Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with xhtml

Wordpress theme editable region help

joelf — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:21:39 -0800

Wordpress Theme help. I need to stick an editable region in the header of my theme so a user can edit a little blurb about themselves. How do I put a Text Widget or something similar up there? I'm banging my head against a wall here. Ideally I'd want something that can be edited from the WP admin screen. Any help would be great. no worries about code fog. I'm pretty good with the stuff, I just can't find the answer on Google. so sad.

Are there any other coding nerds out there?

[insert clever name here] — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:27:26 -0800

Are there any good html and css forums that focus on writing semantic markup? Specifically, I'm looking for places to bounce ideas off of when I'm trying to write code to come up with the best ways of doing it. Sometimes things aren't as straight forward as "this is a paragraph, here goes the p tag!" A place where people live, eat and breath html and css! There are lot of forums out there for web design and coding, but I don't seem to be finding any that fit into this specific area. Kind of like if a list apart had its own forum/discussion area beyond comments.

web design term project ideas?

tamarack — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:09:35 -0800

Idea Filter: I need to create a six-page website for a term project in web design at uni (intro level). What to do it on? I have been given the go-ahead to choose a topic of my liking for my term project in web design. I find I just keep making the same site layout time and time again and I am in need of some new ideas, vague or specific suggestions, or links to other people's favourite small websites. Any creative inspiration is much appreciated :)

Renaissance Communications Man Seeks Advice.

producerpod — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:24:44 -0800

Am I a marketer? Am I a flack? Am I lost? Yep. I'm currently the marcomm director at a non-profit agency - the only person in my department. I am a true renaissance man, handling marketing, PR, internal communications, the website (I've hand-coded an entire site), all our graphic design and some video production.

I do it all, and that's kind of the problem. I'm looking to leave for the for-profit world, and I don't know which way to go. Marketing seems to be the best solid profession to get into (I am a family man as well, so pay is a big consideration) but I'm not sure I know what a for-profit marketer would do. Most marketing positions I see seem to be industry-specific as well. The more job descriptions I read, and the more resumes I read of people who are in marketing, the more I realize I may not have any idea how to do that at all - and it's rather depressing.

In my former life, I was a TV news producer in a top ten market, which gives me a lot of solid, basic skills that translate into any industry: team leading, writing, ability to grasp complex topics quickly and translate them into common language, working under HIGH PRESSURE under daily deadlines. When I do the PR part of my current job, it's this background I use, and I have a very easy time dealing with the media. I have no problem speaking on camera, or to large groups of people. I see people making PR mistakes ALL THE TIME. Sometimes I think I should go into for-profit PR based on my journalism background, but I dread working for an agency, calling reporters and producers with forced story ideas from a lame client.

My true passions, though, are graphic design and web design. I love CSS, Flash, XHTML, all things Adobe. I'm told I have a talent for it, but referencing a previous point (I'm a family man, entering my mid-thirties) I'm not sure I can create a new career from it.

Bottom line: How do I leave the non-profit world, and which path do I pursue?

Semantic markup and the world wide web: non-noob needs an explanation.

josh.ev9 — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 08:29:04 -0800

Semantic markup and the world wide web: non-noob needs an explanation. What is all this semantic markup talk about, and where can I learn more? I've been creating web tools/apps/etc. for years with well-written (as far as I can tell) and valid XHTML & CSS code. But over the last few years I've heard lots of people talk about "Semantic Markup."

What is this, and how can I tell if I'm already doing it? Why is it so good, and are there any problems with it? Finally, what are your favorite web and non-web resources for learning more?

How can I strip out extraneous CSS rules from my stylesheets?

jeremias — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:54:49 -0800

How can I strip out extraneous CSS rules from my stylesheets? I've got an external css file that I've modified quite extensively and it's also quite long. I would like to compare the rules in the css file with the div and class tags that I've added in my html and then discard all the css rules that don't apply. So this isn't CSS optimizing like CSS Tidy . . .

Is there anything either on or offline that will allow me to do this?

SVG task - is it the right tool for the job?

dance — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:14:19 -0800

Resources/information on layering with SVG I'm interested in working with SVG. I have some fairly intricate but simple vector (AI format) digitizations of some drawings I made. I'd like to display these on a webpage with a raster image of the original context 'beneath' the SVG image (does SVG do transparency?).

