Tangled web



Friday, March 05, 2010

Domain / host
 
For an excellent company for domain regisration and hosting and web hosting, take a look at the Canadian company, Baremetal. They provide a lot of help to the novice webmaster, including setting up your domain, your email account(s) and the use of various html and cgi tools and gadgets.

Check out the webhosting FAQ

I like the fact that they let any viewer browse their tool page before signing up for the service. Did I say it is reasonably priced, too?



Sunday, December 31, 2006

A List Apart: Articles: Learn to Read BNF
 
A List Apart: Articles: How to Read W3C Specs

BNF stands for Backus Naur Form, or Backus Normal Form. It’s a compact way to represent the grammar of computer languages, and it’s been around, well, forever. Different specifications use different flavors of BNF, but they all translate long English descriptions into symbolic form. Take this example of what constitutes a sandwich:

A sandwich consists of a lower slice of bread, mustard or mayonnaise; optional lettuce, an optional slice of tomato; two to four slices of either bologna, salami, or ham (in any combination); one or more slices of cheese, and a top slice of bread.

This translates to:

sandwich ::=
lower_slice
[ mustard | mayonnaise ]
lettuce? tomato?
[ bologna | salami | ham ] {2,4}
cheese+
top_slice

The constituent parts of a definition are listed in order, separated by blanks. Items are grouped with square brackets, and choices within a group are separated by a vertical bar.

If an item is followed by a question mark, that means “one or none;” if followed by a plus sign, that means “one or more;” if followed by an asterisk, that means “zero or more;” and if followed by numbers inside braces, it gives the lower and upper limits for how many times an item can occur.

Parentheses, or more square brackets, are used to group items in more complex definitions. Sometimes a generic item (like a “color”) is enclosed in < and >, or fixed items will be enclosed in quote marks."




A List Apart: Articles: Learn to Read a Document Type Definition
 
A List Apart: Articles: How to Read W3C Specs

You know those <!DOCTYPE ...> declarations that you put in your documents to tell the browser which version of HTML or XHTML you're using? Those declarations refer to a Document Type Definition, or DTD, which defines which combinations of elements are legal in a document.

While learning to read a DTD is difficult, it's not an impossible task. And it's worth learning, because the DTD is the ultimate authority for what is and is not syntactically correct for a particular markup language.

A full explanation of how to read a DTD is well beyond the scope of this article, but it can be found in Elizabeth Castro’s XML for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide, or in Erik Ray’s Learning XML. Here's a brief example of something you might see in a DTD:

<!ENTITY %fontstyle '(tt | i | b)'>
<!ENTITY %inline '(#PCDATA | %fontstyle;)'>
<!ELEMENT div (p | %inline;)+>
<!ATTLIST div align (left | right | center) #IMPLIED>

And here’s what it means in English:

The font style elements are <tt>, <i>, and <b>. Inline elements consist of text or font style elements. A <div> can contain one or more <p> or inline elements in any order. A <div> has an optional align attribute with values of left, right, or center."



Saturday, April 15, 2006

CSS positioning tutorial
 
Learn CSS positioning in 10 easy steps!

This tutorial examines the different layout properties available in CSS: position:static, position:relative, position:absolute, and float.



Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Overview of Pages
 
Overview of Pages: "The DotNetNuke? portal builder lets you quickly build and edit a website using only your web browser. This Guided Tour will show you how to build a website step-by-step using DotNetNuke?. If you are not familiar with DotNetNuke?, please review this page before starting."



Saturday, August 20, 2005

Blogger Help : Can I use keyboard shortcuts while posting?
 
Blogger Help : Can I use keyboard shortcuts while posting?: "Blogger has several keyboard shortcuts for use while editing posts. They definitely work in Internet Explorer 5.5 /Windows and the Mozilla family (1.6 and Firefox 0.9 ), and might work in other browsers. Here they are:

* control b = Bold
* control i = Italic
* control l = Blockquote (when in HTML-mode only)
* control z = Undo
* control y = Redo
* control shift a = Link
* control shift p = Preview
* control d = Save as Draft
* control s = Publish Post"



Thursday, August 12, 2004

Moving from my server to blogspot
 
I am hoping to move this blog over to blogspot. that way, MAYBE it will once again become visible. the new url will be http://tangedweb.blogspot.com


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Well, THAT didnt work. I am utterly stymied as to how to fix this blog. sheesh



Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Trying to find out why my url has been highjacked
 
Wehn I go to the bronzefrogs.com/blogs/tangledweb.html url, it forwards to another adress (not one of mine): http://sparclinux.org/ which is something or other under development.

Anyone have any ideas?