Goodies to Go ™
April 22, 2002–Newsletter #177
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Goodies Announcements
Regarding last week’s article on
Bluetooth, I just wanted to clear up any confusion about who produces the
product. Bluetooth, like USB and other innovations, was not actually invented by
Apple but rather first adopted by Apple. The point was that Apple is often a
good bellwether of things to come in the PC world, not that Apple is the
end-all-be-all of computer manufacturers.
Goodies Thoughts – PayPal MasterCard Woes
Recently, there has been
news from MasterCard is that they will be discontinuing service with third-party
credit card payment services like PayPal.
For those of you that
don’t know what PayPal is all about here is a brief description. PayPal and
other services like it offer individuals and businesses the ability to process
credit card transactions without having to work through a financial institution
and acquire a merchant account. It’s easy to see how credit card fees of 3% to
7% and monthly minimums could quickly eat up profits for someone that processes
credit cards infrequently. Those are the types of people that services like
PayPal target by offering a much more reasonably priced service.
The chief reason that
MasterCard is citing for pulling back from third-party payment services is a
lack of information on credit cards being processed which contributes to a
higher default and fraud rates. If you have ever used PayPal before, you know
that there isn’t a whole lot of information that is required. It is just the
basics like name, telephone number, credit card number, etc.
Currently, PayPal is
attempting to secure an exemption from MasterCard’s new rule and it is expected,
but not certain, that they will get it. It is also expected that it will come at
a cost. MasterCard will most likely require more information for transactions
like address, city, state, maiden name, your first born’s full name, your pet’s
name, etc. Well, maybe not that much but you get the idea.
PayPal has some pretty
big affiliations that may help them with their negotiations with MasterCard with
the most notable being eBay. Their affiliations and shear number of daily
transactions should give PayPal the leverage necessary to get MasterCard to
grant their exemption.
The changes that
MasterCard could require is what will be of the most concern for web developers.
For those of you that have web pages/sites tied to PayPal, you may find
yourselves going back to those sites and reworking them to support the new
requirements.
As you may know, PayPal
allows you to link to their payment processing pages directly from your pages.
You can send them certain information like the customer’s name and telephone
number via a HTML form. This ensures that the customer doesn’t have to double
enter any information once they get to PayPal’s payment processing page. This
also allows you, the developer, to obtain customer information on your site and
store that information in a database before sending the customer on to payment
processing.
If you use or intend to
use PayPal’s services, you may want to keep an eye on their website to see what
changes may be coming down the pipe. MasterCard intends to discontinue service
to third-party services at the beginning of May, so a decision will obviously
have to be reached very soon.
If you are wondering
about other services like Yahoo PayDirect or eBay Payment, those services are
tied to financial institutions and won’t be affected by MasterCard’s new
policies.
If you are curious about
PayPal and the pros and cons of their service you can get more information on
the HTMLGoodies webiste at
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/paypal.html.
Thanks for reading!
Quiz Goodies
To follow along with our
PayPal theme for the day, I ran across this problem several months ago when
attempting to use PayPal from an ASP page. I wanted to gather and store all of
the customer’s information in my database before sending it on to PayPal. The
problem was that once I retrieved all of the information from the form and saved
it to my database I still had to be able to create a new form with the PayPal
required fields to send on to PayPal.
Creating the new form
was easy enough, however, I had the problem of triggering the form submission
from the code. I didn’t want the customer to have to push an extra submit button
to move on to the next step.
So, the question is
this: How do you automatically trigger a form submission using JavaScript?
Read answer below.
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/.
Q.
How do I get the "fuzziness" to go away from around my images?…
I used FrontPage and Microsoft’s
Paint program that came with my computer to make the site.
A. Microsoft’s
Paint program is not the best product to use when making graphical images. Don’t
get me wrong, it is a great tool for the general purpose user, however, it
leaves a much to be desired for the serious graphic designer/artist.
There are many other
packages available out there that will give you a much better result for your
graphical work. You can choose from high end products like Adobe’s PhotoShop or
Illustrator or mid-range products like PhotoImpact or even some decent freeware.
Whatever you choose, be sure you feel comfortable using it and look for some of
these key elements in the product:
-
The ability to export to
different file types, i.e. .gif, .jpeg, .png, .tif, etc. -
The ability to adjust
the quality of the file. -
The ability to optimize
the file. (recommended but not required)
Most graphical products
have demo versions available to try out, so be sure to take advantage of the
demos whenever possible.
Q.
