While browsing for something unrelated, I came about this wonderful Lego set called 'Tales of the Space Age'.
It was originally created by a fan designer through the Lego Ideas program and turned into this amazing looking Lego set.

I like the depiction of the space themed science fiction worlds very much, especially the beautiful color gradients giving each world a unique atmosphere.
The provided building instructions booklet builds on top of this with illustrations enhancing the views of these worlds.

Looking at these four panels with the nice space themed color gradients inspired me to rebuild them in CSS.
First I toyed around with one and then built the other three.

The outcome of this is now visible on andreasjaggi.ch where I replaced the previous entry page with the four color gradients.
The previous version is still available on andreas-jaggi.ch as I couldn't decide yet to retire it, so will be keeping both for now :-)

After last weeks work on the statistics page, I was still not completely happy with how it renders in text-only browsers.

Thus the idea of adding <th> headers to the two rows of numbers.
This turned out quite well and helped to make things more clear as you can see in this screenshot.

I initially wanted to use the :first-child selector to hide these additional table headers in graphical web browsers.
But didn't get it right with the first try, so the header still showed.

This actually didn't look that bad, and so I decided to keep the headers visible and styled them nicely so they integrate well with the rest of the statistics table.
This is how the statistics page now looks in a graphical web browser.

Some time ago I read this article from Dan Q about testing your website in a text-only browser (Lynx, which is the oldest web browser still being maintained, started in 1992).

Surfing through my blog with Lynx, I was positively surprised in how well the content and structure was presented.
Seems like the modernization and simplification efforts of the HTML code behind the scenes paid off well.

The statistics page though was not really usable, it was displayed as a random soup of numbers due to the usage of unstructured <div> tags for the elements of the visual graphs.

To fix this I reverted back to using <table> tags to structure the data.
This way the layout degrades gracefully in text-only browsers and provides a minimally structured representation of the data.
And I applied the newly learned CSS skills (linear-gradient backgrounds) to achieve the same visual graph as beforehand when opening the page in a regular browser.

While looking at my 404s the top one for the blog was /.well-known/traffic-advice.
This is part of the traffic advice mechanism to control traffic from prefetch proxies (and based on my current access logs, seems only used by the Chrome Privacy Preserving Prefetch Proxy).

The traffic advice mechanism is specified in the document here.
It can be used to reduce the number of requests coming from prefetch proxies.

To get rid of the 404s and provide support for the traffic advice mechanism, I use the following snippet in my nginx config.
It allows all requests from prefetch proxies (as currently I see no need to limit them).

# Private Prefetch Proxy
# https://developer.chrome.com/blog/private-prefetch-proxy/
location /.well-known/traffic-advice {
        types { } default_type "application/trafficadvice+json";
        return 200 '[{"user_agent":"prefetch-proxy","fraction":1.0}]';
}

After the recent addition of custom Web Components, the usual feed validators were a bit less happy about my RSS and Atom feeds.

They always marked my feeds as valid, but usually had some recommendations to improve interoperability with the widest range of feed readers.
In particular having non-HTML5 elements does not help with interoperability. Which makes sense as there is no real place in the XML of the feeds to reference the needed JavaScript for rendering the Web Components.

Besides stripping away the <youtube-vimeo-embed> tags and replacing them with a link to the video, I took this opportunity to cleanup some other 'Altlasten' (legacy tech depts).
A lot of time was spent trying to get my head around various encodings/escapings of special characters. When the blog started in 2002, UTF-8 was not adopted yet and all special characters needed to be written as HTML entities.
And what didn't help is that I somehow had a text-only part in my RSS file which tried to deliver a version of my posts without any HTML (but failed to do so properly as it only had the tags stripped away but did not revert all the HTML character encodings.
Of course the various resulting & characters nicely clash with XML encoding).

There were some other oddities from the past, such as empty post titles and HTML tags inside titles.

I ended up cleaning up most of this and got rid of the text-only representation and corresponding encoding/escaping problems. (using <![CDATA[ and ]]> with the HTML content inside makes life so much easier)

The still remaing recommendations to improve are about relative links and <script> tags.
The relative links are all due to my replacing of dead and non-archived link destinations with a single #. So they are more a 'false postive' than a real problem, the links are dead either way.
The <script> tags are more problematic, as they result from my embedding of GitHub Gists in posts. The code in the Gists is loaded, rendered and nicely highlighted with color by the script, thus not easy to replicate in a feed.

