Robert Cailliau on Web standards

Why The Co-Developer Of The World Wide Web Isn’t On Facebook (Video Interview)


Comments:

Check out his website: Robert Cailliau . Check out his Web standards test page.

His comments on Internet Explorer:

Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista does not respect the W3C standards for cascading style sheets and it does not even render a file marked as xhtml such as this one. If you have trouble with my site, it may be your browser. Download Firefox or Safari if you are a Windows user.

The end of JASC

Corel will close Eden Prairie office

Excerpt:

Software company Corel Corp. will close its Eden Prairie operations, the company said Wednesday, putting an end to the Twin Cities digital-media business once known as Jasc Software Inc.
....

Corel entered the Twin Cities in 2004 when it bought the former Jasc Software. Jasc, founded in 1991 by a former pilot (the name stands for "Jets and Software Co.," developed the Paint Shop line of photo management and editing software, which established a loyal following despite competing with the much larger Adobe Systems' PhotoShop. Those titles will still be sold by Corel.

Comment: What a great company JASC was. One used to be able to download Paint Shop Pro for free, and use it for 30 days of so. The local support was so capable. Need help? Just call those folk up and they helped you. I still have an old copy of Paint Shop Pro (I think version 7) that I use at work. Sorry to see these folk lose their jobs!

Barebones HTML guide

<H1>HTML</H1>

The Bare Bones Guide to HTML

The Bare Bones Guide to HTML lists all the tags that current browsers are likely to recognize. I have included all the elements in the official HTML 4.0 recommendation with common attributes, as well as Netscape and Microsoft extensions. This document is a quick reference, not a complete specification; for official information about HTML and its development, see the World Wide Web Consortium site at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.

Comment: Handy online guide!

IP Address Location Lookup

Pretty cool free tool to find location of an IP address

IP Address Location Lookup

Other free lookups from melissadata.com

Better colors w Safari browser

Safari ushers in better browser colors

Excerpt:

Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet--Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox--the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.

However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.

Comment: I have IE 7, Firefox 2, and Safari on my old Dell home laptop. In order of preference ...

1. Firefox
   
2. Safari
   
3. IE 7 (last place ... never use it!)
   

My untrained eye has not noticed better colors.

The Clipboard hack

Ever use Edit+Copy or Edit+Cut or [CTRL]+C (for pasting elsewhere)?

Beware: This copied data is stored in clipboard and is accessible from the net by a combination of Javascripts and ASP.

Try this:

1. Copy any text by Edit+Copy or Edit+Cut or [CTRL]+C or [CTRL]+X
   
2. Click this Link
   
3. You will see the text you copied on the screen which was accessed by that web page.
   

To avoid this shocking problem:

1. Goto Internet Options, Security, Click on the Internet Icon
   
2. Click Custom Level, and Change the settings under the active scripting options. (illustration below)
   

Full details here!

Comment: Wow! A Windows engineer at work sent this to me. Note to self - "don't cut a password, a CC #, or other sensitive data!"

---

Checked at home with Safari and Firefox. These browsers would not pass clipboard data to the hacking website.

Help: favicon.ico

Here's a brief tutorial on favicon.ico:

1. The above image is from I.E. 7.
   
2. Comment (not sure why): does not work in I.E.6.
   
3. Displays three places: in the URL (address) area, on the tab (I.E.7), in the favorites listing
   

I. Create a favicon.ico file (3 options):

1. Install an Icon editor (Google to find one) to your PC
   
2. Use a web based tool eg Favicon editor
   
3. Create a larger image and convert it to a 16x16 ico file. (This was my approach. I created a 500x500 pixel .png image and used Dynamic Drive: FavIcon Generator to create my favicon.ico image).
   

II. Store the favicon.ico file on a shared area



III. Edit the HTML in your blogger template:



IV. Here's the code:

1. <link href='http://shared.jrpeet.fastmail.net/favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
   
2. This must go in the <head> section!
   
3. Comment: These same steps work for Intranet and Internet sites as well! (would go in the index.html index.cfm default.asp etc file)
   

Mouseover javascript

The mouseover effect is one of the most fundamental javascript programming need for framed sites with navigation in a TOC (table of contents). Yesterday I created new buttons for ffbc.ws. The button creation itself is fairly straight forward, but the javascript has been (at least for me) more complex. Dynamic Drive offers a DOM Image Rollover II tool.

How easy is it?

1. First you need navigation buttons (out of scope of this discussion)
   
2. Then download the oodomimagerollover.js script file
   
3. FTP (upload) the buttons to the correct directory (/images)
   
4. Same with oodomimagerollover.js (/scripts)
   
5. And for each button pair, insert this code in the HTML:
   
   <img src="original.jpg" srcover="over.jpg">
   

The full link for each button set looks like this:

<a href="welcome.html" target="bottom"><img src="images/ffbcwelcome.gif" srcover="images/ffbcwelcome1.gif" Alt="Welcome" border="0"></a>