Gadgetopia

Warning! Pry Your Career Out from Under HTML: This guy takes exception to HTML's ubiquity and makes a case that HTML's days are numbered and those with careers tied to it need to move on. "Regardless of its usefulness, HTML's inability to change is a warning signal: the game has ...

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: This is a handy little tool. Once you have completed editing an HTML document in Word 2000 or Excel 2000, you can use the Office HTML Filter to remove the Office-specific markup tags from the final copy of the HTML document. I took a 45-page ...

Tidying up your HTML with PHP: This appears to be a PowerPoint converted to HTML, so the presentation is a little horrid, but the content is amazing. We've talked about HTML Tidy integration with PHP5 before, but this details here are fantastic. Yes, you know Tidy can make your HTML ...

HTML Email: This guy has a nice rant going about why he hates HTML email. The underlying evilness of Microsoft aside, I want to address the the underlying evil of HTML email. Some would accuse me of trying to keep the internet in the '90s with old technology and not ...

Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5: The next version of PHP includes an extension for HTML Tidy, so you can have every HTML document perfectly formatted on its way out the door by applying HTML Tidy to the output buffer. When the Tidy extension is installed, it can be ...

Make sure machines dig your designs: XHTMLized: These guys do outsourced HTML/CSS, nothing else. You send them a PSD, they send you back HTML/CSS. Look super in all major browsers [ ] Optimized for search engines [ ] Accessibly ready for everyone [ ] They have a little slider on their site that ...

I've been toying with an idea lately, and instead of actually doing it (don't have the time), I'm going to throw it out here for fun. My idea is for an extremely simplistic content management system -- one based on HTML files and a scheduled file system crawl. First, some ...

I've been playing around with the W3C HTML validator, and I've found, sadly, that there's no easy way to get this page to validate. There were some problems that I fixed, but when I try to validate against 4.01 Transitional, I get about 50 errors related to the use of ...

HTML Tags illustrated: This is absolutely brilliant in places. It makes me want to see LI and STRONG fight. BR is great. Via Boing Boing.

FileStructureToHtml: "FileStructureToHtml let you print out files and folders of your drives ( or selectable folders) recursive into a html file..." I did this, just for fun, and ended up with a 47 MB HTML file that crashes any browser I try to load it into. Neat. Via LockerGnome.

SimpleCode: This is very, very handy if you often post code samples. Translates normal (X)HTML into entity-encoded, nesting indented markup suitable for code examples.

the business value of web standards: This is a good article about how to write good, solid HTML, and the author hits on something I discovered as well when re-assessing how to teach HTML for The Joshua Project. "For years, the standards community has been extolling the virtues of keeping ...

We're deep into HTML and CSS now with The Joshua Project, and I'm determined to teach these guys the right way to do things from the start, which means lots of CSS. I'm not going to let them get into the bad habits of HTML hacks. No FONT tags, no ...

Here's an obvious point: all content is not created equal. When you implement content management, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that content comes in vastly different levels of structure. Structured content is easy -- anything that you can input into an Excel spreadsheet is nicely structured. A list of products, ...

Word HTML Cleaner: Dean Allen has always done a great job with his Word HTML Cleaner. You save a Word document as HTML, upload it, and you get HTML back that's stripped of all the Word HTML funkiness. "This utility strips proprietary Microsoft tags and other cruft from Word HTML ...

The euro sign in HTML (and in some other contexts): I had to use that weird euro sign in the last post. I copped out and just wrote "euro." Here's a page full of different ways to handle the Euro in HTML. Interesting. In HTML documents, it is best to ...

Knobs and Trees: A great rant about how HTML hasn't really gone anywhere for years and Web UIs lag woefully behind client UIs, much as Joel Solsky stated about a month ago or so. I think the essential problem with browsers is that users have not demanded of vendors [...] ...

dompdf - The PHP 5 HTML to PDF Converter: Someone mentioned this over in the post on Prince. It looks quite good -- they have a demo page where you can enter HTML in a box, then generate a PDF real-time. I tried it -- it respects all CSS and ...

