Today I picked up the new Google introduces another ‘meta-tag’. First, the term ‘tag’ is wrong. And second, I don’t like extra markup for search engines.

Okey, the keywords and description metadata are in my opinion not bad at all: they say something about the page. That’s what metadata always does.

But what about this: Google recently announced that a page can include a meta element with name ‘Googlebot’ and content unavailable_after: with the date when it will be unavailable. The page will be deleted from Google’s servers within a day after that date. But Googlebot? What does that say about my web page? That I like the Googlebot? No, it says absolutely nothing about my web page.

The rel="nofollow" attribute, does that say anything? Not at all. The rel attribute is for a relation between pages. But the almighty Google says that it can be used for them to give that link no Page Rank value. The term nofollow is also crap, because Google does follow the link. I have banned these attributes from my web log some moths ago.

In my opinion are these kinds of markup not good, what do you think?

Lately I’ve been working on some group projects, and I had the idea to make a tool to report bugs, errors and other unwanted things on a web site. So I made that tool, and now it is time to share it with the world.

I made a page in my codex for the BugReporter. There you can find info for implementing the tool in you project (it’s quite easy), as well as a demo.

The tool is written in JavaScript, and the server-side script in PHP, but that can be changed in any other server-side language as you want. Nice features are making the bug-window transparent (double-click), and the AJAX transport of the data to the server. It is also very small, only a few kilobytes.

So, if you’re working on a group project, say more than three people, this might be useful.

Many designers want to use fonts for a web site that are not installed on most of the computers. More fonts are a large problem, but there are some solutions.

The first one is a replacement system. You just use h1 and h2 elements for your headers, and after the page is loaded a JavaScript will turn them into an image or a Flash file. All the images are auto-created. sIFR is the most used one in that kind. This solution is very welcome when you’re building a large web site, or a web site that changes of content very often, like blogs.

When the web site is static (the content doesn’t change often), there are two methods you can choose. But one is in my opinion very bad practice.

That bad practice is the usage of a background image, attached to the headers via CSS. It can be done via text-indent (set that to a large, negative number), or via a span element within the header element. CSS then hides the text with the simple rule display: none;.

This is bad practice, because when the user had images turned of, the user doesn’t see anything! Plus, it is not very semantic because you do show an image, aren’t you?

My way for small web sites, is to use just an image tag inside the header element. Via the alt attribute you handle the search-engines, screen readers and people with images turned off. Unfortunately, some browsers do render something weird when there is no image to display, like that red cross in Internet Explorer. I satisfied myself to hope not many people have turned images off…

So, all not very cool solutions… but better solved in this way than wait for ages for more fonts for the web.

For one of my projects I sent an e-mail to my web host to register a domain name, together with a bunch of other domains. As I wanted to use that particular domain yesterday, I set it up within my control panel, as I know of my host that a domain is being registered within one day.

So far no problems, but as I wanted to connect with my FTP-program, there were some errors. Finally I checked the WHOIS data of the SIDN, and I saw that the domain was ‘requested’.

After calling my host, they called with the SIDN, and checked a few things. Finally the SIDN figured out that the domain was registered one day before by another company. The WHOIS database didn’t show that the domain wasn’t free anymore by some mystical reason…

At this very moment, the WHOIS shows the record, with as registrant the other company, but with my host’s name servers. That’s because of a bug at SIDN’s as my host also requested the domain. The record also says that the domain was registered at the fifth of July, 2004.

All together pretty crap…

All front-end coders around the world be aware, the Dutch are doing it again!

A guild of front-end coders is about to set-up within a few months. Lately I’ve been three times in Amsterdam to discuss on what the guild will do for front-end coders.

The main idea is to certify the front-end coders, in order to have a clear sight on them for the government and companies. If they need a good web site, they can look-up at our site for a good front-end coder or a company with good front-end coders as employee.

Also important is our work group on education. The education on how to build web sites is very bad. They just learn how to build a web site with Frontpage, or using tables for layout. The working group is going to do something about that.

Peter-Paul Koch, from QuirksMode.org, started it all. At the first meeting only twelve people came, but now there are 31 organizations on the member list.

For more info, you can subscribe to the (Dutch) mailing list, or take a look at our temporary site.