CSS font stacks, developer FAQs & web standards
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Amended the FontStats servlet so that all surveys may have a "Full" XML file output by separating the base file names from the suffix and extension. Also amended the selection criteria to exclude symbol fonts from the results output. Modified the getContent() method to pass the suffix through to the servlet confirmation screen and give a hyperlink for the relevant XSL transformation.
Created a new full Windows font survey results page and table inclusion and linked from the main top 40 Windows font survey results page. The Mac and Unix full output pages are currently the same as the top 40, so not used.
Split out the standfirst and analysis sections from the font survey results pages into server side includes so they can be shared between the standard top 40 page and full listings as they become available. Also created an include for the results feedback form.
Created a "SamplerNoGenerics" menu include file for the generic font sampler pages, to help readers navigate back to other section pages. Added a CSS font-family glossary link to the local navigation panel for the section.
Updated the Windows font survey results with the first figures from the font survey applet, excluding symbol fonts (although they are still surveyed).
Added new multiple put, mput, commands to the PSFTP upload script for new font results update files.
Modified ServiceLogClientParser to generate updates to the font survey submission table to invalidate spam entries, delete their email addresses and switch off their notify status. Also modified the selection criteria for the FontSurveyTemplate class to exclude symbol fonts from the CSS output. URL-encoded the space in the fragment anchors of the generic font sampler tables to validate.
Added numerous FAQs to multiple sections and moved a couple of servlet lifecycle questions into the appropriate category. Amended the FAQ announcements page so that single digit month values work as well as the standard zero-padded version for most months and days.
Class.forName(String) method?
public access modifier for interface methods?
Created working draft bad questions and pending questions pages for the FAQ section to help manage incoming questions. Also created an server side include file to reference both pages from the FAQ index page and help request confirmation screen. Added FAQ section menus to the operating system FAQ and web browser FAQ pages.
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Added a link from the font survey acknowledgement screen for Mac and Linux to the font survey applet test to encourage more testing. Changed all text ad include references to use a server parsed version of the text ads include for more versatile ad display options. Removed Anchor Points submission form and Soupermail configuration.
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Loaded latest font survey submissions, including those from font survey applet testing. Updated font survey results and updated font survey mailing lists. Also updated the surveyline table with amendments to the fonts_update_survey.sql script to copy fonts from the load table. Corrected the CURRENT_DATE variable name. Removed the SQL purge code from the fonts_validate_submissions.sql script and created a new fonts_purge_spammers.sql script. Re-generated the generic font family sampler tables and Sampler.css with the newly added fonts.
Amended FontSurveyApplet to exclude Java logical font names. Updated applet survey email and SQL templates with latest surveyed fonts. Published Windows font survey applet with font sampler menu and local navigation added to the success confirmation page.
Corrected the form element markup for user feedback on the font survey applet test pages. Added a new .ActionPoint CSS rule to make the layout of the home page links more compact. Corrected a bad link for the history of type source in the CSS font-family glossary.
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Removed all magic numbers from the FontSurveyApplet class to constant fields. Added input rows for mailing list subscription through an addNotifyOptions(Panel) method, with form and email validation and error Dialog panel. Added browser user agent field, rather than the Java applet user agent.
Created a set of JUnit tests for email validation and used all existing mailing list addresses to test. Amended the Ant compile.applet target to clean and re-create the applet class output directory before compilation.
Moved the new font insertion loop to the end of the main survey input section of the email and file template, critically after the submission record is committed. Changed the Soupermail configuration for the font survey applet to distinguish applet-based submissions from original user-selected submissions. Switched the applet submission counter file to share the live survey counter so that test submissions can be merged in. Increased the threshold for backing up the main submission input file to allow for longer font lists from applet submissions. Deployed the font survey applet alongside the original survey for final testing.
Made a minor change to the font survey submissions per week SQL query to round down to 2 decimal places and applied the same rounding to the reported versus sampled query.
Added a Google Analytics server side include to all FAQ pages.
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Created new one-off script fonts_backcopy_new_fonts.sql to move all new font details to the load_family table to preserve manual research and input, then deleted these records from fontline, font and fontfamily tables. New fonts will be stored until their frequency is high enough to add to the main survey list.
Modified the font survey load table so that submission_id foreign key reference is not unique. More than one new font may be found in a single submission. Changed sequence of the fonts_drop_load_tables.sql script to clear foreign key constraints first.
Standardised the format of survey data insertion scripts from the font survey applet testing and deleted the old versions to preserve test input. Changed the new Soupermail font parameter loop output to match new load tables and added submission_id to the load_font insert statement.
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Removed Amazon links from all section and subsection navigation, not enough return over 6 years to justify such prominent links.
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Altered FontSurveyTemplate to instantiate the class in the main() method and changed all others to instance methods. Introduced a SortedSet of Comparable FontFamily objects to generate CSS style rules only for the most common fonts. Also changed the PreparedStatement used to generate the generic font family sampler include files only to list the most common fonts.
Created SQL scripts to create and drop two new load tables for the font survey database. Rather than load directly into the core fontfamily and font tables, load_family and load_font separate new submissions. Also created SQL scripts to list newly added fonts in descending frequency for further manual processing.
Specified the UTF-8 charset (and encoding) for all Soupermail email templates. In test submissions, some font names were not being received correctly with the default Latin 1 character set.
mailcharset : utf-8
Added an inner class FontFamily to FontSurveyTemplate to enable CSS font-family rule output for the most common fonts, rather than all. Test submissions raised the number of fonts in the database to over 2000, which would be too great for a general purpose style sheet.
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Added an escape(String) method to FontSurveyApplet to format new font names for SQL insert statements and created a new FontSurveyAppletTest class to unit test the code.
Updated the font survey applet error page to use XSSI conditional tests to output error report instructions customised for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or generic details for unknown clients.
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Created an SQL update script to automatically populate the surveyline table with fonts submitted through the new FontSurveyApplet. The fonts require a CSS class selector name and generic font-family property to qualify for inclusion. Fonts are adopted via a temporary table with an update to ensure they are not already listed.
Added a new method to the FontSurveyTemplate class to produce a series of SQL update statements in skeleton form to set the class name, generic font family type and foundry name of recently added fonts for manual update.
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