Probably the best approach for the Gists would be to find a way to properly include the content into the posts. So that it is rendered nicely when viewed in a browser, and has a meaningful text-only fallback in the feeds.
Would make sense to self-hosts these anyways. Next rainy weekend project there you are :-)

After the recent integration of Web Components in the blog, I made yet another stab at using some modern technologies.

This time inspired by the Ten years of A Single Div article, my focus was on the linear-gradient() and radial-gradient() CSS properties.

They can be combined to draw almost arbitrary shapes with pure CSS.

I used this to replace all graphics on andreas-jaggi.ch with CSS, while keeping the layout and functionality identical to the original 2005 version.

In the process of this, also some additional modern CSS features were used:
var() to simplify repeating CSS code.
animation/@keyframes to add a little fade-in effect on the hover text.

The recent article from Adrian Roselli explaining how to write a Web Component for YouTube and Vimeo videos, triggered me to finally adopt the Web Components technology for my blog.
Additionally there is Markus using Web Components for his blog since quite some time, which gave me confidence.

Implementing Web Components was now not only for the sake of learning about the technology, but also to address some longstanding painpoints I had with my embedded videos.
In particular did I not like that each embedded video triggered the loading of a plethora of third-party scripts and styles only to render the thumbnail image. And additionally this leaked tracking/cookie information to the video hosters (yes, I was using www.youtube-nocookie.com to reduce this as far as possible, but could not eliminate it completely).

Thus I added a <youtube-vimeo-embed> Web Component and changed all my embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos to use it.

My implementation is almost a 1:1 copy of the code provided by Adrian, with some minor adaptions (such as hiding the original link when the video iframe can be rendered and always enabling fullscreen mode in videos).

I'm quite happy with the outcome, as it provides some new benefits:
Except for the thumbnail image, no other third-party resources are loaded until someone clicks on the play button.
When JavaScript or Web Components are not supported by a browser, it gracefuly falls back to a simple link to the video.
Loading speed of the whole page improved quite a bit, as videos are only loaded on demand.
It always uses www.youtube-nocookie.com and third-party scripts are only loaded if someone explicitly clicks on the play button of a video :-)

The warm temperatures around here made me change the blog theme back to the warm colors ☀️

Basically it's a revert of the winter layout changes from beginning of the year, while keeping all the HTML modernizations done afterwards :-)

We're back on the original 2002 layout (with modern HTML), for those trying to keep score. Enjoy!

Interesting article explaining how to test HTML with visual CSS highlighting: Testing HTML with modern CSS (via)

After following a couple links from the article linked in the previous blogpost, I ended up reading the Website Component Checklist from Mike Sass.
It provides again a lot of inspiration for things to add to my weblog.
What intrigued me today on the list was humans.txt, which is an initiative for knowing the people behing a website.

Thus I've now added the following humans.txt.

Added and ads.txt file to the blog. The idea is to avoid that someone can sell fake advertisment space for this blog.

As I don't use any advertisment here the content of the file is pretty basic:

contact=https://blog.x-way.org/about.html

Just discovered the text-decoration-color CSS property and added it to the style on the blog:

a:hover {color: #454545; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration-color: #26C4FF;}

This causes that when you hover over a link in a post, the underline is not in the same boring gray as the text but lights up in a nice color :-)

(not to be confused with the hacky colored underlines in the righthand navigation bar, where I use a colored border-bottom to achieve a similar effect since 2002)

Over the last couple weeks I slowly replaced the various <table>-based layout elements of the blog with more modern HTML elements.
And finally this afternoon the work was completed with the last <table> element gone.

Visually there should be almost no differences, but in case something looks strange just let me know :-)
(and yes, style-wise everything is still using the pixel-based layout from 2002, one day this might change as well…)

To provide basic dark mode support for the blog, I added the following lines of CSS:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    html { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); }
    img, video, iframe { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); }
}

If the browser/OS has dark mode enabled it will invert the colors and rotate the hue to achieve the dark mode effect.
The whole operation is applied a second time on images, videos and frames to avoid that they have their colors distorted.

You can get a preview by using the developer tools of your browser to enable dark mode :-)

The code is inspired by the post here, and then extended to provide a CSS-only solution by leveraging the color-scheme CSS property.

