Advanced CSS Design Resources - last-child.com » Online Resource http://www.last-child.com CSS Toys for Professional Web Developers Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:59:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How to include a copyright symbol in any language http://www.last-child.com/include-copyright-symbol/ http://www.last-child.com/include-copyright-symbol/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:59:14 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=248 I found this page today while trying to find the proper way to add a copyright symbol ( © ) with XSL. Copyright Symbol Webpage is simply a good reference to how and why to use the copyright symbol.

Here’s a snippet on how to use it in XSL

Unicode Copyright Symbol – Programmers, please NOTE:

Unicode is required by modern standards such as Java, XML, ECMAScript / JavaScript, CORBA, WML, LDAP etc.

Pretty much all of the questions about Copyright Symbols for standards that use Unicode will require the © input. however, this may differ such as for XSL as listed below. We have tried to collate what we can for you – if you can’t work out the answer from here…keep on searching – and please write to us with any information that you think would be useful on this site.

Java Script / JSP Copyright Symbol

In Java use the unicode © or © to get the copyright symbol. One common mistake is typing the © into the code, which will not work.

XML Copyright Symbol

In XML use the unicode © or © to get the copyright symbol.

XSL Copyright Symbol

If you were to use the ‘©‘ entity with XSL, you may well come across the complaint of “Reference to undefined entity ‘copy’.”

In XSL always use ©

Copyright Symbol Webpage

]]> http://www.last-child.com/include-copyright-symbol/feed/ 0 Cross-browser HTML5 video tag with fallback for Flash users http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/ http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:00:44 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=235 Apple’s lack of support for Flash on the iPhone and iPad has forced people to reconsider the value of HTML5 and its video tag. It’s no longer something to put off until the future. However, adding HTML5 video support to your site AND continue to provide a Flash option for older browsers (I.E.) is not as simple as you might expect.

While the video tag has been standardized, there is a lack of consensus for supporting the codecs used to package the videos for distribution and playback. Some browsers are supporting the OGV format, some support the more popular but licensed mp4 format. Others, such as Chrome, will support both. To make it even more exciting, there is a new version under development to make a truly open-sourced format: WebM.

This means your video tag needs to define multiple movie sources to make it playable on all browsers. It sounds complicated because it is. Luckily, Kroc Camen has written a great article and code pattern for adding a cross-browser video tag with fallback to Flash for the older browsers: Video for Everybody!.

The article is full of great advice from a programmer that has learned the stuff the hard way. Here’s an explanation of how you’ll need to adjust your htaccess file.

Ensure your server is using the correct mime-types. Firefox will not
play the OGG video if the mime-type is wrong. Place these lines in your .htaccess
file to send the correct mime-types to browsers 


AddType video/ogg  .ogv
AddType video/mp4  .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Video for Everybody! – Kroc Camen

Related Resources

]]> http://www.last-child.com/cross-browser-html5-video/feed/ 0 Dive into HTML5 should be everyone’s intro to the standard http://www.last-child.com/dive-into-html5/ http://www.last-child.com/dive-into-html5/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:30:50 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=224 I just found out about the Dive Into HTML5 tutorial. It’s downright amazing. I wish all specs were so carefully described. Don’t miss the first chapter on the history of standards creation. It gives you a good understanding of why the HTML standards are quirky and why HTML5 is progressing the way it is.

I especially like the way they test your browser for its ability to handle the various components you are reading about. Take an hour or so to go through this tutorial. It’s the best read you’ll have for the week.

Another good tutorial is The Best HTML5 Slides Ever, but you’ll need to view it in Safari. It doesn’t work well in the standard Firefox and forget about IE.

