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Dreamweaver

Step-by-step: implementing online forms

Online forms should be a key component of all corporate intranets, as they deliver clear productivity benefits and cost savings. Few organisations, however, have taken the next steps beyond simply publishing forms in PDF format.

This article discusses some of the reasons why online forms have not been more widely deployed.

An incremental approach is then outlined for implementing online forms. This is designed to minimise the cost and effort required at each step, while maximising the benefits delivered.

Chris Charlton

4278

General

Information Architecture Primer

What is information architecture? Organising functionality and content into a structure that people are able to navigate intuitively doesn't happen by chance. Organisations must recognise the importance of information architecture or else they run the risk of creating great content and functionality that no one can ever find.

This article provides an introduction to information architecture, discusses the evolution of the discipline and provides a 9-step guide for how to create an effective information architecture.

Chris Charlton

1282

CSS

Working with CSS Background Images – Part 4: Using Images to Fake the Appearance of Columns

In this tutorial, you learn how you can fake the appearance of columns in your CSS design. When you design with CSS, each of the divs in your page respond to the amount of content that they contain; this can be problematic when you want to create the appearance of equal-length columns. In this tutorial [I] will show you how you can overcome these problems in a fixed-width design.

Chris Charlton

2537

General

Joins, Temporary Tables, and Transactions

In this chapter, we'll discuss three additional features you can use to speed up your MySQL applications. While these aren't directly related to one another, each represents an opportunity to decrease the amount of database or code overhead required to perform useful tasks with MySQL by combining queries or operations on the code level into fewer units that perform more work.

Chris Charlton

3678

Flash MX2004 (AS2.0)

Using XML in NeoSwiff

Someone had asked [me] how to load, parse, and display XML files using NeoSwiff (.NET Flash). [I] created a simple example you can download here that does just that.

[This] example runs in the standalone version of NeoSwiff. It consists of two classes - the main application form, and a "Track" class that represents data in the xml file.

Chris Charlton

2283

General

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Today [I] want to talk about categorization, and [I] want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, [I] want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

Chris Charlton

1203

Flash MX2004 (AS2.0)

Form Validation with JavaScript Regular Expressions (part 2)

Form validation is an issue many websites must deal with. In this second article in a two-part series, you will use the JavaScript regular expressions you learned in the first article to put together a script that will validate a range of form inputs.

In the first part of this article, I explained some of the basic building blocks of JavaScript regular expressions, and mentioned that a lot can be done with them to assist in validating the information received through online forms. In this part, I will cover what can be done with these building blocks in more detail.

Chris Charlton

5527

JavaScript

Form Validation with JavaScript Regular Expressions (part 1)

There is no use collecting information that is clearly incorrect. Unless you're a corporate site administrator, there will probably be a limit to the amount of information you can hold in a database, and therefore it makes no sense to fill the database with incorrect information. Something is needed to ensure that users entering data into your forms are entering data that you can use and that meets your expectations of the data.

Regular Expressions can be used as a way of matching patterns in strings. By patterns, I mean specific occurrences of letters, numbers or punctuation marks. This is an extremely effective way of checking that the information visitors to your site have entered into your forms is correct. When I say correct I mean generally in the correct format; if a user spells their name incorrectly when entering their email address, there's not a lot you can do. But if they enter it and fail for some reason to include the @ character, for example, this at least can be detected. There is a home for regular expressions in any form, and almost any field that requires character input can be checked.

Chris Charlton

7681

CSS

Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step

The Challenge: Replicate WebRef's front page using CSS. The Solution: CSS and lots of iterations.

Rogelio Lizaolo improves on Kwon Ekstrom's CSS version of WebRef's tabled home page. Months in the making, the final design successfully duplicates WebRef's layout without the use of tables. Numerous bugs were discovered in Netscape and Explorer in how they handle CSS, and we found some elegant workarounds to these and other problems. What follows is a step by step CSS layout tutorial that shows how we got to the final design.

Chris Charlton

5720

Design

Why Consistency is Critical

Users Need Consistency - There is little doubt that consistency is important for users. Consistency makes sites easier to use, because visitors don't have to learn new tricks as they move around.

Chris Charlton

2817

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