Poem a day

Those of you who like my poetry but are not following the Poem a Day feed might be interested to hear that today's entry, and at least the next few, will also contain a recording of me reading them.

Two small epiphanies

Two techy things I realised over the last couple of days:

1. I want to link to the HTML validator and feed validator from my pages, but in order to check they validate rather than to say "look at me, I write conformant HTML". Finding space for the "Valid HTML, valid CSS, valid Atom" labels was getting to be a nuisance. Yesterday I realised that I could just use HTML relative links for this:

   <link rel="valid-html" type="application/xhtml+xml" href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=..." />
   <link rel="valid-atom" type="application/xhtml+xml"
      href="http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=..." />

   Then if your browser supports it you can just select the "valid-html" link or whatever, and you don't clutter the page up with validation links. An example is here. I haven't yet looked up whether there is some more standard name for these, or indeed whether anyone else has thought of this.
   
   
2. Parchment currently loads story files by base-64 encoding them and supplying them as inline JavaScript (thus). It occurred to me today that the best way to do this would be to load actual z5 files using XMLHttpRequest. It would mean that admins didn't have to encode the files specially, and it would skip the decoding step, so the games would load faster. Of course you wouldn't be able to load games directly from any site but your own. I may implement this at some point and see whether it becomes noticeably faster.