stephenwoods.net

If you live in San Francisco, like I do, you often have to suffer at the whims of the SF Muni. Tragically, the very useful transit.511.org trip planner is almost totally useless on a mobile phone (excepting perhaps the iphone, but it is still very heavy), the place it would be most useful. Quickly looking at 511, it seems like the reason its so frustrating on phones (and the web really) is its very complex markup that breaks on most mobile browsers, and its unnecessarily heavy page design.

In response, I decided to start making a Yahoo Mobile Widget  for the trip planner. Of course the first step was to look up the 511.org api. Well, it turns out they don’t have an api, which seems insane to me, there app is the simplest front-end on a db, an api would be a no-brainer. So this week in my spare time I worked up a simple api that scrapes the pages at 511.org.

The result of my work is this very simple interface to the 511 site. You can specify JSON or XML as the response format, but please don’t try and make any apps on this api yet, I plan to do more work on this to great a real transit.511.org web service, which is something that is very needed. I might also make a more useful UI on the web version, because

Feedback and suggestions? Leave them in the comments. I am planning on having the widget in the gallery some time in the next couple weeks.

I have been playing with IE8 tonight. And I have to say that I am very impressed with what microsoft has done. They seem to be serious about a standards compliant browser this time (bugs not withstanding, but its beta 1, so they get a pass).

They fixed the 2 domain thing, and added some cool features that I hope other browsers pick up soon (XDR: cross domain request!). Better browser history control, and actually best of all they added two new features that the old microsoft would have crippled: Slices and activities. Slices allows developers to add modules that can be pulled off (a bit like dashboard), except the slices are defined by the developer. The bad old microsoft would have made this some horrid non-standard thing that required active x. The new, kinder MS has decided to go with a MICROFORMAT. A completely standards compliant microformat. The kind of microformat anyone will be able to parse. If I felt like it I could probably whip up support for webslices in firefox tonight, its that simple. And it won’t break on other browsers because its just done with html classnames.

Well done Microsoft, I hope this is a sign of things to come. (but silverlight? really? come on!)

So, there is an election going on. As a public service to my fellow webdevs, I decided to look at the candidates and judge them based on the only metric that matters: the quality of their frontend code.Because tomorrow will (maybe) decide which democrat will be the nominee, I will wait for part 2 and make this post the McCain post.

So, if you search for McCain in google and click through you are redirected to a landing page (only in Google, not any other search engine, more on this below). Actually, thats not true. FIRST you actually have to load a bunch of crap on johnmccain.com, because this is not a 301 redirect, its a JAVASCRIPT redirect, called in a script tag some ways down the page:
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