When was the last time you heard "Award
Winning", "Low Cost", and "Free" used in the
same sentence? For FREE & Low-Cost JAVA
Applets: try CodeBrain!
DO NOT MISS the all new SBS 5.5. A custom
scrollbar generator that will knock your SOCKS
off. CSS "style" code for colored, flat-style, and
custom scrollbars / JavaScript code for
multi-color blinking scrollbars. Super for page
styling eye-grabbing scrollbar effects.
Special Happy Mothers' Day greeting to all of
you from the editors at AnyFrontPage Bytes!
Mother's Day is May 12th this year (2nd Sun in
May) for our US, Denmark, Finland, Italy,
Turkey, Australia, and Belgium subscribers.
A special Belated Mothering Day to our UK
subscribers who celebrated in a similar fashion
during Lent (on the fourth Sunday).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Our list of Local User Groups needs help
([ out of date link - removed ])
If you belong to a local FrontPage user group,
please email us at editors@anyfrontpage.com
with your information. We will provide a
centralized listing along with contact information
by locality. If you do not belong to one already,
please see: FRONTPAGE USER GROUPS
Find out about User Groups and some pointers
on how to start your own at: http://www.microsoftfrontpage.com/support/usergrp.html
then let us know about yours!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A VERY Happy Birthday this month to Doc,
Suzy Grant, and Fran Thorsen.
The WINNER of this issues birthday drawing is
FrontPage crafter, Dave "Doc" Dockery, of http://www.synergypublishing.com
Congratulations & Happy Birthday, Doc!!
Doc's award is the very Hot, choice, software,
PopUp Maker 5! http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/cb.htm
PopUp Maker 5 Software by CodeBrain.com
Generates and Tests PopUp Code and Windows
Thank you, CodeBrain. Thank you to all of our
participants in this fun contest. ****************************************
YOU can be our next month's winner!! Register
your birthday with us and let us help celebrate
your birthday with you. Your registration is
completely confidential and used ONLY for the
purpose of announcing a special birthday wish
to you and awarding a special birthday product
to you.
Take that second NOW and register with us at: [ out of date link - removed ]
You too can be a WINNER!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
COMPETITION RECAP
ONLY two weeks left to get your entry in for our
"St George's Day Competition"
The winner will receive a custom-designed
Themes Installer program from Enborne
Computing as featured in Karey Cummins'
themes design article last issue: http://www.enborne.com/_afp/offer.htm
(A $50.00 prize) AND a 7- Point Website
Analysis from George. NO! Not St George
(Smile) but George Prociuk, Webmaster of:
PointAfter.com http://pointafter.com
The runner up will receive a 7 - Point Website
Analysis from PointAfter.com
See the link below for more details on what to do. [ out of date link - removed ]
Get the St George spirit and have a go.
When you edit a web page and republish your
web with a FrontPage counter installed, the
count goes back to 1 for that page. This is
because you are over writing the counter file in
the _private folder on the remote site. Right click
the concerned file on the hard drive and choose
'Page Properties' | Workgroup tab. Tick the
box marked 'Exclude this file when publishing
the rest of the web'. Press ok.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HOW TO ORGANISE YOUR ICONS IN 'OPEN
WEB' DIALOG BOX.
Did you know you could make your icons
smaller by right clicking on the menu and
choosing small icons, click large icons to make
them larger again. If you click on one
of the icons you can also choose from:
Open
Remove
Move up
Move down
Rename
You can also add menu items, like your favourite
webs. I keep my webs under My Documents/My
Webs. So in the Look in: bar I select My webs
and click ONCE to select my favourite web in
the listing in the pane below. Then, still in the
same dialog box, go to Tools (not the tools on
the main menu bar), click on the drop down
menu and select 'Add to My Places'. An icon
with the text of the web will appear in the menu
bar on the left.
