Hello.World

XHTML 2.0 is the W3C's effort to fix inherent problems with HTML and to meet the growing requirements of web-based solutions. XHTML 2.0 takes the move toward XML to the next level and will try to acheive the following design goals:

• Use XML as much as possible: Where a language feature already exists in XML, don't duplicate or reinvent it.
• Structure over presentation: Thanks to CSS stylesheets, you no longer need explicitly presentational tags in HTML.
• Make HTML easier to write: Remove some of the needless idiosyncrasies of HTML.
• More accessibility, device independence: Make as few assumptions as possible about the way a document will be read.
• Improved internationalization.
• Better forms: Long overdue improvements are required!
• Reduce the need for scripting: Include typical scripting usages in HTML itself.
• Better semantics: Make it easier to integrate HTML with semantic Web applications.

Of particular interest to me is the goal of XHTML 2.0 to provide a declarative format for specifying user interfaces in a similar way to Mozilla's XUL or Microsoft's XAML. W3C will also define XBL2, a declarative language that provides a binding between custom markup and existing technologies. XBL2 will essentially give programmers a way to write new widgets for Web applications.

If you want to prepare yourself for the future an article on IBM Developer Works suggests the following:

• Get serious about using CSS, and try to remove all presentational markup.
• Think about how you can deploy microformats in your pages. (Microformats are a way to make human-readable elements in Web pages carry semantics that computers can interpret too. They are a bridge between today's HTML-based ad-hoc semantics and tomorrow's RDF-compatible XHTML 2.0 metadata.)
• If you've not done so already, get experience with XHTML 1.0.
• Experiment with the X-Smiles browser, an experimental platform with early support for many of the W3C's new client technologies such as XHTML 2.0, SVG, XForms, and SMIL 2.0 Basic capabilities.
• If you create new client systems based on XHTML-like functionality, seriously consider using XHTML 2.0 as your starting point.

XHTML 2.0 is not likely to become a W3C Recommendation until 2007, according to W3C HTML Working Group Roadmap. Now is the time to start reading and experimenting with XHTML 2.0 – and prepare for the future!

For the full article from IBM Developer Works click here.

I found an interesting article on PHP and XUL being used to power LeMonde.fr – a leading information website in France. It is an excellent example of PHP and XUL being used at Enterprise level – and a nice case study to read about if you use these tools.

The site receives around 68,000 subscriptions monthly and an average of 70,000,000 (million) page views. Not bad. The entire website is powered by PHP, and they use XUL/PHP combined to power their Content Management System. The following statements highlight the benefits from using these technologies:

The system is now powerful, using 4 Linux servers at 20% cpu while it was using 4 Sun servers at 70% cpu before. Development time has been divided by 2 and number of bugs by 3, in addition to the excellent documentation and support available in both XUL and PHP Communities.

You can read the full article here.

I only just wrote an article on Console² and I found something better – FireBug. FireBug is a new tool for Firefox that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.

FireBug is fairly simple – it adds a console to the bottom of every web page in Firefox. It enables the following features:

• Mouse-over DOM Elements on the page
• Type in JS expressions into the command line for execution
• Inspect AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) responses as text or XML
• Only show errors for the current page – previous data is cleared
• Display JavaScript, CSS or XML Errors
• Show a red dot in the Status Bar to indicate errors on the current page
• Set preferences on what errors you want to see

If you are a developer you can even get your page to write directly to Firebug – instead of using "alert()" or other methods for debugging. There is even a tutorial on how to do this.

Yup, you have to install this one…

Every now and again you come across a little tool that becomes a part of your everyday life. Here are two recently discovered extensions for Firefox that definitely fall into that category:

ViewMyCurrency
ViewMyCurrency allows you to view a web page with any dollar amounts automatically converted to your chosen currency – and using live exchange rates. For example a page might show $99 in USD – ViewMyCurrency will make the page display $145 ($99) for NZD. What's more you can toggle it on and off while looking at the page.

foXpose
Apple Expose for Firefox. foXpose lets you view all the open tabs in the browser by clicking F8 or the little icon in the bottom left of your status bar. It only runs in Firefox 1.5.

If you use Firefox then take a look at these great extensions – and if you have others to share then please leave a comment with a link…

This week I discovered three very useful tools built in AJAX. Here they are for my own future reference – and maybe you will enjoy these as well:

WizLite – this very nifty tool allows users to collaboratively highlight important passages on a page on the Internet. Users can attach notes to their selections. Wizlite is activated by a bookmarklet or Firefox toolbar extension.
Rex-V – a regular expression evaluator. Evaluates PHP PCRE, PHP Posix and JavaScript regular expressions. It also includes quick reference help which is very useful.
phpFunctions – an AJAX interface to quickly look up a function and then load the details from php.net.

Are there any similar tools out there that you would like to share?

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. So … how long have you been programming? How would you rank your ability? Check out this interesting post to see one authors view of how to rank yourself or others. Could be interesting to think about if you employ programmers as well…

In a recent Webcast, Zend showed off the syntax for their upcoming implementation of ActiveRecord. However the syntax shown is simply not possible in PHP5 – which has lead to a number of questions and comments from the community. Check out this post from Jeff Moore for some interesting reading…

The PHP development team just announced the release of PHP 5.1.2. This release combines small feature enhancements with over 85 bug fixes and addresses three security issues.

The feature enhancements include the following notables:

• Hash extension was added to core and is now enabled by default. This extension provides support for most common hashing algorithms without reliance on 3rd party libraries.
• XMLWriter was added and enabled by default.
• New OCI8 extension that includes numerous fixes.
• PNG compression support added to the GD extension.
• Added –enable-gcov configure option to enable C-level code coverage.
• getNamespaces() and getDocNamespaces() methods added to SimpleXML extension.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.1.2, see the ChangeLog.

Here is a quick tip that I found very handy today when I needed to view the files in my Firefox Cache. To do this simply type about:cache in the URL bar and hit enter – you can then search though your cache and retrieve images and files easily.

The favicon.ico is a small icon file that sits at the root of your website. It will display next to your website details in the browser address bar and in a Favorites/Bookmarks list. I have created a ICO file for this website which you should see in the address bar right now – it looks like this How did I create it? It couldn't be easier:

1. Use imaging software to create your image 16×16 (pixels).
2. Use the online FavIcon from Pics tool to convert your image to an ICO file
3. Follow the instructions from FavIcon from Pics:
   - Download the ICO file
   - Upload the ICO to the root folder of your website
   - Insert the code in your HTML as described

Done.