Goodies to Go ™
December 1, 2003–Newsletter #261
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Featured this week:
* Goodies Thoughts – Cover The Basics
* 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 – Cover The Basics
I’m a pretty patient kind of guy — most of the time!! There are
some things that just bug me though. This week, I thought I’d touch on one of
them because it’s something you can help me with.
In my house you won’t find a telephone directory. They are huge, heavy books
filled with information, half of which is out of date by the time it hits the
presses (or so it seems!) And they only cover the local few hundred square mile
area, not the whole Earth, which is where my family, friends and associates are.
They consume vast quantities of trees and are tossed onto my driveway whether I
want them or not — which I don’t. Where I live I am close to the border of two
telephone companies’ territories. Since I have two phone lines they seem to
think I need a set of white pages and a set of yellow pages for each line. Both
companies want me to use their directories and so I wind up with eight sets of
books to throw out as soon as they arrive. I can’t seem to stop them from
coming. They’re not the problem you can help with however.
The reason I don’t want those directories is, as you have guessed, because my
life is centered around the Net. The Net is updated all the time, not just once
a year, so if I want to know a phone number or an address I’ll look it up on the
web.
Google is obviously employing a bunch of electronic psychics because when I put
some search argument in and tap my enter key, they ask me if I meant something
else, which I did, and take me right to exactly what I need. When I get there I
find a beautifully presented web page all about (for the sake of example) Acme
Grommets. I find out where they were founded, and by whom. I find out every
size, shape and color of grommet available to me, and then, search as I might, I
find no address or phone number! AAAAARGGGHHHH! Yep — that’s the part that
tries my patience! And that’s the part you can help me with.
In your endeavors as a web developer you’ll surely be creating or updating a web
site for some business somewhere, or advising or influencing someone who is.
When you do, please remember that just because a potential customer discovers a
site by a fortunate Google search, that doesn’t mean they wish to conclude all
their business transactions impersonally through the web. Of course, if there is
a nice e-commerce option that’s always good, but sometimes I, Mr. Average
Consumer, would like to conduct my business the old fashioned way by chatting
with a friendly fellow human being.
A business web site should provide all the basic contact information. A phone
number and an address are essential, in my view. When they’re not there, or when
they’re hard to find, I have to wonder of the business has something to hide or
if they simply don’t care very much about me.
The sites committing this grievous offence are not always small ones either. It
took me an age recently, to find a phone number for a very large, well known,
retail chain. Their web site provided lots of email contact information, but
nothing that I could discover about their store locations or phone numbers until
I searched through their "press announcements" section.
Contact information belongs on the home page or one click away from it. Thanks
in advance for your help!
Thanks for Reading!
– Vince Barnes
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.
I have a page with
thumbnails which are linked to the full size images. I want the full size images
to open in a in-line frame on a seperate html page. How do I get it to load a
new page and then have the image load in the in-line frame of this new page?
A. The new page that loads needs to itself be a frameset page. With an
inline frame, that means building a unique page for each image. However, you can
use server side includes for code you reuse. This tutorial will explain that:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/ssi.html
Q. I want to add "add to favorites" code (see
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/addtofavs_code.html) to my page but I am
using frames and the code will only "add to favorites" the URL for the frame
from which it was clicked. How do I add the frames page URL?
A. In place of "location.href" add your URL that you want and instead of
"document.title" use "parent.document.title".
Q. I want to change the background color of a cell containing a link, but
only when the mouse is on that link. Then it should go back to the original
color.
A. I’ve had trouble changing background colors in table cells with links,
so I stopped using table cells. You can change the display to "block" to make
the links look like buttons.
EXAMPLE:
<html>
<head>
<title>Table Cell Links</title>
<style type="text/css">
a { display: block;
width: 150px;
background-color: red;
color: white; }
a:hover { background-color: blue; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="link.htm">LINK TEST</a></p>
<p><a href="link.htm">LINK TEST</a></p>
<p><a href="link.htm">LINK TEST</a></p>
<p><a href="link.htm">LINK TEST</a></p>
<p><a href="link.htm">LINK TEST</a></p>
</body>
</html>
There are a lot of things you can do with the styles, but I hope this helps for
starters!
Q. I have a question regarding the "on click" command, which I’ve used
successfully in the past with form buttons, but how can I use the same command
to work with an image in place of the form button?
A. To use it with an image you would use the onClick like this:
<A HREF="#" onClick="some_function()"><img src="mypic.gif"></A>
If you want to use an image to submit a form then you can just specify the type
as image like this:
<INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="subpic.gif">
Also with the first example you can simulate the onClick this way:
<A HREF="javascript:some_function()"><img src="mypic.gif"></A>
The above is preferable because of a bug in IE5.0 version browsers with the void
"#" character in the HREF causing an error.
Q. I need to learn how to pass a variable(s) from web page to web page.
Do I use a cookie? Do I use a file and perl? Can it be simply done with the
hidden fields in a form?
A. There’s a tutorial on just that subject:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/jspass.html
News Goodies
VoIP: The Next Internet Tax Battleground
[December 1, 2003] Baby Bells, consumers and startups watch
as the FCC weighs regulations and fees for Internet telephone
providers.
Click
here to read the article
Wind River Embraces OSDL, Linux
[December 1, 2003] The about-face could pit the software powerhouse against
Red Hat and SuSE.
Click here to read the article
European Portals On Same Team
[December 1, 2003] Hoping a unified strategy helps grow the market as a
whole, six major portals band together.
Click here to read the article
EMC Adding Database Archiving Software
[December 1, 2003] The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company will gain access to
database archiving software in a deal to bolster its broad information
lifecycle management strategy.
