Ask Felgall

The second of the two New Rider books I received is on web standards. This book covers the reasons for applying web standards to your page, how to apply standards to your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server side processing, as well as containing a couple of case studies that show how standards are applied in practice and how for a hugely popular web site where it may be necessary to break with the standards for efficiency reasons, how to determin when such an action is actually appropriate.

Adapting to Web Standards

I received several books for review this last week and since the books usually take so long to reach me, I usually try to review them as quickly as I can after I receive them.

This is the first of two books that I received together, both from New Riders. This particular book is filled with loads of practical information on setting up the appearance of your page using CSS.

Stylin’ With CSS

Making your web site accessible to those with major disabilities, those with very minor disabilities, and even those who for one reason or another have selected to disable JavaScript or who don’t have a particular plugin installed is extremely important if you want your visitors to be able to get the greatest benefit out of using your web site. This book covers a huge number of different aspects of designing a web site to make it as accessible as possible.

Review of “Design Accessible Web Sites”

When you are writing about how to use computers the way I do you will frequently have situations where it is useful to provide an image of what the screen or part of the screen is supposed to look like so that people following your tutorial can see where the menu options are that you are telling them to select, what the effect of doing what you told them to do is supposed to look like and so on. Of course to be able to include these images in your tutorial you need to be able to capture the screen images in the first place.

In this tutorial I discuss how to use Paint Shop Pro to do screen captures of part or all of your screen. You can even use time delays to do screen captures of screen savers.

Capturing Screen Images

Unlike Microsoft Word, WordPerfect can convert documents into HTML that is almost good enough to use on the web. This article was written several years ago now so the versions of the software and HTML that it refers to are fairly dated but the same situation probably still applies today with the latest versions of everything to what applied at the time I wrote this article referring to the latest versions available at that time.

Creating Web Pages in WordPerfect

One of the first things you need to learn when you start on Object Oriented Programming is about classes and objects and what the difference between the two is.

What is the Difference Between a Class and an Object?

I recently had a reason for looking up how to get to a particular location in order to be able to attend a course. I decided that the easiest way to find out how to get there was to use one of the online map services that covers my local area to get the directions on how to get there. I figured that the locally run service should be more aware of local traffic conditions than one of the big international sites.

The site offered several options that you could select from in order for it to work out the best route for you such as including or excluding toll roads, shortest distance or shortest time. I started out by requesting the route using the default settings of using toll roads where appropriate and shortest time just to see what it would come up with. The result was a route that used toll roads almost exclusively and which followed a circular route to get to the destination (obviously far from the shortest way but then it wasn’t looking for the shortest way). Unfortunately given the time of day I expected to be travelling I expected that far from being the quickest way that following that route in the middle of peak hour traffic travelling in the same direction for most of the way would probably be the slowest rather than the quickest way. The site didn’t ask what time of day I would be travelling and so obviously didn’t take differeing traffic conditions through the day into account (not that it would be easy to do so in any case and so you can’t really blame the site for that result).

Selecting to exclude toll roads gave a route that went more across the peak hour traffic rather than with it and so would probably work out to be faster and was certainly somewhat shorter. The route that it chose though has one major flaw. As it happens I am very familiar with the first half of the route that it suggested and the particular turns that it suggested to make in order to follow that route require making a right hand turn at an intersection where no right hand turns have been allowed for at least the last 20 years and probably a lot longer. You would think that the site could at least give you a route that can be followed without having to break the law. It would be understandable if that intersection had the no right turn added recently but that intersection has had that sign there since before the web existed and the web site still seems ignorant of its being there.

From what I have heard, all sites offering to give instructions on how to get from one place to another suffer from flaws and do not always return a practical result. I wonder if GPS navigation systems in cars do any better?

PL/1 unlike many other programming languages provides direct access to define and call program interrupts. In this article we look at how it is done.

PL/1 Interrupts