Thursday, March 28, 2024

Goodies to Go! Newsletter #307


Goodies to Go ™
October 18, 2004 — Newsletter # 307

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


Featured this week:

* Goodies Thoughts – I Was Framed!
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* 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 – I Was Framed!


I try not to repeat myself too much, allowing by choice at least
a year before coming back to a subject I have already discussed. This is a
subject that I have talked about from time to time before, but it always seems
to inspire such hot debate whenever it does com up that I felt it would be worth
at least stating my humble opinion once again, and allow you to ponder the
matter in order to make up your own mind.

The subject is, as the name of this piece might imply, the use of frames.

People very rarely have a middle of the road attitude to frames on websites.
They either believe they are the best thing since the invention of the wheel, or
that they are the bane of all existence. Personally, I’m one of the rare type I
mentioned, whose opinion is neither particularly for nor against.

I do think that a good part of the antithesis towards frames is historical. In
their origins, there was no way to reduce the borders between frames to nothing,
resulting in a clunky, ungainly appearance to a website. Additionally, there
were considerable differences between the levels of support for frames in
different browsers, as well as differences in their looks. There was also
discussion about page load times, which, especially in the days of 28K dial-up
connections, was more important then than it is now. The resulting lack of
professional appearance and lack of cross-browser compatibility, made webmasters
view frames with a most unfriendly eye.

Modern browsers provide full support for frames, displaying them in a
standardized fashion and recognizing the full set of attributes available. On
today’s Internet, with updates very easily available, and with users so
concerned about security that they obtain updates quickly (or at least, they
should!) most of those visiting your site will do so with a pretty current
browser.

Frames allow for some interesting and very easy to maintain designs. It is
particularly useful to have you navigation links on a page of their own and
displayed in a frame on the parent page, so that any navigation maintenance
performed is immediately available to the entire site. The use of frames is far
from the only way to solve that problem, but it is a very easy solution. In my
humble opinion, if you haven’t considered using frames for a while now, this
might be a good time to reconsider.

If you would like to learn a little more about frames, these tutorials are
available on the HTML Goodies web site:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/fram.html
(a basic tutorial)

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/html4_frames.html
(an update for HTML
4.01)

There is a concern about search engine optimization and the way spiders handle
frames. I wrote a piece about that a while age, which you can find here:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/articles/framesandspiders1.html

One other reference I would like to give you is the W3C’s reference information.
This is the slightly dry, but technically definitive information about frames.
What’s here is what is (at least, should be, and in most cases is) supported by
a modern browser; and what isn’t here, isn’t anything to do with frames on
today’s Internet! The link is:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#edef-FRAME

I encourage you to check these refs out, give it some consideration, and join me
in the middle of the road. I just hope the traffic’s light today!

 


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 want to store a variable into an external java file (.ja) so that I
can link other htmls to that one ja and snatch that variable. I really dont want
to go into perl because my main website doesn’t support it and I am very, very
new to the whole cgi concept.

A. You can not use JavaScript to write to an external file. If you had
access to a Server Side language such ast PHP, Perl or ASP you could perform
that function. Your other option would be to use a cookie that could be stored
on the individuals PC and then retrieved by each page. Here are some links to an
explanation on how cookies work:

http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/beyond/cookie.html


http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/cookiedetect.shtml


http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/cookie.shtml

Q. I have a Kodak digital still camera that makes movie clips, I believe
the clips are .mov format. I wanted to know how I could put the clip on my web
page. Do I need to compress or change the format if so how and what would the
code be?

A. Take a look at this tutorial on the HTMLGoodies website:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/videoembed.html

Q. I was looking at several web pages that have their own error pages.
How do you do this, and can you put it on a free service like geocities?

A. It is called a custom 404 error page. All servers have this page and
it can be customized if you have either access to the page on the server or your
web host allows you to create a 404 page and they configure the server to point
to it. It is something that you would need to ask your web host. I believe it
would be possible for free hosts to offer this feature but I doubt that they do.

Q. I was asked recently to do a web site for a chauffeur company. I have
now finished it and he is asking for a price and I don’t know what price to give
him. Any advice?

A. This was actually the subject of a past Goodies to Go Newsletter. You
can read it here:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/221.html

Q. If my site uses the same images on all the pages, do I only preload on
the index page, or should I have each page preload all the images?

A. If they are all in the same directory for each page then you should
not have to pre-load them for each page. Once on the first page should do the
trick. You should be able to test this by commenting out the pre-load script on
another page and see if the images take longer to load.

Q. I would like to eliminate the use of the Enter key that a user may
enter while in a TextArea. How can I do that?

A. Here is a script example that will ignore the enter key in a textarea:
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<script language="JavaScript">
IE5=document.all? 1:0
function stopkey(e)
{
whKey = !IE5? e.which:event.keyCode; // check for NS4 and NS6
window.status=whKey // Display ascii code in status bar
if(whKey==’13’) // check for ascii enter key (ascii)
{
return false;
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<form name="myform">
<textarea name="txta" cols="30" rows="4" WRAP="hard"
onkeypress="return stopkey(event)" >Enter your response here</textarea>
</form>
</center>
</body>
</html>

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top

News Goodies


Microsoft, Cisco Shake on Network Security
[October 18, 2004] Collaboration will push for
interoperability between competing platforms for network
security compliance.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


SBC Sees Cheap Wi-Fi as Cable Cudgel

[October 18, 2004] The carrier offers its DSL customers lots of
hotspots for cheap in new service plan.

