Why are newspapers still around? Who buys newspapers these days? It certainly isn't teenagers looking for a used car. As a family we certainly don't buy newspapers, though we'll occasionally check one out if we find one sitting (discarded and lonely and only slightly stained) in a coffee shop. Read the rest of this entry ...
This is just a quick entry for me to jot down some caveats that I encountered while making a simple instant messaging application for the browser using Asynchronous JavaScript, XML and PHP. Read the rest of this entry ...
In designing a little on-line chat program accessible through a web browser, I came across what was one of the most frustrating problems in my software development career. Read the rest of this entry ...
I've been working on learning JavaScript over the last month or so and I've come to a point where I've started to delve into the hot topic of "Asynchronous JavaScript, DHTML and Server-side Programming", or as some pundits have termed it "Ajax". The 'x' is supposed to stand for XML since one of the primary enablers for this technology is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest (though you can use it to return any type of text). Read the rest of this entry ...
It may seem that Scalable Vector Graphics for the masses is stalling on the web, but I did find this interesting site which has some recent promising news about SVG's rising popularity on the mobile phone front. Mobile vendors Panasonic and Sony have announced models that support SVG.
I've ranted before about XML, but despite my ill feelings, it's obvious that XML is at the root of some very promising technologies. SVG is one of those and it's really a shame that it hasn't yet taken off. This older article from Slashdot hints that March 2005 we'll start to see Mozilla include native support of SVG (the masses will see this in Firefox 1.1, I think)...that will be VERY exciting indeed! Maybe we'll start to see something interesting happening on the web for SVG very soon. As far as I know this will be the first major web browser to have native SVG support.
If you're interested in learning more about SVG, check out http://www.svgbasics.com for an overview of some of its capabilities. If you haven't installed Adobe's SVG Plug-In, don't worry you can turn off "SVG" examples on this site and just see what they would like if you had the plugin. Or you could follow the intructions at svgbasics.com and install the Plug-In.