August 2009
2 posts
JS Variables operators and functions
Variables are a bit like algebra. Identifying a variable allows
If you set a variable to a value you are using an operator (=).
something I didn’t get was functions. I don’t know why but I thought everything in Javascript was a function. It turns out that functions are the parts of script that you don’t want to load until someone does something on the page.
July 2009
1 post
Out of retirement and back into Javascript
Numbers and strings (text)
In really basic Javascript if you set a variable equal to a number, you need to make sure the number is not inside brackets (” “).
This could cause the following problem:
x=5+5;
x=”5”+”5”
If you gave the order to: document.write(x); in the first example it would equal 10 in the second it would equal 55.
There’s actually a...
June 2009
2 posts
all for a lousy "
I have joked before that a lot can ride on a missing ” but I didn’t head my own warning.
I have been trying to get the form on my site to validate for days. Literally days. I have been pulling my hair out going over the code letter by letter, I tried several different types of Javascript codes - and all the time I secretly wondered:
Is it possible to validate a form with Javascript...
did google lie to me?
It hurts me to say this. But google is a liar.
It tells you to insert their maps in the tag <iframe>. I expect google to be compliant with strict XHTML (not that it says this anywhere)
But this is not the case - because the iframe is not XHTML compliant.
Instead what you need to do is use the <object> tag and replace src=”” with data=”“.
This works fine on...
May 2009
10 posts
the new target"_blank"
One of the weirder errors I got when I tried to validate my pages was for using the target”_blank” on my links.
What am I supposed to do? Just send people away from my site everytime there is a link!?
As it turns out the target attribute is not XHTML compliant. You just can’t use it.
So how do you get around it?
A little bit of Javascript helps.
First remove all those pesky...
using javascript to embed quicktime
I know marsha you already blogged about this (thanks Marsha),
but I have to get this out there again because it is so damn good.
the info comes from this site:
basically it makes embedding movies into your site a whole lot easier. It is a downloadable javascript file that you can forget about adding to the head of your html and just link to it and add it to your resources.
Once you link to it...
Validation is near
I validated my first page last night and it was epic.
I thought to myself there can’t be many errors, but boy was I wrong.
34 errors.
It took me almost an hour to comb through make changes and upload each page hoping I wouldn’t make more. I did.
Some things I learnt in my travels:
the <label> tag doesn’t exist in XHTML
names on images - they’re not in. Alts...
the gallery
rather than just list the photos floated down the page and have tex alongside - I thought about some sort of gallery. the next thing I knew I was knee deep in creating a new CSS file.
Here’s how it works.
We are effectively changing an unordered list. So we need to set that up first. We put our photos (12 in this case) into a list in the html - assigning each with a unique slide class and...
the auto solution
I’ve been trying to get my main content to be in the centre of the page for ages! I’ve tried a few things - one which I thought seemed very logical, to set the left and right margins to 10% and the width to 80%.
This was not yielding the results.But with the help of these guys:
http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/82/centering_your_web_site_with_css/
I have discovered the beauty of the auto...
a floater
A little floating knowledge goes a long way.
I plan to float a few photos into the gallery page - so I thought it was important to brush up a little on CSS floats.
I’ve knocked up a little floating text down there. no matter how much text I put up here I will never begin to wrap around it. Because the floating paragraph is below this one.
here is some floated right text with an awesome...
The Nav Bar!
Ever been to the navbar?
I was having a little problem. I wanted the text in my navigation bar to be a little bit fancy - but I knew that on other people’s computers it would just look like arial.
The solution was to turn my navigation text-bar into an image!
This ended up being a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.
Basically I needed each link on the bar to have its own id...
CSS test
I just scored 19/20 in the CSS quiz.
yay! I think I’m finally getting a bit of this stuff.
the z-index
I had been wondering about the z-index. I know there is all this positioning stuff - but what is the z-index?
