Thursday, March 28, 2024

Goodies to Go ™
October 27, 2003– Newsletter #256


Goodies to Go ™
October 27, 2003–Newsletter #256

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
 


Featured this week:

* Goodies Thoughts – A Question of
Degree

* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Goodies Peer Reviews

* Feedback Goodies  
* Windows Tech Goodies  
* And Remember This

 


 

Goodies Announcement

The new Beyond HTML Goodies book
is now available!

 

Go beyond the basics
and learn how the pros add and use dynamic HTML features and advanced
JavaScript techniques. Beyond HTML Goodies demonstrates dozens of new and
different features readers can add to their existing Web pages using HTML and
JavaScript. The book starts with simple text and image tips, such as adding a
clock to a Web page or causing text to appear when the mouse moves over an
image. It gradually builds to more complex tricks, including manipulating forms
or working with cookies behind the scenes. Throughout the book, readers enjoy
Joe’s snappy style and “to the point” discussion of each “goody” in the book.

 

http://books.internet.com/books/0789727803

 

 


Goodies Thoughts – A Question of Degree


If you buy a house and move into it, it’s fairly clear that you
can’t claim that you built your own house. If, on the other hand, you buy some
land, have it cleared, have a foundation put in and then have a house put on the
foundation can you justify making that claim? If not, is it because somebody
else did the work? Suppose you bought prefabricated sections which you put
together yourself. How about then? Does it take doing still more of the work,
and if so, how much more? If you bought bricks, sand, cement and so on and
assembled that, would that be sufficient? Or would you have do dig your own
clay, bake your own bricks, mine your own ore and make your tools and so on? At
what point along the continuum can you say that it’s your work, even though
somebody else constructed or manufactured the elements that you are using?

When I first started programming all my code was written in the Assembler
language. The Assembler provided one to one translations for machine code – the
actual "ones and zeros" instructions that the Central Processing Unit (CPU)
could execute. There were no microprocessors then; our computer had ferrite ring
core memory. The MOSFET (Metal Oxide Field Effect Transistor) chip didn’t come
along until the days of the IBM 370. We didn’t actually write machine code, but
we needed to be able to read it, or at least hexadecimal representations of the
memory containing it, if we were to be able to track down any errors that
occurred in our programs. "It’s not like the old days," the old timers around us
would moan. "We used to have to program computers with jumper wires and
plugboards in our time," they would explain. "You really had to understand the
computer back then."

"Uh-huh!"

High level languages improved and provided more powerful programs more
efficiently, so we started to use those languages more and more for mainline
applications. Then along came third and fourth "Generation Language Generators"
– programs that wrote programs based on sets of very high level instructions.
Today many languages are so high level that you almost don’t need to know that
the functionality you are providing is going to run on a computer! At least, and
much of the time, you don’t need to know what kind of computer it will be
running on. Translators, Interpreters, JIT (Just In Time) Compilers and the like
will take care of that sort of question for you at lightning speed (relatively
speaking) at the last moment before it runs.

The Web is a perfect example of this. Many of the technologies we use in modern
web pages have been designed specifically to remove the need to know such things
from the web developer. This is a good thing. It means that we can develop a
single page to serve our purpose, and that people sitting at all sorts of
computers will be able to use it. As time goes by we’ll see more and more
improvements in this direction.

There are those within our ranks who believe that it is impure to use a WYSIWYG
(What You See Is What You Get) editor to design a web page. They feel that a
real web designer writes HTML code from scratch. That’s fine; but progress is
progress. Exactly how pure do we think this form of writing is? It is, after
all, very high level when it comes to the world of programming. To a programming
purist, WYSIWYG web editors and HTML in notepad may both be so high level that
there’s effectively no difference between them! We use Word to write a letter
and don’t even give a second thought to the notion of hand writing the WPML into
a text file (which, by the way, I have done.)

I value my experience with low level programming and I believe there is great
value in knowing the ins and outs of HTML. I don’t, however, look down in any
way upon one who chooses to generate their website with a WYSIWYG web editor.
The web has become an immensely useful, enlightening and entertaining place. It
became so because of the wide variety of content being placed there by web
developers and each and every bit of it that gets out there adds to those great
characteristics. That it gets there is far more important than how.

Ask me now if I’ll do some assembler level coding for you and I’ll hold up a
string of garlic, a talisman, a hand-grenade and anything else I think might
fend you off long enough for me to make my escape. Give me my Visual Studio .Net
any day!
 


