26 Jul

HTML5

I am not impressed.

HTML 5 draft spec

While there are some handy new elements such as nav (for navigation menus), video and canvas, it also includes some elements which have no contextual meaning at all, and have been deprecated since HTML 4.

Remember how much effort standards evangelists put into the removal of <b> and <i>? Well… they’re back. i, b.

What’s doubly confusing about this is that there is no clear contextual difference between the new definitions of <i> and <b>, and the new element m.

<m> is defined as a span which is “highlighted”. That is not a job for HTML. It is a CSS issue! This can already be handled through <span class="highlight">code such as this</span>.

And where are the handy new form elements? I had been looking forward to at least a <date> input type, so I would not need to always provide a JavaScript calendar or a set of three select-boxes to handle day/month/year. No – nowhere to be seen.

Not impressed.

25 Jul

a few Splitter enhancements.

as promised, the Splitter can now do vertical splitting as well as horizontal.

Also, I’ve implemented minimumSize for the panels.

An example:

top left, minimum height 50px
bottom left, minimum height 100px
right, minimum width:50px

The HTML for the above is this:

<div id="splitter_wrapper" style="height:200px;border:1px solid #000">
  <div id="topleft">top left, minimum height 50px</div>
  <div id="bottomleft">bottom left, minimum height 100px</div>
  <div id="right">right, minimum width:50px</div>
</div>

and the javascript is this:

var horizontal=new Splitter($("splitter_wrapper"));
var vertical=new Splitter(false,{orientation:1});
vertical.addWidget($("topleft"),{minimumSize:50});
vertical.addWidget($("bottomleft"),{minimumSize:100});
horizontal.addWidget(vertical);
horizontal.addWidget($("right"),{minimumSize:50});

The Splitter class requires Mootools. You can get the class file here.

12 Jul

php.ie coming soon

Over the last few days, a group of us have been discussing what we need on the new Irish PHP UserGroup (PHPUG) website. Over the weekend, hopefully, we will get down and dirty with it, and will have a working site which will be the centre-point of Irish PHP activity.

I’m really looking forward to this.

If you have any thoughts on what you, as a PHP developer, would like to see, please mention them either in the mailinglist, or in the IRC channel.

08 Jul

Splitter for MooTools

A while back, I wrote a panel script I called “resizeabletable”. It took a table and made it resizeable, such that you could drag the borders of the table to resize the cells of the table.

I did this to emulate the Splitter capability which is common in a lot of visual languages. For example, there is QT’s splitter, which my new one is based on (the old one had a few architectural faults), and there are others available for Java, wxWindows, and other visual languages.

demo

For now, the splitting is only available horizontally. I’ll add vertical splitting in a while.

The demo’s source is pretty simple, so I won’t bother explaining how to use it.

The source is here. Needs MooTools to work.

02 Jul

charity links

Got tagged by Ken. The idea here is to have a growing list of charities to raise awareness of their existences. You add your own favourite 5 to the end, and tag 5 other people. I don’t know that many charities, but I’ll add Christian Blind Mission, Vincent De Paul, and the Drop Inn Ministries.

I know that’s only 3, but then – I don’t have much experience of them. The Vinnies were were helpful while I was growing up in Tallaght, Dublin, during the impoverished 80s. CBM is an international charity which I’ve helped with their website, and the Drop Inn is a charity which provides cheap second-hand clothes, books, etc.

I have no idea who to tag – I have no social life, and those that I would tag appear to have already been done!