1.Divitis , Classitis, Tagitis

Please think twice before adding a tag to the page.

Bad code

 
<div id="header">
 
<div class="headerTop">
<h2 class="headerTxt">Site Name</h2>
</div>
 
<div class="headerTagline">
<span class="tagline">tagline</span>
</div>
 
</div>

Better Way

 
<div id="header">
<h2>Site Name</h2>
<span class="tagline">tagline</span>
</div>

2.Tables are okay for tabular data

I see some times that web developers are so passionate about divs and table less designs that they try to fake a table using divs (I was one among them ) Be sensible to use tables when you are needing to show tabular data, like a list of customers orders etc.

 
<table>
  <tr>
    <th>col1</th>
    <th>col2</th>
    <th>col3</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>1</td>
    <td>varun</td>
    <td>varunkrish.com</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>2</td>
    <td>google</td>
    <td>google.com</td>
  </tr>
</table>
 
is okay compared to 
 
<div id="table">
  <ul class="heading">
    <li>col1</li>
    <li>col2</li>
    <li>col3</li>
  </ul>
  <ul>
    <li>1</li>
    <li>varun</li>
    <li>varunkrish.com</li>
  </ul>
  <ul>
    <li>2</li>
    <li>google</li>
    <li>google.com</li>
  </ul>
</table>

3.Let the page have good content flow even with CSS removed.

By writing Semantic Markup, you make sure the content flow displayed to the user remains the same even with CSS turned off.
This is very critical when you see from the angle of the Search Engines and Mobile / PDA Devices.This also mean that you separate the content from the presentation

4.Use Tools to make ur life easier

Firefox – Web Developer Toolbar

IE – IEDEV Toolbar

Opera – Dev Opera tools

5.Why do you need Inline Styles ?
Dont use them unless you want to messy code . Try to keep all the CSS in external files. Split the files if it gets big.

6.CSS / Loading times

When loading times of CSS file becomes a concern , you must try moving the styles into separate files so as to the reduce the amount of data. Also you dont need all the styles in the world for a single page. So organize them acording to your needs

7.Use relative paths to images

I see a a lot of sites using absolute paths for images used in either the HTML code or for the CSS background images.

Be smart, use relative paths to your images.

use 
background-image:url(/images/background.gif);
 
instead of 
background-image:url(http://site.com/images/background.gif);

8. I can do a lot of this with HTML why do i need XHTML ?

But HTML is loosing adoption and XHTML is gaining acceptance.Check these pages

for some benefits

New York Library site
WSG

XHTML is more closer to XML although both are derivatives of the same.

9.Make you site printer friendly with just a extra line of code and a CSS file

You must have seen media=”print” or media=”projector” line while including CSS files.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />

Should do the trick

10. Use a Syntax validator

XHTML
CSS

How are Search engines going to work in 2007 ?

Things might not change much , but just get the basics right.

• Quality of links matters ,not quantity – this has been there since the beginning but from now on more importance will be given to quality of links
• Avoid 302 Redirects completely – Matt Cutts had pointed out that this can get your site / page of the listings if you use 302s
• Be careful about link exchanges
• Refrain from link spam
• Get links from relevant sites
• Focus more on semantic content,usability – let the javascript menus die. AJAX enabled websites might suffer on this front as they are heavy on javascript.
• Session IDs are a strict no, get rid of them (Why use sessions on public pages ? )

via [read]

Today I needed to test a bunch of code which is given here

The article talks about using Dojo and JSON for AJAX applications.

There is a sample application available on the site for the article.Its a zip file when extracted

has the following structure.

• web

• actions
  example1.jsp
  example2.jsp
  example3.jsp
  index.jsp
  js
  WEB-INF
  welcome.jsp.html
  

Now i need to build a WAR ( Web Archive ) for deployment on my container – Tomcat.

Permalink to this topic

I have setup XAMPP at work. It comes with Apache 2, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and a whole bunch of stuff.

The Apache resides at

http://localhost (port:80)

I installed Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition and also setup IIS via Windows Control Panel as I wanted to try MSSQL Server Express Edition .

Now after installing IIS, Apache Refused to start.

[code lang="PHP"]Only one usage of each socket address
is normally petmitted. :make_sock could not bound to address:0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available , shutting down
Unable to open logs
[/code]It was because there was a conflict in the port 80.

Now i went to the website properties in IIS and changed the port no to 9090 from 80.

