星期一, 十月 24, 2005

Comments, Links

It's here! The long rumored China Blog List 2.0, now with its own simple URL, hit the streets this morning to much acclaim:

As I read through John P's introductory post, I couldn't help but marvel at the load of features that he and John B packed into this single site: tagging (somewhat), hierarchical geographical location, top ten lists, and a sophisticated sorting tool that lets me check up on the last ten weblogs from Shanghai added to the List.

I only have two small suggestions. First, the server is not sending a Content-Type header, and my zh-cn localized version of Firefox is thinking that the site is encoded in gb2312 instead of utf-8 so that some characters (like the "é" in Andrés Gentry) get displayed as han zi. Second, the filtering conditions get sent to the server as a POST request, while the HTML spec says that GET requests are ideal for things like database searches. More importantly, if the search was GET'ed, I could bookmark my favorite filters (like the "recent Shanghai weblogs" one above). Maybe this was a design decision, but I'm hoping it was just an oversight.

(I'm also a bit curious about the choice to go with numbers instead of strings for form values, but that's more of a question of technical style and isn't really a pressing issue.)

(I just got word from John B that the two issues I listed above have been taken care of. Sweet!)