Sometimes, I really love just to HTML-code an interesting concept. That's exactly what I was asked to do by the fine folks at Windup Design.
The site is now up: www.cottageinternational.com
Have a look. Great concept by Windup Design, and nice careful coding by yours truly ;)
I received one hillarious (though I was thinking WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?? at the time I actually looked at it) piece of HTML coding today, from some "web designer" my company works with (not for long anymore hopefully)
We asked that guy to code 9 pages for us, a pretty simple pages, not Yahoo portal or anything, mind you. Here, have a look what kind of CSS I have received!
Now, have a look at line number and scroll position. This monster has over 7000 lines!! For 9 pages!! And it weights 132K!!
And! It took almost a week to get these pages coded. Well yeah it definintely takes time to produce that amount of junk :)
this is a site I took part in development of, as a HTML coder. Aside from being a beatuful (though minimalistic) web site (I didn't do the design of course, though), it also contains some interesting pieces of HTML coding. Especially, support for rollover transparent-png-based menus on top, which works fine in IE6 and of course in all standards-compliant browsers :)
Also, the HTML is clean of any JS code and unneded stuff like that (although JS is used on every page, especially in order to support transparent png menus in IE6). Have a look at the code, have a look inside the CSS files, there are some interesting bits of coding inside :)
There are several WordPress plugins for showing Google maps on blog pages exist, but unfortunately, they are all kind of do "too much" :) Like displaying your posts on a Google map, or something like that. What I needed is just a simple plugin which would allow me to embed a Google map into my WordPress blog pages, anywhere I want, preferrably with a single line of simple code. There was nothing like that so I have wrote my own plugin. It's easy to use and install, and works fine so.. here we go :)
Aptana is still-in-early-development Eclipse-based (and therefore is written in Java) IDE for Web programmers.
It supports JavaScript, HTML, CSS syntax highlight, JavaScript syntax checking, auto-completion and even shows browser compatibility information for JS commands and CSS. You can work on levels of projects, as well as single-file editing. The IDE also supports various AJAX libraries, and you can even create projects based on AJAX libs you choose (incl. Prototype, Scriptaculous, Rico and many many more)
Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. Do, do yourself a favour and check Aptana out.
The only drawback for me is that it only supports UTF and Roman encodings, and none of Japanese-specific ones. Yeah I know in this age all sites should be created in UTF, but just.. I don't know.. can't get used to it. Being lazy I guess.
I've experienced a very weird crash on Windows Internet Explorer (XP SP2, English) just yesterday. So here's the problem and the solution and may be, just may be it will help somebody.. someday.
The problem is that IE was crashing on me completely. And according to reports I was getting, mshtml.dll was the problem - so it is definitely IE's HTML renderer (thanks Remedee for pointing this out as I suck as Windows debugging - 100% Mac user).
And the code I was having on the page was just an ordinary blocked output (photo + description, in a SPAN tag), just as follows:
<span class="item">The result was a grid of pictures with descriptions under them.
The problem was that if I had over 23 such blocks on a page, IE was just crashing on me!! With some weird "illegal access" 0xC0000005 in mshtml.dll (or something) error. And of course ALL OTHER browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera) were processing the page without any noticable problems at all.
Well I dunno.. was thinking about inline javascript was causing the problems. And inline javascript is NOT a good thing, but of course it depends.. for example if you have LOADs of images and want to create something like lightbox gallery that would work without needing to wait for the whole page to load (and it WILL take time for lots of images). Anyways.. I was using inline Javascript and though it was causing the problem, so got rid of it, but it didn't help at all. Then.. I just started to remove blocks of code and the problem seem to disappear, but I was left with a non-functional page (I need it to look exactly the way I want, and anyway, that's not a huge amount of markup to be able to play with many combinations).
In the end, the solution for the problem was to add the <span> tag around the text below the picture. JUST TWO TAGS solved the problem.
The resulting code was just like the one below:
<span class="item">Now.. I don't know what was the source of the problem for IE. It could be that I just suck at coding and and don't know the basics. And I definitely will remember about the problem and solution in the future.. But can anyone explain my.. WHY?.. Well it was rhethoric question I guess :)
PS: Oh and yes, the page actually validates..
