Let your server do the walking! Whether you’re replacing one headline or a thousand, Stewart Rosenberger’s Dynamic Text Replacement automatically swaps XHTML text with an image of that text, consistently displayed in any font you own. The markup is clean, semantic, and accessible. No CSS hacks are required, and you needn’t open Photoshop or any other image editor. Read about it today; use it on personal and commercial web projects tomorrow.
THE MOST IMPORTANT STORY OF THE DAY
Pouring a bowl of cereal is a morning ritual for many people. Popular wisdom holds that our taste for grains goes back some 10,000 years. New findings may more than double that estimate.
(an older article, but I found it quite good)
You’ve rolled out an application and it produces mysterious, sporadic errors? That’s pretty common, even if fairly well-tested applications are exposed to real-world data. How can you track down when and where exactly your problem occurs? What kind of user data is it caused by? A debugger won’t help you there.
Atom is an emerging XML vocabulary and protocol for syndication and editing. Atom has a coherent linking model to express a number of different types of links. Atom borrows heavily from the element in HTML, although they are not identical. This article explores several of the most common link types that are already deployed in Atom feeds today.
Do you ever look back through your vacation photos and wonder where all of the photos were taken? What if there was a way to have all those images automatically show up as pins on a map or an aerial photograph? It may seem too good to be true, but it can be done. No mirrors or smoke; it’s just making use of existing GPS technology.
XML is a text markup format designed for clarity and ease of use, without concern for conciseness. Because of these design choices, text XML can be costly in terms of both document size and processing overhead. Part 1 of this two-part article shows you some of the issues involved in alternative non-text representations of XML, and covers a few of the approaches being developed for this purpose; Part 2 will add some actual performance measurements so you can get a feel for the level of improvements possible.
One seemingly bankable trend is that every day computer languages become easier to understand, and become more like human languages. The concept that easier to understand languages could lead to less error prone and more rapid development was the basis for Fortran II way back in 1958, and the foundation for the high-level languages of today. Since the 50s, however, numerous high-level languages have propped up. You’ve heard and worked with most of these. Fortran is still used in engineering, and general programming problems are often solved with C, C++, Java, and Perl, which are all considered high-level.
But what about the more obscure high-level languages? Dozens of paradigms have propped up, and every day there seems to be a new language on the block. Here is a handful of popular modern high-level languages, what they are being used for, and where they are hiding in the industry today.
The Web has always included sites that present series of articles, events, and other postings which are meant to be shared and cross-referenced. With large parts of the Web becoming conversational communities, many in these communities have come together to work on an XML-based standard for such interchange and cross-reference. Atom is the product of this effort — a format and API for exchanging Web metadata.