Today I brought my Macbook to my mom’s house for the first time. Like me, she has a Linksys wireless router, but unlike me she is connected to the internet via Verizon DSL. Now, her Windows PC and laptop connect to the network through the router automatically (there’s no wi-fi password since this is northern Vermont and the next house is a mile away).
The Macbook likewise connected instantly to the wi-fi network, but couldn’t see the internet. When I’d try to ping a Web address, I just got “no route to host.” Very sad.
The problem I have with defining “front end development” is that there is no such thing.
Historically there was software called a “home page” or “web site” that was composed entirely of static HTML pages and binary files, connected by hyperlinks. It was then possible to draw a distinction between “real” programmers, who wrote in application languages like C++ and Java, and “web designers” who only wrote HTML.
Today I wanted to know how to get the functionality of the HTML validator Firefox extension. The extension has two modes: Tidy and SGML parser. Each of these modes reports differently on the HTML under test. Both reports can be useful (I’m not going to get into the differences here).
Specifically, I wanted to be able to generate either a Tidy or an SGML parser report from the command line. And I wanted to be able to run my report for any public Web page.
The best practice as he outlines it is to place the most specific information about the page /first/ in the title.
Consider Macys.com. The following is a (hypothetical) nice, useful section title that could potentially be used:
“Fine China - DINING - Dining & Entertaining - Macy*s”
The most specific information comes first, then the name of the subsection, the section, and finally the name of the web site.
This is exactly the opposite of the common approach to titles
This bookmarklet is intended to be used on the “save this” page at del.icio.us. I have also created (and prefer) a version of the bookmarklet that adds the user’s tags along with via:username; as I seem to always do that as well when tagging with via:
Closures are a powerful feature of JavaScript. However it’s often hard to explain in a few words, just what is useful about closures. Well, here on page 131 of the Rhino book, is the recipe for a unique ID generator that doesn’t require a global counter.
One thing that I personally enjoy about the Flanagan book is that he says things like “don’t pollute the global namespace.” This technique does not pollute the global namespace.
var uid = (
function(){
var id=0;
return function(){
return id++ ;
};
}
)();
//then just say:
alert(uid());
Recently, I started building a site with a lot of transparent image elements. The trouble was the the client required support for IE6 as well as IE7. Now, IE 6 and lower do not support transparent PNGs out of the box, but I knew that there were workarounds for that.
The question was, which workaround to use? One method I saw involved using an Explorer “behavior.” Unfortunately, this solution required loading and HTC file, which is an ActiveX control. ActiveX controls aren’t loaded in IE6 with default security settings. Maybe there is a workaround for that, but I couldn’t find it in a timely fashion. Besides, the HTC solution requires an HTC file and a special GIF file be stored on the server. Adding mysterious stuff to the client’s file tree is something I really like to avoid.
This began as a post for the JAG internal wiki. After I’d gone to all the trouble of looking everything up and spelling it right, I thought it would be worthwhile to mirror the post here.
Here are a couple of basic pointers for building Acessible Web sites. I generally am interested in Accessibility, because it’s part of the Semantic Web vision. When I come across a relevant article, I tag it with accessibility. But I became especially interested after the National Federation for the Blind sued Target, basically because Target refused to add ALT tags to their images.
