Web Forms and ISO 3166 country codes

Web Forms and ISO 3166 country codes: "anomalies have occurred as the result of using ISO 3166 country codes. Worse yet, they are part of the 'Domain Name System' as ccTLD (country code Top Level Domains). The founders of the internet just simply used the ISO 3166 codes rather then get involved in the politics of developing the Domain Name Standards. I have actually read comments posted on the internet, by other Developers/Programmers, to simply use these standards without question and if it's not suitable for the application to pass the blame along to the ISO.

Why?
Why ISO 3166 was ever developed the way it was, is beyond belief. Now there's more bad news on the way, I recently came upon Verisign's experimental use of ISO 3166-2 Country and Country Subdivision codes. It does not get any better here. The manner in which ISO 3166-2 details the subdivisions of the United Kingdom is so poor, that the United Nations opted to use the British Standard BS 6879 in it's UN/LOCODE system. Here's a direct quote from Part 3 of the UN/LOCODE MANUAL

'The subdivision of United Kingdom contained in ISO 3166-2/1998 is not suitable for the purposes of UN/LOCODE. For this reason, the code list below is based on the previous British Standard BS 6879.'

This sounds like a very polite way of stating how bad ISO 3166-2 is in regards to the 'United Kingdom'.

GENUKI: Country and County Codes - British Isles

nice looking german site about nature

Wildbienen - Übersicht der Themen
Institut für Biologie und Naturschutz Kusterdingem happy Xmas

RootsWeb "Disaster" is getting sorted out

RootsWeb Newsroom » Blog Archive » Update on the Message Board Updates:

"The message board team has been very busy this week reading your feedback and fixing bugs. We have also spent a lot of our time planning and developing adjustments to the boards based on that feedback.

Our first priority in this post-launch period is to fix anything things that are broken (also known as “bugs”). Often when new code is launched and/or a database is updated (both happened with this board update), there are bugs that are not caught during the QA process or things that don’t work correctly when the code goes live."

dreamweaver and XML

Displaying XML Data in Web Pages

Macromedia - Dreamweaver Developer Center and more about XML

Web Designers Success free ebook

Web Designers Success Guide: how to profit from freelance web design By Kevin Airgid: "The reason I wrote this book is because every time I speak about web design at conferences like Flash In The Can, DigiFest and other festivals I always get asked the same question repeatedly 'How did you get into freelance web design?' Unfortunately there is no short answer, so I wrote a book.

I don't claim you will make a million dollars after you read this book, but it will give you insight into ways to succeed. I've tried hard to keep the book concise and to the point. So no fluff, no page fillers with useless graphics that bump up the page count. In most of the chapters I end with a step by step tutorial on how to use software to achieve some of the goals of the chapter. This book isn't about theory, it is about practical applications you can use right away."

Finney / Woodward

Finney / Woodward: "
John Andrew Finney was a successful business man who started his life in Ravenswood West Virginia. As a 17 year old he pestered his mother into allowing him to join the Union Army during the Civil War which ended two months later, but helped us located information about him through his military records."

Blogging to peak next year

BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogging 'set to peak next year': "The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on."

Projectseven.com

Happy Holidays from PVII
- and don't forget to look under the tree !

Happy Holidays from PVIIProjectseven.com - Dreamweaver Menu Extensions and CSS Templates

Projectseven.com - Support

Aptana: The Web IDE

Aptana: The Web IDE

Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features:

• Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
• Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
• NEW: FTP/SFTP uploading, downloading and synchronization
• NEW: JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code
• Error and warning notification for your code
• Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
• Cross-platform support
• Free and open source licensed under the Eclipse Public License, v1.0.

space saver for librarians

Anguline Research Archives: "Shrink the cost of your library by using digital books, no longer do libraries have to be expensive Anguline Research Archives are dedicated to keep the cost of information down to affordable levels in order that everyone may enjoy the benefits of a wide range of sources.

A further benefit soon becomes obvious to anyone doing research and requiring extracts to be made from books, this may be done instantly without resorting to cramming the book on a photocopier and in the process damaging the spine, copies of extracts may be made quickly and conveniently with no damage ensuing.

Digital Conservation, archivists have long acknowledged the best way to conserve an object is to do the least amount of repairs to the object and certainly nothing that cannot be reversed at a later date.

Digital technology now affords the archivist and librarian the perfect way to avoid damage, and wear & tear to the library or archive stock. Scanning books does no damage and allows the original to be kept in archive conditions suffering no further damage yet the information contained within is readily available."

XHTML, XForms, and device independence

XHTML, XForms, and device independence:

"Diversion: arachnophobia

'Google is, for all intents, a blind user. A billionaire blind user with tens of millions of friends, all of whom hang on his every word. I suspect Google will have a stronger impact than [laws] in building accessible websites.'