Digital Inspiration: Convert doc, xls, ppt, rtf, pdf to HTML: Brutally simple hack to get a ton of different document formats into HTML: send them to a GMail account as an attachment, then "View as HTML." GMail will show the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, ...

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I got to thinking today about the major protocol and language that drive the Web HTTP and HTML and I reflected on the fact that this pair is essentially frozen in time. There hasn't been a major update to either of ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

XHTML: Technical Masturbation: Some good points here on XHTML. "When and if XHTML browsers become popular, will they be as forgiving as HTML browsers with structural mistakes? Answer has to be Yes because people want browsers to be a Tool, not a Judge."

Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link: http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm Looks like a "CMS preview" link accidently made it's way into production. I ...

Markup Guide: Here's a handy guide to all those obscure HTML tags you never use, and probably should. A lot of these tags giving meaning to the text they affect, not just formatting, much as we discussed in this post about the ADDRESS tag a few months ago.

Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?: I hate Flash. What I hate even more is when someone presents a well-reasoned argument for why it beats HTML. "Remember my original statement, 'HTML and CSS will never be able to do what Flash does'? While this is true, it’s quite possible ...

Monopoly (game): Here's the Wikipedia entry on Monopoly, notable to geeks for a very cool rendering of the gameboard via an HTML table. Nicely done. (The link above has a bookmark which will take you right to it.) The text of the B & O and Pennsylvania Railroad spaces is ...

Party Like It's 1996!: Apple has gone all Microsoft on us, creating new Safari-only HTML markup willy-nilly. Even more troubling is the opening phrase: "Another extension we made to HTML is..." I'd be really happy if someone explained to me how this is different from what Netscape and Microsoft did ...

HTML 2 PHP - Convert your HTML Scripts to PHP: Here's a simple but handy little tool: drop a bunch of HTML into the input box and it will return it all surrounded by PHP print statements. So if you need to move an HTML block into a PHP code ...

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Google parsed a billion Web pages and pulled some stats out of the HTML. We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, ...

Joe and I got to talking about this little-known HTML tag today. It's an odd-bird one of the few HTML tags that provides semantic meaning, as if it would be more at home in XML. I found this explanation, which is what Joe and I suspected: The devisors of ...

Content Management vs. Unstructured, Flat HTML Pages: This article tries to make the point that content management is for everyone. It's a comparison of using a CMS against using simple HTML. "So how do you convince a company that no matter how small its Web presence it should consider some ...

HTML/OS is a Web development platform from Aestiva that has an interesting angle the database is built into the binary kernel. So unlike ASP, JSP, etc. where you have a scripting language as middleware between a Web server and a database, in this case the same executable does both, ...

Slashdot HTML 4.01 and CSS: Good for them. I can't believe they went this long. After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. Here's the incredible stat from the story: [Thanks ...

The big limitation of Web apps is that you're at the mercy of the user's browser. It may behave like you want it to, or it may not, but there's no doubt that it limits how complicated and functional a Web app can get. In a browser, remember, your page ...

I believe in presentation logic, I really do. Call me a hack, but formatting logic mixed into your presentation code isn t necessarily a bad thing. I started Web development in traditional ASP. And I sucked at it, believe me. I wrote some of the most ridiculously convoluted apps that were ...

Xinha Here! - All Releases: Your content management system doesn't have WYSIWYG? No problem -- here's a Firefox extension to make any textarea a WYSIWYG HTML editor on-demand. Xinha Here! is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any HTML textarea and text input elements. ...

Style Master Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editor: Western Civilisation has released Style Master 3. We've talked about this software before. About a year ago, we said. "...I don't see a need for it, really. It's a GUI for building CSS sheets with controls for just about every possible directive and ...

DevEdit is a Browser Based WYSIWYG Online HTML Editor...: DevEdit has got to be one of the most impressive, feature-rich, Web-based, WYSIWYG HTML editors on the market. At first glance, I thought this was just another basic rendition of the browser control within IE. Looking deeper though, I saw it's ...