Click here to read the article
Small Business Embraces the Tablet PC
[December 1, 2003] Corporate IT departments still view the Tablet PC as a
niche technology at best, but many small businesses are finding new ways to
benefit from using them. Once they start using Tablet PCs, small businesses
typically refuse to return to other types of PCs.
Click here to read the article
HP Ups Stake in India with Digital GlobalSoft
[December 1, 2003] Hewlett-Packard buys the outstanding
shares of its Indian subsidiary as concern grows over the
off-shoring movement.
Click here to read the article
Online Shoppers Are Getting It Done Earlier
[November 28, 2003] Haven’t started your holiday shopping yet? If you’re
online, you’ve become the exception to the rule.
Click here to read the article
Can Bluefly Make a Real-World Outlet Work?
[November 28, 2003] The question is whether shoppers will want to buy
discounted designer goods that didn’t click online.
Click
here to read the article
Linux Leaders Launch Awareness Campaign
[November 26, 2003] With the release of the Linux 2.6 production kernel
coming next month, the minds over at the OSDL hope to dispel fears caused by
the SCO Group ruckus.
Click here to read the article
Microsoft, Open Source Claim XML Success
[November 26, 2003] UPDATE: Industry watchers say Microsoft’s recent move to
open up its XML schemas in Office 2003 deserves more credit than the open
source crowd is giving.
Click here to read the article
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handle the publication side of things. "Watch this space!"
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Thanks again for all your feedback!
Top
Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:
Efficient Use of an ADO.NET Data Component
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/031120.htm
Frustrated with having to maintain separate Connection
objects,
DataAdapters, and DataSets in each form? Nathan Zobrist
shows how to create
and use an application-wide data component.
*** And ***
Working with Google APIs to Fetch Results using ASP
http://www.asp101.com/articles/graphiz/googleapi/default.asp
Google is experimenting with a free web service that can be
used non-commercially to gather search results in an
XML-based format. Their SDK includes samples and
documentation for .NET and Java, but not ASP. That just
doesn’t seem right to us…
Top
And Remember This . . .
On this day in…
1955 Rosa Parks Would Not Give Up Her Seat
In Montgomery Alabama in 1955 African Americans were required to
ride in the back of the busses and to give up their seats if the
front filled up and a white person needed to sit. A member of the
Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), Rosa Parks, a seamstress, refused to give
up her seat under these circumstances when told to by the bus
driver. Rosa’s protest act of civil disobedience initiated a boycott
of the Montgomery busses by African Americans who made up 70% of the
buses ridership. The boycott was organized by a young minister
called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was the first protest of the
new Civil Rights Movement. The successful boycott, which lasted 381
days, led to the November 13, 1956, U.S. Supreme Court ruling which
struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws
as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On December 20, Rosa Parks was
one of the first African Americans to ride the newly desegregated
buses.
Today was also the day that: in 1641 Massachusetts became the
first colony to recognize slavery by statute; 1742 Empress
Elisabeth expelled all Jews from Russia; 1804 Emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine of Martinique; 1821
Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) proclaimed independence from
Spain; 1835 Hans Christian Anderson published his first book
of fairy tales; 1878 first telephone was installed in the
White House; the first western movie, "The Great Train Robbery" was
released; 1906 the first cinema, the Cinema Omnia Pathe in
Paris, opened; 1909 Deganya Alef, the first Israeli Kibbutz,
was founded; 1913 the first drive-up gas station opened (in
Pittsburgh); 1918 Denmark granted Iceland independence;
1919 Lady Nancy Astor was sworn in as the first female British
Member of Parliament; 1928 Railroad Museum opened in Utrecht,
Netherlands; 1929 BINGO invented by Edwin S. Lowe; 1931
Royal Mint, Ottawa branch became Royal Canadian Mint; 1939 SS
Fuhrer Himmler began the deportation of Polish Jews; 1941
British cruiser Devonshire sank German sub Python; 1941
Emperor Hirohito signed declaration of war; 1943 FDR,
Churchill and Stalin agreed to "Operation Overlord" (D-Day); 1959
12 nations sign a treaty for the peaceful scientific use of
Antarctica; 1963 Nagaland became a state of the Indian Union;
1969 US held its first draft lottery since WWII; 1975
US President Gerald Ford visited Peoples Republic of China; 1976
Sex Pistols use profanity on TV and are branded "rotten punks";
1982 Michael Jackson released "Thriller"; 1987 digging
began for the Anglo-French Channel Tunnel; 1990 British &
French workers met in the Channel Tunnel (the "Chunnel"); 1992
Amy Fisher was sentenced to 5-15 years for shooting Mary Jo
Buttafuoco; 1997 Westinghouse formally changed name to CBS;
Born today were: in 1671 violin maker Francesco Stradivari
(son of Antonius); 1671 mathematician John Keill; 1712
composer Bernhard Christian Weber; 1726 US Judge & signer of
the Declaration of Independence Oliver Wolcott; 1729 composer
Guiseppe Sarti; 1878 US NAACP chairman (1940-65) Arthur
Spingarn; 1910 (or 1912?) ballerina Dame Markovea (Alicia
Lilian Alice Marks); 1912 architect Minoru Yamasaki (World
Trade Center, NYC); 1925 (or 1929?) actor David Doyle (Bosley
– Charlie’s Angels); 1935 actor/director/musician/comedian
Woody Allen (Allen Stuart Konigsberg); 1935 (or 1936?) singer
Lou Rawls; 1939 golfer Lee Trevino; 1940
comedian/actor Richard Pryor; 1944 drummer John Densmore (Doors);
1946 Irish singer Gilbert O’Sullivan; 1951
singer/guitarist Eric Blom (Blue Oyster Cult); 1951 actor
Treat Williams; 1988 Zoe Kravitz (daughter of Lisa Bonet &
Lenny Kravitz);
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!