In a recent article from Visual Studio Magazine, Rod Stephens wrote an article on how to write better code for yourself as well as other people who may view it. These tips can be applied to almost any programming language (JavaScript, .NET, PHP, etc.) so it is useful for any web developer.
“A computer does exactly what the code tells it to do and doesn’t care what the code looks like. At the same time, it’s easy to forget that you write code for people, not computers. Ultimately, you are satisfying the requirements of a user somewhere, not just writing text that will execute in a vacuum. In a development environment of any size, the code you write will be reviewed and or maintained by other people, so you need to make sure that you are clear about your intentions.”
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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is based on the same parent technology as HTML or XHTML. XML looks a lot like HTML, complete with tags, attributes and values. But rather that serving as a lagnguage just for creating web pages, XML is a language for creating other languages. You use XML to design your own custom markup language and then you use that language to format your own documents. Your custom markup language, officially called an XML application will contain tags that actually describe the data that they contain.
If a tag indentifies data, that data becomes available for other tasks. A software program can be designed to extract just the information that it needs, perhaps join it with data from another source, and finally output the resulting combination in another form for another purpose. Instead of being lost on an HTML-based web page, labeled information can be reused as often as neccessary.
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The most extensible of all browsers is Firefox, which now has over 1,000 extensions. These are almost all cross-platform, so they work on Macs and Linux machines as well as Windows. They include debugging consoles, syntax validators, cookie manipulators, accessibility tools, manuals, and measurement tools. Add to that extensions that can rewrite the pages and stylesheets you’re using and suddenly Firefox becomes by far the most developer-friendly of all the browsers available.
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Microsoft will be releasing Expression Studio, a set of web-design and graphics software that will try to compete with tools from Adobe. These products are Graphic Designer Expression Design, Interactive Designer Expression Blend, Expression Web and Expression Media
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There are a lot of ways to learn a computer topic — buy a book(s), attend a user group or workshop, do online research or bug a friend to teach you. But for the past couple years a new way has emerged as an easy and inexpensive alternative; online learning — training videos or online classes.
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Published by a UK magazine giving you ideas of what to look out for in 2006.
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As we start this workshop, I have mentioned that you can use any text or web editor to create your JavaScript code. So if you already have Adobe Dreamweaver or another similar type tool, go ahead and keep using it. If you do not and you are cheap (like me) then you probably want something that is free.
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