Blogger trackback form

Encouraged by an immediately working backlink for the last post I added an experimental trackback form to the template of this blog, it allows manual trackback pings:

<!-- trackback form --><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
 <b:if cond='data:blog.title != &quot;&quot;'><!-- trackback blog_name -->
 <b:if cond='data:blog.pageName != &quot;&quot;'> <!-- trackback title -->
 <form action='#requires.javascript' id='track' method='get' name='track'
       onsubmit='document.track.action=document.track.back.value;
                 document.track.method=&quot;post&quot;' target='_blank'>
 <input expr:value='data:blog.url' name='url' type='hidden'/>
 <input expr:value='data:blog.title' name='blog_name' type='hidden'/>
 <input expr:value='data:blog.pageName' name='title' type='hidden'/>
 <input name='back' size='50' type='text' value='http://delorie.com:81/'/>
 <input type='submit' value='ping'/></form>
</b:if></b:if></b:if><!-- end of trackback form -->

Apparently you can add this form to any type='HTML' widget after going to Layout: Edit HTML and checking Expand Widget Templates. I used #track:target { display: block; } in the CSS to show the form only when it's the target. Text mode browsers will see it anyway, but maybe they have no JavaScript.

I ✅ Unicode

Some days ago Mark noted on the Official Google Blog that UTF-8 finally managed to be more popular than US-ASCII, I found it on the Q&A Weblog.

Actually it is not that impressive, it merely shows the Unicode conspiracy at work, UTF-8 is designed to replace US-ASCII in the next decades, one encoding to rule them all.

But it is fascinating to see the usual suspects working together on IDNAbis, another important step in the master plan, among others Vint as author of RFC 20, Mark as co-author of UTF-7 when UTF-8 was not yet ready for prime time, Harald as author of RFC 2277, and John who recently added two critical missing pieces to the puzzle:

• RFC 5137 - ASCII Escaping of Unicode Characters (BCP 137)
• RFC 5198 - Unicode Format for Network Interchange

Hamburg-Web

An attempt to add this blog to HH-web.de finally worked, while I was at it I created a HH-web search googlet and learned some new CSS tricks.

For years I used hreflang="de" in links to German sites on English pages or vice versa, without visible effect, and likely no effect at all. Now I found a way to do something with it:

:link[hreflang]:hover:after {
     content: " " attr(hreflang); font-weight: 100;  
     vertical-align: super; font-size: xx-small;   }

This construct matches links with a hreflang, and displays the value as small as possible at the end of the link while the mouse hovers over it. Test it with the HH-web link above.

Another nice CSS feature is :target, not displaying the ugly blogger dashboard is one thing, but now I can also get it back when I need it with an invisible link in the upper left corner of this blog.

Googlet gallery

After a year one of my googlets is apparently used by some folks, great, it encouraged me to work on the whole set, add some settings such as the help language on the PDA LEO googlets, and create a gallery.

New entries are googlets for the German and English Heise whois for older browsers without OpenSearch support. For a different preview see googlemodules. No, I've not given up on the command line rxwhois client, but allegedly some users don't like command lines... ;-)

Another new entry is a MetaWikiHelp googlet, the Wikipedia help often is not good enough when working on other MediaWikis with different features and rules.