SIGNIFICANT BITS
October 2008

by Sean N. Henderson

WORLD WITHOUT WEB

As I write this, there's a fair amount of pressure to label some sites as 'phishing' sites or otherwise dangerous because the page or website is constructed using elements from other websites. To me, this is the essence of the World Wide Web. It is about incorporating the efforts of others into something again useful, which hopefully will be used in some way by someone else going forward. The WWW is the supreme example of a “collage” art form.
Constructing pages from various sources would be the essence and value of the “Web.” Copyright and commerce peck at this ideal. The critics and fear-mongers would have all content come from a single server, authenticated and sanitized for our protection. Bah! Those sites and pages should merely be called “sites” and “pages” and not “websites” and “webpages”. Put the “web” back in WWW! Use Mashups, Screen-scraping and share content. Reuse code. Be a rebel!

EMAIL IS DYING

My email is dying, it seems. The setup and configuration of email accounts is a continually moving target. Configuring email servers is so complicated that there are conferences about it. In my own situation, it seems that my email hosting provider has not kept up its systems and I am paying for it in all manner of ways. Some close to me do not understand why I do not just use some (so-called) free, ad-supported, web-based email like Google or Yahoo! Well, being a longtime Pine user, it is really hard to get used to how slow web-based email and client-side email can be. I also do not like ads with my email. Data mining or being given up to foreign governments does not seem appealing, either. Mostly, I just have not found a local email client I like, nor do I have the patience for web-based email. Also, I can effectively use Pine from my PDA using an ssh terminal program. That is unmatched using the PDA's built-in mail client or trying to access a web-based mail interface using the PDA's limited browser. I know I've written about Thunderbird and Pegasus before, but email configuration has really gotten out of hand. Contact your government leaders about this outrage. (Half-kidding here.)

JOYS OF JAVASCRIPT

Authoring Javascript is pretty hard. It is version and browser dependent, and hard to debug. The reason to use it is to make the HTML more dynamic (DHTML). So I've relegated my Javascript pursuits to mostly collecting useful bits of code to use as I find them. I've found three bits, recently. Here they are:
Tabular data is displayed in HTML using the TABLE tag. Wouldn't it be great to let the user sort these page items without having to do something silly like have multiple pages of the same data, or having to pull from the database again with merely the sort criteria changed? Visit http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/ and grab the code. There is a CSS component and a Javascript file (.js) called, and then merely mark the sortable columns as described. Easy.
Similarly, wouldn't it be nice to reorder the columns in wide tables? Again, with similar versions of the same page or additional pulls to the server? Visit http://www.danvk.org/wp/dragtable/ and grab this bit of code, and voilà! Bonus, you can use sortable and drag-able together! Now that's some Dynamic HTML!
What else, how about that date entry field on your report form? Yeah, most people can enter a date pretty reasonably, but why not wow them with a click-able calendar underneath the input box? Visit https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/Support/KB/Docs/JavascriptCalendar and grab that bit of code and follow the easy instructions.
There it is – three bits of Javascript that'll put some lipstick on that 'ol site of 'yers.

REVIEWS

My Skype piece is on hold, no pun intended. More about it next month – promise.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Just a reminder that John Patrick is again slated to be our December presenter. Also, the registration period before the DACS General Meetings start is a great time to network with other members about projects, jobs, and technology. This Fall I will again present my PC-Based Music Production workshop. Keep an eye on http://www..dacs.org/calendar for dates.

DacsGear!
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