Thanks for Reading!
 



– Vince Barnes


 

Top

Q & A Goodies


Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors
.



Q. I’m trying to design a personal portfolio site and need to have people
click on my thumbnails to see larger images in a new window… easy. However I
found a site that makes it hard for people to save/steal copyright materials- it
makes the new window close when it is clicked on… I can’t figure out how to do
this.

A. You could use the onClick event in the body tag. Of course they can
still steal your images because the images have to be downloaded to your PC for
your browser to display them. The body tag would look like this:
<body onClick="window.close()">
This will only work if the window was opened using the JavaScript window.open
command.

Q. This is a question based around HTML and Java. Firstly, how do you
specify a constant width for a drop down menu, and secondly, how to you change
its colours?

A. This is more of a HTML/CSS question, but you could use a style tag in
the select tag to specify that. Here is an example:
<select name="sel" style="width:80;color:red;background-color:yellow">
<option value="yes">Yes</option
<option value="no">No</option
</select>
This example would limit the select (dropdown) to 80 pixels, the text will be
red and the background color of the select will be yellow.

Q. I’m trying to create a sort of mouseover-driven context-sensitive help
system for my website. The basic idea is that you mouse over a set of services
(system checkup, basic service, advanced service, etc) and a window pops up
telling you what it is you’re going to be paying for. I can get windows to pop
up quite neatly…it’s getting them to go away again that’s having me in fits.
Is there any way to do something like:
onMouseOut="window.diediedie(‘popup’);return true"
and have it actually work?

A. You might want to take a look at this script. It is very flexible and
looks great.
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex5/popinfo.htm

Q. I am in the process of designing a site mainly for seniors, some of
whom have difficulty seeing small fonts. Can you please tell me how I can code a
page to include the option to change the size of font?

A. What you need is called a Style Sheet Switcher. The links allow the
user to change the font size of the text by choosing a different style sheet.
There are several style sheets used and some JavaScript can be used to help some
browsers that do not recognize CSS. For a detailed explanation of how to use
this, take a look at this site:

http://www.alistapart.com/switcher.html

You could also do a search for Style Sheet Switcher and maybe come up with more
versions of the same switcher.

Q. How do I make a scrollbar on a page that goes up or down automatically
by just putting your mouse over it?

A. Check the scripts a this site:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/index.html

There are some there that are similar.

 

 

 

Top

News Goodies


Gates Opens Windows’ Next Wave
[October 27, 2003] Gates sees connected systems and
interoperability driving Web services out into the real world.

Click
here to read the article


 

 

Diller’s InterActive Buys France’s Anyway.com
[October 27, 2003] InterActiveCorp still expanding online travel footprint.

Click here to read the article

 



 

Symantec to Snap Up ON Technology
[October 27, 2003] UPDATE: Seeking to beef up its software management and
security business, Symantec goes after ON Technology, offering $100 million
in cash for the Massachusetts vendor.

Click here to read the article

 

 

VERITAS Expands Linux Involvement
[October 27, 2003] Support for the enterprise storage software company’s
entry onto SuSE Linux comes from an unlikely source — IBM, whose
StorageTank technology is seen by some as a direct competitor to companies
like VERITAS.

Click here to read the article

 

 

CommScope Buys Last-Mile Specialist
[October 27, 2003] The broadband cable maker buys an Avaya unit to round out
its product line and push its annual revenue past $1 billion.

Click here to read the article

 

 

Motorola Makes Its Case for MRAM
[October 27, 2003] The company pushes its 4Mb magnetic
memory chip, which the industry is eyeing to replace
multiple memory devices.

Click here to read the article

 

 



XM Radio Hits 1M Subscribers
[October 27, 2003] Satellite radio operator says it’s on target for 1.2M
paying customers by end of year.

Click here to read the article

 

Rich Media Growth Trend Continues
[October 27, 2003] DoubleClick’s third-quarter ad serving report shows that
the rich media ads continue to outperform standard ads, while click-through
rates, though nothing to rave about, remain stable.

Click
here to read the article

 

 



IBM Boosts Thinkpad Mobile Workstations
[October 27, 2003] Big Blue adds processing and graphics technology to
high-end notebooks.

Click here to read the article

 

 

IBM, Fidelity Ready For Banking Spending Spree
[October 27, 2003] With the financial industry poised for an infrastructure
overhaul, IBM and Fidelity come out with a solution to pick up some of money
expected to be spent.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

 

Top


Goodies Peer Reviews


 

Every week a site selected each week for review. Each week,
reviews of the previous week’s selected site are chosen for
publication on the HTML Goodies website.

