Judging by the number of computer questions that I receive where the sender has selected the mainframe category that in fact have nothing whatever to do with mainframe computers, I’d say that there are a lot of people who have no idea what a mainframe is.

Well one of those people finally decided to ask the question giving me the opportunity to explain how to tell if the computer you want to ask a question about is a mainframe. So now there is no excuse for anyone to make that mistake again is there?

What is a Mainframe?

A lot of people building web sites thing “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) when what they should be thinking is “Marketing“. Marketing is a lot more than just SEO and the end goal is not to get to the top of the search results.

HTML 4 has been around for over fifteen years now and all browsers now in use have supported it for years. Why then do so many people starting new web sites not begin by using an HTML 4 strict doctype? Why do so many of then still insist on usiing things that were removed from HTML 4 for good reason?

Browser Support for HTML

Quite a few pages have been changed this week. Those with more than a word or two changed include:

• PC – What is a zip file?
• PC – Two Hard Drives
• CSS – ID Styles
• HTML – Ads in Web Pages
• CSS – Child Selectors
• Browsers – Unknown Link

I just received a letter from a company calling themselves “Domain Renewal Group” advising me that I have a domain due to be renewed in September and offering to handle the renewal – at FIVE times what I pay the current domain registrar. Make sure you don’t fall into the trap of paying way more to renew your domain than you need to. Besides which “Domain Renewal Group” didn’t offer a Paypal payment option and I pay slightly more than I might otherwise pay in order to have the domain with somewhere that accepts that payment method.

Just about all of the forum questions asked by PH beginners have no input processing in their script whatsoever. With over half the code that they should have in the script missing, that the part they do have doesn’t quite work properly is the least of their problems. One way of making sure all of the necessary input and output processing gets done for each variable would be to make each private to an object and attach all of the input and output code as methods of that object.

Proper Processing of Variables in PHP

Some of the commands originally introduced in JavaScript are now completely unnecessary and just make the language more of a mess than it needs to be. Those responsible for defining the language have taken the first step in redefining what is and isn’t allowed in order to start getting rid of the mess.

Worst Bits

Not all links on the web are created equal. When you are adding a link to a web page you need to look at it from the general visitor’s viewpoint. Will what is being linked to be of interest to the people reading the page where you place the link.

Relevance

Internet Protocol uses what are called “port” numbers to identify different types of communications on the web. Programs ‘listen’ on particular ports to identify the traffic that is intended for them. This article provides a brief introduction to what port numbers are all about and identifies the ports used by some of the most commonly used server programs on the internet.

Internet Port Numbers

Different Linux versions implement a slightly different set of commands but there is a significant group of commands that almost all versions understand. This reference page lists all of the most commonly supported commands along with a brief description of what each is for.

Common Linux Commands

Back when I wrote this article it was still fairly common to pollute your HTML with deprecated attributes to define your page appearance such as the background attribute on the body tag. Even back then the better way to specify your page background was to use stylesheets since there are many things that can be done when you specify the background that way that are not possible without stylesheets.

Manipulating Your Background Image

Most forums have the outgoing links that you can add flagged as nofollow so that the search engines will ignore them. From a practical viewpoint this has no impact whatsoever on the value of those links since it is the relevance of the link that determines its value.

Forum Links and SEO

You can’t answer yes or no to whether a particular JavaScript is obtrusive because there are a wide range of different degrees to which JavaScript can be obtrusive. The most obtrusive is where it is jumbled throughout the HTML while the least obtrusive only exposes the bare minimum needed to allow it to actually interact with the page. In between there are a range of ways in which a script may be more or less intrusive. By applying one or more steps we can reduce the obtrusiveness of a given script.

Obtrusive JavaScript

The latest version of my marquee script can convert any block tag in your web page to a continuous marquee just by adding a class and a height. Other styles such as applying a width are optional.

Marquee

Word documents use a proprietary format. That means that without your spending an extensive amount of time to reverse engineer their file format, any edits that you do have at least the potential to corrupt the document.

Enter the proprietary format that Microsoft based on HTML which they designed for transferring files between their programs. This format has the advantage that it is entirely plain text making the proprietary tags much easier to identify when you want to edit the file outside Word and it can be imported back into Word restoring the original file perfectly except for your changes.

Editing Word Files Outside of Word