I have a
(probably) relatively easy question: How do I maximize a window. Or how can I
open a window maximized.
I have a script
to open a window but I have to get the new window maximized.
A. The only
way I am aware of doing this is by capturing the users screen size settings and
then adjusting them a bit and calling the window.open function and placing the
size in the call. Here is an example:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript">
function newWin(page)
{
wHeight = screen.height – 80;
wWidth = screen.width – 20;
window.open(page,’popup’,’height=’ +wHeight+ ‘
,width=’ +wWidth+’,locationbar=0,menubar=0
,personalbar=0,scrollbars=1,statusbar=0
,toolbar=0,top=0,left=0′);
}
</SCRIPT>
This works off of another script I have. I used popup (you could also use
resource) so that the users standard browser settings are not affected by this
call. If you leave the section blank, the next window the user opens will be
full screen (this usually gets users a little peeved). This type of call,
whether as popup or resource, will not allow the user to change the size of the
window. If you turn scrollbars off (change to 0 or leave it out), then the user
will not be able to scroll a long page. Personalbar is a call for Netscape, but
Internet Explorer should ignore it.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by C.L. Smith, one of our JavaScript Mentors.
Q. I am not
sure that what I want to do is possible. I have been searching the web for 2
weeks now looking for a form code or, JavaScript code that will put the
information inputted into the text box in alphabetical order.
I am trying to list all my movies on my computer, (currently over 500 and,
climbing!) so I can keep track of them. I can list them alphabetically, but I
was looking for a code that would automatically insert them under the proper
letter. That way as I accumulate more movies, I can just enter them and click
post instead of having to add them in the source code.
Is this possible, and, do you know where I would have to look to learn such a
code?
A.
The most efficient way to do something like storing a list is to use a
server-side technology like ASP, PHP or Perl in cooperation with a database or
text file. ASP, PHP or Perl will allow you to interact with a database or text
file, sort your data and dynamically create your pages.
Obviously, this will
require some work to learn how to use databases and server-side technologies. If
you don’t want to make the time and/or effort to learn about the technologies
then I would do this:
-
Contact your website’s
host and see what server-side technologies are available to you, if any. -
Search the web for "Free
(ASP, PHP, Perl or whatever) Code" and you may find just what you are looking
for.
This process will
fulfill many of your basic code needs. You will just need some time to track
down the code sample. Then, if you are so inclined, you can take the time to
learn more about the technology and start to tweak the code to better suit your
purposes.
If you are interested in
learning about databases you can find a tutorial at
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/database_intro.html.
If you are interested in
Perl check out this tutorial:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/perl/perl01.html.
We will also be starting
an ASP tutorial series very soon. Watch the HTMLGoodies site for details.
News Goodies
If you are a serious or professional
web developer you may want to take note of this article regarding a standardized
privacy policy on P3P from W3C.
Click here to read the article
Speaking of W3C, they now have a new
office open in Korea.
Click here to read the article
Well finally someone other than
Microsoft has hit the lawsuit pages. You’ll never guess who is suing Yahoo!
Click here to read the article
Quiz Answer
To solve my problem I
set up my form just like I would normally only I made all of my fields hidden
and populated fields with information I passed through the URL.
Now, here’s how I
triggered the page to automatically post the form:
<script>
function submit_it()
{
document.forms[0].submit()
}
</script>
<body onload="submit_it()">
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" name="PayPal_Forward"
method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="myemail@wherever.com">
…
</form>
</body>
The submit_it function
is what actually handles moving the form along. Be sure to include ONLOAD="submit_it"
in the BODY tag, otherwise your JavaScript function will never be called.
And Remember This . . .
Today, April 22, has a
very strange combination of famous birthdays.
For example, Alexander
Kerensky, the leader of the revolution that removed Czar Nicholas II from power
in 1917, was born.
Coincidentally, this day
is also the birthday of Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov who is better known as Nikolai
Lenin. After the revolution of 1917 Lenin returned from exile to overthrow
Kerensky and establish a Socialist society. Kerensky himself was then exiled.
Interestingly, there is
another unusual and unrelated birthday today. On this day in 1904 a quiet
intelligent son of a textile manufacturer was born in New York City. He grew up
to attend Harvard and Cambridge Universities. He excelled in both chemistry and
physics and became fascinated with atomic structure. Eventually, while working
for the United States government during World War II, he was credited with
inventing and testing the world’s first Atom Bomb. Today is J. Robert
Oppenheimer’s birthday.
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!
