Data binding uses the Data Binding Agent object that is part of Internet Explorer 4 and higher. When programming in a language like Visual Basic or C++, the special controls that are part of that environment are used to implement data binding instead.

The Web-based Data Binding Agent can provide two types of data binding, either tabular data binding or single record data binding (often called current record data binding). All DSO controls can take part in tabular data binding or single/current record data binding. We’ll briefly summarize the HTML controls that are used in Web pages next, then go on to look at the two types of data binding where they can be used.

Controls that can be bound to a DSO recognize special HTML attributes that provide the connection information they need. These are:

DATASRC - the ID of the DSO that will supply the data, prefixed by a ‘#’ hash character.

DATAFLD - the name of the field in the DSO’s recordset to bind this control to.

DATAFORMATAS - Either ‘TEXT’ (the default if omitted) to display the field value as plain text, or ‘HTML’ to specify that the browser should render any HTML content within the value.”

Read the full article at ASP101.

The problem, as has been stated by Derek Featherstone in More reasons why we don’t use accesskeys, John Foliot in Using Accesskeys - Is it worth it?, and Jukka Korpela in Using accesskey attribute in HTML forms and links, to name a few, is that most current web browsers do not prevent shortcuts assigned through an accesskey attribute from clashing with existing keyboard shortcuts specified by the browser or operating system. Even if they did do that, there would still be issues with internationalisation and key availability.

Because of this, I rarely use the accesskey attribute. In fact, I am considering not using it at all. Looking forward (way forward), the accesskey attribute is not included in current drafts of XHTML 2, since it has been replaced by the access element. Unfortunately it looks like the access element will suffer from the same problems as the accesskey attribute.

John Foliot explains why in ACCESS + KEY still = ACCESSKEY - The XHTML Role Access Module still flawed, an open letter to the draft editors of XHTML 2. Ian Lloyd at Accessify agrees and points to a system that lets users specify their own shortcut keys in The Trouble With Accesskeys.

Source: 456 Bereastreet

Structure

An APNG stream is a normal PNG stream as defined in the PNG Specification, with three additional chunk types describing the animation and providing additional frame data.

To be recognized as an APNG, an ‘acTL’ chunk must appear in the stream before any ‘IDAT’ chunks. The ‘acTL’ structure is described below.

Conceptually, at the beginning of each play the output buffer must be completely initialized to a fully transparent black rectangle, with width and height dimensions from the ‘IHDR’ chunk.

The default image may be included as the first frame of the animation by the presence of a single ‘fcTL’ chunk before ‘IDAT’. Otherwise, the default image is not part of the animation.

Subsequent frames are encoded in ‘fdAT’ chunks, which have the same structure as ‘IDAT’ chunks, except preceded by a sequence number. Information for each frame about placement and rendering is stored in ‘fcTL’ chunks. The full layout of ‘fdAT’ and ‘fcTL’ chunks is described below.

The boundaries of the entire animation are specified by the width and height parameters of the PNG ‘IHDR’ chunk, regardless of whether the default image is part of the animation. The default image should be appropriately padded with fully transparent pixels if extra space will be needed for later frames.

Each frame is identical for each play, therefore it is safe for applications to cache the frames.”

Read the full article at the Mozilla Developer’s web page.

This is old news, but why do I consider it noteworthy? Because it’s the #1 application where media-dependent CSS, on top of media-independent HTML, ought to come into play… and yet, and I’m guessing, only 5% of all pages make use of it. You’d think after years of evangelizing done by web developers, the likes of CNN or Wired would have gotten the point.”

Read the full article hosted by the Google Blogoscope.

“The essence of Pixy’s Fast Rollovers involves creating one image for each navigation item that includes normal, hover and active states stacked on top of each other. Later, we’ll use CSS to change the background-position to reveal each state at the appropriate time.Figure 1.1 on the right shows an example image that I’ve created and used for Fast Company’s new navigation. Each state is 20px tall with a total image height of 60px. The top 20px is the normal state, the next 20px shows the hover state and final 20px shows the active state (which is also used for the “you are here” effect). There are similar images for each tab we’d like to use.

Using one image for each state allows us to toss out ugly Javascript and instead make use of simple CSS rules for hover effects. This is good. It also eliminates the “flicker” effect that other CSS methods suffer from, where separate on/off images are used. This is good. We also don’t have to pre-load any additional images. Again… this is good.

The CSS: This is Where the Magic Happens

First we’ll set up the rules that all navigation items will need. This will save us from writing duplicate rules for each tab. Then we’ll add a separate rule for each list item id, giving the li it’s own background-image and width — the only two variables that will be different for each tab.”