The more you use CSS, the harder this is, because you find that CSS really scales down the number of HTML tags you use. I forgot very few really easy ones about half of the tags I missed I had never heard of before. 49 (In case the image ...

XHTML Validator to RSS : Ben Hammersley: Oh my goodness, this is brilliant. ...I like nice to-do lists and automatic checking of my pages. So to combine the two, I've made a widget to create a XHTML Validation Results RSS feed from any page. I now have an RSS feed ...

Funny you should bring up Vermeer Technologies. While trying to beat a Visual Studio web project into working yesterday, I did a little network sniffing to find out what FrontPage and Visual Studio actually do to make things work. I'd always thought it was WebDAV that made them go, but ...

Helping your client maintain markup quality: Interesting concept of a way to help your clients keep their markup clean: style it ugly when it s wrong. [ ] one idea is to make any errors or suspicious markup obvious to the person working on the document. One way of doing that is ...

Transform HTML with Regular Expressions: If you don't know what regular expressions are or why you would need to use them, read this. It's a good introduction to regex, grounded with examples of transforming HTML.

I just have to get something off my chest: Adobe GoLive generates the most wretched HTML I have ever seen. Joe and I are working on cleaning a site up that was done in GoLive. Joe was so irritated by the wee hours of the morning that he threatened to ...

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: Here's a great antidote for hotlinkers people who embed images from YOUR Web site in their page (so they get the image at your bandwidth expense). This system will prevent images from loading in pages not on your site. These fixes aren't uncommon, but this ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

Prince: Overview: There's a big gap in getting Web content into print. I've had to cross the gap a couple times, and I've both generated PDFs server-side and used CSS to style HTML into printable format. Both methods suck. Prince is a system that lets you take XML, style it ...

Mason HQ: Welcome to Mason: Ever wanted to use Perl without CGI? Ever wanted to just embed Perl in HTML like PHP or ASP? Anyone? Seriously....anyone? Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages ...

A Large-Scale Study of the Evolution of Web Pages: This page may seem terribly long and dry, but it's fascinating. Researchers from Microsoft and HP (as part of the PageTurner project) were measuring the rate of change and decay of Web pages over time. "Between 26 Nov. 2002 and 5 ...

SpellBound - Spellchecker for Firefox and the Mozilla Suite: All those comments this morning about my spelling made me self-conscious. This works beautifully. SpellBound is a port of the spellchecker code and user interface from the Mozilla Suite's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea ...

Acrobat...to Support Full XML Digital Editions: More information on the changes coming to Adobe Acrobat. XML is great. "...a website that is XML-compatible could automatically display as HTML elements the text, illustrations, or entire pages or chapters of 'Adobe Reader' PDF documents. Likewise, Adobe's new software would be able to ...

Texty: scms: This interesting. It s a CMS where you can create fragments of HTML, and then put them on your Web site using a Javascript include. So you edit the content there, and it gets pulled in to your pages client-side. Never open a HTML page again for a minor ...

Web Development at WTFU: This is a good one. There's a twist at the end. Gabrielle's grasp of "documents" versus "programs" was just as painfully embarrassing. After editing an HTML document, she'd always say, "OK, I'm now saving my HTML program and will run it in Internet Explorer." I won't ...

AOL's Garden Might Flourish Without Rainman: I did some searching for "Rainman" and didn't find much. The good news is they're bagging it for HTML. Over the past year, the Dulles new-media pioneer built a fancy new system to publish its fare not in the company's proprietary programming language called ...

Stealing Content Follow-up: Happy Results: Shirley kicked some butt. Good for her. Our original post on this (with an in-depth comment from Shirley), is here. "After sending off a more formal letter Friday with copies to upstream providers I finally got positive results from the company that stole my Websitetips.com ...

How the PHP acronym was reborn: Interesting post from one of the old-school PHP guys about ho the language came to be called PHP . There really wasn t much rhyme or reason to it. This is a quote from Rasmus back in 1998: I think I would prefer to just ...

