HTML was written with one main goal in mind ? to define a language that allowed the formatted display and presentation of information across as many platforms as possible, be it text, graphics or even added flexibility through scripting languages to allow interaction within the browser; and server databases have caused an explosion in the volume of information available nowadays.
All is not well, though. Developers are struggling to keep pace with the complexities of maintaining large sites that are compatible across browsers, where a lot of the information is changing on a daily basis. There is also a lot of repetition of information both within a single site and across the Web as a whole and somehow the ends need to be tied up. Surely databases are the answer? Well, yes and no. True, a database can act as the shared source, but not everybody uses or has access to a particular database format. Enter stage right, XML ? eXtensible Markup Language.
Why Another Language?
XML, like HTML, has its roots in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), but shares even more of its features. A great limitation with HTML is that it has driven Web development down a one-way street; content gets produced and displayed but it is very difficult to later extract meaningful information from the mixture of tags and text.
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October 27th, 2011 | Posted in XML | No Comments
XML is a general-purpose markup language that has become the industry-standard means of organizing data to be transmitted across the Internet.
XML is completely textual and non-binary. It consists of text data organized hierarchically with opening and closing tags which delineate particular portions of the data. These tags can be nested and can contain additional information called attributes.
Here is a simple example of XML:
<employees>
<employee ID=”E99>
<name>
<firstname>Sam</firstname>
<lastname>Jones</lastname>
</name>
</employee>
</employees>
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October 27th, 2011 | Posted in XML | No Comments
Web design, like any type of design, moves through times when certain styles and paradigms are popular. Creating some of the currently popular visual effects can be a difficult task. Added to this challenge are a number of common problems that web developers encounter. Here are 10 jQuery plugins that will help you create stunning visual effects on your web sites and solve many common web application challenges.
Google Feed API Plugin
One common web development task is to include content from another web site or blog on a page. Often this is done in a sidebar or widget. Many blogs and web sites today use Google Feeds to deliver their RSS feeds. The Google Feed API plugin makes it trivial to access a Google Feed and retrieve items to display on your page. This plugin provides a high level interface to the Google Feed API for accessing the feed. After you get the contents of the feed, you’ll have to write code to use the items returned. This makes it possible to literally do anything with the data returned by the API.
Fullscreenr
A common design technique is to have a large background image that fills the browser window. Many web sites have examples of this design element. Fullscreenr is a jQuery plugin that makes it simple to scale an image so that it fills the browser window. This relieves the designer have having to worry about things like screen resolution. Fullscreenr will take into account aspect ratios and will scale a background image to fill the available area. It can also handle centering the the image.
jMagnify
jMagnify is a neat jQuery plugin that adds a level of mouse interactivity. When you mouse over a block of text, jMagnify will animate the text under the mouse pointer. This plugin has many options for creating interesting text effects. You can enlarge the font under the mouse to create the effect of running a magnifying glass over the line of text (hence the name). You can also change color, underline the text under the mouse pointer or put a box around the letters that moves with the mouse.
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October 27th, 2011 | Posted in Jquery | No Comments