Davin's blog

Tag: code

  • Revision: Using Javascript to add instructive text for input and textarea form fields

    OUTDATED POST: HTML5’s placeholder attribute creates the behavior that this javascript did. Just use the placeholder attribute. This is a code update to a prior post. The Javascript I had posted earlier fell short in one important arena: when you submitted the form without entering your own text, the form would send in the instructive…

  • Using Javascript to add instructive text for input and textarea form fields

    OUTDATED POST: HTML5′s placeholder attribute creates the behavior that this javascript did. Just use the placeholder attribute. UPDATE 2008-04-13: This code has been refactored. Please view the updated posting. Over the last year or so, I’ve worked on a number of websites where I wanted to add instructive text to form fields, but didn’t want…

  • Nephtali

    Oh! Nephtali! Alright, so if you look up “Nephtali” on thinkbabynames.com, you see it listed as a variant of “Naftali.” The boy’s name Naftali \n(a)-fta-li, naf-tali\ is of Hebrew origin, and its meaning is “struggling”. Biblical: a son of Jacob and one of the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. “Struggling.” Apt. How many…

  • Can robots.txt prevent a dead page from being removed from a search engine’s index?

    Problem: Pages taken offline 4 months ago are still indexed by Google and Yahoo! In the course of work this week, we discovered that Yahoo! and Google still have record of a section of a website we removed nearly 4 months ago. Surely the search engine robots had revisited the pages, repeatedly received 404-File Not…

  • XML file of shooting ranges in Michigan

    As another small step in this process of manipulating a data set to upload to Google Maps, I took the cleaned XHTML I had from a few days ago, and used TextWrangler to do some quick search and replaces on the source code in order to produce this XML file. ranges-data.xml Next, I think, I’ll…

  • Sample KML structure for the shooting ranges data

    And here is a sample of what the intended shooting ranges KML feed will look like.

  • Clean XHTML of shooting ranges data

    My goal is to upload a comprehensive list of shooting ranges to Google Maps (see prior posting). So, to accomplish this, here are the steps I’ve thought of.

  • We need a “credit” attribute in XHTML

    The XHTML 2.0 draft document by the W3C includes some promising attributes for elements. For instance, a navigation list could have a role with a value of sitemap. I.e.: <nl role=”sitemap”> That’s cool. Think on that a bit, o ye of semantic persuasion. The potential benefits of this type of specificity in standard markup is…

  • Diagram of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript as types of code in a web page

    I’m thinking of using this diagram in an XHTML class I may be teaching in a couple weeks. The idea is to put XHTML, CSS, and Javascript in context with each other—yet to also illustrate that they are separate types of code and often are actually different files altogether.

  • Why use CSS-based layouts?

    I was prepping for a Dreamweaver class a couple months ago and was fiddling around with the practice files that came as part of the course material. There is a whole lesson devoted to using html tables as a tool to do page layouts. This poses an issue for me. My primary job for the…