After switching the colors of the design, I kept the momentum and continued working on the HTML of the blog.

It took couple iterations of multiple hours, but now it's done: the HTML source of this blog is valid HTML5!

Getting rid of the obsoleteness hidden in old blogentries dating back over 20 years also led to some interesting observations.
Back when moving from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, I remember spending some time to transform old <br> tags to <br />. And now for HTML5 I did the inverse and moved all <br /> tags back to <br> :-)

Also once more I'm very thankful for the work of the Internet Archive, which helped to recover images hosted on servers long gone (like URLs which already at the end of 2002 were no longer valid!).

Overall a lot of replacing no longer existing HTML tags and attributes with CSS definitions.
And there is virtually no change to the visual representation of the blog (which was the goal), so we still have the table-based layout with pixel-sized fonts as originally drafted in 2002.
Moving this to actually leverage modern HTML5 mechanisms and making it also more mobile friendly are tasks left for some future cold winter evenings :-)

Happy New Year! — Happy New Colors!

Winter is here (for a while already), time to change the colors of the blog.
To keep it in the nostalgic theme (the previous design was a repurpose of the inital design from 2002), I'm using the colors from the 'plain 2' winter layout (also from 2002).

Enjoy!

Added a JSON Feed to this blog (in additon to the existing RSS and Atom feeds): https://blog.x-way.org/feed.json

To build the proper JSON file, I used this Jekyll template and the JSON Feed validator.

For quite some time I've been using custom nginx error pages on this site.
My approach so far was to generate a bunch of static HTML with the various error messages and then configure them for each corresponding HTTP status codes in nginx.
As there are quite a number of HTTP errors, I used a little shell script to generate the whole config and HTML, in the end I had a huge file with snippets like the one below.

error_page 429 @custom_error_429;
location @custom_error_429 {
	internal;
	more_set_headers 'Content-Type: text/html';
	echo '<html>...</html>';
}

Now while implementing custom error pages for a different project, I tried to see if there is an easier way to do this.
Some searching lead to the One NGINX error page to rule them all article which describes an alternative approach leveraging the nginx SSI module to generate the error pages on the fly.

Instead of generating and defining a specific error page for each error, a single error page is used for all errors.

error_page 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414
           415 416 417 418 421 422 423 424 425 426 428 429 431 451 500
           501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 510 511 /error.html;

location = /error.html {
	ssi on;
	internal;
	root /var/www/default;
}

nginx provides the status code as variable to our error page, but we also need the error message to make it more userfriendly.
For this we define a mapping of status codes to the error messages.

map $status $status_text {
  400 'Bad Request';
  401 'Unauthorized';
  402 'Payment Required';
  403 'Forbidden';
  404 'Not Found';
  405 'Method Not Allowed';
  406 'Not Acceptable';
  407 'Proxy Authentication Required';
  408 'Request Timeout';
  409 'Conflict';
  410 'Gone';
  411 'Length Required';
  412 'Precondition Failed';
  413 'Payload Too Large';
  414 'URI Too Long';
  415 'Unsupported Media Type';
  416 'Range Not Satisfiable';
  417 'Expectation Failed';
  418 'I\'m a teapot';
  421 'Misdirected Request';
  422 'Unprocessable Entity';
  423 'Locked';
  424 'Failed Dependency';
  425 'Too Early';
  426 'Upgrade Required';
  428 'Precondition Required';
  429 'Too Many Requests';
  431 'Request Header Fields Too Large';
  451 'Unavailable For Legal Reasons';
  500 'Internal Server Error';
  501 'Not Implemented';
  502 'Bad Gateway';
  503 'Service Unavailable';
  504 'Gateway Timeout';
  505 'HTTP Version Not Supported';
  506 'Variant Also Negotiates';
  507 'Insufficient Storage';
  508 'Loop Detected';
  510 'Not Extended';
  511 'Network Authentication Required';
  default 'Something went wrong';
}

Now we have the status and the status_text variables available in our error.html page.

<html><body>
<h1><!--# echo var="status" default="" --> 
<!--# echo var="status_text" default="Something went wrong" --></h1>
</body></html>

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this blog, I've used archive.org to reconstruct the original HTML layout from back in the time and applied it to the Jekyll templates.