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/dive-into-html5/feed/ 1 HTML5 Helpful Links http://www.last-child.com/html5-helpful-links/ http://www.last-child.com/html5-helpful-links/#comments Sat, 03 Apr 2010 18:55:45 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=216 I’m starting to hack away at HTML5 and I’m finding that I need to start bookmarking more and more pages. There are lots of good resources out there. Here are a few:

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/html5-helpful-links/feed/ 0 New Yahoo! BOSS Hacks web site http://www.last-child.com/new-yahoo-boss-hacks-web-site/ http://www.last-child.com/new-yahoo-boss-hacks-web-site/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 17:00:31 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=196 There’s a lot of information about Yahoo! Boss on the official site: Yahoo! Developer Network. However there is still a need for a more informal portal for quick reviews of BOSS-based mashups, helpful hints, techniques, and upcoming events.

BOSS Hacks is an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS Site that does exactly that. I started it last week as I noticed this site was becoming less about standards based markup and more about how I was working with Yahoo! BOSS.

This site will feature shorter, more succinct blog posts. I’ll save any large posts for the YDN blog. Please feel free to visit the site and send me notes about what you would like to see or any new BOSS-based sites that should be mentioned.

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/new-yahoo-boss-hacks-web-site/feed/ 0 Quick and Free Online PDF Creator http://www.last-child.com/quick-free-online-pdf-creator/ http://www.last-child.com/quick-free-online-pdf-creator/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:25:06 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=188

I needed to create a .pdf document for a paper submission to an upcoming conference. Unfortunately I do not have Acrobat Writer on m laptop so I needed a quick fix.
PDF Online has a very simple tool for generating .pdf documents: Doc2PDF.
you simply upload your document, give it a name, your email address and its delivered in less than a minute.

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/quick-free-online-pdf-creator/feed/ 3 Yahoo! Boss now features keywords and more language support http://www.last-child.com/yahoo-boss-features-keywords/ http://www.last-child.com/yahoo-boss-features-keywords/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:33:32 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=168 Yahoo! Boss search APIThe Yahoo! Developer Network blog just published a blog post with new Boss features: Yahoo! Search BOSS Releases Key Terms. There are a few key details in this article.

  • Key terms are now available: Each result now includes the keyterms Yahoo’s search index has assigned to the web page. This is the same information Yahoo! uses for search suggestions. I was trying to recreate this by using key term extraction in Yahoo! Pipes. But this would have involved multiple requests and slowed the page down. Boss’s inclusion of keyterms opens a whole new world of semantic search options. I’m using them to display related results on V3GGIE.
  • Extended language/region support: I was in Romania a couple weeks ago discussing Yahoo! Boss with some students in Bucharest. I noticed we didn’t support the Romanian language in Boss. I was able to send a few emails asking for support and voila, the Yahoo! Boss has not only added Romanian, but also Turkish and Hebrew! That is some fast turn around and shows their commitment to the users.
  • Boss made easier: Christian Heilmann has been creating Boss plug-n-play projects. You can get a JavaScript Boss badge, grab all the keyterms in one arrray, and recently a build your own site search in 3 easy steps lesson.
  • The article also has a link to a new site I’m developing: Tartin3. This is still in the development stages and is a prototype for a much larger site InsiderFood.com. I’m hoping to take the covers off Insider Food within the next couple weeks.Insider Food is now Live – but in Beta mode as I fix bugs and make enhance the search logic

Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! but I’m not on the Yahoo! Boss team. I’m their “customer”, as I use Boss for multiple projects outside Yahoo!. I also am a member of the International Yahoo! Developer Network, which allows me to demonstrate and teach some of the Yahoo! API’s and services.

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/yahoo-boss-features-keywords/feed/ 0 Make a niche search engine with Yahoo! BOSS http://www.last-child.com/niche-search-engine-yahoo-boss/ http://www.last-child.com/niche-search-engine-yahoo-boss/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:05:26 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=163 The Yahoo! Developer Network blog just published an article I wrote about Yahoo! BOSS. It discusses how to use the search filters and query attributes with the BOSS API.