As it turns out the default z-index of an image is 0, so as soon as you turn it this into a negative you reduce its priority. This means that you can use your image as a background!
But you have to make sure that you position the element - i.e. absolutely or relatively.
I’ll try...
April 2009
13 posts
Basic CSS I didn't know
Here are just some little syntax things that I have learnt:
If the property value has more than one word it needs to be placed in quotes. e.g. font-family:”sans serif”
Don’t leave spaces between the value and the units e.g. 1000px not 1000 px
In one of my first posts I said that CSS had to be defined inside <!— and —> now I know why! These are HTML...
XHTML Quiz
17/20!
hey hey!
bring on CSS.
XHTML
The combo between HTML and XML.
Basically the big differences between HTML and XHTML are:
Tags must be closed properly!
uppercase letters are not to be used in tags
Elements must be properly nested i.e. <tag 1> <tag 2>… </tag2> </tag1> note that because tag 2 is nested in tag 1 it must be closed before you close tag 1.
Empty elements like line breaks have to be...
W3 schools HTML Quiz
19/20!
The only one I got wrong was about making a text area in a form.
I’m ready for XHTML.
Character entities not to be confused with markup
Some characters would just confuse the browser with the markup language, things like the greater than sign.
So there are special codes for these entities. These entities can be referred to by a unique name using the ampersand character “&” and then putting the name for the entity.
e.g. ©
will appear as ©
These entities also have numbers which can be introduced by also...
Form builder
There are only a few types of basic things you can do with forms
The form tag. There are a few things you need to identify:
“action” this is where you put your script to tell the form what to do with the data
“name” give your form a name
The Input tag:
value
type There are several types of input boxes you might have: “text” is the most basic text box
...
list master
ordered lists aren’t restricted to mere numbers - you can use letters and roman numerals too just by using the following codes:
ol type=”a” will give you a,b,c etc.
ol type=”i” will you give you the romans
And what about anything other than the “disc” bullets? You can specify the type of bullet in your unordered lists too.
ul type=”circle”
...
HTML fundamentals - the first lesson
Some things I didn’t know:
HTML is not a programming language - as I had mistakenly put in my first draft analsis. No it is a markup language.
Different tags are called elements
Elements are referred to by abbrieviatons, for example you don’t write paragraph you just write “p” and for a link you use an “a” tag which stands for anchor.
Attributes are extra...
An update
My website stinks. Seriously. I can’t seem to get any of the content to lay in its proper place. It looks like a game of pick-up sticks.
I’ve decided to undertake a week and a half of serious back to the drawing board learning. I skipped over too many things way too quickly.
My learning period begins today and will end when I finish doing the following lessons:
The HTML tutorial and...
basically php
A couple of basic syntax things for php:
<?php introduces php into the html and ?> closes it.
echo ” “ is a way of getting the browser to print whatever you put in the brackets.
There are three basic things you can get the browser to print:
text - i.e. whatever words or numbers (n.b. with numbers you don’t need “”) you want it to say
variables - in...
Horizontal Navigation bars in CSS
I need to create a horizontal navigation bar for my site.
This is how to do this with CSS.
1. Create a CSS id for your nav bar and call it whatever you like e.g. #navbar
2. Now give your nav bar some text colours or font properties
3. Now identify what the list items in your nav bar will do - in this case I don’t want it to look like an ordinary list but want it to go straight across the...
Cascade anyone?
Why do they call them cascading sheets anyway?
A cascade is defined as “a chemical or physiological process that occurs in successive stages, each of which is dependent on the preceding one, and often producing a cumulative effect”
So how do they cascade?
Well firstly one page can have heaps of em. They can be external, in the head of the html and in the html element itself (called...
Umm...
really good website:
http://www.squidoo.com/become-a-really-good-graphic-designer
heaps and heaps of links!
March 2009
14 posts
CSS Margins and padding
There are various ways to put space between elements on the page one way is to use margins.
margins can be added into the css like this:
margin-top: 2em;
If I add this into my rules for h1 say, then I’m adding a space of 2 times the font size on top of the heading.