Click here to read the article

 

Macromedia Builds More Muscle Into Flex
[October 18, 2004] The latest version of its presentation server adds IBM,
Oracle and Fujitsu support with .NET waiting in the wings.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


JBoss Takes On jBPM Project

[October 18, 2004] The professional open source outfit adds
workflow management to its middleware software lineup..

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

Software by Subscription Shows Rising Interest
[October 18, 2004] Industry group survey says more than half
of publishers will offer subs by 2006.

Click here to read the article
 

 

 

Interwoven Gives Intranet Docs a Simple Touch
[October 18, 2004] The company better known for its Web-based content
management is tackling corporate intranets now.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

A Decade of E-Commerce
[October 18, 2004] Industry players recall the beginnings of e-commerce —
and speculate on its future.

Click here to read the article

 

 



XHTML,HTML Get International Flavor
[October 18, 2004] A W3C task force issues a working draft to give
developers some new techniques.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

Tech Job Cuts Leap 60%
[October 18, 2004] Tech sector is also a major contributor to job cuts from
all industries so far in 2004.

Click here to read the article


 

 

Rise of the Underdog Browser
[October 15, 2004] FEATURE: Is your company paying attention to the browser
market shift? If not, there’s a train leaving the station..

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

 

Top


Goodies Peer Reviews


 

Every week a site is selected 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/

Thanks again for all your feedback!
 

 

Top


 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:
 


Creating Triggers Using Managed Code in SQL Server 2005

Thiru Thangarathinam discusses taking advantage of the
integration between the .NET CLR and SQL Server 2005 in
order to do things like create triggers using managed code.


http://www.15seconds.com/issue/041006.htm

*** AND ***

XML to HTML (via XSL) ASP.NET Sample

This sample script takes an XML file and an XSL file and
combines them to produce whatever output you want. The
sample files we use simply take some of our sample data and
convert it to a basic HTML table, but you can use the same
code to convert your data to whatever format you want…
just by changing the stylesheet.


http://www.asp101.com/samples/xmlxsl_aspx.asp

***AND ***

Using ASP.NET to Prompt a User to Save When Leaving a Page

In this article we’ll examine how to extend the base Page
class, adding a couple of methods that will allow for a user
to be prompted when they leave the page without saving
without the page developer having to write a single line of
client-side script code.


http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/101304-1.aspx

 

 


 

Top


 

 

 

 
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…
 

1898 US Takes Puerto Rico

Towards the end of the Spanish-American war, in 1897, Spain granted
Puerto Rico self-rule. A year later, in July 1898, US troops invaded
the island. There was little resistance, and only seven of the
invaders were killed. By mid August, the Island had been secured,
and later, after the armistice with Spain was signed, the island was
officially turned over on this day in 1898. The US spent about
thirty years Americanizing the population, including making them US
citizens, and trying to make English the official language of the
island, but popular movements such as the Popular Democratic Party
put up strong opposition. In 1952 the US Congress made Puerto Rico
an autonomous US commonwealth, approving its constitution which was
adopted on July 25 of that year. Referendums in 1967 and again in
1993 have both failed to win the popular vote for Puerto Rican
Statehood.

Today was also the day that in: 1016 Danes defeat Saxons at
Battle of Assandun (Ashingdon); 1648 1st US labor
organization formed (Boston Shoemakers); 1748 Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, ends War of Austrian Succession; 1767
Boundary between Maryland & Pennsylvania, the Mason Dixon line,
agreed upon; 1776 In a NY bar decorated with bird tail,
customers ordered a "cock tail"; 1922 The British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was established; 1960 In
Britain, the News Chronicle & Daily Mail merged, & The London
Evening Star merged with the Evening News; 1962 Dr Watson
(US) & Drs Crick & Wilkins (Britain) won the Nobel Prize for
Medicine for work in determining structure of DNA; 1967 Walt
Disney’s "Jungle Book" was released; 1979 "Beatlemania"
opened in London;

Born today were: in 1697 Venetian painter Canaletto; 1898
Austrian singer and actress Lotte Lenya; 1919 former
Canadian PM Pierre Henry Trudeau; 1922 comic strip character
Little Orphan Annie; 1925 Greek actress Melina Mercouri;
1933
actor Peter Boyle; 1939 JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald; 1947 actor Joe Morton; 1947 singer Laura Nyro;
1951
actress Pam Dawber; 1956 Czech tennis player Martina
Navratilova; 1958 Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme;
1962
actress Erin Moran; 1977 actor Chris McKenna;
 

 




Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!


 



Archive Home Page.


Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends & analysis

Popular Articles

Featured