Read the full article from SimpleBits.

HTML on the Web Today

While HTML 4.01 is formally an SGML-based document format, the only clients actually treating HTML that way are validators. Browsers, on the other hand, treat HTML documents as tag soup—they try to make sense out of, and display, even the most horridly broken document to their best ability. Very little content on the web is valid HTML 4.01; most of it is invalid and ill-formed, but browsers still have to parse it, or they will soon be disregarded as users switch to browsers that support their favorite sites.

Tag-soup handling—trying to correct errors in documents—is essential, but every browser does it a little differently. All browsers try to get as close as possible to how their largest competitors do it, but even when broken content works the same in different browsers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are performing error correction in the same way, just the way that both works for the common case and is most practical for them. HTML5 tries to put an end to this need for reverse engineering of competing browsers by defining exactly how this error correction is to be done. HTML5 doesn’t just define how valid documents are to be parsed, it also defines how parsing should work if documents are invalid, ill-formed, and broken, so that browser vendors can make their products fully interoperable with each other.”

Read the full article at Digital Web Magazine

A W3C Approved Solution

Many good CSS and HTML techniques seem to require developers to dodge the guidelines recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Not for fun, but because many browsers don’t completely support the W3C specifications. But the W3C guidelines endorse external CSS files!

Other external file advantages include:

• Smaller pages: Use external files to replace many lines of JavaScript or style definitions with a single line of code that calls the external file. Less code equals faster loading pages - and happier visitors.
• Easier maintenance: Easily include the same code or formatting information on every page. Need to change a font-family, color, or variable name? Just change it once in the external file and you see the change on every page.
• Search engine friendly: Search engine spiders like to see important content at the top of the page. Some even rank earlier content as more important. Pages with important content close to the top of the page are more spider-friendly.

”

Read the full article from Netmechanic and learn to control the head section of your web pages.

Why? Two reasons. First, it’s required, as stated in the W3C HTML 4.01 spec as well as in the W3C XHTML 1.0 spec. Second, modern web browsers use the specified DOCTYPE to decide which rendering mode to use. This is also known as “DOCTYPE switching”. For more consistent results across browsers, especially when using CSS, you’ll want browsers to use their “Standards compliance mode”. More info on DOCTYPE switching can be found in Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE! and Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration.

A common way of styling something with CSS is to wrap it in a element with a class attribute and use that to hook up the styling. I’m sure we’ve all seen things like and why? It is, in most cases, completely unnecessary, has no semantic value, and just clutters the markup. Use heading elements for headings, put paragraphs in paragraph elements, mark up lists with HTML list elements. Use CSS to style those elements. If necessary, add class or id attributes.”

Read the full list of common web development mistakes and see if your web page has any of them.

However, it is still possible to compensate for different sizes of text in animation with few modifications to our image design principles and code, which I may display in another article. Ironically, if you like to change, font-sizes on web pages, Opera is a superb alternative which doesn’t break pages while resizing, and works perfectly with this technique while allowing the users to read content with gigantic font sizes.

Preparing the images

In this example, each frame is 210*30px. The size of the frames does not necessarily have to be the same as the element(s), for example, anchors on this page are actually 150px wide. Likewise, they wouldn’t need to be of the same size height either, as you could go for such styles that would account for elements with different heights.

We will vertically stack all animation frames. Sadly, for best accessibility, stacking frames horizontally would have been better, as we could place the background image 50% vertically to account for different heights without having to compensate for that in our images; but Opera has problems with ultra wide background images so some frames go missing and background images are misplaced. One of the few times I am let down by Opera…”

Read the full article by Hesido complete with full examples and information about XHTML methods.

Similar functionality is covered in a proposed W3C standard, Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Load and Save Specification. In the meantime, growing support for the XMLHttpRequest object means that is has become a de facto standard that will likely be supported even after the W3C specification becomes final and starts being implemented in released browsers (whenever that might be).
Creating the Object

Creating an instance of the XMLHttpRequest object requires branching syntax to account for browser differences in the way instances of the object are generated. For Safari and Mozilla, a simple call to the object’s constructor function does the job:

var req = new XMLHttpRequest();

For the ActiveX branch, pass the name of the object to the ActiveX constructor:

var req = new ActiveXObject(”Microsoft.XMLHTTP”);

The object reference returned by both constructors is to an abstract object that works entirely out of view of the user. Its methods control all operations, while its properties hold, among other things, various data pieces returned from the server. ”

Read the full article from Apple’s own Developer corner.