Web Development
Web Development
A friend of mine is the creator of a really nice WYSIWYG HTML Web Editor :
WxEdit. I know there already are a lot of editor out there but this one is really beautiful and has a lot of nice features. It's not ASP.NET specific so you can use it in every web applications using PHP, ASP, etc.
Here's a small javascript code snippet that checks if the page is nested in a frameset, and if so, reloads the entire page (reseting the frameset) so that the page takes up all the space of the browser. Typically, I use this trick for login pages : assume that a user wants to display the default page of an application, which uses a frameset (with 2 frames for example). If the user isn't authenticated, the login page will be displayed twice, one in each frame. To avoid this, just use this little javascript function :
function expandToTop() {
if ((top == null) || (top == self))
return;
top.location.href = location.href;
}
Just make a call to the expandToTop() function in the onload event of the body of your login page and that's it !
Luke Hutteman complains about ABC News providing RSS Feeds that do not stick to RSS Standards (use of exotic date formats and weird namespaces declarations, lack of mandatory elements). He also mentions the "Parse RSS At All Costs" article of Mark Pilgrim, which I immediately read.
Since there are some RSS Feeds (10% according to him) that aren't well-formed XML, Mark proposes to NOT use an XML Parser to manipulate feeds content, but use regular expressions... WTF ?!? Even if I agree with him that RSS readers should try all possible solutions to extract datas (in many different elements or different hierarchical structure), I really don't think that we (RSS Reader makers) should try to parse not XML well-formed feeds... They're totally killing the definition of standard and XML... Dare Obasanjo (the famous RSS Bandit maker) left some comments :
Encouraging consumers of XML to support ill-formed XML reduces the power of XML and induces fragmentation. If we arbitrarily pick bits and pieces of a standard to support then we cheapen the technology and reduce it to worthlessness.
I'd hate to see XML on the 'web reduced to HTML during the browser wars with people simply checking if "it works well with Mark Pilgrim's program" or creating ill-formed markup simply to satisfy broken tools.
I totally agree with Dare. A lot more comments were posted, but Dare and Mark couldn't agree... Anyway, if you're reading this and you're publishing your website content with RSS, please, provide at least well-formed XML... You can use RDF, RSS, or any other well-known format, but please, produce parsable XML !!
Who said progress bars cannot be in web applications ? Well, I say they can ! This article will demonstrate how you can improve the quality and the user-friendlyness of your web applications, by using progress bar to keep users informed during long server-side process. Indeed, the fact that a web application runs in a "stateless" and "disconnected" mode, leads us to think such things can't be done. But progress bars can be and without the need for any ActiveX and other dirty Java Applets.
The key thing for creating Progress Bar in a web application, is the browser's ability to display a page before it's totally loaded. We'll use this feature to progressively build and send the page to the client. First, we'll send the HTML code to display a nice and beautiful progress bar. Then, here is the trick, we'll dynamically send some Javascript code blocks that will updates its progression. All these, of course, before closing the HTTP request. In C#, Response.Write() lets us add some HTML to the buffer while Response.Flush() sends all buffered data to the client.
Here is the link to the article : http://www.myblogroll.com/Articles/progressbar
Since it's my first article, I don't know the best website to post that kind of article. CodeProject, Builder.com, any suggestion ?
UPDATE : Doug Thews told me that he posted an article on a similar subject, which has some interesting comments : http://www.ddconsult.com/blogs/illuminati/archives/000089.html
I'm back from vacations. I spent two wonderful weeks at Saint-Tropez, in the south of France. Just sad it's already finished, but let's work again !
Here is what's coming in a very near future (this week) :
- MyBlogroll : I will release the first beta version (which is more an alpha version) of my Web/Online RSS Reader.
- "Progress Bars in Web Applications" article : I'll demonstrate how you can improve the quality and user-friendlyness of your web applications using progress bars (ASP.NET/C#).
- "XMLCursor" article : XMLCursor is a wrapper class (C#) which encapsulates the DOM, and provides a set of really usefull methods to manage XML documents.
- A new .Text Skin.