What is key is that the layers within the SVG (which I create as layers in Illustrator CS2 presumably) are clickable on/off and the raster itself is clickable on/off also - presumably using JavaScript.

Is this possible? Does anyone have any resources or information on how this could be accomplished? I can't find a great deal on the www about this aspect of SVG although similar projects have clearly been done - although that example doesn't have the raster background I am looking to achieve.

In addition it would be great if the layers could be searchable, perhaps through an XML sort/filter...

Any thoughts?

Problems with XHTML content type.

The Confessor — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:04:08 -0800

I seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall in approximating W3C XHTML standards compliance on my website. From what I've read, XHTML should be served with content type application/xhtml+xml, rather than text/html, and recent versions of Microsoft and Mozilla browsers should support serving them as such. Well, they aren't. I set the content type and character set for all of my pages using the header statement in my primary include file, as shown here.

When I try to switch the content type (currently by commenting one line and uncommenting the other), however, the following happens:

Firefox 2.0.0.3 complains that this XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it, and displays a bare document trees.

Internet Explorer 7.0.5450.4 opens an Open/Save/Cancel for a file of type php_auto_file.

Opera for Wii shows the bare interface, stripped of all styling.

Can anybody help me figure out what's going wrong?

object for iframe

juiceCake — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:31:30 -0800

Using Object instead of iframe for Google Calendar embeds? A client wants to play with the idea of embedding a particular Google Calendar. Google does this via iframe like so:

Since I prefer to use XHTML 1.0 Strict, iframe, being deprecated, doesn't validate. So I use the object tag like so:

Works fine in Firefox. Effectively crashes IE 6.

My Google Fu is at yellow belt and though I can find that people are having similar problems, I haven't found the exact one, nor if there is a solution that doesn't include ie conditional hacks. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Advanced CSS: can I float right with cropping on the left?

jragon — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:02:55 -0800

I want to float a css element to the right and have the left side get cropped when I shrink the window size. (Self link example) View that link in Firefox and you'll see the left side of the page disappear as you make the window smaller, with no scrollbars.

View it in Safari or IE6 (though IE6 has other more serious problems too) and the left side of the element fixes against the side of the browser, causing horizontal scrolls to appear.

Any thoughts? I also wrote this code example to simplify the issue, and I see the same problem:

Help with CSS, please?

dance — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:50:55 -0800

Posting on behalf of a friend: CSS Absolute / relative positioning problem. In designing a course website which has to validate as XHTML (Strict or Transitional), I've come up against a problem with an image. I want the image to remain in the right hand div but resize gracefully. My problem is that the trowel image either interferes with the header (is too high) but IS able to move with the page or doesn't interfere with anything but won't resize with the page! Two examples

here
and
here .

Thanks!

Arbitrary [x]html DOM Containers

lodurr — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:57:36 -0800

Is it "standard" for a browser to parse an arbitrary tag as part of the DOM? I don't know why it never occurred to me before to do this, but for some reason today I was inspired to see whether a browser would apply style rules to a block defined by an arbitrary tag. I created a block that looks like this:

<melvin>This is Melvin</melvin>

...then I added a style container and applied a style rule to the entity "melvin" (e.g., melvin { background-color: #000000;}). And it worked, in both Safari and Firefox. Seems to work for doctypes all the way from html 4.01 transitional all the way through xhtml 1.1 strict.

Should it? Why? And if so, would it be a reliable technique? I've never heard of this before.

Bonus question: Am I a sad, sad geek for thinking this is cool?

Most useful CSS related resources?

volandmast — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 07:02:09 -0800

I'd like to learn more about Cascading Stylesheets, but there are so many resources related to CSS - so I simply do not know where to begin. Sometimes there is too much, sometimes there isn't enough. Therefore I'd like to ask, which resources would you recommend as the most useful and ultimate web-sites related to CSS? Please don't post hundreds of links, instead please describe, why the resource is useful and why you keep using it every day, while developing web-sites.

What's wrong with my XML?

miniape — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:13:51 -0800

XML Character Woes: I'm getting the error Reference to undefined entity 'ldquo' (and 'rdquo, etc) when I try to open my XML files with IE or Firefox. Can you help me fix it? I know the parser is seeing it as an entity and looking for a definition, but I can't define them in the DTD because I don't know what entities might be coming in.

