Friday, November 15, 2002

Errata

The honeymoon's over, alas. There are a few errata to report.

If you find any, please let me know.

Sunday, November 10, 2002

Cross-browser standards-based objects!

A List Apart has a great new article by Drew McLellan detailing how to add Flash animations to Web pages for most major browsers with just the OBJECT tag (and no EMBED), thus sticking to standards.

Those who've seen the new 5th edition of my HTML book will note (in the Multimedia chapter) that I lamented the whole OBJECT/EMBED situation. In short, only OBJECT is valid XHTML. Current browsers support OBJECT except that IEWin insists on adding a proprietary ActiveX control which trips up most other browsers. So you're forced to use the non-standard EMBED tag in order to get the thing to work cross-browser/cross-platform.

I haven't yet fiddled around with the examples, but I'm encouraged by the promised results.

Friday, October 11, 2002

New Reviews of 5th Edition

Very psyched. People have started to review the new Fifth Edition of my HTML book. And they like it!!

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

New Extra Tips section

I love FileMaker Pro. As I was writing the new fifth edition of HTML VQS, I would find little bits of information that were either too obscure for a particular topic, or that simply didn't fit on the page. So, instead of writing it in a to-do list or thinking maybe I'd write an article about it someday, I just popped it into a quickly-created FileMaker database. When I finished the book, there were some 40 extra tips, already written up and ready to go.

They're a bit esoteric, but perhaps you'll find them useful. More likely, you'll just find one or two of them useful, but they'll be so useful you'll be glad you waded through the others to find them. And the next person who stops by will find two other useful ones, that you dismissed as completely obvious or irrelevant.

Check out the extra tips.

Friday, September 13, 2002

Blogging CSS

Oof, adapting this movable type blog to my new style is not easy. First, figuring out how their style sheet works and then trying to meld that into my style.

I can only ask that you forgive me the size of the calendar. I'm hoping you don't have to actually see the numbers, that you can sort of intuit what they are...

Still new to this blogging stuff... not to mention that it's 3am.

New HTML VQS 5e Web Site

Attempting to practice what I now preach, I've been completely redesigning my Web site with XHTML and CSS. Once I finally got a style down (such that it is), the actual work has been rather fun, the kind I can listen to music while I do it.

I've taken advantage of two shortcuts in my code. First, I've created a "current" class that I can apply to the section header and link for the current page. This current section then stays purple to indicate that it's being viewed, and the cursor does not change into a pointer over it (even though the link is still there). The technique is described in a bit more detail on page 185. Now that I've got several pages with the same links, this saves a lot of time.

Another time saver is to use absolute URLs that start at the root directory. Instead of, for example, http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html I use /html/extras/entities.html to the same effect (but with much less typing).

I'm rather pleased with all of the data--the examples, index, table of (X)HTML entities, and much more.

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