HTML | Technology Tales

TOPIC: HTML

Improving a website contact form

23^rd April 2018

On another website, I have had a contact form, but it was missing some functionality. For instance, it stored the input in files on a web server instead of emailing them. That was fixed more easily than expected using the PHP mail function. Even so, it remains useful to survey corresponding documentation on the W3Schools website.

The other changes affected the way the form looked to a visitor. There was a reset button, and that was removed on finding that such things are out of favour these days. Thinking again, there hardly was any need for it any way.

Newer additions that came with HTML5 had their place too. Including user hints using the placeholder attribute should add some user-friendliness, although I have avoided experimenting with browser-powered input validation for now. Use of the required attribute has its uses for telling a visitor that they have forgotten something, but I need to check how that is handled in CSS more thoroughly before I go with that since there are new :required, :optional, :valid and :invalid pseudoclasses that can be used to help.

It appears that there is much more to learn about setting up forms since I last checked. This is perhaps a hint that a few books need reading as part of catching with how things are done these days. There also is something new to learn.

Easier to print?

20^th February 2010

One matter that really came to light was how well or not the pages on here and on my hill walking and photography website came out on the printed page. After spotting a WordPress Codex article and with an eye on improving things, I have made a distinction between screen and print stylesheets. The code in the XHTML looks like this:

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

The media attribute seems to be respected by the browsers that I have been using for testing (latest versions of Firefox, MSIE and Opera) so it then was a matter of using CSS to control what was shown and how it was displayed. Extraneous items like sidebars were excluded from the printed page in favour of the real content that visitors would be wanting anyway, and everything else was made as monochrome as possible, with images being the only things to escape. After all, people don't want to be wasting paper and ink in these cash strained times, and there's no need to have any more colour than necessary either. Then, there's the distraction caused by non-functioning hyperlinks that has inspired the sharing of some wisdom on A List Apart. Returning to my implementation, please let me know in the comments what you think of what I have done on here and if there remains any room for improvement.

A case of "peekaboo" behaviour in Internet Explorer

1^st July 2008

Recently, I changed the engine of my online photo gallery to a speedier PHP/MySQL-based affair from its PHP/Perl/XML-powered predecessor. On the server side, all was well, but a peculiar display issue turned up in Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8 were afflicted by this behaviour) where photo caption text on the thumbnail gallery pages was being displayed erratically.

As far as I can gather, the trigger for the behaviour was that the thumbnail block was placed within a DIV floated using CSS that touched another DIV that cleared the floating behaviour. I use a table to hold the images and their associated captions in place. Furthermore, each caption was also a hyperlink nested within a set of P tags.

The remedy was to set the CSS Display property for the affected XHTML tag to a value of "inline-block". Within a DIV, TABLE, TR, TD, P and A tag hierarchy, finding the right tag where the CSS property in question has the desired effect took some doing. As it happened, it was the tag set, that for the hyperlink, at the bottom of the stack that needed the fix.

Of course, it's all very fine fixing something for one browser, but it's worthless if it breaks the presentation in other browsers. In that vein, I did some testing in Opera, Firefox, Seamonkey and Safari to check if all was well and it was. There may be older browsers, like versions of IE before 6, where things don't appear as intended, yet I get the impression from my visitor statistics that the newer variants hold sway anyway. All in all, it was a useful lesson learnt, and that's never a bad thing.

CSS Control of Text Wrapping

11^th September 2007

Recently, I spotted a request for a dropdown list like that which you see below. I managed to create it using the CSS, but it only worked for Firefox, so I couldn't suggest it to the requester.

form select, form select option {width: 185px; white-space: normal;}

form select {height: 16px; width: 200px; white-space: normal;}

form {margin: 300px auto 0 auto; width: 300px;}

Here's how it looks in Firefox 2:

Drop down Menu with Wrapped Entry Text

And in IE6:

Same Drop down Menu as Displayed by IE6

And in Opera 9:

Same Drop down Menu as Displayed by Opera 9

It would be nice if the white-space attribute gave the same result in all three but hey ho... As it happens, the W3C are working up other possible ways of controlling text wrapping in (X)HTML elements, but that's for the future, and I'll be expecting it when I see it.

For menus with wrapped entries, using DHTML menus and DOM scripting seems the best course for now. I suppose that you could always make the entries shorter, which is precisely what I tend to do; I am pragmatic like that. Nevertheless, there's never any harm in attempting to push the boundaries. You just have to come away from the cutting edge at the first sign of bleeding...

Of course, if anyone had other ideas, please let me know.

