XML Course

Just completed delivering the XML course at the North West University in Potchefstroom.

Went very well.

IE8 JavaScript and backgroundImage

On one of my site I use a technique where I search for all elements that have the same title attribute. All the ones found I change the backgroundImage so those elements are highlighted.

Works brilliantly on all browsers (IE6, IE7, Firefox [all versions], Chrome, Safari, Opera and maybe a few others). But on IE8, it simply doesn't work!

Testing has shown that the JavaScript works, except where it changes the backgroundImage. That is where it [IE8] simply ignores the action requested of it.

Of interest, backgroundColor works. Just backgroundImage style property does not work.

I checked all the standards and found only one thing that seems to make a slight difference:

obj.style.backgroundImage = "url('images/myBgImage.gif')";

must become:

obj.style.backgroundImage = "url(images/myBgImage.gif)";

One must drop the single quotes.

At first this looked like we are going someplace. But now some work and others don't. Haven't noticed a pattern yet. So, I need to do some more work to figure out a solution to this very peculiar problem.

It is strange that Microsoft has not found this problem yet. There are a number of Blog entries that I have found when googling the problem. One of them gave me an idea which I shall be trying this weekend.

Date for IE8 Workshop

We have decided on a date for our first workshop: 16 July.

It will be a full day's event with lunch included.

Go here to to find out more info: http://www.workingwebs.co.za/workshop_ie8.htm

Workshop for IE8 Compatability

We decided yesterday that we would run a workshop to share the tricks we have learned so far to get IE8 to show the various cases we found solutions and work arounds for.

Still choosing a date. Will keep you posted.

Quick review of Microsoft's new IE8

My first experience with IE was a pain. I was hoping that after the candidate release that MS would have fixed many of it's errors, but, alas, its being released out to the world via the Windows automatic updates as a critical update!

What's the issue?

The looks and the tabs handling etc. would not be something that would worry me. Those things one gets used to. My issue and bug with IE8 is that it renders many (some fairly normal markup) differently to every other browser out there.

As designers and developers, we already have to contend with browser differences. We have IE6 still being used quite widely - I was visiting a prospective client yesterday and they still use IE6.

IE6 being very different from the IE7 which, in turn, is different from Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Now we have another browser which renders certain things completely differently from all the other browsers.

Well, its more work for all of us!

That, wouldn't be so bad, except for this: how does one charge for something like this? Clients expect you to have all your design ducks in a row. Ouch!

Hi! I am still here.

Wondering where I've been?

Well, thanks:-)

I have been doing back-to-back training now for the last few weeks. This has kept me unusually busy.

I have a bit of a gap now. So you will see more updates.

PS: I'm on Twitter now too! See my tweets on http://twitter.com/onlinewolf

Welcome to 2009!

We are all fully back at work. Yes, I started early and did a Silverlight workshop with my most enthusiastic student, Mark Mann.

While there is a long way to go to become experts at Silverlight, we both learned so much! The most interesting project was to create a fully dynamic menu system, i.e. a menu that will work from data in a database.

Clearly some clever things were done by Microsoft's developers and it looks like Silverlight will have quite a following. But, whether it will be a Flash beater is yet to be seen. Flash has a long track record and has a lot of support. But it does seem that Silverlight has an edge when it comes to integrating into the back end, be it at this stage only really ASP.Net. But, I am sure some work will follow to provide support for other back end technologies.

PS: In case you are wondering what Silverlight is. It is primarily a front end (running in the browser) technology to provide what is known as a rich user interface (really meaning graphics and text that can move, zoom, fade in and out, play movies, etc.).

What is interesting about Silverlight is that aside from a plug-in (which must be installed on the browser) and a little JavaScript, is that the "Silverlight instruction set" gets sent from the server in XML format (the particular application is XAML). Though, now (from Silverlight version 2), the XAML file actually gets compiled to a XAP file. This does two things: (a) it compresses the file for quicker loading over the network and (b) the XAML isn't exposed for all to see (and steal).

Interesting stuff.

What is XML?

Some of you will know what XML is. Some of you may even use it. For those of you who don't, this blog entry will be of interest to you.

Well, let's start by discussing what XML is.

XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language. It is called extensible because the language is extendable. See, while it can be compared to HTML (since the data is also marked up with tags) it really is quite different because:

a) The tags are not predefined (to put this simplistically, you create your own tags, hence extendable - one can add more tags as needed);
b) The rules are very strict (it would have to be because of point a above);
c) XML was not designed to display data, but rather to structure data;
d) HTML is restricted to be viewed in browsers (or similar software), whereas XML can be (and is) much more widely used.

XML is most often used to store data or transfer data. Either usage requires that the data is defined. E.g. this part of the data is the product name and this part is the price. This makes it possible for humans and computer programs to interpret the data.

So, what's the big deal? Well to start with, HTML is too restrictive (only has a limited set of tags) to be used to structure data. It does a great job in presenting data along with style sheets. But that is where its usefulness ends. XML won't replace it for this task, but it will work with HTML and, interestingly enough, it defines the latest version of HTML, called XHMTL.

What does this all mean? XML's job is to provide a way to store data in a structured and meaningful way that is not ambiguous. The design of XML is so clever that it can structure almost any data, including but not limited to electronic transfer data, mathematics, music, documents (of almost any kind), etc.

However, by itself, XML can't do these things. It is actually through the use of software written to use XML that its usefulness really comes out. And then it shines light years above anything else devised so far.

Therefore, to use XML one has to have at one's disposal programs (software) that are XML enabled. To the web developer it means that to benefit from XML you will need to know how to write programs (e.g. ASP.NET, JavaScript, etc.).

What software uses XML? Actually, quite a bit. Some word processing software already stores the documents in XML format. Many banking systems have already deployed XML to transfer financial information. From a web developer's point of view, you can use XML from inside many browsers using JavaScript. ASP can be used to create or read XML data. Technologies such as Java (JDEE) and ASP.NET have been developed to natively use XML as one of its array of data sources.

The question that may come to your lips is: Could you use XML inside your web pages? Yes, you can. Amongst the simplest functions can include using JavaScript inside the browser to display selected bits of info, make sortable columns, etc.

But, whatever way you want to use XML, you do need to get to learn it. There is really quite a lot to it and you should add that to your list of things to learn.

If you are interested in learning more about XML you may attend our XML course.

Find out more about web related training in South Africa visit http://www.workingwebs.co.za/.

Night Classes

We are ending our year with night classes.

For a while I didn't want to do night classes. I am already working the whole day. But it has been interesting that the demand was sitting there all the time. And after starting the second set of night classes I met some really nice folk. In fact, from our previous class, I have gained an employee.

So all in all it has turned out to be quite fun!


Happy holidays to you!