Enjoy the blog in all the (<table> based) glory from 2002 :-)

After running it for a bit more than a decade, I've now removed again the Google Analytics tracking from this site. It does not feel appropriate anymore on a personal website.
At the moment no alternative statistics solution is in place yet, but I could imagine setting up a self-hosted solution like Matomo or Plausible in the future.

Google Analytics declared illegal in the EU.

This website now also serves a security.txt file which is a standardized way of making security contact information available. (Wikipedia)

The file is available in two locations /security.txt (the classic location) and /.well-known/security.txt (the standard location following RFC8615).

To easily add the file on all my domains, I'm using the following nginx config snippet.

location /security.txt {
	add_header Content-Type 'text/plain';
	add_header Cache-Control 'no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate';
	add_header Pragma 'no-cache';
	add_header Expires '0';
	add_header Vary '*';
	return 200 "Contact: mailto:andreas+security.txt@jaggi.info\nExpires: Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 +0000\nEncryption: http://andreas-jaggi.ch/A3A54203.asc\n";
}

location /.well-known/security.txt {
	add_header Content-Type 'text/plain';
	add_header Cache-Control 'no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate';
	add_header Pragma 'no-cache';
	add_header Expires '0';
	add_header Vary '*';
	return 200 "Contact: mailto:andreas+security.txt@jaggi.info\nExpires: Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 +0000\nEncryption: http://andreas-jaggi.ch/A3A54203.asc\n";
}

This snippet is stored in a dedicated file (/etc/nginx/conf_includes/securitytxt) and is included in the various server config blocks like this:

server {
	server_name example.com;

	include /etc/nginx/conf_includes/securitytxt;

	location / {
		# rest of website
	}
}

15 years ago this weblog received the current o5 design (or theme as it would be called nowadays).
During this time the design has aged quite well and also survived the move of the backend from a self-written PHP blog-engine to Jekyll.

Although it still works surprisingly well and presents the content nicely every day, there are some parts where better usage of contemporary technologies would be desirable.
It has no mobile version nor a responsive layout as the design was created before the now omnipresent smartphones were invented. Similar is the font-size hardcoded and not very adequate for todays retina displays. And yes, it uses the XHTML 1.0 strict standard with all its quirks and CSS tricks from 2002 (which luckily are still supported in current browsers).

Overall I'm quite happy that the o5 design has turned out to be so timeless and that I did not have to come up with a new one every other year (btw: I don't remember where the o5 name came from, likely the 5 is a reference to 2005 when it was created).

With the current Corona situation forcing me to spend more time at home again, I have the feeling that some things might change around the weblog (not quite sure what or when exactly, first I need to re-learn how websites are built in 2020 :-).

The about page now features some fancy blog statistics, check it out :-)

The statistics are created with the help of Cal-Heatmap which allows to easily create calendar heatmaps similar to the activity heatmap of GitHub.

Update: couldn't stop playing around and thus added another chart, this time with the help of C3.js (a D3.js based reusable chart library).

ImageFlow, CoverFlow mit JavaScript. (via)

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="flash.swf" width="100" height="200">

<param name="movie" value="flash.swf" />

</object>

Amy Hoy has released a nice Scriptaculous Cheat Sheet just at the right moment since I'm going to use Scriptaculous for the redesign of actualites.epfl.ch.

Da hier anscheinend doch machmal ein paar Benutzer mit dem Internet Explorer vorbeikommen habe ich nun doch noch das Layout so angepasst, dass es auch im Internet Explorer wie gewünscht aussieht (zudem soll ja eine potentielle Kundschaft nicht abgeschreckt werden).

Eigentlich sind die Änderungen am CSS nur ganz klein, aber umso schwerer herauszufinden *grrr*.
Als sehr hilfreich herausgestellt hat sich die parallele Installation verschiedener Internet Explorer Versionen. Dieser Artikel erklärt wie man eine solche Testumgebung erstellt.

Interessanterweise sah der unangepasste Stylesheet im Internet Explorer 4 bedeutend besser aus als im Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 oder 6.

Am Wochenende bin ich per Zufall auf die CSS Reboot Seite gestossen.
Da ich am Sonntag Nachmittag nichts Interessantes vorhatte, ist innerhalb eines Tages das neue Design entstanden :-)

Wer immernoch das mittlerweile etwas verbleichte alte Layout sieht, soll bitte hier klicken um zum neuen zu wechseln.