HTML provides formatting tags for headings, so why don't we use them? H1, H2, H3...you wouldn't believe how often designers re-invent the wheel by enclosing headings in DIV tags with stylesheets classes attached. I used to do it, then I learned a few things: Search engines will weight terms in ...

New XML Features in Microsoft Office Access 2003: I've talked before about how Access would make a handy client-side publishing tool, a la Radio or CityDesk. Just this week, I've been doing some Access user interface programming, and I've been impressed with how good it is in that regard. However, ...

About Conditional Comments: A handy but pretty obscure feature of Internet Explorer. A special comment format lets only IE see certain HTML / CSS code. So make that Web page look good in Mozilla and Opera, then hide the code necessary for IE in these comments. Conditional comments have certain ...

Say you have someone who is interested in Web development, but who has never really progressed beyond Dreamweaver. Where would you start with them? My gut is telling me that you start by teaching them HTML and CSS from the ground up. Do you agree? If so, what resources would ...

In a perfect world, you'd never put anything in your HTML that defines the presentation of your page. You'd only use HTML for content, and allow the stylesheet to define the presentation. One of my few gripes with CSS is the inability to create a box with rounded corners. In ...

I'm interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I'm sure you know, is not havig too little functionality, but having too much. I haven't found one yet that I'm comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors. How about FrontPage or Dreamweaver, ...

Updating Excel From the Web: Really great article on Excel Web Queries. Users always want to get data in Excel for some reason. Web queries are a rock-simple way to let them do this. Web queries essentially let Excel read data in from an HTML table. Excel can call a ...

XHTML templating joy: I looked into TAL a bit when I was on my Zope fling last year. It is handy to be able to have all sorts of dummy content in your template while you're developing it. The benefit of doing it this way is that WYSIWYG editors can ...

HTML Tip: Sorting With The OPTGROUP Element: I found a tag today that I had never heard of before. OPTGROUP allows you to have an option in a dropdown that isn't selectable, is seperately formattable via CSS, and that other options are indented under. Until recently, the OPTGROUP element belonged ...

TopStyle Pro HTML Editor, CSS Editor, XHTML Editor for Windows: Nick Bradbury was the creator of the legendary HomeSite probably the first text editor made specifically for editing HTML. Now he has a new text editor called TopStyle. I downloaded it and tried it out, and it's extremely good. ...

Lindows.com - Michael's Minutes: Apparently somone found a FrontPage meta tag on one of the pages on the Lindows site, and they contacted the company about it. This announcement was made shortly after. "...we're kicking off Nvu (pronounced N-view). This product will bring to Linux a solid WYSIWYG HTML editor ...

Got FoO - Office 2K3 Style: This guy duplicated the upcoming Outlook 2003 layout in HTML for his blog. Nicely done.

There's a standard way of handling object updates via HTML forms. Generally speaking, when the user selects an object to edit, you populate an HTML form with all the data from the object, post all these fields when the user presses Submit, then update all the fields of the record ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

This page was transformed into this page through nothing but a new CSS file; no HTML was changed.

Convert PDF, HTML, DOC, TIFF and more: So, your office needs to produce simple PDFs, but you don't want to pay $450 for a retail copy of Acrobat? First, of all, don't pay it because their are a number of alternatives like RoboPDF that are so much cheaper. They don't ...

At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these ...

I think it's time to address content usability in RSS feeds. I subscribe to about 100 feeds, and I run through postings really quick, either hitting the Delete key (thanks Newsgator!) or the down arrow to move to the next item (when I've looked at them all, I go back ...

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...

Testing Page Load Speed: Here's a really interesting look at what a browser does to render a Web page by the guys over at Mozilla. It brings up all sorts of stuff you may not have considered about your pages. So what happens when you go to a URL like ...

IE2Mozilla: Here's a hack to make all Microsoft programs (including IE) render HTML using the Gecko rendering engine instead of the IE engine.

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It s a traditional Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick ...