Exploring AJAX

7^th June 2007

When I started it, my online photo gallery started out simply as a set of interlinked HTML pages. Over time, I discovered frames (yes, them!) and started to make use of JavaScript to make the slideshows slicker. In those days, I was working off free webspace provided by my ISP and client-side scripting was the only tool that I had for enhancing functionality. Having tired of the vagaries of client-side scripting while the browser wars were in full swing and incompatibilities reigned supreme, I went with paid hosting to get access to tools like Perl and PHP for server-side processing. Because their flexibility compared to JavaScript was a breath of fresh air to me, I am still a fan of the server-side approach.

The journey that I have just described is one that I now know was followed by many website builders around the same time. Nevertheless, I have still held on to JavaScript for some things, particularly for updating the DOM as part of making the pages more responsive to user interaction. In the last few years, a hybrid approach has been gaining currency: AJAX. This offers the ability to modify parts of a page without needing to reload the whole thing, generating a considerable amount of interest among web application developers.

The world of AJAX is evidently a complex one, though the underlying principle can be explained in simple terms. The essential idea is that you use JavaScript to call a server-side script, PHP is as good an example as any, that returns either text or XML that can be used to update part of a web page in situ without the need to reload it as per the traditional way of working. It has opened up so many possibilities from the interface design point of view that AJAX became a hot topic that still receives much attention today. One bugbear is efficiency because I have seen an AJAX application lock up a PC with a little help from IE6. There will always remain times when server-side processing is the best route, even if that needs to be balanced against the client-side approach.

Like its forbear DHTML, AJAX is really a development approach using a number of different technologies in combination. The DHTML elements such as (X)HTML, CSS, DOM and JavaScript are very much part of the AJAX world but server-side elements such as HTTP, PHP, MySQL and XML are also very much part of the fabric of the landscape. In fact, while AJAX can use plain text as the transfer format, XML is the one implied by the AJAX acronym and XSLT is used to transform XML into HTML. However, AJAX is not limited to the aforementioned technologies; for instance, I cannot see why Perl cannot play a role in place of PHP and ASP, both of which can be used for the same things.

Even in these standards-compliant days, browser support for AJAX remains diverse, to say the least, and it is akin to having MSIE in one corner and the rest in the other. Mind you, Microsoft did introduce the tools in the first place only for them to use ActiveX, while Mozilla created a new object type rather than continue this method of operation. Given that ActiveX is a Windows-only technology, I can see why Mozilla did what they did, and it is a sensible decision. In fact, IE7 appears to have picked up the Mozilla way of doing things.

Even with the apparent convergence, there will continue to be a need for the AJAX JavaScript libraries that are currently out there. Incidentally, Adobe has included one called Spry with Dreamweaver CS3. Nevertheless, I still like to find out how things work at the basic level and feel somewhat obstructed when I cannot do this. I remember perusing Wrox’s Professional AJAX and found the constant references to the associated function library rather grating; the writing style didn’t help either.

My taking a more granular approach has got me reading SAMS Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes as a means for getting my foot in the door. As with their Teach Yourself … in 24 Hours series, the title is a little misleading since there are 22 lessons of 10 minutes in duration (the 24 Hours moniker refers to there being 24 lessons, each of one hour in length). Anything composed of 10-minute lessons, even 22 of them, is never going to be comprehensive but, as a means for getting started, I have to say that the approach seems effective based on this volume. It has certainly whetted my appetite for giving AJAX a go, and it’ll be interesting to see how things progress from here.

Are developers and designers overcomplicating their CSS?

11^th May 2007

When I have been tweaking the widgets in this blog, the thought crossed my mind that purveyors of open source blogging and CMS's may be overcomplicating matters with the CSS that they are writing. Using inheritance without much thought as to others having to pick it up is one irritation, but bunching styles together can confuse too. For instance, you can draw from two different styles for the same HTML element (it's what's going when you see class="class1 class2" in a tag definition), which is OK if done simply but can confuse matters when customisation is attempted later. Drupal particularly suffers from this bugbear, but it's there on WordPress too, though not to the same extent. Using a hierarchy to define and attach your styles (#id1 .class2 tag1 {style definition...} is the kind of thing that I have in mind), can also confound, even if I admit to finding the approach very useful for myself. I think that I know what's driving this: the need to cut down the bulk of CSS files but using the advanced features that I mentioned above without clear commenting and other documentation hampers later efforts. It would be nice if every developer of a theme to use in blogging or CMS software was forced to document their work extensively and share that documentation with interested users. After all, sharing is the whole purpose of their endeavours...

A web development toolbox

23^rd March 2007

Having been on a web-building journey from Geocities to having a website with my own domain hosted by Fasthosts, it should come as no surprise that I have encountered a number of tools and technologies over this time and that my choices and knowledge have evolved too. I’ll muse over the technologies first before going on to the tools that I use.

