Few months ago, while exporting vCards from Apple’s Address Book (which uses UTF-16 instead of to me more common UTF-8), I discovered that there’s really no general agreement on which encoding should be used for storing vCards. It was quite a disheartening discovery, since you can’t get this information from a filesystem and it’s difficult to transform encoding to a uniform one, if you don’t know the encoding of the source.

I decided to tackle this problem once other problems were solved and I’m happy to say my procrastination payed off. Mark Pilgrim wrote another excellent module which solves my problem better than I ever could.

Universal Encoding Detector is a python port of code used by Mozilla to accomplish the same thing and is really very simple to use. Obviously it can’t be perfect since it’s not possible detect encoding completely reliably. But it works quite well and if you need such functionality, you should really give it a try.

And people say laziness doesn’t pay off.

Years ago I published my first code and I still remember the anxiety. Will people notice that I’m an incompetent idiot or do they already know?

I grew up a lot since then and these days I know I’m not a great programmer. Even more importantly, I’m comfortable with this. But as I was reading vobject’s code to see how difficult it would be to add support for vCard 2.1 and hCard, it dawned on me… Jeffrey is a much better programmer than me and there’s little hope that my yet-nonexistent contribution won’t spoil his code.

Nasty. Something new to worry about.

Have you ever created a new design for an existing website without changing XHTML templates?

I’m not talking about designs for css Zen Garden and its imitators or any other occasion where doing so was done to prove a point. What I mean is building a new design on existing XHTML template during normal course of action.

I haven’t and I don’t know anyone who did. It’s also hard to imagine being otherwise if designs are done without taking existing XHTML into account. There’s always an element missing for attaching a part of your design to, unless XHTML was somewhat loose to begin with.

I don’t think this is a problem. There are plenty of real benefits to table-less designs and few, if any deficiencies. However, I do believe that this benefit, touted by many including me, is contrived.

Or am I just wrong? What’s your experience?