I’ve used these methods on V3GGIE.com, a vegetarian search engine and will be launching a new niche search engine in the next few weeks.
Yahoo! BOSS plus your ideas make a unique search experience

Update

Insider Food badge for featured expertsI’ve just taken the covers off my latest search engine project. Insider Food is a regional search engine powered by local bloggers, chefs, and restaurant fanatics.

It’s a wee bit slow right now due to a multitude of API requests to Yahoo! Boss, Yahoo! Pipes, Flickr, Amazon, and more. Look for some upcoming posts about the construction of the site. Hopefully I can even describe caching and threading. Once somebody teaches me :) .

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]]> http://www.last-child.com/niche-search-engine-yahoo-boss/feed/ 0 Create a tabbed search form with YUI http://www.last-child.com/tabbed-search-form-yui/ http://www.last-child.com/tabbed-search-form-yui/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:00:59 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=159 Yahoo! makes it easy to create an accessible, handsome tabbed interface. I used their Tab View library to create the tabbed search form for V3GGIE.com. While Tab View can create the tabbed content dynamically, I’m using it to hide/show hard-coded individual forms.

Update: I’ve removed the tabbed interface from V3GGIE.com. This particular use of the tabbed module seemed to have created some confusion in users. The approach is still valid, just not the way I originally implemented it. See the tabbed search form on V3GGIE.com

Step 1. Create the basic HTML code.

The tabbed code is a simple pattern:

  1. Start with a parent div and give it an id and class=”yui-navset”.

  2. Create an unordered list inside this div with class=”yui-nav”.
  3. Each list includes a deep link to a corresponding div that is also a child of the parent div. The link text in an em tag.
  4. V3GGIE Search

  5. Create a div with class=”yui-content” and create a set of content containing divs. Each div has an id.

    ...
    ...
    ...

  6. Insert the Tabview CSS at the top of the page, the Tab View JS at the bottom of the page, create a small js that instantiates the tab-view module.
  7. For easier styling, use the sam_skin CSS package and add class=”yui-skin-sam” to the body.

Step 2. Use PHP to make it more interesting

Each page calls this chunk of code to insert the tabbed form, it also sets a variable ($selected), determining which tab is selected on page load. I’m also inserting the last search query into the text input to make it easier on the user. This is easily done by grabbing the query from the Request object.

The finished code:

Try "San Francisco Pho", "Paris Fromage", or "92104 tofu"

Try "corn chowder" or "vegan pizza"

Try "Vegetarian Chinese Olympics"

Try a subject: "PETA", "Tempeh", or "Paris -Hilton Vegetarian"

View the source as a text file

The Final Product

We now have a tabbed module that allows the user to find recipes, news, blogs, and local restaurants from any page. This is an easy introduction to the YUI libraries. However, I came across the following surprises:

  • The order of the tabs must match the order of the target divs. I moved my tabs around and discovered they were toggling the wrong forms.
  • The links that generate the tabs need to have em tags surrounding the text
  • You’ll need to download the entire YUI package to gain access to the CSS and sprites needed for the library. The examples on the YUI site assume relative links to files, you will either need to duplicate that file structure or upload the skin’s sprite and change the CSS accordingly.
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]]> http://www.last-child.com/tabbed-search-form-yui/feed/ 0 Create your own Search Engine with Yahoo! BOSS http://www.last-child.com/create-search-yahoo-boss/ http://www.last-child.com/create-search-yahoo-boss/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:38:41 +0000 Ted http://www.last-child.com/?p=158 Yahoo! recently launched BOSS, which opened their search platform to developers around the world. They didn’t just create an API to access data. That has been around for a while. Yahoo! has opened the data to developers with no limits on requests, no restrictions of icon use, results display, or even the need to let people know the search engine is Yahoo! based.

Yahoo BOSS plus your special sauce equals search innovation

This open approach lets anyone build a search engine to their particular skills, mash the data with other sources, re-arrange results, or any other novel idea for the next king of search. You could also use BOSS to add search capabilities to a pre-existing site, limiting the resuts to just its data.

