German flip cards Google gadget

May 16, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Google, Languages, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

gadget for Google homepage. It displays a German word for a few seconds and then shows it’s translation. And then repeats with a new word. The vocabulary is very small at the moment but it will increase by at least one per day.

At the moment it also limits itself to 5 words per viewing. That is after showing five cards it loops (if it didn’t you’d never actually begin to memorise them).

Google Homepage

To use Google personalised homepage, you must have a Google account. When you have one, go to “Personalised Home” (links for that and to create an account are in the top right corner of Google’s homepage).

Adding the Gadget

From your personalised homepage, click “Add Content”, then “Create a Section” and then put the following URL in the box: http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/gadgets/flip.xml . Then just click “Go” and you’re done :)

If anyone is interested I might extend the idea to be more flexible.

German, flip cards, Leitner]]>

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So where are the Google gadgets

May 12, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Google, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

Google personalised homepage, you can add Google gadgets to them. A Google gadget is just an XML file (or more usually the XML output of some dynamic page) that is displayed. There is a well developed API and you can do quite a lot of nifty stuff with them. But they don’t seem to be that popular (searching for Google gadgets, with Google gets very few relevant results).

There are quite a few in their gadget directory but very little mention of them outside Google…]]>

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BackBase really pushing AJAX

May 5, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, PHP, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

BackBase is another AJAX toolkit. This one is different though. It’s not really an AJAX toolkit, more a toolkit powered by JavaScript taking advantage of AJAX. The clue is the price. Yes it has a price – $2000 to be exact. There is a “community edition” that is free for personal use though.

Anyway, I don’t have time to run down all the features but basically it defines a whole new bunch of tags allowing you to create complicated content in a declarative HTML style way. These tags are then translated into proper XHTML on the fly by the back end JavaScript engine. Since the clever work is actually handled by the browser, you’re free to use whatever you like on the server (PHP, Ruby) including static HTML pages – outputting BXML is no different to outputting HTML.

In fact BXML has a very ASP.NET feel to it and embedding BXML into an XHTML page along with ASP content could have the ultimate cleanness about it (syntax isn’t one of my complaints about ASP.NET). It should be noted that Microsoft are working on Atlas which could be something very similar but I haven’t looked into it…

It all seems very clever.

BackBase
BackBase Demos
ASP.NET Atlas

ASP]]>

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Silly things with JavaScript closures

May 2, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

JavaScript is immensely cool. You can do some amazing things with it. Although I’m not entirely sure whether you should.

For example I had a bunch of elements on a page I needed to update using AJAX. I needed a function I could pass the URLs and ids of elements to replace with those URLs and then have it perform each replacement in turn (I’ve seen IE have problems with simultaneous AJAX requests).

First I replace a simple replace_id function that accepts three arguments. An element id, a URL to GET to replace its contents with and finally a function to be called when it’s all completed.

And then things got silly.

function chain_replace(urls, ids)
{
  id = 0;
  next_id = function()
  {
    if (id < = ids.length)
    {
      return function()
      {
        replace_id(urls[id], ids[id++], next_id());
      }
    }
  }
  next_id()();
}

Now the next_id()(); bit towards the end should be a clue that something a little odd is going on. But I must confirm that this code does actually work. With enough arguments it might make the browser explode with some sort of call stack problem though…

closures]]>

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Going more mobile

April 23, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

announced limited support for mobile devices viewing the blog recently. That support basically only covered phones with Opera Mini.

Well now I have a WML theme installed so you should be able to view the site with any WAP device.

You can force WML output with any browser though (although most browsers do not understand WML).

Detecting Mobile Phones

You’re first instinct is probably to check the user agent. Although it’s true there are fairly consistent ways to detect a phone from the user-agent there is a better way.

One of the many under-utilised headers that browsers always send (well 99.99% of browsers you encounter will) is called Accept. This is just a list of MIME types that the browser can handle. Since all mobile phones (as well as PDAs can display WML pages, we’ll use this as the basis to detect mobile devices. The MIME type for WML pages always seemed rather odd to me: text/vnd.wap.wml.

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'text/vnd.wap.wml') !== false) $mobile = true;

Now we need to find out if the phone can accept XHTML Basic (or XHTML Mobile Profile or whatever) in pretty much the same way:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml') !== false) $xhtml = true;

Many “real” browsers are inconsistent with regards to the MIME type for XHTML. As far as I know since mobile phones do not have any sort of backwards compatibility issues they all use the proper application/xhtml+xml.

cell phones]]>

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XHTML Compliant – Thrice!

April 22, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

nobr tag not allowed, span tag not allowed inside a ul and few others) so I fixed them and I'm XHTML 1.1 compliant once again. That is the home page and a few random pages I tried are compliant. There are probably some posts with random stuff that isn't...

The main reason I did it was for the sake of any mobile browsers that might complain really loudly about bad markup. So I started reading about XHTML Basic what exactly was and wasn't allowed. Well I couldn't find anything useful so I just tried validating as XHTML Basic 1.0. I had to remove script tags, style attributes, replace i with em and again, a few other minor things. The end result is that an XHTML Basic version of the site is available to mobile browsers. Since I don't have a mobile browser to test it on I can't guarantee I'm detecting them properly yet. If you want to see what it looks like though, just go to Oliver Brown - Basic.

Then I discovered that it's mainly PDAs that use XHTML Basic and that mobile phones tend to want XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP also called WAP 2.0). Just changing the doctype was enoughto get XHTML Basic to validate as XHTML MP. You can check it out at Oliver Brown - Mobile (it looks the same as Basic).

Just to let you know, when browsing the other versions manually all the links bring you back to the normal site - you actually need a browser detected as being a mobile phone for it to work properly.

WAP, XHTML Basic, HTML, WML]]>

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Looking good in every browser

April 21, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

Firefox (and Mozilla variants) and Opera as well as almost right in Internet Explorer. And although I didn’t look in depth it seemed fine on Safari when I used a friend’s Mac.

Well now it looks how it should in IE too. Although I did have to do a pretty nasty hack of sorts (but I remain XHTML compliant).

IE supports “conditional comments”. They’re HTML comments in a specific format which IE interprets as special. Overall this is quite a clever idea since the other browsers see them as normal tags and technically my site isn’t using any no standard markup.

The dodginess in IE (if you hadn’t noticed or don’t use IE) is that the graphic behind the Google links bar was 1px to the left. So all I did was put a style definition inside an IE conditional comment to nudge it to the right:

<!--[if IE]><style> #linksbar { background-position: 1px 0 } </style><![endif]-->

Apparently you can do cleverer things with the comments like so conditionals on specific version of IE but that’s getting a little silly and if you want that much control it’s probably better to do it on the server so you don’t send every version of a page to every browser…

For more information, check out conditional comments on Quirks Mode.]]>

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