 

The current week’s selected site is published in Goodies To
Go and in the Peer Reviews section of the website. 
Current contact email addresses for submitting your site and
for submitting reviews are published in Goodies To Go.

If you would like to have your site reviewed, sign up for
the Goodies To Go newsletter in the Navigation Bar on the
left side of this page. 

For full details about this program, see

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/peerreviews

 

 

 

Top

Feedback
Goodies


Did you ever wish your newsletter was an easy two way communications medium?
Ploof! It now is!
If you would like to comment on the newsletter or expand/improve on something
you have seen in here, you can now send your input to:

mailto:nlfeedback@htmlgoodies.com

We already receive a lot of email every day. This address will help us sort out
those relating specifically to this newsletter from all the rest. When you send
email to this address it may wind up being included in this section of the
newsletter, to be shared with your fellow readers.
Please don’t send your questions to this address.
They should be sent to our mentors: see
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/

I received lots of responses to last week’ piece about
Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software (see
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/255.html ) It seems like
a lot of you will be working with it now! That’s great — I
highly recommend it. It’s fun to use and it certainly allows
more flow in your creativity if, like me, you have
(greatly!) limited typing skills. Thanks also to those of
you who pointed out the typos. For those who still wish to
find them, they were:
"is" instead of "as" (two places)
"get to know me" (the word "know" was missing)
and for all who pointed out that "nun" should be "none";
folks, that’s just my humor – that was deliberate!
 


(This message is repeated from last week — just in case you
missed it!) For those who are missing Peer reviews: we are
once again revising the Peer review program in the hopes of
creating a workable solution. All those who have been
selected for reviews in the past will be featured in the new
pages. The new method will make it much easier for your
peers to provide feedback and much easier for us to handle
the publication side of things. "Watch this space!"

Thanks again for all your feedback!
 

Top


 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:

Some Very Early Information About ASP.NET 2.0


http://www.asp101.com/articles/john/aspnet2preview/default.asp

I realize that most of you are too busy to try and keep up
with all the news and rumors that circulate in the ASP and
NET communities… that’s why you come to us! The latest
rumblings from the underground are about the next version of
ASP.NET… ASP.NET 2.0.


 

 

Top
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…

1659 Quakers Executed for Religious Beliefs

In 1656 William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson left England to
avoid religious persecution. On this day in 1659, however, they died
for their beliefs when they were executed in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony for violating a law passed the previous year which banned the
Quakers from the colony. The Religious Society of Friends, or
Quakers as they are commonly known, a Christian religious group,
opposed a central church authority, advocated sexual equality and
opposed slavery. The Quakers settled in Rhode Island and other
colonies and later returned to Massachusetts when the anti-Quaker
laws were repealed. In the 19th century, Quaker Lucretia Mott gained
fame for her work creating the "Underground Railroad", a chain of
participants who helped slaves escape to the northern states and to
Canada. Mott was also renowned for her work in the women’s’ rights
movement.

Today was also the day that: in 1787 the Federalist letters
started appearing in New York newspapers; 1810 US annexed
West Florida from SPain; 1858 RH Macy & Co. opened their
first store (6th Ave & 34th Street in New York City); 1880
Teddy Roosevelt married Alice Lee (on his 22nd birthday); 1904
Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), the first NYC subway, opened;
1925
Fred Waller patented the water ski; 1947 Groucho
Marx’ "You Bet Your Life" premiered on ABC radio; 1954
"Disneyland" – Walt Disney’s first TV show, premiered on ABC TV;
1971
the Republic of the Congo became the Republic of Zaire;
1982
China announced its population head reached 1 billion;

Born today were: in 1728 explorer James Cook; 1782
composer/violinist Niccolo Paganini; 1811 home sewing machine
inventor Isaac Singer; 1858 26th US President Theodore
(Teddy) Roosevelt; 1872 etiquette authority Emily Post;
1914
the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas; 1923 pop-art
painter Roy Lichtenstein; 1926 White House Chief of Staff and
Watergate figure HR Haldeman; 1939 and now for something
completely different: comedian John Cleese; 1947 reporter/
hostage Terry Anderson; 1953 English actor Peter Bradford;
1958
rocker Simon Le Bon; 1963 actress Deborah Moore;
1963
model Marla Maples;

 




Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!


 



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