webDU 2007 Post Mortem

I figured it was about time I made some comments on webDU now that the dust has settled (and I'm finally over the gastro I've had all week, including at the conference).

Overall, I have to say I have an absolute blast, and it was brilliant to put some real faces to people who were just names on a mail list, IM or irc chat room.

There is a huge amount of kudos that needs to go to Geoff, Julie and the rest of the Daemon team for putting on webDU, it was well organised, professional, and not to mention a whole lot of fun.

The only criticism on the conference was that with the Flex heavy presentations, there seemed to be a fair amount of overlap in terms of content covered.  I went to a few Flex presentations, and many of them covered that very beginning level of introduction into Flex.  While I am not a Flex user by any means, I like to keep my eye on the Flex space, and was often looking for something more than just another 'here is how to say 'Hello World' in Flex', especially when the title of the presentation lends itself to make you believe it is something more.

Otherwise, the presentations where very good, and on the whole insightful.  My favourites included the Keynote: Flash Bang, Apollo, FarCry 4.0: The Application Framework, Seeding, Developing and Growing an online Community, and Using the IM gateway in ColdFusion .

I felt that my Transfer presentation went very well, although I'm still not sure how I managed to get through all 39 slides in just over half an hour without someone telling me to speak slower ;o).  I did have to laugh when I got the webDU booklet and my presentation slides took up something like 4 or 5 pages, compared to other presenters usual 2 or 3.

Speaking to people after the session, the feedback was generally positive, and people seemed to have walked away feeling like they had learnt something.  Mind you, if anyone has any extra feedback they wish to give me on the presentation, I'm all ears, so fire away. I'm always looking to do a better job.

Charlie Arehart and I did a BOF: ColdFusion Componentry session together, which, in all honestly, I didn't think anyone would show up to, being 8am after the night of the banquet.  But people did, and we had a good chat about Object Oriented development, from a variety of angles.  I apologise if I wasn't making any sense, as I may have possibly had my fair share of the Microsoft tab at the bar the night before.

Speaking of which, the Banquet was great as well, including the Kath and Kim impersonators.  I think the most enjoyable part was watching the American visitors try and work out who Kath and Kim were. ;o)

The drinks at the bar after the banquet were also lots of fun, but I am wondering where everyone went around 11pm.  It seemed like the place was packed, and then suddenly it was empty.  Go figure.  I did get a definite giggle out of a Microsoft representative asking me why I didn't program in .Net.  All I know is that at around 2am they kicked us out, so I ended up going back to my room to crash.

The definite highlight of the whole thing, I have to say, was the people.  It was such a good opportunity to run around and actually physically talk to a variety of people who worked with Adobe technologies.  (Especially to one guy who couldn't quite believe that I thought manipulating a huge amount of financial data was really cool... I didn't really care about the Flex part).  To those of you I talked to, and there were way to many to mention, was great to chat to you all, and I'm glad to have (finally?) met you.

A brilliant conference, and I hope that those of you who didn't come, will show up next year, and those that I met this year, I will see again.

Javascript escape() and UTF-8

Something I came across today when dealing with Chinese languages -

the javascript escape() function only works for ASCII characters, so if you are using another language things tend to go wonky pretty quick.

The function you want to use is encodeURIComponent() which will handle Unicode quite happily.

For a bit more reading: WorldTimZone's article on UTF-8 encoding for older browsers.

 

XHTML and 3 Column Layout

For a while now the CSS markup on Compound Theory has caused some interesting display bugs to occur on IE, and particularly on Mac IE.

I've redone the whole CSS structure, and I think this is a much better (less bugs?) way than the previous.

The originial incarnation was based on the principle of floating one nav bar on the left, one nav bar on the right, and keeping a middle section for the content.

E.g.

div.left {
    float: left;
    width: 200px;
}

div.right {
    float: right;
    width: 200px;
}

div.middle {
    margin-left: 210px;
    margin-right: 210px;
}

However, apon shrinking the size of the browser window, often the middle section would drop below the left, or really wide content would shift the middle section down the page.

I tried everything known to mankind to stop it from shifting down, to no avail.

Finally my friend Adrian shot me over to www.glish.com and I discovered a xhtml layout that used absolute positioning for the outer columns.

Simply put:

div.left {
    position: absolute;
    left: 5px;
    top: 50px;
    width: 200px;
}

div.right {
    position: absolute;
    right: 5px;
    top: 50px;
    width: 200px;
}

The full details can be found here, however by using absolute positioning to line up both of the left and right columns for my nav bars, the issues inherent with using a float no longer applied.

Definatley the way to go.

Now I still need to sort out the form display issue on a Mac...

My apologies to Mac Users

I just wanted to extend my apologies to Mac users, I know full well none of my forms display correctly on Macs (particularly Safari).

It's a known issue, but since I don't have a Mac at hand, it's very hard to debug :oP.  I realised that everything was all skew-iff when I did some screen grabs on the site at Dan Vine's iCapture site to see what things look like.

Not sure when I am going to fix the problem (or how at this stage), but I will get to it.

This is one place where XHTML Strict kicks me right up the....

Mishoo's Website

I just posted a link for Mishoo's website, simply because of the fact that he probably comes up with some of the coolest DHTML driven, cross browser free software out there.

I personally use his HTMLArea WYSIWIG editor, which is great, and is backed by a large developer community.

I recently came back to the site, as Flex-Mx started talking about his great DHTML Calendar.  It is a seriously nice piece of work, and will probably replace the DHTML Calendar I've been using in some other places.

I also love his business model for free software - feel free to make a suggestion on the product, however, add a donation to the suggestion, and you get more influence.  The more donations given to a particular suggestion, the more likely it is to be added into a product.  In some circles that may be called bribery, but in this case I think it's just smart ;o)

XHTML and '

It took me about 2 hours to work this one out, but it I ended up getting there at the end.

I had ''' in comments on this blog, and they were written as ''' in the source, yet they didn't want to come up as apostraphes.

So I'm scratching my head, and I'm thinking -

1. ''' is a valid XML element.
2. XHTML is valid XML
3. Hence - ''' should display correctly.

That would all be well and good (according to my deductive reasoning) except for the fact that - ' IS NOT VALID HTML.

So - on that note, if you are displaying something on an HTML page - don't use XMLFormat(), as it will escape your apostraphes into a very annoying '''. Use HTMLEditFormat() instead.

That also being said, if you are pulling in text from XML feeds, you may wish to filter out the ''' and replace them with real apostraphes, as quite obviously they won't display correctly.

Just thought I would share this one.

You can see some more at: XHTML 1.0 - HTML Compatibility Guidelines

EDIT :::
I just discovered, that ' actually works as intended in Mozilla based browsers, however not in IE.  I'm not totally surprised mind you.  Just something else to factor into the mix.