I've set the elements to CDATA hoping the parser would ignore it, but that doesn't change anything. I've also tried changing the entities to the various numerical entities.

My goal is just to have valid XHTML entities in the text. These files are certainly going to be converted to HTML at some point but who knows where else they'll go. They might go back into InDesign, etc.

In case it matters: I'm getting the content from InDesign and running it against some scripts to fix them up. InDesign is giving me Unicode, and I'm converting the Unicode special characters to the 'rdquo' style html entities

How to produce a Gmail-style checkbox selection interface?

tommorris — Sat, 20 May 2006 02:07:31 -0800

Does anyone know how it's possible to produce an interface for checkbox selection like the one in Gmail? Namely, where you can hold down shift and click the first and last items in a list, and it'll automatically select all the ones in between. Is it possible with simple JavaScript without having to use AJAX or other fancy-pants technology...

A Grave Problem with HTML Entities.

Charlie Bucket — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 18:40:32 -0800

Is there a Unix/Mac OS X utility that can will batch fix badly-coded HTML entities? So I'm trying to convert 7 years of HTML files from hand-coded and hand-managed on Pagemill 3.0 for Windows. They're a mess, but that's okay for the most part. I'm converting them from HTML-esque to XHTML 4.0. They will eventually get redone in a custom XML schema.

HTML Tidy is generally doing a bang-up job, but I'm having trouble with a bunch of files that have poorly implemented HTML entities.

The problem is that Pagemill took the Windows character set and created numeric entities out of them.

HTML Tidy will convert them to Unicode equivalents. Problem was, it doesn't do it correctly, or I should say doesn't recognize the problem. It will turn & ;#148; into & #igrave; instead of & ldquo; (put spaces in there to stop the posting process from converting them..)

These improperly coded entities tend to choke or confuse every other utility I've tried to throw at 'em (recode, html2text.py) Any ideas how to fix these things short of learning Perl overnight?

Where to find further showcases of web2.0-sites?

volandmast — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:22:13 -0800

CSS is gradually becoming more and more popular in the Web. Over the last year web-developers have created CSS Table Gallery, CSS Zen Garden, CSS Navigation Tabs Gallery, Comment Design Showcase, Typography for headlines, Form Assembly Garden, sIFR Beauty Showcase. Do you have any further suggestions?

I (wish I could) see right through you...

charmston — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:50:26 -0800

BeatIEIntoSubmissionFilter: Is it possible to force IE/Win to display CSS background images with PNG transparency? I know that it is possible to hack it to render PNGs displayed with tags with full transparency support, but several internet sources seem to suggest that this is not possible.

Oh great hive mind...is it possible?

High-quality, standards-compliant instructor-led XHTML/CSS print courseware?

Jairus — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 07:27:03 -0800

High-quality, standards-compliant instructor-led XHTML/CSS print courseware. Does it exist?

Converting A Plain Text List Of URLs Into An HTML List of Clickable Links

jack_mo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:11:24 -0800

What's the easiest way to convert a plain text list of URLs with descriptions into an HTML page of clickable links? I have a long list of URLs and descriptions in a plain text file, formatted like so

### This is a page about monkeys
http://www.monkeypage.com
### This is a page about weasels
http://www.weaselpage.com

and would like to convert them into an XHTML list formatted like so

This is a page about monkeys


This is a page about weasels

What would be the best way to do a conversion like this? I'm running OS 10.4.5, and I'm guessing a good method would involve command line stuff I'm aware of but don't really understand - regular expressions, grep, and the like. Alternatively, since the resulting page is destined for the web, I suppose another option would be a PHP or Perl script to convert the text file on the fly (I only mention PHP and Perl because I have some, very limited, experience with them, and would be lost if someone suggested, eg., a Python solution). I also assume some of the more advanced text editors would be up to the job (though from what I've seen of them, I'm a bit intimidated by the likes of vim or emacs!)

If this is a simple proposition, I'd be very grateful if someone could give examples of commands/possible scripts, if not, pointers to resources about manipulating text files in this way would be great too (I keep everything in plain text files, so am keen to learn about manipulating and repurposing them in general).