In Mozilla Firefox, Opera und Safari sieht die Seite ziemlich genau so aus wie gewünscht, aber im Internet Explorer stimmt wiedereinmal gar nichts :-(

Voilé quelques liens vers des démos d’AJAX.

• Demos in script.aculo.us Wiki
• RSSReader
• Couloir
• TiddlyWiki
• JS/UIX - Terminal
• Rico
• Ajax Status Wiki Demo
• Backbase AJAX RSS Reader
• The Form Assembly Garden
• Jalenack’s AJAX Periodic Table of the Elements
• colr.org
• MochiKit - Demos
• Ajax Examples - Ajax Patterns

I’ve found some color resources & utilities on del.icio.us. These are always useful, especially since i’m not the person who can just throw together three colors and automatically the result looks good.

• EasyRGB – Search for color harmonies, complements and themes for your RBG values
• Color Blender – Calculate midpoint colors
• 4096 Color Wheel – Color Wheel with corresponding web-safe & web-smart colors
• Spectacle – Tweaked web-smart Color Schemes
• Adam Poselli » Get the Look – Design & style guides
• Adam Poselli » Where’d Ya Get That Color Scheme? – Color schemes from photographs
• Adam Poselli’s 2005 Color Forecast – Colors
• Adam Poselli’s 2004 Color Forecast – More colors
• mezzoblue § Colour Schemes – How to select colors

• Rounded Corners in CSS via del.icio.us
• CSS Photo Zoom via LinkDump
• Flash Interface Design via metamorphine

Wie ich Andrew Porter Glendinning besuchte, entdeckte ich diesen Graphikfehler in Mozilla. Der Text lautet

If you can read this, your browser doesn't support the over 4-year-old CSS Level 2 Recommendation. These icons should be fixed in the lower right corner of your browser window, and this message should be invisible.

Nach der Analyse des Stylesheets, habe ich herausgefunden, dass der Text eigentlich ausserhalb des Browserfensters dargestellt werden sollte. Bei Mozilla hört das Browserfenster vor dem Scrollbalken auf, jedoch für die Rendering-Engine erst am Fensterrand :-P

Developing With Web Standards Recommendations and best practices. Eine gute Übersicht, auch geeignet um Leute in die Thematik einzuführen.

Via LinkDump

Gestern habe ich Inkscape entdeckt. Inkscape ist ein Vektor-Graphikprogramm, das SVG als Dateiformat benutzt.

Das Programm lässt sich mit Macromedia Fireworks vergleichen, wennauch der Funktionsumfang noch nicht ganz so gross ist. So kann Inkscape nur nach PNG exportieren und unterstützt keine Animationen. Dafür ist IMHO die Vektorbearbeitung von Inkscape schon jetzt der von Fireworks überlegen.

Nachdem ich auch das Tutorial gemacht habe, durfte ich feststellen, dass das Userinterface von Inkscape grösstenteils absolut top ist. So eine angenehme und einfache Handhabung habe ich bei einem Graphikprogramm bisher vergebens gesucht. Da kann selbst mein bisheriger Favorit Fireworks fast nicht mithalten.

• Screenshots
• Default Tutorial
• Inkscape Tutorials

Im Stylesheet dieser Seite findet sich unter anderem folgende Styledefinition:

#rechts li a {
	display: block;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #FFFFFF;
	width: 100% - 30px;
	padding-left: 30px;
}

Diese macht, dass die Links im rechten Submenu auf der ganzen Breite funktionieren und nicht nur wenn man auf den Text klickt.
Zuerst hatte ich die Weite auf 100% gesetzt. Jedoch hat der Mozilla wegen der 30px Padding noch 30px ausserhalb des Rahmens angezeigt. Mit overflow: hidden habe ich versucht das Problem zu lösen. Jedoch hat das nicht funktioniert, da es ja kein eigentlicher overflow ist.
Schlussendlich bin ich durch ausprobieren von garantiert fehlerhaften Styledefinitionen auf die jetztige Lösung gekommen. Natürlich validiert das nun nicht mehr als korrektes CSS, aber es funktioniert :-)

Da ich nun keine Windows-Maschine mehr habe, wäre ich froh um Screenshots vom Submenu, wenn mit der Maus über ein Link gefahren wird (a:hover).