A lazy man’s secret is that while you can add margin-top, margin-left, etc. you don’t have to, because if you...
The Basics
there seem to be a few ways to insert CSS into the head of a doc.
w3c say to do it this way:
<style type=”text/css”>
I’ve seen some people leave off the type=”text/css” but I am going to do it this way from now on.
Basic font stuff:
to mess around with the body and headings I’ll make some rules for them:
<style type=”text/css”> -...
Fresh CSS
CSS is alot more tricky than I first had it pegged. I need to start afresh and learn things more slowly and deliberately and stop trying to cut corners and only learn the things I thnk are important.
So I am going to work my way through the tut’s here:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
and record everything I learn.
DISTURBING
Check this out it’s disturbing. DISTURBING.
Well not that disturbing. But it’s a website to make websites - really quick and easy. Might be a good place to learn something.
www.synthasite.com
I made a website in 5 minutes - seriously. So EASY.
And then what about these guys
www.wufoo.com
well they make forms, and yes it is super easy and quick.
PHPee
today I messed with some simple PHP by putting this code into an html head
<?php echo “The date is: “; echo date(“l jS F Y h:i:s A”); ?>
I produced this page which tells the time!
whacked.
http://www-student.it.uts.edu.au/~awall/week4prac2.php
My font-family
I’ve been thinking:
what happens if someone doesn’t have the font you specify in CSS? Or what if the browser doesn’t recognize it ? can you just choose any font name even if you don’t have it?
Font-family. that is the answer to all these questions. Font-family.
“font-family The font-family property specifies a list of one or more fonts using the family name...
Css'd learning prop
I’ve updated my learning proposal with some lame CSS - hey you gotta start somewhere!
http://www-student.it.uts.edu.au/~awall/learningproposal.html
tony on rails
I’ve started trying to get my head around ruby on rails. I found this website which has some excellent resources including podcasts for beginners:
http://www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts
At the moment I have to be honest and say that I am completely and utterly baffled. But I am beginning to get a vague sense of what it is - which is a start! It seems like rails are an easy and efficient...
suc-css
The CSS I was copying to learn was confusing me, so I sat down again and using this site: http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/Dreamweaver/CSS/cssRules.html clarified a few good things. CSS code has 3 parts: the selector , the property and the value. for e.g.
h1 { font: arial } h1 is the selector - i.e. what will be selected in the HTML by the CSS
font is the property - what property you want to...
this morning I attached my first style sheet to the head of an html doc. I’ve been looking at CSS for the last couple of days trying to get my head around how little bits of punctuation like { can layout a whole page.
I tried placing a few css rules into the head of my document but for some reason it didn’t work. I was defining it as a syle for the document. And then I realised that I...
snippets
hey guys for anyone on mac using smultron, I just made a nice little discovery. You may have already found it yourself but if not look for “snippets” in your tool menu.
these handy little guys can save you from having to type out the code for things like lists, hrefs images or whatever you like really!
nice.
now I get it
I quietly just ended the last post without ever putting up my proposal - because I didnt know what I was doing!
now I get it.
here it is up on the server
http://www-student.it.uts.edu.au/~awall/learningproposal.html
My learning on the learning proposal
Is anyone else finding that their proposal is really really brief?
On a sidenote - HTML is a little clunky no?
I’ve been learning the joy and pain of leaving out the odd ” or >. who’d of thought they could mean so much?
It may not look very nice but I had to learn how to make the colours in the background and stuff.
Firefox goodies
I’ve just added the webdeveloper toolbar to my firefox. Not quite sure how to use well any of it. I also added the firebug tool - now this tool is bloody excellent! I love the inspect button. You can just open up the guts and look into any site, in a totally intelligible way. Can’t even imagine how useful it will be when I can actually use it.
So if you haven’t got it - as the...