The technique of splitting up a information into multiple pages is known as pagination. For web pages it normally means taking a resultset from a database query and only showing a specific number of records per page. There are many variations of how to do this no matter what technology (PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion) you use.
All modern browsers support the most common media attributes, which are supplied within the link element to target specific style sheets in a specific situation. For example, to ensure only visitors viewing the web site on a monitor, you add media = “screen” to the link element to call your default style sheet. Underneath that a second link element can be used with media = “print” added to call a print style sheet with only basic styling, such as black text on a plain white background, and all graphics removed.
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.
If you are using my online ASP.NET Workshop to learn the basics of creating web applications using ASP.NET, one of the lessons that often gets overlooked by the novice (including me) is how does the ASP.NET architecture work behind the scenes. Although learning this may seem a bit too technical or unnecessary since all you want to do is create some dynamic web pages, it is worth taking a brief look at least at these informative videos.
I know the basics of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but beyond that I sometimes need to bumble and fumble around looking for answers in books or online. One aspect of CSS that gives me some occasional problems (and I’m sure others as well) are floats.
When you float an element, it becomes a block-level element that can then be shifted to the left or right on the current line. A floated box is laid out according to the normal flow of elements, but it’s then taken out of the flow and shifted to the left or right as far as the containing element will allow. Floats are a must for placing images in context, creating columns and other neat design ideas.
Learning Flash by watching videos is a very efficient way to learn specific techniques without going through books or online tutorials. As I mentioned in a previous post about online learning, there are many website that offer video tutorials on different web technologies including Flash.
LearnFlash.com is one of them and they offer one of the largest selections of Flash video tutorials.
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If you want to build modern web sites, you need to know about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS gives you the power to style and lay out web sites so they are usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain.
The basic purpose of CSS is to allow the designer to define style declarations, and to apply those styles to selected portions of HTML pages using selectors which are references to an element or grop of elements to which the style is applied.
In my attempt to learn PHP I thought I would create a simple web site that does some basic database interaction (select, insert, update and delete), sorting and paging, keyword search, and use some of the new PHP 5 features such as OOP, exception handling and the new mysqli extension for MySQL 4.1 and above.
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.
Once you learn the basics of PHP, you will want to know how to interact with a database and update its data from a web page. MySQL is the most obvious and recommended choice using PHP and is fairly easy to setup.
You can use phpMyAdmin to easiy setup your MySQL database, tables and perform any necessary SQL statements.