Converting to XHTML?

futility closet — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 06:59:08 -0800

I'm planning to move from Blogger to WordPress, migrating about 1,000 posts that currently validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional. I'd like to convert them to XHTML on the way. What's the smart way to do this?

Is Blogspot serving invalid XHTML?

Tuwa — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 11:14:13 -0800

Blogspot automagically codes line breaks in XHTML form, so I'm trying to get my site to validate as XHTML 1.0. Parts of it fail to validate, but they're all parts that expand from strings in the Blogger template. What am I doing wrong? How do I get these parts to validate? Going to the validation results for my page you can see that the same errors present themselves over and over:
there is no attribute "location.href".
an attribute value specification must be an attribute value literal unless SHORTTAG YES is specified.
NET-enabling start-tag not immediately followed by null end-tag.
end tag for element "a" which is not open.

These all expand from this part of the template:
<MainOrArchivePage><BlogItemCommentsEnabled><a href="<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>" <$BlogItemCommentFormOnclick$>><$BlogItemCommentCount$> comments</a></BlogItemCommentsEnabled> |
which is, in turn, the part that puts the number of comments between the permalink and the linkbacks on each entry.

Is there anything I can do to get this part to expand to something that's valid XHTML?

I'm not finding any solutions in my searches, though I'm quite likely using all the wrong terms. And I've written Blogger support, but I've written them before and I know how that goes: you might as well write it out, roll up the paper, tuck it into a bottle, and toss it into the sea.

CSS positioning: X px from bottom

signal — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 18:36:10 -0800

In CSS, is there any way to make the background image have a set distance from the bottom of the div? I know how to set a distance from the top or left, or make it flush from the bottom or right, but not how to set a certain amount of pixels from the bottom.

CSS Help Request

caution live frogs — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:39:20 -0800

Strange CSS problem with my departmental website when using cookies to set text sizes. On any font size but the standard, content is (correctly) centered. Using the standard size, content is left-justified. Both XHTML and CSS* validate. This is killing me. Site is here. Things often look OK on first load, but try changing font sizes using the menu on the sidebar... it gets messy in FF.

I'm using the relative font sizing + stylesheet switcher mechanism discussed here on A List Apart to allow resizing of fonts on the site. The main body of text is fine, but there's a centered DIV that holds the main navigation menu... it refuses to stay centered unless I change font sizes away from the default in Firefox. Upon first setting the cookie, it sometimes is centered but always immediately jumps to the left upon page refresh. Works fine in IE, but the whole thing seems to always stay left-justified in Opera no matter what I do. At any rate if it only works correctly in IE it makes me suspect that there's something screwy going on here with my admittedly haphazard coding, and the fact that it is never centered in Opera makes me think it isn't just a Firefox bug.

The only thing that is changed on resetting text size is a cookie: nothing else in the XHTML or CSS changes at all.

The center content is a bunch of floated DLs, with an image added as styling. It used to be tables and I killed them because layout tables suck. Currently if the page is resized small enough the content ends up as one single column, which is also how it displays in older browsers. Nothing inside the DL is resized, that text stays static to make my life and my layout easier.

Any help on this would make my life easier...

(*CSS validation caveat: Using the moz-border-radius on some block elements, which technicaly isn't valid, but the rest is 2.0.)

QuickTime objects and IE6

tenseone — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 18:07:58 -0800

I am searching for help in dethroning a QuickTime object from the authority it has been given by Internet Explorer 6. ( I have requested assistance from a number of internet message boards, though what I thought had a simple solution appears to not to have one that is easy to come by. )

I have a page, and in the middle there is a QuickTime object in the form of an audio file ( an MP3 ). There is content above the QuickTime object, and there is content beneath it. When Internet Explorer 6 reaches the QuickTime object while parsing the markup, it stalls loading everything below until the audio file has finished loading. Because this MP3 might weigh as much as 2Mb, the page must sit half completed until the QuickTime object has been completely downloaded, at which time the remainder of the markup is presented.

Safari, OmniWeb, Firefox, Netscape, et al, behave in a way that I would consider 'proper', that being that the page is loaded around the QuickTime object, so that the markup is completely loaded, regardless of the MP3's download status. Would any one know of a trick to have Internet Explorer behave in a similar fashion?

I would be extremely grateful for any help one may offer.

I have an example ready upon request.