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Interface Widgets: Datagrid (part I)

Whether you use the web for shopping or banking, blogging or content management, every once in a while you stumble across an interface widget that makes you wonder: “how the heck do they do it?”

One of those widgets is the datagrid that looks and behaves like your datagrid /spreadsheet in a desktop application: scrollable with static headers, selectable rows and editable cells, sortable columns and other “desktop-like” features.
In this and the following articles of the Interface Widgets series you will learn how to create a datagrid like this in Dreamweaver from scratch.

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Alex July
3978

Maintaining Viewer Loyalty with Community-Building

How do you build and maintain an online community for your site? How can you instruct your clients on how to build online loyalty for their sites? Further, how can anyone handle the angst that seems built into interactivity with unknown and sometimes hostile viewers? When Amy Jo Kim wrote her book, “Community Building on the Web” in 2000, she outlined some of the first guidelines for building online interactive loyalty with an emphasis on “organic” growth. In this article, I’ll review Amy’s strategies and compare them to a current venue to consider whether her strategies still stand true.

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Linda Goin
1824

Fireworks MX & MX2004: Fun with Productivity - Part 1

It's no secret, when designing a site, your graphics need to be sliced, diced, optimized, and even put back together in our (X)HTML pages. In a previous article, Things you should know about FW (part 1), I covered basics of features like Symbols and Styles, perfect for during the production process. Now, I'm going to show how we can chop down more grunt work areas before and after we draw any of our cool ideas; we'll be more productive thanks to Fireworks. This article shows productivity tips that work in both Fireworks MX & MX2004.

  • Learn where and what shortcuts (not keystrokes) provide you less mouse strain.
  • Learn “safe sizes” for designing web-pages, making sure they fit in each popular browser nicely.
  • Take “safe sizes” to another level of productivity, utilizing a free FW extension.
  • Learn to batch process like a pro.
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Chris Charlton
4694

Separating Form and Function: JavaScript and HTML

Wherever CSS and Standards are discussed, you'll often hear about separating content from presentation. Meaning (X)HTML for content and CSS for presentation. At the same time as we separate the content and layout, we can also separate out our JavaScript functionality from the main document, for much the same reasons.

In this tutorial we'll look at moving the JavaScript code out of the HTML document, to keep our page sizes down and our code reusable. We'll look at a different way to handle user initiated events via the script, and develop a sample piece of code for clearing a search box into a more reusable piece of code.

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Matt Machell
4527
FREE

Free! Benefits of an accessible website - part 1: Increase in reach

The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Some organisations are making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?

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Trenton Moss
947

K.I.S.S. Accessibility and Design Issues

How much movement – or confinement for that matter – do you need on your Web site to capture a viewer’s attention? Do you really want to build in <target=”blank”>, add animations that slow down the presentation, or confine your pages to a static frameset? While all these tricks and more are available to the Web designer, what criteria can the designer use to just say “no” to these gimmicks? Further, how does a Web designer convince a client that he really doesn’t want that moving water applet? This week, I’ll share a few reasons why designers might cease these activities. Accordingly, you can use these reasons to help your client understand “understated” and “accessible.”

Web Designer as Accessibility Thief

My mother actually told me when I was a mere pup that I shouldn’t complain about my trek to the bus stop, because she had to walk two miles to school each day up and down a hill. I’ve seen that hill, and it’s nasty. Although her reprimand has become a cliché, it returned to haunt me this morning as I sat to write this article. I can picture it now…In about five to ten years I’ll respond to my grandchild’s complaint about his quark-second delay in download time: “Listen, sonny, I remember when I had to deal with pop-up windows, moving water applets, and frames in the hands of inexperienced Web designers. Get over it.”

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Linda Goin
2247

CSS From the Ground Up: Linked Style

While inline and embedded style are also considered part of CSS’s application hierarchy, grouped within “author styles,” it is the linked style sheet that gives designers and developers the utmost power over their work.

