Recently, I’ve received a few error 404s on a request for “siteinfo.xml.” siteinfo.xml is a file used by Amazon’s A9 search engine’s browser toolbar SiteInfo, and is automatically fetched for every website a user visits.

This sounds pretty similar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s infamous favorites icons feature. For every site a user visited with Internet Explorer, the browser would automatically request a file called favicon.ico, to be displayed in the browser’s location bar and bookmarks. A lot of people were not happy—all of the sudden web servers would begin to get swamped for requests for this mysterious favicon.ico that did not exist. These requests polluted many web server logs, and were very annoying.

On some sites, especially dynamic ones, 404 errors are very expensive. Unfortunately this is true of most Drupal-powered sites, including mine. When using Drupal’s “pretty URLs” which uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to, well, make URLs pretty, all requests that the web server does not process (including errors) will go through Drupal. Going through Drupal means a long boot-strapping process to initialize Drupal and load all its modules, and at least one database request to find out a URL does not exist and to return an error 404. Too many requests for a non-existent file can basically become a DoS attack.

It seems Amazon’s A9 developers didn’t get the memo people don’t like tools that request files that don’t exist.

Granted, it’s not too bad: I don’t think this toolbar has much market penetration, so it’s not as if millions of people are killing my site. The siteinfo.xml specification page also mentions that the file is fetched through A9 and cached, so the file will not be requested for every user that visits, but only for the first one.

Kudos for Amazon’s programmers being a bit brighter than Microsoft’s, but eh, I can’t say how much more bright for designing a system that is a bit too similar to the favicon.ico debacle.

In the process of writing a term paper for a class, I’ve been paging through many research papers.

Unfortunately, many of these research papers are only available for reading via PDF. Even for those papers that have full text on a normal webpage, complex login and authentication systems (i.e. I can only access said page through my university library) force me to save PDFs to facilitate later reading.

PDFs are really miserable for reading on the computer. My gripes:

Fixed font styles

Many PDFs use serif fonts, which are generally difficult to read on screen (though fine on print media). Some irate designers even create PDFs that use “Times New Roman,” which despite it being default on many web browsers is ugly and difficult to read. In a web browser, you can change it; in a PDF, you are forced to suffer with it.

Fixed font sizes

Font sizes are fixed in PDFs, you cannot change them. Often when reading on screen, fonts are just too large, or are too small. This is compounded with…

No wrapping

Text is statically laid out, so you are completely reliant and sizing your window and adjusting your zoom to be able to read a block a text, or stuck with moving your scrollback back and forth.

Columns

Computers have scrollbars. Columns make absolutely no sense when you can scroll. The worst case comes up when you combine columns AND scrolling: you have to scroll down to finish reading a column, and then scroll back up to begin reading the top of the next column.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson thinks so too: in 2003 he had a column PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption.

It seems that some of these problems stem from a mismatch in orientation. Computer monitors are generally landscape; PDFs and printed media are portrait.

And computer monitors just keep getting wider. While widescreen is nothing short of awesome for movies and television, its not that useful for computing. The classic use case is the accountant with a wide spreadsheet: but how many people have wide spreadsheets? Because most people use computers to create content in a portrait orientation, and that most content we read expands downward rather than to the side, it seems as if it would make sense if monitors were a portrait orientation rather than landscape.

Fortunately, this is easy to try out now. Most LCD monitors swivel into portrait orientation with a flick of the wrist. Microsoft Windows and Linux (through the XRandR extensions) have provided orientation switching support for a few years as well.

But it’s not yet usable by the mainstream. For example, on Linux with nVidia’s binary drivers, running in portrait means losing out on accelerated 3D as well as multimonitor support, things many people (including myself) are not ready to lose.

When I first saw Microsoft Office 2003, I thought it was fairly ugly. It looked like some kind of ugly KDE theme.

And now, apparently Office 12 looks even uglier.