Web Info & Tutorials

The Ext team has announced the first public release of Ext 2.0. As our very own, Rey Bango, said:

This new version of the Ext framework introduces a host of new features, a new document center, expanded & better organized samples and bug fixes. Another important aspect to note is that there has not been a significant library size increase in this new version.

A great way to see all that is available is to use the new interactive documentation center, now with fading. You should also play with the Portal example.

As always, the look and feel of the Ext components are great!

If you’ve seen a demo of Adobe AIR or Flex recently, you’ve probably seen Buzzword, a Flash-based word processor. Compared to Microsoft Word 2007 or Pages ‘08, Buzzword is unimpressive and underpowered. However, compared to any Ajax word processor, Buzzword is a revelation. A web-enabled word processor that doesn’t limit you to the incredibly basic typographical engine used in the live HTML editing everyone else uses? Hey, that’s pretty neat. In fact, Buzzword’s text layout capabilities are pretty dang cool.

Add to it some great collaboration features, animation eye-candy, and a well-designed, innovative, and polished UI and you’ve got people asking the question once again: wait, do I use Ajax or Flash?

Buzzword has been around for a while; why is it in the news today? Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind Buzzword. And they’ll be integrating it into a new offering: Adobe Share, which is basically their competitor to all of the Web 2.0 Office Suite plays (and gives you a cool way to embed PDFs in your web page).

When it comes to Ajax vs. Flash, Dion and I have always been pragmatists; when we can use one to enhance the other, they should work together. While Buzzword is not yet embeddable into your own custom applications and not yet integrated with Adobe’s Share suite, it does make one wonder if the future of Web-based word processors is Ajax or Flash.

Do you think Buzzword is a compelling improvement over the Google Docs word processor or Zoho Writer? Or just what some would expect from the Flash of word processors: distracting eye candy that is ultimately useless.

Just a few years ago, I remember a client telling they needed a Word-like experience in the browser, and I remember telling them, “Sorry, it’s the Web.” Amazing how far we’ve come in such a short time…

Glen Lipka has been frustrated with the task of producing quality HTML email that works across various email clients, which of course got even harder when Outlook 2007 took email design back a few years.

Anyway, Glen thinks that he nailed it:

1. Outlook 2007 actually has a little more CSS support than I thought.  Just because I don’t get positioning and float and a decent DIV or the right box model or margins, doesn’t mean that I can’t still make it work.  Using a couple of tables, borders, padding and width, I think I came up with a solid solution that still looks like clean html.
2. I refuse to use spacer.gif.  Spacer.gif can kiss my shiny metal ass.  Boo spacer!  As a side note, I sometimes interview web developers for positions.  I look at their html.  If I see spacer.gif I say, “Nope, they stink”.  Sorry, it’s a pet peeve.
3. Opening up your email html in Word 2007 is NOT the same thing as opening up your html as an email in Outlook 2007.  They are really really close, but they have differences.  I kept seeing them, so I stopped trying to use Word 2007.
4. There is a bug in Outlook 2007.  If you have a table, and each cell has padding of 10px and then you put a cell in the middle to be 0px, it shortens the height of the cell and basically makes a HOLE in your table.  I was dumbstruck by this one.  It seemed impossible to do, but it does it.  The fix is to keep the padding on top and bottom, but remove left and right.  The bug is related to height, not to width.  It shortens vertically, but not horizontally.
5. Gmail is evil.  They only allow inline CSS.  They do this to avoid overlapping CSS rules. They could have dealt with overlap CSS rules using a rewrite scheme that put a prefix in front of all the classes.  It just made the html really messy.  I did my best in my template above to make it clean.  But still, that’s lame.
6. Gmail strips all height css rules.  Why height??  What did height ever do to them?  I got around this problem using padding, but in the dynamic app, it means we need to calculate specific padding rules based on the height the user requested minus the height of existing content.  Not trivial, but doable.  Why does Gmail allow width?  What’s the deal with height?
7. Borders can not be defined as 0px width.  In Outlook 2007, if you declare a border as 0px width, it shows up anyway.  I couldn’t figure that out, so I said, “Ok, I won’t do that.”  I saved an example which works in the browser, but not Outlook 2007.
8. Divs can have borders, but not padding in Outlook 2007.  Why not Microsoft?  Come on, work with me here.  Meet me halfway.  YUCK!

Alex has cursive most whatever newborn script attach support additional in Dojo 0.9:

For a daylong instance systems same Flex and Laszlo hit had a crossway on course mixing activity with markup. HTML’s autochthonous <script> attach doesn’t wage some context, and worse, can’t wage a artefact to be triggered by a portion circumstance or state (outside of proprietary extensions). Several use-cases are important:

• Scoped execution
• Event-driven execution
• Attachment vs. replacement

In Dojo 0.9 we took a hornlike countenance at them and devised <script type="dojo/method"> and <script type="dojo/connect">. Lets verify a hurried journeying and exhibit how it makes composition circumstance handlers natural, antiquity newborn widgets a snap, and over-riding built-in activity trivial.

So, you crapper verify cipher same this:

and change it with the playscript attach artefact of attaching an event:

This definitely looks a lowercase assorted on the eyes.