Also under the tools menu you can access:
Delete
Add to Favourites
Map Network Drive
Properties
In properties you can enable a thumbnail view
and see the calculation size for a web.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For many people, the term "XML" is
synonymous with "data transfer" or "data
exchange". For others, it's just a
buzzword to add to the dictionary of
strategic technical terms. For those who
are more familiar with it, it sometimes
seems hard to get the big picture on XML
and its applications, or even to be able
to describe what it is.
What is it?
Basically, XML stands for "Extensible
Markup Language" . It was designed to be
"served, received, and processed on the
Web in the way that is now possible with
HTML" Simply put, think of a syntax
similar to HTML (with lesser-than and
greater-than symbols, making up tags,
attributes, nesting, etc.), without a
fixed vocabulary, and with slightly
stricter rules.
What does it look like?
An example XML document would look like
this (this is an example from my book
collection, in case you're wondering):
A few things to note that may not be
obvious right away:
In XML, there are two basic "types" of
files: well-formed and valid. A well-
formed XML document essentially means
that it respects all rules in XML (more
on this shortly). A valid document is
well-formed, but also has something to
describe what the XML document is about.
To illustrate document validity, take,
for example, the XML above: who says that
the <library> element can't contain a <cd>
or <dvd> element? And who says that the
<book> element can't have an
<illustration> element, or that the ISBN
must be an attribute? As you can see,
validity goes a lot farther same simple
well-formedness.
All tags must be closed. For example, in
HTML, you can have <p>, and never close
it. This is illegal in XML. You would
need to have <p>Content…</p>. You could
also use the shorthand syntax,
<MyElement/>, which essentially means
<MyElement></MyElement>.
Tags cannot be nested improperly (as is
sometimes done in HTML, such as
<b><i>My </b>text</i>). This is illegal
in XML, since <b> and <i> overlap. The
proper way to describe this in XML is:
<b><i>My </i></b><i>text</i>. Although
this may look complicated, it's really
not, since it doesn't really make any
sense from a data perspective to have
tags crossed, as in the previous HTML
example.
Attribute values must be enclosed in
quotes. Notice above that the ISBN is
contained in quotes.
What does it do?
Now that you know the basic of what XML
is about, and what it looks like, you may
be wondering what you can do with it, and
why it is that you would need to describe
anything using XML. Note, first off, that
XML alone doesn't "do" anything. Opening
an XML document in Internet Explorer, for
example, simply displays its contents. It
doesn't render it, as it would with HTML.
(if you go ahead and paste the text from the
example above into NotePad, then save the
file with a .xml extension, and open it in Internet
Explorer, you will see what it looks like). Note,
by the way, that if you open an XML document
in Netscape 6.2, it will do nothing, which is
understandable, since a browser, in the strict
sense of the term, isn't designed to support the
display of XML documents in their raw form.
Now, to illustrate one application of XML,
let's take a fictitious database, describing a
library of books, belonging to Acme corporation.
This database contains everything from the ISBN
to a short description to the MSRP . One day, a
customer doing business with Acme
corporation, who we'll call Beta corporation,
needs the ISBN of the books, along with the
MSRP. The next day, Gamma corporation
comes along, and also wants this information,
but wants only the ISBN and short description,
and wants this information in their database.
Sounds easy enough if this only happens once
in a while. The truth is, this is common business
practice, and is a problem that IT shops around
the world deal with every day… before XML.
With XML, data can be extracted to a specific
format, using an agreed-upon vocabulary, and is
easily integrated into any modern database. Ah,
but the shrewd reader says: "But there is no
advantage over CSV, or a text file!" The
advantage is that with XML, you preserve the
data hierarchy, and you get information on what
the data is.
Another application of XML is for
messaging across applications. If you
were to have application "A", again, from
Acme corporation, talk to applications "B"
and "G", from Beta and Gamma corporations,
respectively, you would need to agree upon
a standard. But what if Acme corp. is using
DLLs created with Visual Basic, whereas
Beta corp. is using EJB , and Gamma corp.
is using something else? Do you see the
advantage here, given the previous example?