Technologies

XHTML

When I started building websites, it was not after HTML 4 got released, and I devoured most if not all of Elizabeth Castro’s Peachpit Visual Quickstart guide to the language within a weekend. Having previously used fairly primitive WYSIWYG tools like Netscape Composer and Claris Home Page, it was an empowering experience and the first edition (it is now on its third) of Jennifer Niederst Robbins’ Web Design in a Nutshell took things much further, becoming something of a bible for a number of years.

When it first appeared, XHTML 1.0 wasn’t a major change from HTML 4, but its stricter more XML-compliant syntax was meant to point the way to the future and semantic markup was at its heart at least as much as it was for HTML 4. XHTML 2.0 is on the horizon and after the modular approach of XHTML 1.1 (which I have never used), it will be interesting to see how it develops. Nevertheless, there is a surprising development in that some people are musing over the idea of having an HTML 5. Let’s hope that the (X)HTML apple cart doesn’t get completely overturned after some years of relative stability. I still bear scars from the browser wars raging in the 1990’s and don’t want to see standards wars supplanting the relative peace that we have now. That said, I don’t mind peaceful progression.

CSS

Only seems to be coming into its own in the last few years and is truly a remarkable technology despite the hobbles that MSIE places on our ambitions. CSS Zen Garden has been a major source of ideas; I wouldn’t have been able to customise this blog as much as I have without them. I was an early adopter of the technology and got burnt by inconsistent browser support; Netscape 4 was the proverbial bête noir back then, fulfilling the role that MSIE plays today. In those days, it was the idea of controlling text display and element backgrounds from a single place that appealed. Since then, I have progressed to using CSS to replace table-based layouts and to control element positioning. It can do more…

JavaScript

Having had a JavaScript-powered photo gallery before my current Perl-driven one, I can say that I have definitely sampled this ever-pervasive scripting language. Being a client-side language rather than a server-side one, it does place you rather at the mercy of the browser purveyors, and it never ceases to amaze me that there is a buzz around AJAX because of this. In fact, the abundance of AJAX cross-browser function libraries is testimony to the need for browser-specific code. Despite my preferences for server-side scripting, I still find a use for JavaScript, and its main use for me these days is to dynamically control CSS elements to do such things as control the height of a page element or whether it is shown or not. Apparently, CSS may get some dynamic capabilities in the future and reduce my dependence on JavaScript. Meanwhile, Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed) will prove as much of an asset as it has done.

XML

These days, a lot of the raw data underlying my personal website is stored in XML. I did try to dynamically transform the display of the XML into something meaningful with CSS and XSLT when I first scaled its dizzy heights, but I soon resorted to other techniques. Browser support and the complexity of what I required were the major contributors to this. The new strategy involved two different approaches. The first was to create PHP/XHTML pages from the precursor XML offline, and this is how I generate the website’s directory pages. The other one is to process the XML as text to dynamically supply an XHTML page as the user visits it; this is the way that the photo gallery works.

Perl

This still powers all of my photo gallery. While thoughts of changing it all to PHP linger, there is a certain something about the Perl language that keeps it there. I suppose it is that PHP is entangled in the HTML while Perl encases the whole business, and I am reasonably familiar with its syntax these days, which is why it still does a lot of the data processing grunt work that I need.

PHP

PHP is everywhere these days, though it doesn’t attract quite the level of hype that used to be the case. It still appears with its sidekick MySQL in many website applications. Blogging software such as WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Mambo and Joomla! wouldn’t exist without the pair. It appears on my website as the glue that holds my visitor directories together and is the processing engine of my WordPress blog. And if I ever get to a Drupal element to the site, by no means a foregone conclusion though I am spending a lot of time with it at this time, PHP will continue its presence in my website scripting as it powers that too.

Applications

Macromedia HomeSite

I have a liking for hand coding, so this does most of what I need. When Macromedia (itself since taken over by Adobe, of course) took over Allaire, HomeSite sadly lost its WYSIWYG capability, but the application still soldiers on even though Dreamweaver offers a lot to code cutters these days. Nevertheless, it does have certain advantages over Dreamweaver: it is a fleeter beast to start up and colour codes Perl syntax.

Macromedia Dreamweaver

There was a time when Dreamweaver was solely a tool for visual web page development, but the advent of Dreamweaver UltraDev added server-side development capabilities to the Dreamweaver family. These days, there is only one Dreamweaver version, but UltraDev’s capabilities still live on in the latest version and I would not be surprised if they were taken further in these database-driven times.

