The daily bookmark

Updated: Oct 24, 2006. Comments are off

OK, so it’s not really daily and in some days there’s more than one bookmark. Thing is, this page holds links to interesting things I stumble upon on the Web. Think of it as a glimpse into the today’s history of my browser.

All of the links are related to Web development. Most are cool or useful, yet I can’t be bothered to make a proper post about them. Simply linking to them here is better than nothing, I hope. Please note that the newly added ones are placed at the top of their section.

You may also be interested in my other link page, which is more static and holds sites that capture my long-term interest.

1. The basics

Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing
“This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I’ve made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won’t have to repeat those mistakes.”–Philip Greenspun. It actually covers a lot of “why” and “how” questions for the newbie and wannabe web developers.
Introduction to Unicode
… or The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

2. CSS

HTML’s a Tag Too
Proof that <html> can be styled with CSS. The comments to this article have more interesting links on the subject.
Clearing floats: [1], [2], [3]
If you have a container box and you apply float to another one inside it, the container will not expand around the child, it will let it hang over the margin (in standard conforming browsers, that is :roll:). The above techniques provide CSS methods to fix this.
Step by step CSS tutorials
Various CSS tutorials which show cool things that can be achieved using lists, floats and CSS selectors in general.
Overcoming max-width in IE
This page offers a trick that allows you to make max-width (and max-height) work even in Internet Explorer.
Writing crossbrowser CSS
Roger Johansson offers a nicely annotated compilation of guidelines for writing crossbrowser CSS as painlessly as possible.
How to: Get pixel fonts to resize in IE
“A pet peeve for many, whether new to CSS or old CSS farts, is Internet Explorer’s inability to dynamically size pixel based fonts based on user preferences.”

3. HTML

Mastering tables
“So you think you know how to make a table. Sure, you know the table, tr, td and th tags, you’ve even got the rowspan and colspan attributes in your pocket. You can make a really cute little plywood coffee table, but don’t you want to know how to make one of those polished solid wood, glass top dining tables that can take the weight of an oversized elephant?” (Oh, and in case you’re thinking “but aren’t tables ‘out’ and CSS ‘in’?”, you need to also read Dave Shea’s Too Far.)

4. DHTML

MIT’s Simile
Like Google Maps, only for timelines. In other words, feed this baby an XML data file and it will render a graphical interactive timeline, complete with baloon popups for the important events.
Comet
A way of building Web applications that involves very low latencies by means of keeping connections open and most of the traffic consisting of the server pushing data to the client. It also involves an event-based approach, both in the client- and server-side applications.
/IE7/
IE7 is a JavaScript library to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.
Docking Boxes (DBX)
A library that adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements. It’s fully accessible via keyboard as well.
script.aculo.us
JavaScript library that makes it easy for you to enhance your website with drag’n'drop, animation effects, AJAX, easy DOM access and more.
Walter Zorn
Walter Zorn is the author of several breathtaking JavaScript libraries. Using only pure cross-browser JavaScript he is able to manipulate images (drag&drop, resize, clone, rotate), draw on the page using a graphical toolkit and create function graphs using said toolkit. Truly worth a visit.
Easy AJAX with Prototype, Edit in-place with AJAX
An excellent introduction to AJAX via the means of a ready-made, easy to use framework, courtesy of Drew McLellan and Sam Stephenson.

5. Security

Cross site cooking (this is not XSS!)
“There are three fairly interesting flaws in how HTTP cookies were designed and later implemented in various browsers; these shortcomings make it possible (and alarmingly easy) for malicious sites to plant spoofed cookies that will be relayed by unsuspecting visitors to legitimate, third-party servers.”

6. Graphics

Visual Complexity of the World Wide Web
A site by Manuel Lima, which collects complex graphical views of various types of information (thanks to Antipixel).
PNG Behavior
“This behavior adds support for the most powerful raster graphic format available to Internet Explorer. It is of course our all beloved PNG format I am talking about.”

7. Reference

Web Devout
It lists the status of various standard implementations, comparatively and extensively, in the latest version of the major browsers.

8. Programming

Practical PHP Programming
An excellent PHP tutorial, dubbed one of the best out there, written by Paul Hudson. Fully available online as well as a printed book called “PHP in a Nutshell”.

9. Web engineering

Multilingual brainstorming
A section on the Microformats wiki which gathers information about what it means for a site (and in particular, a blog) to be multilingual.
Why the World is ready for the Semantic Web
An article by Dan Zambonini, who argues that the semantic Web is already here and is being used even though the complex technologies developed specifically for its sake are not yet widely deployed. In the process he offers an interesting presentation of the various manifestations of semantics on today’s Web.
Weblogs: a history and perspective
A look at blogs, from their early beginnings. It tells how they came to be and examines their methods, effects and importance. An article by Rebecca Blood, who was “there” in 1999. A fascinating look at both the past and the future, written back in 2000.

10. Making money on the Web

How much should a design cost?
Chris Pearson explains that a full-featured blog design starts at $1,500 and can reach $3,000. He also points out that his main target are companies, for whom such prices are not unrealistic if they really want the best.

11. Trivia

Levels of Knowledge
Emil Stenström, Roger Johansson and Dean Edwards give us a humorous look at levels of CSS, HTML and JavaScript knowledge, respectively.