WebliminalBlog

So much time wasted looking all over the place for the instruction manual to tune the tv-set, find the printer cartridge replacement how-to, the meaning of the blinking led on the dashboard.

Oliver Ackermann (A Place to Bury Strangers singer/guitarist)
“That wall of sound is what made me excited to play electric guitar. You can plug it in and crank it up and there’s almost this chaos where, with the sounds coming out of the amp, it’s a mystery, something that’s beautiful.”

Developing a robust, interactive and engaging Web site involves many different avenues, such as interactive pop-out menu’s using dynamic JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), complex maps that allows visitors to rollover individual sections for detailed information, forms designed and formatted with CSS and are programmed to collect and send visitor feedback to a specified recipient. Other features could include: database driven pages that display a current member directory, a customized blog section that enables administrators to manage postings and allow random users in coordination with CAPTCHA techniques to post remarks to an article. Arguably, one of the most popular features of any database driven site is a searchable form feature that allows anyone to search for current staff members of an organization and find additional information, such as their email address or phone number.

AJAX—it’s the buzzword that hit the Web with a bullet in 2005, thanks to Jesse James Garrett, a user-experience expert who founded AdaptivePath.com. If you’re totally new to AJAX, I’ll just point out that; at its core, AJAX is nothing that scary or horrendous. AJAX isn’t even a new technology or language!

This article discusses how to use JavaScript to validate important types of form data, including names, addresses, URLs, email addresses, phone numbers, zip codes, expiration dates and credit card numbers (Visa, Master Card, Discover, and American Express, in both Canadian and US formats, with either 13, 14, 15 or 16 digit account numbers). Each data validation function returns an array of valid inputs that were detected, and has the ability to filter and reformat data to desired appearances and standards. If no valid input is detected, then an error code is returned. In addition to providing definitions for each error code number, the JavaScript form validation script also provides associated human-readable error messages which explain the error after it has occurred.

Available in static JavaScript and dynamic (with a Perl backend) flavors, the WebReference xref script is a traffic-building tool that enables you to automatically insert links into your Web pages whenever a key term is encountered on the page. You can both use the script on your own Web pages (to be certain you are creating links for those key terms consistently throughout your site), as well as offer the script to your affiliates, so their pages can also automatically include links back to your site. Including the script on your pages (or on your affiliates) requires only a single line of JavaScript; and affiliates can link directly to your copy of the script, if you prefer (i.e., affiliates need not copy the script and install it on their own Web servers; they only need to insert the necessary JavaScript command on their pages to activate the script).

The W3C Document Object Model (DOM) has opened the door for dynamic Web content presentation. The combination of HTML, style sheets and scripts whose aggregate make up Dynamic HTML, allows us to manipulate any document element on the fly and update page appearance and behavior accordingly. What is less known is the DOM also exposes the style sheets themselves as a property of the document object. Using the document.styleSheets property, you can create, delete and modify existing rules within any style sheet in the page. In general, it’s faster and easier to access and modify an element’s style directly than through the style sheet, but there are times that the later may be necessary. That’s what this article is all about.

nserting new items into the database is remarkably similar to getting items out of the database. You follow the same basic steps: make a connection, send a query, and check the results. In this case, the query you send is an INSERT rather than a SELECT.

I have been recently asked which tools I think will make it onto next year’s Top 100 Tools list. Here are 10 that I think have a good chance.

In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.