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Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Hacker's Diet: Fourth Edition Published
The Fourth Edition of The Hacker's Diet has now been posted. This is the first major update since the original Web edition was published in 1994. The content is unchanged; other than rewording some sentences so awkward print-style cross-references could be supplanted by more mellifluous hyperlinks, the text is identical. The appearance and structure of the document is much different. The small snippets of text which were considered "screen-sized" in the age of dial-up modems have been replaced by one HTML document per chapter, more consistent with the contemporary community standards of today's broadband fat city. This edition is 100% compliant with the XHTML 1.0 (Transitional and Frameset) and CSS 2.1 standards and requires a browser which fully supports them, including the ability to display Unicode text entities such as proper “double quotes”—and em-dashes. JavaScript and DOM/DHTML are used to a minor extent for navigation, but everything will work fine if they are disabled or not functional. Current browsers are remarkably compliant with these standards, at least if you don't push them any harder than I did in this document, which I considered skating very close to the dark open water in the middle of the pond. I've tested this document with Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, Opera 8.5, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, and other than requiring the Exploder width kludge in one chapter, everything worked fine. If you spot something funny, whack me upside the head with the feedback button and I'll dig into it. In case this document can't be digested by a user's browser, all the earlier editions remain available.Posted at November 17, 2005 00:27