Now restarted IIS and tried to start apache

Now similar error but diff port

[code lang="PHP"] Only one usage of each socket address
is normally petmitted. :make_sock could not bound to address:0.0.0.0:443
no listening sockets available , shutting down
Unable to open logs

[/code]Now i suspected the conflict was in the SSL port so tried digging through the XAMPP files.

found this file httpd-SSL.conf in \\apache\conf\extra\

Navigate to this line.

[code lang="PHP"]# When we also provide SSL we have to listen to the
# standard HTTP port (see above) and to the HTTPS port
#
# Note: Configurations that use IPv6 but not IPv4-mapped addresses need two
# Listen directives: "Listen [::]:443" and "Listen 0.0.0.0:443"
#

Listen 443

[/code]change 443 to say some port like 4499

1 more change

[code lang="PHP"]# General setup for the virtual host
DocumentRoot "c:/web/xampp/htdocs"ServerName localhost:4499
ServerAdmin admin@localhost

[/code]Voila !!!

Now i can run IIS and Apache parallelly

That means i can work with ASP and PHP at the same time

WinCvs is a free source code version control tool .. CVS is usefull for any damn project be it 10 files or 10000 files.. In this post i will try to explain how to start using wincvs and thereby bring CVS into your project.. Please bear with me for sometime until i post the tut here.

Building a form like this using tables is easy .. scroll down and see the source code … no table no td no tr … just plain CSS..

CSS is real fun to play with and powerfull too

[code lang="CSS"]

body{
background-color:#fff;
font-family:Arial;
}
#frmAddress{
background-color:#fee9bd;
padding:0px;
margin:0px;
border:1px solid #FFCC66;
width:50%;
}
#frmAddress h1{
font-size:20px;
background-color:#fff8db;
padding:0px;
margin :0px;
}

.frmin{
width:150px;
background-color:#fff8db;
margin-top:2px;
margin-bottom:4px;
}

label{
background-color:#fff8db;
border:1px solid #ccc;
float: left;
width: 120px;
margin:3px;
padding:3px;
font: bold normal 13px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

br{
clear:left;
}

[/code]

[code lang="HTML"]

[/code]

Last time round we stopped with just on printing output with asp.It means that you can print HTML tags and HTML content using ASP the same way PHP or JSP does.

Now we will see some commonly used variable declarations and loop constructs in ASP.

Variables

People who have worked in Visual Basic will have come accross the Dim keyword. Its the same way variables are declared in ASP.

[code lang="asp"]
<%
dim variablename
variablename="value"
response.write("value is: " & variablename)
%>
[/code]

As you can see, the Ampersand operator is used for appending.

Arrays

You can declare and use arrays in the following manner. We will see how to use loops so that you can access the array elements

[code lang="asp"]
<%
Dim array_name(array_size)
array_name(1) = "value 1"
array_name(2) = "value 2"
array_name(3) = "value 3"
array_name(4) = "value 4"
array_name(5) = "value 5"
array_name(6) = "value 6"
%>
[/code]
For Next Loop

This is the general for loop you might have used in some application.

[code lang="asp"]
Dim variable
for variable=start to end [optional step argument]
statements
next
[/code]

The step argument is used to increment the variable in steps less than or more than 1

Do Loops

[code lang="asp"]
<%
Dim variable
variable=5
Do
response.write("The variable is: "&variable&"
")
variable=variable-1
loop until variable=0
%>
[/code]

IF statements

[code lang="asp"]

<%
if condition is true then
true statement
else
false statement
end if
%>
[/code]
Select Case

[code lang="asp"]

Select Case variable
case 1
response.write("case 1")
case 2
response.write("case 2")
case 3
response.write("case 3")

end select

[/code]

We will see about Functions and Procedures in the next part.

I was learning asp and figuring out how to do simple things in the now almost obsolete language.

But i heard the knowledge of asp helps you work in the Microsoft Technologies like ASP.NET etc.

Lets get started rite now.If you have worked on PHP you will be knowing tags.

Similarly in asp the ASP tags are <% and %>. You need to place your asp code between the same.

example1:
[code lang="asp"]
<% response.write("Hello World!")%>
[/code]

for working in any server side language, HTML knowledge is must. Its not that difficult to learn HTML. You can use HTML within asp response statement.
[code lang="asp"]
<%
response.write("

You can use HTML tags to format the text!

")
%>
[/code]
Next time we will deal with variables and loops.Happy ASP ing!! .