Davin's blog

Tag: code

  • I’m looking for a good text editing program for Windows, for coding

    As many of you know, I’ve been a Mac user for a good many years. As such, when I feel the need to do some coding (for example: xhtml, css, php, or javascript) by hand, I would just fire up BBEdit and have at it. Let me also say, BBEdit is a ridiculously great program.…

  • Features of robust dynamic menus

    There are many fine examples of dynamic menus, menus that display sub menus when you hover your mouse pointer or bring focus to them in other ways, such as tabbing through links with your keyboard. I was reading a recent article on AlistApart.com regarding hybrid CSS menus, and the discussion that followed the article showed…

  • How HTML and CSS is like an egg hatching.

    A discussion has been building in a web developer community email list I receive. The discussion looks at the field of “professional web developer/designer/etc.” One of the posters wrote up a long response to many comments; one of the things he said struck me as true, but a shallow observation. It was this: Stuff like…

  • Indenting blocks of code in Dreamweaver

    It is nice when you discover something new and useful in a piece of software you’ve been using for years. For instance, this past week I discovered that in the Code View in Dreamweaver MX, you can highlight a big block of code and tab the whole thing to the right, uniformly, by pressing TAB.…

  • Props to Capital Area District Library on their web site

    Was just looking up something on the CADL site for my wife, and, as is my habit, I took a quick peek at the HTML code (View -> View Source in Safari). I was pleased to see first that it appears to be valid XHTML 1.0, and quickly noted some nice uses of accesskey attributes…

  • XML/RSS is awesome

    I just downloaded and installed NetNews Wire Lite. It is super-easy and fast. And it’s free. You add RSS feeds that want to receive updates from, and it let’s you scan news items very quickly. What a great example of XML in action! (RSS docs are specific kinds of XML docs) On that, I’m seriously…

  • Semantic vs. valid markup

    Scott Pennington of Matrix at Michigan State University emailed an interesting link to me. The SimpleBits blog has a post and discussion of semantic markup of a page heading. A fairly elementary quiz starts it off, but the range of perspectives in the discussion starts to show the complexity of semantic markup. On the one…

  • Visual description of an HTML element

    Click on the words above to see the differences between an element, element content, attribute name, attribute value, start tag, and end tag. This is the first version of this “diagram,” so bear with me. Let me know if you have any feedback on it.

  • PHP tab navigation switcher

    I don’t consider myself a web programmer, but I have occasionally fiddled with the odd perl script, php, or asp code snippets. I had a situation yesterday that caused me to want to come up with a php script that would switch tab graphics on a web site, based on the URL of the page.…

  • xsl to tranform xhtml pages

    I don’t know why it took me this long to realize this. I’ve been writing xhtml for a couple years now, and around the same time I started playing with xsl stylesheets, but it just occurred to me in a real way that I can probably use xslt to transform my xhtml pages (at my…