  screenfluent.com
     70 http:  www.google.com
     24 http:  www.banjax.com
     23 http:  www.netvibes.com
     21 http:  www.mostinspired.com
     13 http:  www.cssleak.com
     ...

AWK is very useful for working with logs, you can read more about it here on the Wikipedia page for AWK.

by Stephen Stewart
13-May-08

It’s hard writing these “first post” posts. There’s a lot of performance anxiety, what’s my voice, my motivation…

We don’t generally use XHTML here, we hate neither web standards nor Zeldman. We just don’t believe in XHTML. 99.999% of the time what people sell as XHTML is actually HTML. If you’re not transporting your content text/html then it doesn’t matter what you say in the DOCTYPE or META, it’s plain ol’ HTML. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all, in fact, since it works in all browsers (ie. Internet Explorer) it’s a much better idea all round.

Anyway, I think I’ve set the bar low enough here for future blog posts from the people at Banjax (and guests!).

I hope you like our website and I hope we find the bugs before you do. :)

by Stephen Stewart
22-Apr-08