BANJAX Web Design, Belfast, Northern Ireland

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We're here to help you build a great website.

Banjax is a small web engineering firm specialising in highly usable web applications and consultancy; Banjax is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

About Banjax

The Banjax team has gained invaluable experience in building high performance web applications by focusing on customer needs and meeting client expectations.

We also have our own projects that we think will change the world… at least a little bit.

Our Services & Expertise

  • Web application design & build
  • E-commerce build & integration
  • Video for the web
  • Usability & accessibility expertise
  • Ruby, Perl, Rails, LAMP based

Want to work with us?

Why not send us an email or give us a call on +44 28 9033 2697, we're more than happy to talk shop.

Or simply drop in and see us in person, there's an address and map at the bottom of the page.

The Banjax Weblog

HTML5 Reading Material

The HTML5 specification is being implemented piecemeal as areas of the specification become stable; with all of the major browser manufacturers involved in one or both of the two working groups (W3C and WHATWG) HTML5 will be becoming a bigger part of our day to day work.

Currently all browsers support the HTML5 doctype, which triggers standards mode in browsers, so as an exercise we're trying out HTML5 on banjax.com:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Banjax Web Design</title>
    ...

If you try banjax.com on the HTML5 Outliner you should see it breaks down into a nice neat 'Table of Contents' like outline, albeit without using the new section or footer elements (HTML5 is backward compatible).

You can also try validator.nu with the Banjax.com url, can't guarantee it's valid because as the spec changes so does validator.nu and we may be a little behind—though at the minute we're not doing anything too advanced so there shouldn't be a problem.

There is a lot of material on HTML5 out there, articles, presentations, tools and wikis. I thought I might try and bring together some of the good stuff:

A couple of really quick HTML5 previews:

XTECH '08 HTML5 Lightning Talk
by Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software ASA
How HTML5 can be used today
by Simon Pieters of of Opera Software ASA

A couple of much longer articles on HTML5:

A Preview of HTML 5
by Lachlan Hunt of Opera Software ASA
New elements in HTML 5: Structure and semantics
by Elliotte Rusty Harold

Useful Resources:

HTML5 Validator
by Henri Sivonen & Mozilla (go to Henri's site, read the articles, acquire knowledge!)
HTML5 FAQ
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML5 Elements List
by Simon Pieters
HTML5 Differences from HTML4
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML vrs. XHTML
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML5 Outliner
by James Graham

by Stephen Stewart
7-Aug-08

How not to get round the Data Protection Act

While registering for a click-use licence on the UK OPSI website I was presented with this gem, see if you can spot the mistake:



  <p>We publish a list of Licence Holders on our
    website. However, to comply with data protection
    legislation we do not show details of private
    individuals without their consent.</p>
  <label class='checkbox' for='listpublic'>Please tick
    the box if you have no objections to your name and
    address details appearing on our website:</label>
  <input class='checkbox' type='checkbox'
    name='listpublic' id='listpublic' checked='checked'
    disabled='disabled' />

The input to opt out of being listed, and thus be compliant with the UK Data Protection Act, has the disabled attribute, which disables the use of the checkbox completely. You're signed up whether you like it or not.

Let's see what the W3C HTML spec says about use of the disabled attribute:

"In contexts where user input is either undesirable or irrelevant, it is important to be able to disable a control or render it read-only..."

Genius. :)

by Stephen Stewart
18-Jun-08

Thanks for all the linky love

Looking at the server logs for Banjax.com we've got some nice linky love from the likes of bestwebgallery.com, cssmania.com, webcreme.com, screenfluent.com, www.cssleak.com & www.mostinspired.com. So it seems only fair to return the favour, thanks everyone!

If you're interested, when I say I looked at the server logs this is what I mean:

awk -F\" '($2 ~ /GET \/ /){ print $4 }' \ 
banjax.com-access.log \
| awk -F\/ '{ print $1,$2,$3 }' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Which returns something like this:

   1742 http:  cssmania.com
    861 http:  www.webcreme.com
    676 -  
    195 http:  webcreme.com
     88 http:  screenfluent.com
     70 http:  www.google.com
     24 http:  www.banjax.com
     23 http:  www.netvibes.com
     21 http:  www.mostinspired.com
     13 http:  www.cssleak.com
     ...

AWK is very useful for working with logs, you can read more about it here on the Wikipedia page for AWK.

by Stephen Stewart
13-May-08

Notes & Links

Short notes from the field. (Some taken from the Banjax Twitter feed).

© 2008 Banjax Ltd.
49 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1JL
Telephone: +44 28 9033 2697