Panther man solution

[Vic Norton]

Thanks for all the input on my man problems with Panther (and bash).
Here's my final solution. Perhaps it will work for others.
1. I have accepted the /man directory. Why perl module manuals should be
   going in there is still unclear to me, but I can live with it. So I
   have simply added the line
  OPTIONAL_MANPATH  /man
   to /private/etc/manpath.config.
2. In my .bash_profile I have added the line
  export PATH
   after PATH is constructed. I picked up this idea from the darwinports
   README file. It seems to make manpath work.
   For example my current .bash_profile reads
  PATH=~/bin:$PATH
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/teTex/bin
  export PATH
   and I expect I may add some more "PATH=$PATH:" lines in the future.
Regards,

Vic

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newbie help for installing perl 5.8.2 on 10.2

[John Fowler]

Hello,

I have tried to install perl 5.8.2 on my powerbook running 10.2.

I used information on one of Apple's web pages to try this:

 http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/perl.html

Note that this page is for installing 5.8.0, but it seemed to work OK, 
substituting the newer 5.8.2 downloaded gz file.

I followed the instructions exactly (I think), using the default 
installation configuration, NOT installing the new Perl on top of 
Apple's Perl 5.6.0.

The make seemed to work.

The make test gave me three errors - two with Berkeley DB (as mentioned 
on Apple's page), and one in a Ping test.

I went ahead and make installed anyway.

this also seemed to work.

However, when I checked the perl version ("perl -v"), it told me I am 
still running 5.6.0.  This even after a restart.

I must be missing something obvious???

many thanks for any suggestions,
John
John Fowler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: newbie help for installing perl 5.8.2 on 10.2

[Geoffrey F. Green]

On 11/22/03 3:14 AM, "John Fowler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have tried to install perl 5.8.2 on my powerbook running 10.2.
> 
> I used information on one of Apple's web pages to try this:
> 
> http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/perl.html
> 
> 
> Note that this page is for installing 5.8.0, but it seemed to work OK,
> substituting the newer 5.8.2 downloaded gz file.
> 
> I followed the instructions exactly (I think), using the default
> installation configuration, NOT installing the new Perl on top of
> Apple's Perl 5.6.0.
> 
> The make seemed to work.
> 
> The make test gave me three errors - two with Berkeley DB (as mentioned
> on Apple's page), and one in a Ping test.
> 
> I went ahead and make installed anyway.
> 
> this also seemed to work.
> 
> 
> However, when I checked the perl version ("perl -v"), it told me I am
> still running 5.6.0.  This even after a restart.

By default, a new installation of perl 5.8.2 (and earlier) doesn't overwrite
the default perl executable installed in /usr/bin, which is the directory
that the shell's searching before /usr/local/bin which is  where perl 5.8.2
was installed.  So, when you execute perl -v, it's still launching the perl
5.6.0 preinstalled on OS X 10.2.  If you look in /usr/local/bin, however,
you'll find "perl" and "perl5.8.2" commands.  So either of these commands
will verify that your perl 5.8.2 installation proceeded properly:

/usr/local/bin/perl -v
/usr/local/bin/perl5.8.2 -v

If you want to switch the plain old "perl" command to refer to perl 5.8.2,
you'll need to switch some symlinks around, but since I'm no longer running
10.2, I don't want to suggest something that may end up stomping on your
perl 5.6.0 install.  I'm sure others can help.

 - geoff

css design, was Re: File Writing and CGI

[Chris Devers]

Peter: I've cc'ed this back to the list
   in case anyone else was curious, too.


On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, Peter N Lewis wrote:

> How do you do page layouts without tables?

Check out ESPN  or Wired . Both of
them have done high profile site redesigns in the past year or so, where
everything is now based on XHTML and CSS. Both published case studies in
the weeks after the switchover, and have been discussed extensively in web
standards & design circles:

Links discussing the Wired redesign:
 
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55675,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/explanation.html
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/wired-interview/
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1002a.html#wiredmorning

An excerpt from that last link:

Four additional points about the Wired redesign are worth
making:

  1. The site's builders have written a rationale
explaining why they did what they did and positioning the
new standards-compliant Wired design vis-a-vis W3C specs and
browser history. [link is above --cd]

   2. Behind the scenes, the builders are addressing many of
   the technological issues that stood in the way of validation
   when the site launched late last night.

