Archive for July, 2008

What software should I use?

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

If some of you were to look at my desktop, your mouth would drop wide open and you would say “Do you actually need all those programs?” Well my simple answer would be that each of them have own specific use.

Sure there are some programs that do relatively the same the thing but which little extra features that the other one doesn’t have. Eg. Dreamweaver vs. Aptana. Well Dreamweaver will cost you some money, but on the other hand Aptana is free.

Of course you have the whole religious debate on hand-coding (Notepad++, TextPad, and TextMate) versus WYSIWYG (Dreamweaver, and Frontpage).

Personally, I do most of my programming by hand. The reason for this is Dreamweaver and Frontpage create really messy code and doesn’t allow you complete control over every aspect.

To wrap this little post up, here are some software that you should consider if you are getting into this field.

  • Adobe Illustrator CS3
  • Adobe Flash CS3
  • Adobe Photoshop CS3
  • Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Aptana Studio
  • Eclipse
  • XAMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl)
  • WS_FTP Professional
  • SSH Shell Client
  • Timetracker
  • Norton Ghost

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CSS or Tables for layout?

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Let’s first take a look at some history of the web, to get the full picture on this. The web believe it or not was initially created by the military to share information quickly. It was not meant to be pretty, and have a pile of graphics on the pages. The HTML was created to LOGICALLY mark-up the content provided on the website.

As the internet began to gain popularity, designers were tired of these boring looking websites and needed to add some flare to them. Due to this need browsers like IE and Mozilla added proprietary tags such as <font>, <blink>, etc…

They also needed to position elements on a page in a finite way, and not just one under another. Thus comes into play tables. It allows you to have elements side by side.

I’m not sure if you can imagine this now, but this can get quite complex and create a lot of mark-up. A table, within a table, within another tables cell, and yeah it gets ridiculous.

Enter CSS – which allows us to use our HTML for strictly mark-up and use CSS for presentation. Our HTML can use <div> tags to mark divisions in our pages, such as header – content – footer instead of having a table for each. We can then assign it an id and create a CSS rule to format the text however we want. Bold, Red, and Times New Roman

It does take some getting used to, but wow do the search engines love it. As well as this a sites layout can be completely changed without affection the HTML at all.

For an example, View My XHTML/CSS Project, and click a layout under the left side links

I don’t expect you all to be switching to CSS as it is not always that easy, but I hope to at least open your mind to the idea.

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