Web Info & Tutorials

Zach has picked up on google’s own corner generator.

Google probably doesn’t want this to be a corner service, but for now you can create your own google-esque corners with URLs such as:

http://groups-beta.google.com/groups/roundedcorners?c=999999&bc=white&w=4&h=4&a=tr

The parameter list:

• c - the color, as either a name or a CSS-style hex color spec (RGB or RRGGBB) sans #. The color names are taken from the CSS2 spec and are as follows: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow (thanks, anonymous commenter)
• bc - the background color, same acceptable input as c. One twist: if you leave out the bc parameter entirely, the background is transparent.
• h - height in pixels. If you leave it out, uses a default of 8.
• w - width in pixels. If you leave it out, uses a default of 8.
• a - which corner to generate; tl is top left, tr is top right, bl is bottom left, br is bottom right

Jeffrey Sambells has written a nice intro post on Doing it Asynchronously.

If you are new to Ajax and haven’t spent much time thinking about the A part, take a peak through the article.

Ten Ships has announced AjaxDNS, the stylish Ajax supported DNS and hosting admin tools.

It includes:

• Live DNS
• Whois Search
• IP Whois
• HTTP Headers
• RBL Search
• Ping
• DNS Traversal

If you've read any tech news in the past 24 hours, you'll now be familiar with the meeting Bill Gates held among influential bloggers, ahead of next year's Mix conference. Aside from learning what's on Bill's Zune, we get to hear his views on the future of web apps, thanks to a question from Liz Gannes. She asked him which apps should live in the browser and which should not, one of the key questions in Ajax and one we have touched on in the past.

He replied that the distinction would come to be silly from a technical standpoint, but that the necessary movement toward web APIs does present challenges on the business side. “One of the things that’s actually held the industry back on this is, if you have an advertising business model, then you don’t want to expose your capabilities as a web service, because somebody would use that web service without plastering your ad up next to the thing.”

His solution wasn’t very specific: “It’s ideal if you get business models that don’t force someone to say ‘no, we won’t give you that service unless you display something right there on that home page.”

Then for the tease: “And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.”

There hit been a couple of articles on the so titled uprise of MySpace over Yahoo! in the comScore metrics.

This digit is effort vex to death. The idea of Ajax cloudy tender views as a intense abstract is dumb.

• Using Ajax to intend more accumulation that users poverty in a more disposable fashion? Good.
• Can you near more targetting meliorate ads using Ajax? You could.
• Do another organisation choices modify tender views? Yup. I could modify Ajaxian to hit inferior posts per page, or exclusive exhibit a unofficial forcing users to utter finished to the flooded postings (ditto on RSS feeds). We do not do that as that isn’t what users want. Our tender views are modify than they could be, but who cares.