...

'In a world where Google likely has a valuation several orders of magnitude higher than any chrome such as flash, graphics, audio, interactivity, or 'personalization', I see a heady revision.'

Karsten M. Self

Spider traps

• Sites with no content (e.g. Flash), no content</li><li>Java/Javascript dependencies.</li><li>Obviously CGI-driven sites (bots avoid these as they tend to be spider traps)</li><li>Session-ID'd URLs.</li><li>Audio content (not searchable)</li><li>Text-as-graphics. Google handles a number of formats, but it doesn't OCR.</li><li>Changeable sites. The longer you stay in one place, the better your Google score. Don't move content!</li></ul><br /><p><a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.cwi.nl/%7Esteven/">Steven Pemberton</a>, <a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.cwi.nl/">CWI</a>, <a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.cwi.nl/%7Esteven/amsterdam.html">Amsterdam</a> and <a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.w3.org/">W3C</a></p> <p>Chair, W3C <a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/">HTML</a> and <a href="http://not-a-real-namespace/http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/">Forms</a> Working Groups</p> <noframes> content<br /> * Java/Javascript dependencies.<br /> * Obviously CGI-driven sites (bots avoid these as they tend to be spider traps)<br /> * Session-ID'd URLs.<br /> * Audio content (not searchable)<br /> * Text-as-graphics. Google handles a number of formats, but it doesn't OCR.<br /> * Changeable sites. The longer you stay in one place, the better your Google score. Don't move content!"

Browser News: Statistics - Trends - learn about trends in browsers, colour-depths, and resolutions

Browser News: Statistics - Trends - learn about trends in browsers, colour-depths, and resolutions: "1024x768 and higher: this accounts for ~80% of page accesses. Most new PCs have enough video memory for high resolution displays, but many are set to a lower resolution because many new PCs default to a lower resolution: lower resolution displays are faster. The percentage of high resolution users will continue to grow steadily."

Give Up or Transfer a Mailing List

RootsWeb Newsroom » Blog Archive » New Tool to Give Up or Transfer a Mailing List: "RootsWeb mailing list administrators have a new tool to assist them in transferring or putting their mailing list up for adoption. The List Orphaning tool replaces the old process of writing the ListMaster or HelpDesk to request that a list be orphaned.

The List Orphaning tool provides list administrators with a secure method of transferring or putting a list up for adoption without having to wait for staff assistance. The process is secure because only the assigned list administrator can put their own list up for adoption."
Click here for more details on how to transfer or orphaning a mailing list.

RootsWeb: Requesting a Mailing List

How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?

W3C QA - How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?: "Here you will find easy, painless techniques and ideas to improve your Web site quality and make your Web site valid. This document is intended for HTML users, developers working on Web applications, and Web masters.

Most of the Web sites on the Web are not valid. We may assume that this is the case for 99% of the Web pages, but there are no statistics to support this. It would be interesting to run a survey to prove that this case is indeed true."

an attractive graphic

::: ANSWERS :::

Spans are Evil

Spans are Evil: "Are you still using tables for page layout? If you use an authoring tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver, a very good tool by the way, you can easily fall into a trap. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to lay out a page using a feature called 'layout view'. When you use layout view, you simply use the mouse to 'draw' tables on the page. It allows a huge amount of flexibility in designing your page and allows you to place elements wherever you want them.

So what's wrong with that? The problem is in the code written by Dreamweaver to accomplish that task. Dreamweaver's layout view makes abundant use of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN attributes to split and merge table cells to format the page exactly the way you have drawn it. However, when you begin adding content to the page, you may find that your carefully crafted layout begins to explode. "

Image:Layout engine usage share.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image:Layout engine usage share.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bankside Gallery

Bankside Gallery
an interesting web design

good design

Apple still has one of the best designed web sites with navigation possible in three or four ways
Apple - Site Map

Site Development

Site Development, Dreamweaver Training, Newsletters, HTML Emails - Certified

a nice example of a shaded background by Murray in my usenet mail:-

Look at my site - http://www.great-web-sights.com - and note how the
background is a fading blue horizontal stripe. It eventually fades to a
solid very light blue. Here is my CSS -


body {
background: url(newimages/page_bkg.jpg) #edf2f8 repeat-x;
margin: 7px 0px;
color: #000;
text-align: center
}

This rule says to make the body color #EDF2F8 (that's the light blue). It also says to use a background image -
http://www.great-web-sights.com/newimages/page_bkg.jpg - and to tile it
horizontally across the page. The color of the background happens to be the
same as the ending color of the gradient on the image.

more examples
Great Web Sights' Client Portfolio