Nowadays, Dreamweaver isn’t an application where I spend a great deal of time. In former times, when my site was made up of static HTML pages, I used Dreamweaver a lot, even if its rendering capabilities were a step behind the then-current browser versions. I suppose that it didn’t fit the way in which I worked, but its template-driven workflow would have been a boon back then.

However, my move from a static site to a dynamic one, starting with my photo gallery, has meant that I haven’t used it as much since then. However, with my use of PHP/MySQL components on my site. Its server-side abilities could get the level of investigation that its PHP/MySQL capabilities allow.

Altova XMLSpy Professional

Adding MySQL databases to my web hosting costs money, not a lot, but it could be spent on other (more important?) things. Hence, I use XML as the data store for my photo gallery and XML files are pre-processed into XHTML/PHP pages for my visitor directories before uploading onto the server.

I use XMLSpy to edit and manage the XML files that I use: its ability to view XML in grid format is a killer feature as far as I am concerned and XML validation also proves very useful; particularly when it comes to ensuring that DTD’s and XML files are in step and for the correct coding of XSLT files. There are other features that I need to explore and that would also take my knowledge of the XML further to boot, not at all a bad thing.

Saxon

For processing XML into another file format such as XHTML, you need a parser and I use the free version of Saxon to do the needful, Saxonica offers commercial versions of it. There is, I believe, a parser in XMLSpy, but I don’t use it because Saxon’s command line interface fits better into my workflow. This is a Perl-driven process where XML files are read and XSLT files, one per XML file, are built before both are fed to Saxon for transforming into XHTML/PHP files. It all works smoothly and updating the XML inputs is all that is required.

AceFTP

If I were looking for an FTP client now, it would be FileZilla, but AceFTP has served me well over the last few years, and it looks as if that will continue. It does have some extra features over FileZilla: transfers between remote sites, and scheduling, for example. I have yet to use either, but they look valuable.

Hutmil

In bygone days when I had loads of static HTML files, making changes was a bit of a chore if they affected every single file. An example is changing the year on the copyright message on the page footers. Hutmil, which I found on a magazine cover-mounted disc, was a great time saver in those days. Today, I achieve this by putting this information into a single file and getting Perl or PHP to import that when building the page. The same “define once, use anywhere” approach underlies CSS as well, and scripting very usefully allows you to take that into the XHTML domain.

Apache

Apache is ubiquitous these days, and both the online and offline versions of my site are powered by it. It does require some configuration, but it is a powerful piece of kit. The introduction of 2.2.x meant a big change in the way that configuration files were modularised and while most things were contained in a single file for 2.0.x, the settings are broken up into different files in 2.2.x, and it can take a while to find things again. Without having it on my home PC, I would not be able to use Perl, PHP or MySQL. Apart from this, I especially like its virtual site capability; very useful for offline development.

WordPress

My hosting supplier offers blogs on Blogware, but that didn’t offer the level of configuration that I would have liked. It is true that this is probably true of any host of blogs. I can’t speak for Blogger, but WordPress.com does have its restrictions too. To make my hillwalking blog fit in with the appearance of my photo gallery, I went popped over to WordPress.org to download WordPress so that I could host a blog myself and have maximum control over its appearance. WordPress supports themes, so I created my own and got my blog pages looking as if they are part of my website, rather than looking like something that was bolted on. Now that I think of it, what about WordPress supporting user-created themes? I support that there is the worry of insecure PHP code but what about it?

MySQL

I am between minds on whether this is a technology or a tool. SQL certainly would be a technology standard, but I am not so clear on what MySQL would be. In any case, I have classed it as a tool, and a very useful one at that. It is the linchpin for my WordPress blogs and, if I go for a content management system like Drupal, its role would surely grow. While I do have a lot of experience with using SAS SQL and this helps me to deal with other varieties, there is still a learning curve with MySQL that gets me heading for a good book and Kofler’s The Definitive Guide to MySQL5 (Apress) seems to perform more than adequately in this endeavour.

Paint Shop Pro

As someone who hosts an online photo gallery, it won’t come as a surprise that I have had exposure to image editors. Despite various other flirtations, Paint Shop Pro has been my tool of choice over the years, but it is now set to be usurped by a member of Adobe’s Photoshop family. Paint Shop Pro does have books devoted to it, but it appears that Photoshop gets better coverage and I feel that my image processing needs to be taken up a gear, hence the potential move to Photoshop

HTML Tidy for Windows

22^nd March 2007

Drupal has modules (Import HTML and its helper Static HTML together make up one option) for importing static (X)HTML pages into its database, and it needs HTML Tidy to work. Since I am playing with the thing on Windows, I went out and snagged the version for that OS. Being either lazy or bloody-minded, I tried an XHTML page with PHP code embedded in it and, needless to say, the thing choked. I must try it with plain XHTML instead.