I'm working on an app right now with a multi-step form process, and a brilliant designer put step indicators in the design so you'd know what step you are on. So the unstyled HTML looks like this:

  1  2  3

Now, before I knew I could use multiple classes on a ...

I'm doing a project with Ektron CMS400.Net right now, and that system relies pretty heavily on XSL, which I hate. I really think XSL is a tool of devil, meant just to drive me mad. But I digress. I needed a good little XSL authoring app. XMLSpy is the absolute ...

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...

Web design and development isn't a perfect science there are no absolutes. You can take a stand on how something should be done, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to work that way. I wrote this article about a year ago, and in it, I drew several lines ...

Here's something that WYSIWYG editors don't do well: paragraphs within list items. Like this (ironically, Markdown does it just fine): This is a paragraph This is another one. This is another list item. The problem is that one you're in a list item and you press Enter, you get a ...

onfocus.com : snapGallery: This little gem was written by Paul Bausch author of Amazon Hacks and it demonstrates two things I've believed in for a long time: (1) the underestimated power of Windows scripting (the only people fully exploiting this are virus writers), and (2) the publishing model ...

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...

One of the perennial problems with Web-based content management is that people don t want to code HTML for their formatting. They don t want to surround italic text with the right tags, form IMG tags, write link tags, etc. So there are several WYSIWYG options ActiveX components like Ektron, and ...

What effect does RSS have on the commenting and discussion of blog entries? Take Mr. Foo and Mr. Bar. They are identical in every way, except Mr. Foo visits Gadgetopia.com a couple of times a day, while Mr. Bar just monitors the site via RSS. Who's more likely to comment ...

Are you paying someone to make web pages? By now I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot ...

Link Markers: CSS Generated Content: A good example of something you can do using Mozilla and Opera, but not IE. Makes me want to use XML/XSL instead of HTML.

Example Style Guide: The guys over at silverorange have published one of their HTML style guides under a Creative Commons license allowing you to borrow it for your own uses.

XML Workshop Ltd. - WordML: Here are some samples of the underlying XML format in the new version of Word. Microsoft has also just released a WordML to HTML XSL convertor.

How Microsoft Lost the API War: This is an incredibly long, but very interesting, article from Joel Spolsky in which he explains why the venerable Windows API is dying. He spends 6,252 fascinating words and a couple of dozen tangents getting to this point at the end: [...] Microsoft's API ...

...it's all about layers. A List Apart has put out two great new articles on the use of JavaScript in web design. In 'JavaScript Triggers', Peter-Paul Koch (of Quirksmode fame) makes an interesting point: There are 3 big layers to an HTML page: structure, appearance, and behavior. CSS is great ...

html2text: THE ASCIINATOR (aka html2txt): This Python script takes HTML and converts it to Markdown, which we love around here. Here's how a complete post (sidebar content and all) on this site looks in Markdown. Very cool.

The Mythical Business Layer: This is an exceptionally well-written article from an unlikely source discussing the classic N-Tier application structure. [ ] what it really is, however, is a bad design that leads to bad software. Or at the very least, dangerously poor semantics. Now, multi-tiered applications aren t bad, but some ...

PowerGREP: Windows grep Software: I know that search and replace tools aren't anything new, but PowerGrep is far and away the best one I've ever seen for Windows. PowerGREP is a powerful grep tool for quickly searching through large numbers of text and binary files, such as software source code, ...

NYPL: Style Guide: Need to come up with HTML and CSS coding standards for your company? You could do a lot worse than this resource a set of well-written, easy-to-understand guides from the New York Public Library.

A few weeks ago, I read a good article on paper prototyping over at Jakob Nielsen's site. And then the other day, I wrote a bit about how overall application design and interface was more of an influence on an app's success than the actual code behind it. So, in ...

On Managing Content and Content Management Systems (CMS): This guy makes a great point here: "I have yet to see one [CMS] that is anywhere worth the amount of money and time needed to get it into place and often times, for many reasons, a CMS can actually make a ...

