Entries Tagged 'XHTML' ↓

I just downloaded and tried another text editor, this one is called Continue reading →

PHP5 is totally ok with Unicode utf-8 encoding. And yes you should be using it for everything, period. ASCII is bullshit. To make things even better, PHP5 functions work fine with Unicode all the time, unless stated otherwise. So the question you have now is: “How do I enable utf-8 in my php5 code for dynamic sites?”

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So, I’m waiting for your comments. Why should I bother going to all the trouble of getting a good looking, standards-based web site working with Internet Explorer? Why should anyone support Internet Explorer?

FireFox is better and FREE as in beer! If you’re using OS X, Safari is better still. If you’re using Linux, Konqueror/KHTML is basically Safari. So why not take the lead and join me, in supporting a real internet.

Drop support for Internet Explorer now! 

So many things have been said and are out of date or still true in different ways about the problems of web design.  Sure there are books galore, and they tell you ten thousand different “correct” ways to Continue reading →

Oh we are so close yet so far away… the dream of pain-free multilingual computing. Several technologies make this more a reality every day. In particular, XML and Unicode are the two big heroes of multilingual computing. The downside? Well, unfortunately, these things are still not fully implemented everywhere and are very poorly understood and cared about by many. Unfortunately, to many software engineers it’s a non-issue, but it should be a no-brainer. Since all modern operating systems support Unicode and XML data, it should be simple, right? Wrong.

The problem is, XML itself is also still a very vague, fuzzy thing to many, including myself. So much time is spent focusing on 1’s and 0’s and data types, that one of the most important aspects of all is just ignored. Fortunately, hardware is reaching a critical mass of capability so that supporting Unicode and XML can be very feasible all the time. The sad part is, not enough engineers are privy to or savvy about either technology. Everything outside of C and assembly code uses a subset of XML for key/value encoding in arrays. It’s brilliant. But unfortunately, even C has poorly documented multilingual support. The truth is most programming is basically done in English, but the data is in many languages.

With the web this is as much a problem as anywhere else. Actually, with the web it is worse still than with software on the computer in question OS X and Windows XP both handle multilingual software very well these days. The toys that run the internet playroom don’t. Most server setups will still mangle non-Latin text. The goal of Unicode and XML is to make the language issue transparent. A set-it-and-forget-it mode.

If anyone out there knows a resource for PHP or Perl scripting to process forms in utf-8, please contact me now!!!テスト

I mean, WOW. It is completely amazing to me, how much IE really sucks at rendering valid and proper CSS no matter how simple. Even this WordPress blog gets mangled by IE. Not to mention other sites I work on.

If you are reading this from a Windows PC, do yourself and everyone else a favor and make damn sure you are using Firefox. If you are reading this from a Mac, use Firefox or Safari. Linux users, use KHTML/Konqueror or Firefox.

I can understand when a client wants sites that work with IE6, but only barely. It really is pathetic. I wonder how on earth anyone can use the internet at all with IE?

Sadly, there are still numerous sites, even government sites like the Direct Student Loan Service site, that will not work well with anything but IE. How they manage to do that is way beyond me, but I would not be surprised if it was hackable.

I am sitting in an internet cafe, and I am deathly afraid to publish this post vie IE6 for fear it will screw up WordPress somehow.

World, get your act together and ditch Internet Explorer!

I downloaded and test-drove the (barely) OS X version Amaya, the W3C’s browser/editor. It has some very interesting features, but Continue reading →

For those who don’t know, or don’t realize it, the next phase of life on the internet will be some sort of CMS (Content Management System). A CMS allows you to focus on contributing content to a site and not on writing code. Well, that is, once you have done all the planning and/or coding to set everything up the way you want it. Blog-centric CMS software such as WordPress, MoveableType, Blogger, etc all make it a lot easier to get started and to customize things. More powerful solutions such as Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, etc offer far more potential for customization, yet have a much bigger set of steps to climb to have a functioning, unique web site. Continue reading →

CSS. Now you’re in for a ride. Ok, Cascading Style Sheets, the name is dumb, like many internet technologies with acronyms. CSS is cool, not perfect, but better than styling things with HTML 4 element attributes. If you’ve done a little OOP (object oriented programming) it’s kinda like that.
CSS tries to “separate the presentation from the structure” of the HTML/XHTML document. And for basics, it does this quite well. But to achieve the really cool looking web 2.0 style sites with rounded corners, and nifty plasticy stuff, well, you’re going to end up breaking that rule. It means using 4 things in XHTML a lot, Continue reading →

Browsing through the book stores, there are books galore that claim to be all about HTML, XHTML, those + CSS, and on and on. There are books about about PHP, MySQL and both together. But there is one segment poorly covered.
Forms. Specifically, XHTML Strict compliant Forms. There is a big gap here. Forms are one of the major uses of JavaScript (for validating forms) PHP (for processing or even creating forms) and MySQL for storing form data. All the books cover Forms briefly at best. All books published in the last 2 years claim to be XHTML compliant, too. And well, they are, sort of. Saying they are XHTML compliant is almost as meaningful as saying you speak a language. What they tend to be, though, is XHTML Transitional compliant, which is pretty much nothing more than lower-case element tags. They all still maintain chapters (wastefully) on Framesets and there is a tendency to give oodles of examples of elements with deprecated attributes while failing to point out what is deprecated or barely making the effort.

We need two things out there, and we need them now.

1. Books that are only XHTML Strict
2. Books that focus on XHTML Strict Forms and connecting them with PHP/Perl/etc… and MySQL

I really wonder why so few books spend time addressing forms…? Forms are not basically hard, but can be very sophisticated. One problem that is inexcusable and that I see all to often is the name="somename" attribute in the <form> element. You can put that in the elements that make up a form, but not the form element itself.