Why is Yahoo! doing this? It’s a brash approach to push search beyond its current status of pages with ordered sets of links You can let your imagine fly with the only cost being your personal development investment. I recently took this challenge and decided to build a search engine for vegetarians.

V3GGIE – A Vegetarian Search Engine

My goals were simple:

  1. Create a simple site that could be copied easily as a proof of concept for other genres. Document the construction for others to explore.
  2. Keep it fast with minimal javascript and images
  3. Use as much Yahoo infrastructure as possible to minimize development time
  4. Most importantly: return information relevant to the niche audience: Vegetarians and Vegans.

I’m not a PHP expert and some of my code is crude. I hope to clean it up and add a number of features to enhance performance and usability. However, the code samples will still be useful to the PHP beginner. More advanced PHP programmers could easily see where they’d take the concepts and improve on them.

Set up the basic structure

V3ggie has a basic workflow, there’s an input and result page. Arguably, this should only be one page which displays the original landing and subsequent results. I have separated them as I hope to create extra content that is appropriate to either the landing or results pages.

Further, there are several search engines built into this site. Each has a specific set of resources to fine tune the results. Currently, these are built with subdirectories (/recipes/, /blogs/, /news/, /local/ ). Each subsection includes index and result pages. This could be changed by utilizing rewrite rules. I’ve kept it simple for now.

Setup the Resources

The BOSS API allows you to create a query param with a list of domains to search through. This is the easiest way to fine tune your results. For instance, the V3ggie recipe search page uses a list of vegetarian cooking sites as well as the vegetarian subdirectories of Epicurious and FoodNetwork.

Technorati is the source for blog buzz. V3ggie searches through blogs tagged with “vegetarian” and/or “vegan”. This helps get the vegetarian viewpoint for any subject.

You have complete freedom to mash the data as much as you like. You could take the search results and mix them with other data, such as the page rank for a result page, the company or product’s appearance on wikipedia, or perhaps data you’ve stored in your own databases. I can imagine creating an internal product search page that cross-references the results with a list of preferred vendors to encourage employees to purchase supplies from the correct vendor.

Setup the Platform

V3ggie is built from PHP. However, Yahoo! has also provided a python platform, the BOSS Mashup Framework, for building sites very quickly. You can combine this with the Google App Engine to create a custom search engine in a short time. Four Hour Search, formally known as Yuil, is such an example. It got its name from the length of time it required to research a domain name, setup Google Apps, and build the final search web site. Personally, I spent more than 4 hours trying to get Google Apps set up and I really didn’t want to learn yet another language (python).

YUI on the frontend

The Yahoo! User Interface library handles the tedious, basic formatting of a page. The CSS libraries allow you to create a wide variety of page grids, standardize the fonts, reset browser inconsistencies and establish a common look and feel.

I started the project by using the CSS Grid Builder. This easy to use tool sets up the page with the desired columns and includes the base css files. I then added the YUI Base CSS file. This takes the plain page and re-establishes the margins and font-styles for a basic site. These two CSS files will remove 75% of the CSS you would normally have to write for a site. Now you can concentrate on what makes your site special.

I also wanted to offer different seach options from a single interface. Once again, I used the YUI TabView package. This combination of CSS and JS allows you to create a semantic set of links and corresponding series of div wrapped objects. YUI Tab View will turn this into the tabbed interface that even has built in ARIA support for screen readers.

I had some trouble getting the tabs to look correct. The documentation does not make it very clear that tab links must have an em within the links to get the proper look and feel. I also downloaded the preferred sprite and used fireworks to change the tab color gradients from blue to green.

Yahoo also provides a design pattern library. This helped me configure my pagination links. Yahoo has spent a lot of time with user testing to make sure things are easy to use.

Create your own search engine

So, what are you wating for? Visit the Yahoo Developer Network and start by signing up and getting a application key. I will write separate posts that describe how to build various components of the page. I’m looking forward to hearing from better PHP programmers on how to improve the code.

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