PNG is an awesome image format, primarily useful for its ability to support 8-bit transparency (that is, an alpha channel where there's a continuum from opaque to transparent, instead of the simple on/off transparency of GIF). So what's been holding you back from using it? IE for Windows, mostly, which ...

A long time ago, I reworked the URLs of this site. They used to just be the ID of the entry (a la the default MT URL scheme), but then I decided to get cute and embed the date and title in the URL as well. At the time, I ...

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don t want to hack into Ben s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting ...

Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky): This a good post that discusses how Joel Spolsky changed his mind about user interfaces. I knew Spolsky was very thick-client oriented for a long time, but this post has some interesting insights and information on how and why he ...

Notepad popups: Oh, nice. "Because of a design flaw in Internet Explorer, Notepad popup windows can be displayed from an HTML email message or Web page regardless of browser security settings. In addition, Notepad popups can access files on a hard disk, possibilly causing stability problems in a Windows system." ...

A few weeks ago, I posted about how to use some Apache directives to protect your content editors from themselves. In that post, I said: ...there is a way to configure mod_rewrite to check two roots for a file. If it doesn't find a file in the actual Web root, ...

EditPlus Text Editor, HTML Editor, Programmers Editor for Windows - Welcome!: A while back, Cory Doctorow had a little love-in for BBEdit, apparently the greatest text editor for Macs ever made. Well, after mentioning it a number of times over the years, it's time I did the same for the ...

Speaking of CSS, check out this crazy gallery by Stu Nicholls. There's nary a stitch of javascript on this page. Even the CSS isn't that complicated, and the HTML is fairly basic. This is so cool, it literally gave me chills. That's how big of a dork I am, people.

Learning Movable Type: I didn't dig too deep into these, but they look good. Via Lockergnome. Learning Movable Type is a growing set of tutorials aimed at helping beginners to the Movable Type content management system. These tutorials are geared for those with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, ...

List-o-matic - generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items : Very cool service. Enter the items in your list, pick a snazzy style, and it will give you all the HTML and CSS necessary to build it. Great for people like me who learn best through reverse engineering gimme ...

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: After all these years, Slashdot is redesigning (the link is a preview). Sort of. This was the winning design to convert Slashdot from it's old-school HTML to a current CSS-driven design. Not much has changed, though it's cleaner and we finally say goodbye ...

GWT is Open-Sourced: This is cool, but I had no idea the GWT was that complicated. The Google Web Toolkit has been open-sourced. The toolkit was developed internally and can be used to create products like GMail and Google Maps. It allows you to program in Java and let the ...

malfunction.org | fulifier: This site looks just peachy through this tool. "The Fulifier fulifies a site, which means turning it around three thousand times uglier than it was before, making it look something like all the sites around 1998 made by lame ten year old script kiddie who wanted to ...

Movable Type doesn't have a content review system. You can write an entry and leave it in "Draft" status, but no one knows about it unless they go looking for it. In practice, this can be a pain. New authors to Gadgetopia are told to leave their first dozen or ...

Here's another pattern of content management: content objects have "views." This means that content objects have several predefined ways of being viewed across your system. For example, here are (the) two big ones using an "article" as an example. Individual The view of a single contect object -- how your ...

Meta Gen: Handy. Looks like you can isolate a particular directory, so not everything on the site has to have the same META. META Gen is a fast and useful freeware tool for Web developers. Generate META Tags. Unlike the simple programs that you will find in other web sites ...

ObscureTags.com -- a museum of strange and rarely used HTML tags: I love this site. Old tags never die. They just go to Hell and regroup. This page contains absolutely no CSS because CSS is dumb. We've talked about some of these in the context of the ADDRESS tag last ...

Zempt :: Multi-platform posting for Movable Type :: Zempt: I'm writing this from Zempt, so if you see it on the blog, then it worked. Zempt is a desktop client for Movable Type. It's not WYSIWYG, but it still seems very competent. HTML edit buttons, spellcheck, tabbed preview, etc. The ...

Enable DesignMode: I tried this, and it worked great. Someone please tell me there's something like this for Firefox. Enable DesignMode is an extension for Internet Explorer that adds a context menu option that enables Design Mode. Design mode lets you edit the web page in the active window. No ...

