Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

In its Events That Shaped The Wired World section, Wired magazine credits Scott Fahlman with first using the Smiley :-) & "Frowny" :-( emoticons in electronic messages . On Sept. 19th, 1982, he had proposed on the computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University that the smiley be used as a joke marker & "frowny" to mark things that are NOT jokes. Scott came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post .

Firefox 3.x used to have an option to block pesky images that were not part of the context of page that you were viewing - like image ads. You just had to right click on the image, & select "Block images from {domain serving the image}" to never see any images from that domain again. That context menu option is missing from Firefox 4  & above. It turns out that it is still there but there are some additional steps to reach it. Right click on the image on the page you are viewing in Firefox & from the context menu, you have to select View Image Info & click on the checkbox "Block images from {site name}". Thanks RalphB Also see: HOW TO block IFRAME based ads

A web developer's education is never finished. Here is a list of trends & reference tables that, in my opinion, every web developer should track - HTTP Archive - Trends in web technology, interesting stats, repository of web performance information Browser Security Handbook - Key security properties of contemporary web browsers  HTML 5 Reference Table HTML 4/ XHTML Reference Table CSS 3 Reference Table CSS 2 Reference Table PPK's Browser Event Compatibility Tables - Desktop , Mobile HTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers work in progress...