Christian Heilmann

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Archive for August, 2005

CSS Table Gallery

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea:

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table.

What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don’t expect to see things appearing immediately.

Summer gone, Webzines back

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

I admit I had fallen behind my webzine browsing, mainly because BT promises to make the move of your telephone number to a new location easy, but fouls up badly when you really try to do it. Therefore my only online experience at home is my neighbour’s unencrypted wireless…

Good news is that A List Apart is back with a new, slicker layout and another Joe Clark article, this time dealing with PDF accessibility.

I am also proud to see that evolt.org is finally live with the new Drupal based layout and will hopefully get some good articles to review there soon. Right now the backlog is rather overwhelming though.

Sitepoint.com has lately taken to have an illustration for every article and its Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML is as much what it says on the tin as Cats in Sinks is.

Digital Web focuses on the business end of the web design stick with an article about RFPs . They will publish my article about “10 reasons why our clients don’t care about accessibility” in the next issue I am told.

Devarticles gets very techie in the last few issues, reporting on C++, Java and how to build an encrypted Login system in JavaScript.

Web Standards, Style Sheets and Semantic Markup presentation

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Funny, right at the moment where I am working on slides and examples for a training at the company here, maxdesign, the lovely bunch behind listamatic and listutorial, offer their slides: Basic Webstandards Workshop.

Very good collection indeed, and I now have to restrain myself not to copy and paste the lot :-)

Found via Jens Grochdreis

Bulletproof Web Design Review

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

Bulletproof Web Design Dan Cederholm did it again: The author of the indespensable “Web Standards Solutions” delivered with “Bulletproof Web Design” a wonderful follow-up showing you how to use CSS and XHTML to create flexible web sites. One of the main reasons developers still stick to layouts using tables – their resizability without breaking the layout grid – has lost a lot of its punch after reading this book and following its advice.

Just like in his older publications, Dan is based deeply in our developer world and does not dwell in theory, but explains the issues we have to face daily and offers solutions to them. (more…)

Why Homesite 5 still rocks my world

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005

I have the fun job at the moment right now to turn a lot of word documents into HTML, as the client does not have a CMS or want one.
The Homesite keyboard shortcuts are a real treat there (ctrl+shift+p to turn the highlighted section into a paragraph), and the right-click “turn into unordered list” helps a lot, too.

However, what was missing was a keyboard shortcut to turn a line into a heading. What is cool about Homesite 5 though is that you cannot only write your own toolbars, menus and containers with something called VTML, which is much like XUL) but you also have an API to completely script the editor itself. So what I did is write a small headings.js file and attached it to the keyboard shortcut ctrl+2 (ctrl+1 already replaces all special characters with numbered entities – another script I did) via the Options -> Customise -> Script Shortcuts dialogue.
When I now write something like

1Welcome to the last day of your former life

and press ctrl+2 it turns it into

Welcome to the last day of your former life

the number defines the weight of the heading (1 to 6). The script is easy enough:

function Main()
{

var selectedString = ‘’;
var weight=1;
// highlight the current line and store its content in s
Application.ActiveDocument.SelectCurrentLine();
s = Application.ActiveDocument.SelText;
// get the first character and add the tag brackets with that weight
// around the line
weight=s.substr(0,1);
var r=’< h ' + weight + '>‘+s.substr(1,s.length) +’< / h ' + weight + '>‘;
// replace the highlighted line with the new one
Application.ActiveDocument.SelText = r;
}

//Following is some textile bug:

More Information about the API is available at The Macromedia Site.