There is no such HTML tag as <marquee> and yet many browsers insist on recognising it. While you can avoid using such garbage tags in your own web pages, dealing with web pages where such garbage has been used and where your browser insists on recognising it produces a separate problem. The different browsers vary in how friendly they are toward your being able to get the browser to ignore the tag.

Fixing the Marquee Tag

Converting a PDF into a Word document (provided that the PDF isn’t protected) doesn’t require any special software provided that all you are after copying is the text content and are not worried about if some of the formatting gets lost. At least that was the case back when I wrote this article. More recent versions of Acrobat may do a better job on maintaining the formatting and copying things that are not text. The steps to follow shouldn’t have changed much though apart perhaps from the menus being rearranged.

Converting a PDF into a Word Document

While this old tutorial talks about reinstalling Windows 98, the same situation can occur if you have to reinstall Windows XP or Windows 7. Windows just doesn’t like to play nice with other operating systems installed onto the same computer.

I Reinstalled Windows and it Wiped Out Linux

Both C and C++ (as well as many of the more recent languages derived from them) distinguish between a constant containing a single character and a constant containing a string of characters. The way you quote the content does count.

The Difference Between Characters and Strings

If you are creating a new web site these days, there is no excuse for not using a strict doctype for your page. Those tags which are proprietary or deprecated have all been replaced with a better way of achieving the same result that is better supported by more browsers either using stylesheets or JavaScript. There are even some tags which are not deprecated which you should seldom if ever need to use. This latest XHTML tutorial lists many of these tags and tells you what you should use instead.

Tags to Avoid

Without getting into the intricacies of using Regular Expressions, it is a relatively simple task to perform validations of an input field using JavaScript. In fact by not using Regular Expressions you can provide more meaningful feedback on exactly what it is that is wrong with the input. This tutorial takes you through how to test for just about all of the combinations of input that you are likely to need to test for, it is just a matter of substituting the appropriate characters into the tests. The combination of all of the tests shown also makes a reasonable test for an email address validation.

Validating a Text Field

This book introduces you to both PHP and mySQL and how to use them together to create dynamically generated web pages using relatively modern methods.

“Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site”

Getting forms in your web page to look the way you want has always been one of the most difficult parts of setting up the appearance of your web page. Not any more as this book shows you exactly how to get web browsers to apply the appearance you want to the form fields. Where CSS can’t do it they show you how to use JavaScript to do it.

“Fancy Form Design”

My favourite FTP program is WS-FTP. While the company that created this script no longer offers a free version, the versions that they used to offer free can still be obtained. In this tutorial that I wrote several years ago I show just how simple that it is to upload files to your web hosting using this program.

Copying Files with WS-FTP

If statements in JavaScript evaluate the condition test as a boolean value. That means that it is either true or it is false. Of course of you don’t start with a boolean value or perform a comparison in order to create a boolean value then the condition will not be a boolean. When this happens JavaScript will convert whatever the value actually is into either true or false. In this seventh JavaScript decision making tutorial we look at how JavaScript decides what values to convert to true and what values to convert to false.

Non-Boolean Results

JavaScript does comparisons using == and === and does assignments using =. When you are coding your if statements you might accidentally leave out an = converting your comparison into an assignment. You might then have a great deal of difficulty in locating why your code is not behaving as expected. In this sixth tutorial on JavaScript decision making we look at how you can rearrange the condition tests in some instances so that the code will generate a syntax error when you make a simple typo when typing your comparison rather than having the code still run but producing the wrong results. This will make it easier to find where you made the error.

Formatting an If Statement

Continuing on with the tutorials on how JavaScript handles decision making, this fourth tutorial introduces the first of the decision making commands – the if statement.

The IF statement