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Premium Content articles are the very best articles from the world's leading internet technology, subject-matter experts. We have many categories of content below on a wide variety of subjects that have all been commissioned from big name authors.

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Introduction to XML

In this beginner's article, you'll find out what is it that gets developers excited about XML, and makes them want to use it. XML is not dependent on any particular operating system; it’s designed to survive IT changes such as a move from Microsoft NT to Linux. It allows you to be able to repurpose data quickly without moving to a new architecture or language. And it allows you to build your own applications. It's also an open standard; you don't need to pay anyone anything to use it; no special programs are required to produce xml (just a text editor), and no single company controls it.

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Tom Dell'Aringa
4034

Managing Assets

One of the primary goals of Dreamweaver MX is to provide effective site management tools that help you streamline and organize your site work. In fact, one of the most attractive aspects of Dreamweaver MX is the very fact that it can be used successfully to manage almost every aspect of a Web site, from design to server-side development.

 

Assets in Dreamweaver MX help you keep most of the components of a Web site organized and updated. Keeping track of an ever-increasing assortment of HTML pages, images, links, color schemes, templates, Flash, and multimedia files can be a challenge, and without Assets in Dreamweaver MX, you’d have to find another external management tool, or keep running lists of assets by hand.

 

While these alternative methods might work for a small site, try it on one that has hundreds, even thousands of documents and you’ll be running to the pub to calm your nerves in no time!

 

Save your time, sanity - and your liver! -  by getting to grips with Asset management!

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molly holzschlag
2312

PHP Graphing: Pie Charts Coloured and Exploded

In the continuing series of dynamically drawing graphs with the PHP image functions, this week we revisit our pie graph and look at how to fill it with colour, and then how to give them an "exploded" look.  As in most things with programming, there is more than one way to skin a cat, so we'll also take a look an alternate method of drawing the wedges of our pie chart.

It'll look much like this:

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Allan Kent
6110

Validating Forms with ASP.NET Validator Controls

This tutorial will explain how to correctly use the Validation server controls built into the .NET Framework to validate user input on your pages. We begin by defining what validation is and the differences between client side and server side validation. Complete working examples of each of the validation controls are provided as well as solutions to some of the common problems that arise when using the Validator controls, including how to implement validation groups. These can be used for submitting different sets of validated fields separate from other sets of validated fields whilst only validating the set of fields being submitted.

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Kevin Marshall
14059

List basics in (X)HTML and CSS

Lists are great. There are many elements that you might include on your web pages that are ideally marked up as a list and lists are easily styled with CSS to make them far more interesting to look at than the default styles used by the browser. In this article we will look at the three different types of list available in (X)HTML and which one you should use for which purpose. We will also explore how you can nest lists, for when you need a list within a list. The final part of this tutorial looks at the basics of styling lists with CSS, once you understand the basics you will be able to create attractive lists just by experimenting with applying different effects.

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Rachel Andrew
16229

Point, Line, Plane: Foundations of Web Design Communication

"Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away."
Robert Henri (1865 - 1929) US painter


In today's tutorial, Linda discusses that fundamental component of design, the line. It's particularly relevant to web design, which has traditionally been based around tables and is now moving to CSS boxes. We look at different cultural responses to line, how lines make symmetry and how symmetry provokes a response from the viewer, helping him or her subconsciously judge whether a site "means business", is trustworthy, stable and responsible - vital design characteristics if you're designing a business site for yourself or your client!

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Linda Goin
9142

Understanding Draw Layers

DMXzone premium tutor, Jason Cranford Teague (author of  DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide) begins a new series today on CSS and DHTML.

CSS allows you to set up elements called “layers” on the screen that can be absolutely positioned in relation to the Web page. For example, you can set up a layer containing graphics, text, forms, or any other HTML elements and then position that layer 25 pixels from the top of the page and 360 pixels over. This layer will ignore all other content on the page even if it overlaps the content that is underneath it.
 
Dreamweaver refers to these CSS positioned layers as Draw Layers and provides special tools, not only to add and move these layers, but also to allow you to animate these layers, show and hide them, change their size, or even allow the visitor to move them around in the browser window.
 