This power isn’t limited to design, of course. It also involves several other critical issues, as I’ll examine with you in detail in this installment of CSS from the Ground Up on DMXzone.

Linked Style within the Cascade

As mentioned in previous articles, there are three groups of style sheets: Browser, User, and Author styles. Browser styles are those styles that are defaults provided by the Web browser. If you don’t apply a style to some element, the default browser styles come into play. Browser styles take the least precedence over other styles.

On the other side of the fence, there’s user style, which is style created by a user. This is typically done for those individuals with accessibility needs that require they have high contrast or large fonts. User styles are typically the most powerful of all, due to the fact that they were intended for this kind of special need. In the middle we find the author styles, which are the styles we as authors create for our pages. Author styles include inline style, which controls the style of one element; embedded style, which controls the style of one document; and finally, linked style – the holy grail of CSS.

So why would I call linked style “the holy grail” of style sheets? Well, there are plenty of reasons. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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molly holzschlag
3078

Coldfusion MX (7), Multiple Update Delete Functionality

Click click click click click…. AAAHH! The clicking madness

One of the common user friendly functionality is the ability to update and/or delete multiple records at the same time. This has benefits for the user because it is much easier to maintain data and the user doesn’t need to click hundreds of times to do the same with 1 click. But also the traffic of your database and web server goes down enormously and in the end it will benefit your application. So if you want to make your customer happy, this is the way to go if you need to update records frequently.

In this article we’re going to build a “restaurant menu manager”. With this manager you can insert dishes, put them in a specific dish type and set the display order of the individual dishes within a dish type.

Sounds complicated huh?! If you’re not familiar with Coldfusion, it could be, if you are familiar, it isn’t.

So take a look at the prerequisites

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Michael van Leest
4243

Implementing Site Search with FreeFind

Thanks to the widespread popularity of search engines like Google, most computer users know that the answer to nearly any question can be found on the internet. The problem is that finding the specific bit of information they seek may be harder than they expected. If you can help your site's visitors find the information they need with a minimum number of clicks, you can make them very happy. You’re on your own to create compelling content, but this article can help you create a search feature your visitors will love.

FreeFind offers hosted search technology, so there's nothing to download or install.

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Zac Van Note
5397
FREE

Free! - Why a CSS website layout will make you money

Although CSS layouts have been around for years, they haven't become so commonplace until recently. This was basically due to limited browser support (especially from Netscape 4) - nowadays though, CSS 2.0 (which introduced positioning) is compatible with over 99% of browsers out there (check out the browser stats over at The Counter).

So, why should you convert your website from its current table-based layout to a CSS layout? It'll make you money. Simple really. And here's four reasons to explain why:

 

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Trenton Moss
14721

Scripting fades and rotation

This is the third article in the series on creation movement in Flash with ActionScript. In the first article, I looked at how you could move an object in a straight line using ActionScript. The second article covered circular movement.

In this article, I'll show you how to create fade in and fade out effects with ActionScript. I’ll introduce you to the concepts and then we’ll load an external photo and fade it in. I’ll also show you how you can rotate objects with ActionScript.

I've assumed that you are using Flash MX or Flash MX 2004 and that know how to add ActionScript to a movie. I've used ActionScript 1.0 for the examples.

You can download the source files for the tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need as well as the completed files.

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options… and clicking the Delete Cookies… button on the General tab.

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Sas Jacobs
19396

Blog II: Three-Column Layout Modifications

Last week I promised the coding wizards out there that you could shake your collective heads at my efforts with PHP and MySQL this week. However, despite my lack of skills and with a little help from my server manager, I managed to upload WordPress 1.5. From that point, with very little further help, I added a three-column template and modified it to suit my needs. Therefore, I wrote this piece for any designer (or beginning coder) who longs for a three-column personal blog, but who freaks out when she views a string of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks that look like an alien language. A warning, however: You must at least have access to an FTP program and you must know how to use it.

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Linda Goin
5506
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