  3. Following in the footsteps of A List Apart and many
other indie sites last year, Wired's CSS/XHTML redesign makes
content accessible to all browsers and devices (including
screen readers) but hides its layout from old browsers that
weren't built to support the CSS spec.

  4. Users of these old browsers are informed about newer, more
compliant ones (screenshot) and encouraged to give them a trial
download. Wired supports the WaSP's Browser Upgrade Campaign.

Links discussing the ESPN redesign:

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/01/
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/02/
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0203b.shtml#espn

Here's a blurb from the Netscape Devedge article:

ESPN.com, the online sister of the ESPN cable networks, serves up
more than half a billionpage views every month, so when the home
page of the site dropped all layout tables in favor of structural
markup and CSS-driven layout, the Web design community took notice.

And quoting Zeldman again:

ESPN.com has redesigned using CSS layout. For now, the
retooling is limited to the front page. Once it's been
fine-tuned, the approach will work its way into the rest of
the vast site. Though the site has problems that will likely
be fixed in the coming weeks, here's what art director Mike
Davidson and his team got right:

* All CSS positioning. No tables for layout except in sponsored
Microsoft elements beyond the design team's control.

* No font tags.

* Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Front page markup and code
are now half the size they were before the relaunch while
displaying a much richer page. (With structural markup,
the bandwidth savings would be even greater.)

* Only one style sheet for all browsers -- no detection
used or needed. The site looks more or less identical in
all browsers that support getElementById (including Safari),
though Linux rendering may be unattractive.

Visitors using non-standards-compliant browsers (fewer than
2% of ESPN's audience, we're told) are bumped to an upgrade
page. If they choose not to download a conformant browser,
they can view a "light" version of the site. This old,
WaSP-inspired technique is not to everyone's taste, but it
may be appropriate given the site's emphasis on scripting
and rich media.  The approach will be more justifiable once
the team has ironed out validation issues, some (but not all)
of which are due to third party content.


Here's a wiki with other commercial sites that have gone to a CSS/XHTML
layout: .
Samples include Cingular Wireless (a big American mobile phone company),
the PGA (professional golf association), Fast Company, Lycos Europe, Fox
Searchlight Pictures, HotBot,


Additionally, if you've ever played around with the Movable Type weblog
software, it emits XHTML that is laid out entirely by CSS -- switch out
the stylesheet, and you can radically change the appearance of the page.
(I have fun with this on my blog by using a cron job to rotate the default
style sheet a few times an hour, so the page layout is different for most
page views :).


Not everyone is convinced that this CSS kool aid is good for you though:



But the person behind that page seems to be deeply in the minority
opinion.

This kind of forward looking XHTML/CSS layout seems to be getting very
popular & viable now -- check out the source code & stylesheet for some of
these sites for ideas, 

Re: css design, was Re: File Writing and CGI

[Chris Devers]

Speaking of sites considering a move to modern design techniques:




Sample of the current Slashdot site, and the proposed redesign:




Note how fast that page loads. Now that isn't exactly a fair observation,
since this version isn't running all the Perl code & making all the
database queries that the real site presumably runs on each page load. But
even still, note that the revised version is 20% smaller, and yet appears
to be identical in most browsers. If nothing else there is that much of a
bandwidth saving, but my hunch (again, untested at the moment) is that the
revised version should also render more quickly, and perform better on a
wider variety of platforms (PDAs, phones, Lynx, etc).

Actually, testing them with the 'links' text browser -- which does a
tolerably good job of putting tables together -- this revision ends up
putting several secreens of page furniture before the actual content
begins. A better implementation might put the interesting parts of the
page at or near the end of the page's HTML source, so that browsers like
this put the core content ahead of things like navigation links. (Better
still, a future version of links could become aware of CSS layout and the
problem would just go away...).

In any case, it's another interesting case study to examine.




-- 
Chris Devers

[OT] Old BBEdit question

[Thornton]

Okay, so I've been messing around with my website
lately and in the transition to it being database
driven, part of it is going over to CSS. I have an old
version of BBEdit (4.5.3 on macclassic) and I was
wondering if someone has made a CSS "language" to get
the colors to highlight correctly. I'd get a newer
version of the program if it didn't cost so darn much
(and if I weren't such a poor college student), so
that isn't really an option.

~wren

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