Because draw layers can work as free agents in the page, this not only opens a lot of possibilities for layout, but can be used to add a bit of dynamic zest to your page. You can place the draw layers around the page for the exact positioning you need in your design, crop parts of a layer to create independently scrollable regions, or even hide draw layers and then use Dreamweaver behaviors to show them when needed. Read More
Jason Cranford Teague
9625

PHP Graphing – Pie Charts

We've built up a bar chart script, and now we draw a pie chart.

Drawing a pie chart is more complex than drawing a bar chart.  We will need to create a script that takes the data from the data holding class and convert it into proportional amounts.  With line and bar charts we were simply plotting a value along the vertical axis and the series along the horizontal axis, but with a pie chart, all of the data is represented in a circle.  This means that we will need to work out proportionately how much each of our plot values will take up of the 360° that makes up a full circle.  Once we have worked out the proportional amounts, we will then have to use some maths to determine where and how to draw the wedges of the circle that will represent the data.  Read More
Allan Kent
14081

JavaScript: Introduction to Cookies

How does DMXzone.com remember who you are when you login? How does amazon know what you've bought? Cookies! No prior knowledge required, this tutorial will help you set and read cookies from your own sites using JavaScript on the client's machine. Now you can begin to add personalisation, by-pass log-in procedures by "remembering" users, welcome back visitors by the name they registered with - and all of those other sophisticated e-commerce functions that make your site stand out from the Geocities crowd.

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Tom Dell'Aringa
5145

PHP Custom Web Statistics – Part 2

In the second part of this tutorial about creating your own custom web statistics, we analyse the data that is collected each time a page is viewed. We'll be looking at various ways of reading the data we require from the database, and making MySQL work harder by using some of its extra functions to process our data.

We create a function to execute an SQL query, so that we don't repeatedly enter code to open and close the database etc, which makes for shorter code that’s easier to understand and debug. We then create a range of functions that could extract certain statistics from the data stored in the database. We create a set of functions which create the SQL queries dynamically, and can be easily inserted into the framework of the main site pages.

We then construct a page which serves as the index page for the web statistics application, and shows an overall view of every year that has data in the database, showing each year and the number of hits per month.

Finally, we create a page that displays a single year's-worth of data at a time, in a table which is dynamically generated using PHP, and shows more detailed figures for the year.

 

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

 

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Gareth Downes-Powell
4352

Using Server Behaviours – Good or Bad?

Today we’re going to look at Dreamweaver’s ASP Server Behaviours (hereafter SBs). We’ll make use of them to display some data, step by step, and analyse how quick and easy it was to do. We’ll have a look at what happens when we try to take it a step further. Once we realise that the SBs merely provide a starting point, we’ll apply some code by hand to increase the usefulness of our page.
 
Finally, once we have seen both the use of SBs and hand-typed code, we’ll explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. I hope to demonstrate that although SBs are useful, they are quite limited, and that learning to code by hand will provide immense benefits over SBs, both in terms of possibility and performance. Read More
Robert Stuttaford
4484

Cornerstones of Dreamweaver Design: The Fabulous Hyperlink

The web is many things, but here’s one thing for certain: The web wouldn’t exist at all without the hyperlink.  We use it to link from page to page, from a web page to email, from a point in a document to another point within that document. We use links to download files from web pages, and to attach behaviours to, as in the case of JavaScript rollovers.

In this tutorial, you'll learn about the many different links available in HTML, how to form them for maximum usefulness, how to style them by removing the default underlines and how to ensure that they are usable for all visitors.

Table of Content:

  • Types of Links
  • Document-Relative vs. Site-Relative Links
  • Hyperlink Attributes
  • Add a Link!
  • Typing the Path
  • Browsing to the File
  • Point-to-File
  • Drag n' Drop
  • Targeting Links
  • Intra-Page Links
  • Email Links
  • Removing Link Underlines
  • Adding Accessibility Features to Links
  • Descriptive Links
  • The title Attribute
  • The Hyperlink Dialog
  • Add the title Attribute by Hand
  • Defining Tab Order
  • Using the accesskey Attribute
  • LinkMANIA!
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molly holzschlag
8335
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