Apparently price settings for telecom (broadband/mobile/land line) plans in Belgium are significantly higher than its neighbouring countries and our Belgian government has decided to do something about it.

I try to avoid posts about Belgian/Dutch subjects but this one is too big of a disgrace:

To increase competition between operators, our government has launched a site to compare different telecom offers (Dutch). I can only assume someone naively decided this is the cheapest way to get prices to drop without extra legislation and while one can doubt its effectiveness in case of (forbidden) price setting agreements between operators, it must have cost (or still costs) huge amounts of time to get up-to-date data in their application.

If you now doubt this is something a government should occupy itself with, you’re not alone.

But it gets even worse. As you may have guessed looking at the site, the underlying code is terrible. This is even more sad because, while very basic and a bit outdated, there are guidelines for creating sites from the government (Dutch).

With less work and more talented people, they could have built an application that could at least be user friendly (as an example: if you submit without some required field, everything you entered is reset) and it could have been an attempt to justify the budget spent.

Maybe it is best they just fire the one responsible for this decision. No motivation needed.

Ever wondered what the ideal heights and distances of your workspace are?

Try out the Ergotron Workspace Planner in inches or in centimeters: just enter your height en adjust your chair, desk or screen as required.

More about optimizing your workspace on Lifehacker.

While Ext JS turns 3 and already had a turbulent past, the development team has come up with a new project & licensing structure.

While it is still in beta, Ext JS seems to have been split up in an Ext JS Core library, which is a complete alternative to jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, Mootools,… and the upcoming full Ext JS library, which will probably include the features you know Ext best for: the slick user interface.

Together with the beta release of the core version, a bunch of popular widgets have been mimicked: Lightbox, Tabs, Image rotation and Context menu’s.

The Ext JS Core is MIT licensed, which basically means it is completely free. There was of course no other way to go because of the competition. But since the core version completely eliminates the use of any other JavaScript framework, it will pave the way even more for the full version. Together with the already huge Ext community (> 70000 registered members), world domination can’t be far away.

Although I have had a lot of fun with jQuery, I guess I no longer have a reason to use it. They seem to have done a fine job to offer a replacement (with a file size that almost matches)!

When creating an application, developers and designers tend to invest to little time in a proper semantic (X)HTML structure.

The layout of your project probably won’t benefit from this and while SEO will, what makes it so important is that it simplifies your work  (or someone else’s in your team).

A good example is the use of <thead> and <tbody> tags inside tables. You can easily apply a different visual style to a table header without adding a class to the first row (thead tr {background-color: #ccc;}).

Another one is the use of <button type=”submit”> tags over <input type=”submit”>. When applying CSS styles, you will be able to style buttons separate of input fields. Can you see the advantage?