Another one for the web developer toolkit: MOZiE will simultaneously display the same page using both IE and Mozilla. A great way to shed some of your CSS woes. MOZiE is an extremely light-weight, free Windows application that allows web designers the ability to compare page rendering in Mozilla and ...

We've talked here before about Nvu -- the open-source WYSIWYG editor that wants to unseat FrontPage. I've played with it before, but -- despite my glowing reviews of the product -- I had never actually tried to build a site with it. However, this week, the preschool at my chuch ...

SeaMonkey News: While the Mozilla Suite split into its component parts (Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu), the combination of all the pieces will live on as SeaMonkey. The group is planning to deliver an Alpha version of its first release, SeaMonkey 1.0, within the next few weeks. [...] SeaMonkey contains a ...

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library: We need another JavaScript library like we need a hole in the head, but this one looks quite good. jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to ...

Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla 1.3: Very cool. Along with NTLM (coming in 1.4), this is one more thing to which IE can no longer lay sole claim: "Mozilla 1.3 introduces an implementation of Microsoft Internet Explorer's designMode feature. The rich-text editing support in Mozilla 1.3 supports the designMode feature which ...

AIDA32 - Worldwide Sysinfo Tool: This little gem of a tool will tell you more about your system that you thought there was to know. It generates a big report (2MB as an HTML archive) with every possible piece of information on your machine: motherboard, chipset, BIOS, running processes, user ...

FCKeditor - The text editor for Internet: A neat little Web-based WYSIWYG editor with an extremely unfortunate name. I'd love to see this name come up in a board meeting of some kind. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors ...

I don't like content management systems that try to handle the displaying of content. I alluded to this last year, when I wrote: There are two sides to publishing Web content: First you create the content, store it, edit it, send it through workflow, get it approved, then stage it ...

A lot of people want to roll their own search with Movable Type. Us, for instance Gadgetopia has a two-tiered search system based on whether the search term appears in the title, keywords, or body of the entry (see this post for more information). Our search is done in ...

I built a small utility some time ago to do batch XSL transforms. It was both (1) an attempt to make transforming easier, and (2) an exercise to get some experience with Microsoft's woefully under-exposed HTML Application technology (can you call it a "technology"? It's just an unrestricted Web page, ...

Code Generation Network: A site devoted to automatic code generation. Full of articles, information, and links to tools that will write code for you. I was interested in janeBUILDER which promised: "janeBUILDER is a visual editor for PHP. JaneBUILDER allows you build complex PHP pages by dragging and dropping. The ...

AOL discontinuing newsgroup service: Obviously, you can still get them through Google Groups, but is it the same? America Online says it will no longer provide subscribers with access to Usenet newsgroups. When you visit keyword "newsgroups" while signed on to the service, a pop-up appears with the following message: ...

What's the deal with comment spam like this: http://www.pornsite.xyz/viagra.html badonkadonkbarker There's always a link to some porno/gambling site and a made-up contraction that makes no sense. The only think I can figure out is that if you Google one of the nonsense words from the posts, you get a bunch ...

www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project: Did you know O'Rielly publishes some free books? Man, I love free books. Over the years, O'Reilly & Associates has published a number of "Open Books" books with various forms of "open" copyright. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific ...

Turn Firefox into a web writer: Here's a great article over at Lifehacker on how to hot-rod Firefox into being a really nice place to write text. We've probably covered all these extensions at one time or another, but it's really handy to have all this one place. You can ...

Firefox Experiments With Keyboard Navigation: This reminds me of DVD menu navigation, which kinda sucks, so I don't know how well this is going to work. Bravo for trying, though. Rather than point and click with the mouse, these Firefox builds let users apply the Shift and Alt keys, then ...

We've written about CSS Zen Garden before, but development of style sheets for that site has really taken off. There are some truly breathtaking designs on display over there. Try these links any one of them will blow your mind. Zunflower fleur de l’avante-garde Backyard White Lily Creepy Crawly ...

