The Perceptus Back Story

A little while ago my custom user script for Chrome stopped working. I’m currently using the “dev channel” at home. When I first switched to Chrome, that was the only version that supported user scripts (basically GreaseMonkey from FireFox integrated into Chrome).

My script is simple, it makes some font and color changes to a few websites that I view regularly to make them more legible (IMHO). I should bundle it into an extension some day…

Anyway, it took a bit of research to figure out what happened. Look here on the Google Chrome blog:

[r33013] Disable –enable-user-scripts. (Issue: 27520)
NOTE: You can now install user scripts by navigating to them. You will have to reinstall your current scripts (they aren’t migrated).

– http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2009/12/dev-channel-has-been-updated-to-4.html

So, scripts are still supported, but I have to install it again. I didn’t quite understand “navigating to them” meant, but it actually means exactly what it says. In the address bar browse the file system, e.g. go to here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts

Then double click on your .JS file, and a little extension installation prompt pops up. It’s pretty cool actually.

Hmm… now that Google Chrome regular version supports extensions, I might be able to take myself off the dev channel.

Today, the Perceptus Web Tools got a minor upgrade to improve browser compatibility.

A company bought a  license to our unique Excel to SQL INSERT Commands tool for their internal, confidential, use.  Cool! We never expected tools.perceptus.ca to be a revenue generator… but it does have unique features.  After all, we wrote them because we couldn’t find another website that could do the task for us!

In the interest of delivering a nice package to our new licensee, we  noticed that many of the text mangling features did not work in Google  Chrome.  Chrome web browser was stripping line breaks and consolidating sequential “spaces”.  We then realized that the site was not working in Internet Explorer either. Whoops.  Well, it is a  site primarily for our own internal uses, after all.

We had discovered a browser compatibility issue that probably affects very few people. We want a textarea without any wrapping, because some features are based on copy and pasting large amounts of data from Excel – automatic text wrapping makes hard to read.

Our original, Firefox functional, Chrome and Internet Explorer non-functional, TEXTAREA used the following:

• CSS: white-space: nowrap;
• TEXTAREA attribute: WRAP=”OFF”

In Firefox, we got a nice blob of text that you can scroll horizontally displayed.  In IE7 and IE8?  All kinds of crazy.  ”Enter” keys got replaced by some sort of special inline character, lines and spaces got trimmed or cut out.  Google Chrome stripped out line breaks and leading spaces, and other oddities.

Upon research, we learned that the “WRAP” attribute is not W3C approved.  Technically, it is not deprecated, but that’s because it never existed in the specifications. So we removed it and tried to use only CSS. We tried a few combinations of the overflow, white-space, and display CSS properties.  They didn’t work.

What did work?

No CSS at all.

If you view the source of the tools.perceptus.ca site and the corresponding CSS file, you will only see this:

<TEXTAREA NAME=”thetext” ROWS=”20” COLS=”100” WRAP=”OFF“>

This works as we wanted in all three web browsers.  It is officially non-standard.  But it works.

If someone would like to submit a CSS that will actually work, I’d love to see it.  But for now, I’m just going to keep complaining about how much web programming still stinks. Maybe the moral of the story is that thanks to Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome, every web site should be tested against at least one of the Webkit based browsers in addition to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

It’s always caught me off guard… it’s already back to school time for some parts of North America.

So, for those whose summer break is already coming to an end, here’s a reminder of Print-Bingo.com’s template bingo design for Back to School Bingo.  It’s a great way to help ease kids back into the learning state of mind.  So, if you have a class of restless students, try our Back to School Bingo Cards.

You can customize our designs through your web browser, so you can do some prep work from home and finish it off at work.  It’s super flexible.

As always, printing a few cards is free at Print-Bingo.com.  Of course, we’re also happy if you decide to upgrade to Premium access for $10 to get the rest of our great bingo card printing features.

People who have never had to make a website often wonder, why don’t people use nicer or unique fonts?

People who make the websites wish that they could!

I know that I’m bored with Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman (or their Apple equivalents).  But, since we can’t guarantee that every computer will have every font, that’s pretty much what we are stuck using.

While we can’t change the font of the main content of our webpages, we do use some tricks to get nice headers.  In fact, we’ve just updated print-bingo.com’s decorative font headers.  We’ve had them for a couple years, but our (now) older software tool didn’t work with the latest Adobe Flash Player, version 10.  We’ve also changed the font that we use… we hope you like it.

For the geeks: We’re running SIFR 3 v.436.  The font file was built with a free online sIFR font generator, and we were formerly using sIFR 2.

When will we see the day where crazy steps aren’t needed for a nicely rendered web page?

Tired of accidentally closing Firefox with Ctrl+Q when all you wanted to do was close one tab with Ctrl+W?

I sure was.  Maybe I’m just an inaccurate typist.

I finally got around to disabling that key combination in FF3 a week or two ago.  It seems to be working, so I’ve decided to share a bit.

I used the “keyconfig 20080929″ addon.  You can find it on this thread here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=72994.

This addon adds a “Keyconfig” menu item under the Tools menu. Scroll down about 8 items and find “Close Window”.  Remap it to something that you’re not likely to use by accident.  I used Ctrl+Shift+W (for some reason, I couldn’t enter Ctrl+Shift+Q).

Anyway, use at your own risk.