So then ...

[SheepCow]

I'm me, I'm a programmer, and I'm not ashamed. Anyway, into PHP, ASP, yadda yadda.

Here's one of the little scripts I've written:
http://www.0wns.me.uk/pathfinding/

 

[fatbusinessman]

Pwetty - not familiar with the algorithm in question, but it looks good

 

[Imaboyo]

Nice algorithm! Looks damn complicated mind you

 

[wyrd_fish]

ooo... shiny...

thats really cool...

 

[Concept04]

Thats pretty good, not sure what it could be used for, but still, pretty clever.

 

[Gurnox]

I'm me, I'm a programmer, and I'm not ashamed. Anyway, into PHP, ASP, yadda yadda.

Here's one of the little scripts I've written:
http://www.0wns.me.uk/pathfinding/

Nice! Did something like that in my CSAI degree. Well, was meant to but was too busy drinking

Greedy search, A*, plateauing... Ah, they were the days.......

 

[[UKLans]Khan]

Hello!!

I'm a web-developer, I use asp, and now asp.net, it's great!!! An example of my site is in my sig. What area of web dev do you work in, are you member of a big team or a solo dev?

Regards,

Khan

 

[fatbusinessman]

Note to Khan:

Table layouts are bad, mmkay...


Edit:

<cuddly>
but aside from that, it's a very nice site. Well done
</cuddly>

 

[Shovel]

Note to Khan:

Table layouts are bad, mmkay...

Oh for the love of God....

Yes, CSS is powerful and nifty and tres nice for layout these days, but responding to every WebDev post with "Table layouts are bad</End post>" really isn't helpful. Table Layouts are an older way of doing things, that is all. The fact is, Khan happens to have created a website that is exceptionally esthetic and well designed - knocking him for using last season's layout manager is just not on.

This is the Web Dev forum, it's cuddly, friendly and constructive. Please?

/me returns to normal cuddley state.

 

[Gurnox]

Oh for the love of God....

[snip]

Agreed.

Nothing wrong with tables. If it looks good, and looks good on all browsers, go with it.

Many professional web developers do!

 

[Jonty]

Hello

Just a quickie, continuing somewhat off-topic I'm afraid. Anyway, I'm with Shovel on this one (not that I'm getting at you, Fatteh). Khan's site is very impressive, as we all know, but just because it utilises tables doesn't mean we should chastise him for it. Yes, standards are great, and I'm all for people at least trying to convert; but recent estimates put the figure of wholly standards compliant sites on the net at a staggering little 0.01%, which is a little depressing.

Kind Regards

Jonty

P.S. Now I think of it, when XHTML 1.1 (based on XHTML Strict) first came out ages ago, I built a front-end for a site which validates, but utilises tables for layout and very little CSS. It may go against the general aims of the spec, but it still's technically fine.

 

[[UKLans]Khan]

Thank you very much Shovel, Gurnox and Jonty. As for using CSS, I would like to try to keep up with the web techs but I work in an extremely high paced web development environment and don't always get time to check that my sites are X compliant, I do see what you are saying tho.

Web development is very individual, if we were all given the same spec website to build; all of them would be different. I use what is most comfortable for me, I’m not saying that’s right, but it works for me .

Regards,

Khan

 

[fatbusinessman]

Thank you very much Shovel, Gurnox and Jonty. As for using CSS, I would like to try to keep up with the web techs but I work in an extremely high paced web development environment and don't always get time to check that my sites are X compliant, I do see what you are saying tho.

I would indeed have to agree with you there, certainly to the extent that 100% compliance with the standards is not a necessary quality in a website (while it's quite nice to be able to have). I lost some of my fanatical support for the W3C when they deprecated the 'target="_blank"' option.

And yes, I agree that I was somewhat harsh in my excessive dedication to CSS layouts, and I appreciate that Web development is an individual matter, and the ultimate question you have to ask is "does it work?". However, I would definitely recommend that you take a look into CSS and its uses, as it can be very useful when deployed properly, and can assist in separating your content from the method in which it's displayed, which not only makes your site easier to modify and customise, but can result in some very neat and pretty source code

 

[[UKLans]Khan]

fatbusinessman do you have any recommended sources of wither tutorials or general sites that could help?

It may also be an important point that my site is based on the Mircosoft IBS web portal system, I did however completely re-write most of the code but it still retains many of the features. Here are a few:

- Completely modular, I can have any modules (for example - A poll, HTML page, news feed) on any page with the click of a button, I can also create new sections on-the-fly.

- Complete WYSIWYG Form input - The form input section uses the asp.net "Free Rich Text Box" allowing "Word" like formatting on news articles and content etc. It also includes a spell checker

- Compiled site, The site is compiled code... I have aspx pages that use "code behind" which stores the aspz code in VB files that are compiled after an update, this means that the site is a LOT faster than the old asp based site.

cba to list them all as I'm sure we have all developed CMS in the past.

Khan

 

[Jonty]

Hi Khan

W3Schools have some excellent XHTML and CSS tutorials, although with your current setup it may be hard to implement.

Kind Regards

Jonty

P.S. Just out of interest, who hosts uklans.com?

 

[Shovel]

With regards to the modularity you speak of Khan: The big attraction with CSS is that it makes your layout moduler, not just the content.

For instance, if you were to consider your logo, menu, sidebars and content to be individual modules, you would be able to lay out your site in the same way as it is at the moment with one style sheet, while by (at the simplest) just adjusting a handful of values, you could completely move the content around (swap the sidebars around, make a horizontal menu vertical etc.).

There are limits to the above 'dream', but it can be done. The big problem I currently have with CSS is that it requires everything to be sqaure - therefore adding curved edges to anything is an utter pig of a hack (though I'll be doing that anyway with my upcoming site). Curved edges with tables was a lot easier imho.

With regards to the depreciation of the target attribute (not just target="_blank"), I can understand where they're coming from. The problem is that the system that takes on the behavial duties (javascript with the Document Object Model (DOM)) is really not up to speed yet - having to loop through every tagged link in my web page on load is not ideal at all - if it were as simple as saying class="external" is to be openned in a new window (along with some unique styling, for instance) then I'd be happy, it's simply that replacing target with javascript is a significantly less elegant system than XHTML and CSS. Maybe I should protest my way onto the governance board (ha! as if I could..).

To give you a futher example of the way XHTML is designed: the provisional 2.0 spec depreciates the <img /> tag. It's designed to totally remove appearence from the HTML itself. Instead, there will be promotion of the <object></object> tag.
Having done some minimal looking into this, I personally don't have a problem with this - apart from browser support issues. <object> has some very interesting nested tags such as "<caption>" which will make the process of (oddly enough..) captioning pictures a lot more elegant than it is at the moment.


As I say, there's a lot of benefit to the new standards, some interesting and brave decisions being taken. It's just a case of wanting the different standards to keep up with each other!

 

[[UKLans]Khan]

Thanks for the information guys.

Jonty - www.catalyst2.com - Been with them for around 2 years now, very good tbh.

Shovel - Thanks for the more detailed information, I'm going to take a look at the tutorials suggested here.

Regards,

Khan