making apps, making webs.

Was playing around with jquery mobile the other day, which has planned it's first beta release sometime next week. jQuery mobile is what jquery+jquery-ui are to desktop browsers. It abstracts a lot of the parts away so that you can write your code without having to figure out all the different mobile browser quirks yourself. It offers a structure to make web apps which are cross platform across current mobile devices and which as a bonus work in desktop web browsers as well. Mobile style events are provided as well. Like touch and swipe which work across the various mobile browsers is a nice touch. Another great thing it provides is media queries. CSS media queries are buggy on some browsers so this abstracts out a lot of the bugs on the various different devices. Supported are most of the mobile devices. Some are supported better than others, and some provide certain features that others do not provide. For example, the ajax style page loading is not done on opera mini. But ...

Dear reader, I joined the iOS web developers for adventure and a chance to see the world but instead I am working in a mud hole, freezing my arse off, with a constant fear of death. I am writing this note in hope that it makes it out of the trenches. In case I do not. It's bloody here in the iOS trenches and I feel my days are numbered. With these thoughts on my mind, I hope to share this with you. Some of this stuff is not documented in the standard issue manual, or disseminated via the standard propaganda channels. I feel it ought be of use to you. Unfortunately it has been very hectic here, so the words will likely be rushed and detail will be lacking. I apologise for this, but I still think it will be useful (no brain rockets, just some Damn Useful Information). In case I don't make it, Your friend from the trenches, René Dudfield. ps. if you find this note, please consider commenting on the back with any other useful information your fellow iOS trench mates might fi...

So you want to parse a website? Python has some pretty cool html, rss, and atom parsing modules. There is also a promising CSS parser. This parser is cssutils. http://cthedot.de/cssutils/ Parsing CSS is one part which can occasionally come in handy. Say you want to figure out how big a piece of text will display on a page? Without CSS parsing you can not test this. You want to check to see if a piece of html is displayed at all? Well assuming we ignore javascript, CSS can be used to disable parts of a website with display:none or by setting the visibility or transparency. So this is another reason why you might want to parse CSS. It's also handy if you are using CSS in your own non web based GUI engine. CSS is a fairly well understood language. So using it instead of your own format might be a good idea. Above are some reasons why you might want to parse CSS with python. However I'm sure there are others which might pop into your head if you are a web developer. Thank...