Posts with keyword: html

8 entries

Stupid Web Design Tricks

Mon May 21 08:39:00 2007

I found this list of 19 things not to do when building a Web site. The first, DO NOT resize the user's browser window, EVER resonated with me because I was reading a site last week that had some great information that I wanted to read, but every time I clicked on a link, my browser would blow up to full size. I finally gave up--it was just too annoying to go on. I also liked number eight: If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS. Even though on average, only 10% or so of
Continue reading {Stupid Web Design Tricks}

Obfuscating Passwords in Forms

Fri May 18 10:59:00 2007

Most are familiar with password fields in Web forms. When you use a password field, anything the user types is obfuscated. This is, to my knowledge, to reduce the danger of shoulder surfers stealing the password by reading the screen as it's typed in. As long as I've used computers, this has been standard practice--the IBM Selectric terminals I used in 1976 would pre-print multiple characters on the paper before having you type your password so it couldn't be stolen from the printout. What would you think of a social networking Web site that in the interest of reducing
Continue reading {Obfuscating Passwords in Forms}

Olivier Thereaux on the Unicorn Validator

Thu May 10 15:53:00 2007

I'm in a talk in the Developer's Track where Olivier Thereaux is discussing the Unicorn project, which is building a new, opensource, generation of Web content validation.
Continue reading {Olivier Thereaux on the Unicorn Validator}

Firebug

Fri Jan 12 11:57:00 2007

Brent Thompson turned me onto Firebug, a Firefox plugin for inspecting and editing HTML and CSS on pages you're viewing. This is a lot more convenient that editing the CSS and then reloading to see what the change does. You can also edit and debug Javascript on the fly and explore the DOM. Fun stuff. And the fact that it's a plugin for Firefox means that it's OS agnostic.
Continue reading {Firebug}

My HTML Mode for Emacs

Fri Oct 20 14:18:00 2006

Some people have asked what HTML mode I finally settled on. I'm using a customized version of Daniel Pfeiffer's adaptation of James Clark's sgml-mode. Yeah, there's lots of SGML stuff that I don't use, but it has a set of HTML keybindings and is easy to add things to. For example, here's my code for inserting an image from Amazon: (define-skeleton amazon-image "HTML image tag for an Amazon book" "ASIN: " '(setq input "") "<a href=\\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/" str "/windleyofente-20\\"> <img src=\\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/" str ".01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg\\" border=\\"0\\" align=\\"right\\" hspace=\\"5\\" vspace=\\"5\\" /></a>" ) You can do much more complicated things. For example, I like
Continue reading {My HTML Mode for Emacs}

Google's Serendipitous Uses

Tue May 30 21:19:00 2006

Derrick Story has a nifty tip for using GMail to convert Word docs to HTML. Just send it as an attachment to your GMail account and then select "View as HTML" next to the attachment. I just tried it with this Word doc and got this HTML document. Very nice. Now, if someone would just get around to building a tool that you drag a Word doc onto and it uses GMail to convert it to HTML and deposit the result in the same directory, that would be awesome.
Continue reading {Google's Serendipitous Uses}

AJAX Color Tool

Thu Apr 6 09:10:00 2006

Here's a nifty little AJAXy color tool demonstration. Once you pull out the tool, drag colors from the bottom of the box to the black boxes on the right hand side of the Web page to see the effect of that color on the layout.
Continue reading {AJAX Color Tool}

Writable Web: Annotating Manual Pages

Wed Nov 16 13:36:00 2005

I'm doing a project in Perl where I needed to tidy the HTML in some pages. There's a nifty little Perl package called, appropriately enough, HTML::Tidy. I used CPAN to grab it and got it working, but I'll be darned if I could figure out how to actually get the tidied text back from the package. If you read the man page, I'll bet you can't figure it out either. No useful examples with the code and searching the Web turned up very little. Turns out the clean method returns the cleaned text, although the man page doesn't say
Continue reading {Writable Web: Annotating Manual Pages}