While they say a picture is worth a thousand words, not every image is self-explanatory. Sometimes a few words of description or context can make the difference between a confusing image and a clarifying one. That’s why image captions are often a good idea.
Web Development is infinitely more troublesome when you have documents in languages other than American English. The onus is on us web developers and server administrators to make sure browsers and search engines can detect the right language. Here is how you can declare the language of your document in HTML 5.
Anyone who has visited YouTube.com in the past four years knows that you can embed video in a web page. But prior to HTML5, there was no standards-based way to do this. Virtually all the video you’ve ever watched “on the web” has been funneled through a third-party plugin — maybe QuickTime, maybe RealPlayer, maybe Flash. (YouTube uses Flash.) These plugins integrate with your browser well enough that you may not even be aware that you’re using them. That is, until you try to watch a video on a platform that doesn’t support that plugin.
As momentum quickly builds behind HTML5, the new version of HTML and XHTML, we've had a close eye on what impact this might have on HTML email in the years to come. While the finer details of HTML5 are still being finalised, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have offered support for much of the new technology for some time.
HTML5 and CSS3 have just arrived (kinda), and with them a whole new battle for the ‘best markup’ trophy has begun. Truth to be told, all these technologies are mere tools waiting for a skilled developer to work on the right project. As developers we shouldn’t get into pointless discussions of which markup is the best. They all lead to nowhere. Rather, we must get a brand new ideology and modify our coding habits to keep the web accessible.
Read MoreSpecialization has made our trade a lot harder. Just 10 years ago it was still possible to make a quality site by yourself, today you need to take into account accessibility, strategy, content structures, browser compatibility, usability, flexibility and scalability. In all of these fields you will find people with specialized skills, but getting all of them on the same line isn't always easy. This article will dig a little deeper into the relationship between the html guy and the people implementing the html and how to improve it.
Read MoreThis article deals with the display of tree-structures that are driven by a database. There are actually a few approaches to transform a 2-dimensional structure into a tree, and it seems odd that most are unknown to many developers.
The most obvious approach is using the parent-ID as a back-reference for recursion. But then what happens if the tree-structure gets a bit bigger? How about 5 childnodes and a depth of 5 levels? Well, suddenly you end up with 52 database requests and your application becomes incredibly slow... That's why we're just about to bin the idea of using the parent-ID!
Read MoreIn this article [I] want to share my thoughts on techniques for keeping our code XML-based - so there's no need to get your hands dirty in your application code to change the markup that is rendered afterwards. Most things will be PHP related though.
Once we get the seperation working properly, we can completely detach the development of front end from the application logic by first agreeing on an XML scheme to exchange data between those two.
Read MoreWould you like to learn how to make rich user interfaces with nothing more complicated than a text editor? Welcome to XUL, a subset of XML used to describe user interfaces. This article will get you started.
Many of you may not have heard of XUL. [I] hadn’t until recently. If you’re excited by the prospect of making rich user interfaces, quickly and easily, using nothing but a simple text editor, then you’ll want to learn all about XUL, because that’s exactly what it’s for. It’s pronounced to rhyme with "cool" and is a W3C compliant subset of XML that is used specifically to describe user interfaces. It stands for XML User interface Language, and was designed to implement the user interface of the Mozilla suite (including the browser and the Thunderbird email client.)
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