Joel on Software: A really interesting point here. ...language designers never bother to put database integration features into their languages. As a tiny example of this, the syntax for "where" clauses is never identical to the syntax for "if" statements. And don't get me started about data type mismatches: just ...

Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent: It looks like the W3C's trip to the patent office may have paid off. "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has stepped squarely into a fight roiling the Web by agreeing to re-examine the Eolas patent for a browser plug-in, a development likely to ...

log4php - log4j ported to PHP!: Log4j and Velocity were the only two things I liked about Java. Smarty can replace Velocity, and now Log4j is covered too. Log4php is a php port of Log4j, the most popular Java logging framework...Supports configuration through xml and properties file... Supports File, RollingFile, ...

MySQL - Dynamically Insert and Update Values In a MySQL Database Using OOP: Good stuff, because I hate writing admin interfaces. Just hate it. We will make a class that goes out and looks for the values for us and builds a SQL statement on the fly. All we have ...

The more I work with Perl/CGI, the more it looks like J2EE. The Perl I m seeing in apps today is a far cry from a few years ago. Now Perl apps post to a single script (the controller) that controls the flow of the app, have all their code abstracted ...

Design Guidelines for Visualizing Links: A lot of really good guidelines for hyperlink usability that really boil down to one point: do links the way HTML was built to handle them and you won't have any problems. Ninety-nine percent of usability problems on the Net are a result of people ...

Create a Pull Quote with Javascript (and CSS): Interesting method of dynamically creating pullquotes. When used for drawing a readers eye to an important passage, it can be argued that they are a presentational effect, so it would be nice to have a method to create a pull quote without ...

Someone just posted this comment to an entry, not realizing that I strip HTML from comments. "There is a very real possibility levitra of coming off as deranged, drulogies after all. Also - this may vioxx sort of uncomfortably foreground ambien critical reactions to music. celebrex If someone walks up ...

Dynamic Text Replacement: Look at this page. It looks like someone did all their headings as images, which hides the text from search engines and has huge usability problems...but then look at the source. It's all good 'ol HTML. I haven't read the article that explains how to do it, ...

The internet is s**t: Worth reading: " ...look what we've done with [the Internet]. Food wrappers and soap operas now tell us to visit their websites. Money is pumped online by people who can't even spell HTML. All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type: Ouch, this is a good plugin. There's no limit to what you can do with this. This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. [...] The plugin will work ...

CSS Naked Day: I wish I had mentioned this earlier, but it's a good idea nonetheless. Where did my Design go? The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a ...

Google Enterprise: Google Search Appliance: The latest version of the Google Search Appliance has direct connectors for some popular CMS systems, so it can spider their content both by browsing the resulting HTML pages, or by directly plugging into the systems. The connector framework makes it easy for partners, developers ...

(Note: If you re reading this in RSS, it refers to an audio widget only available on the HTML side. Click the post title to go to the page which contains the widget.) Okay, here s the first one. I hope it goes well. (And I m purposely not calling this a ...

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google: This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, because it s just good to know. Second, because it confirms the value of keywords in the URL, as I ve questioned in the past. One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores ...

Download details: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta: Hadn't seen this before, but I'm game for anything that makes developing for IE suck less. Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page. [...] Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques. ...

CSS Colors: Take Control Using PHP: Good article on how to use PHP (or any scripting language, really) to generate your CSS. While many web sites use powerful programming environments to create HTML, these same tools are usually ignored when it comes to creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article ...

ALTer: Adam Kalsey whipped up a quick script to add ALT attributes to all IMG tags in a site. Sometimes, the simple solutions are the best. "The program walks through a directory and opens every file ending with .html or .htm. Then it looks for image tags without alt attributes ...

Microsoft removes ActiveX activation warning from IE: The Eolas debacle has apparently ended. Microsoft paid them off and hopes to update all IE versions by April 2008. For an undisclosed sum, the software maker has licensed the patented technology in question from Eolas, allowing it to modify IE6 and 7 ...