Instead of creating nightmares for calling
the EJB built by Beta corp. from the DLL
built by Acme corp. and so on, if everyone
agrees on XML, which is easily transferred
over the web or any other (because it's
text), the problem is solved!
Writing XML
So, you may be wondering how you would
go about writing an XML document. The
good news is, any text editor will do, since
XML is simply text. And therein, by the way,
lies its power: the fact that its text makes it
portable. On the flip side, however, there are
some nice tools that will help with writing and
viewing XML documents, my two favorite being
XML Spy (http://www.xmlspy.com/) and
Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/)
What now?
There are a lot more applications of XML,
and XML is much bigger than what could
ever fit into one short article.
Hopefully, this article gave you a quick
idea of what XML is, and some practical
applications. You can learn a lot more
on XML at the following
places: http://www.ucc.ie/xml/ and http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp
I would also strongly suggest getting a
copy of Wrox Press' Beginning XML, 2nd
Edition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
******************************
Dave Beauchemin, MVP
Dave is a senior web developer in the IT
Architecture and Integration group
at Future Electronics, a multinational
electronics distribution corporation.
He is also a Microsoft MVP since 1998.
You can reach him at webdave@web-dave.com,
or on his web site, http://www.web-dave.com/
******************************
Let us and our author know what you think
about this article at our new Article Poll. Your
feedback will help us bring you just the
information you want! [ out of date link - removed ]
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Our Featured site this issue is our very own
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~ NetZoom Symbols - NEW ADD-ON http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/zoo.htm
This add-on allows you to easily create powerful
web pages with detailed and accurate network
equipment shapes. NetZoom Symbols Feature
Set Includes:
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No more software pollution on your hard drive!
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Jimco UPDATES - NEW ADD-ON
ContextExport http://www.jimcoaddins.com
One thing that has always annoyed me about
FrontPage is that there is no Export option on
the context menus. If I want to export a file, I
have to click the file, and then I have to click the
File menu, and then the Export option. To
correct that annoyance, I have created the
ContextExport add-in.
Now, if you want to export a file in FrontPage,
just right-click on it and choose Export. It's as
simple as that, and it's available in all views that
show you files in your FrontPage Web.
~ Close All 2.0 - UPDATE http://www.jimcoaddins.com
Close All adds two commands to the File menu
in FrontPage. One command will simply close
all of your open files. You will be prompted to
save any unsaved files. Save and Close All will
automatically save any unsaved files without
prompting and will close all files.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ FrontPage Links:
SiteCrafters - Sound http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/scr.htm
A detailed explanation about adding sound to a
web page.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Site Crafters - Generate the sound code. http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/jsc.htm
Generate the JavaScript code for your page
automatically that works with Internet
Explorer®, Netscape® and WebTV®. All you
need to do is Copy & Paste the code that's
generated by sitecrafters. Free Resource well
worth using.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maintaining Your Web Site Using Mac FrontPage http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/jsc.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
10 April 2002 Cumulative Patch for IIS http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/pat.htm
Protect Web servers using Microsoft Windows
NT 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ General Resources
PointAfter http://www.pointafter.com/tools.htm
RandText-Random Text Generator - A perl script
that will display a random line of text on a web
page using SSI. Apart from this NEW tool there
are more besides, such as an RGB Color
Calculator, Search Engine Position Analyzer,
Text Box Scroll Tool, Drop Down Menu Tool and
Slide Show Tool.
Don't forget to go back to the download page
and rate the script, the more feedback the
webmaster has, the better he can make the
scripts. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ General Links
Murl to Url - FREE http://murl.com/splash/
Take your bookmarks with you to any internet
connected device. A simple and convenient
calendar. A convenient place to store your to-do
lists and notes. Your online Bookmark Manger.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Adobe PDF IFilter v5.0 http://anyfrontpage.com/rd/pdf.htm
Adobe PDF IFilter is designed for technically
savvy administrators who manage or implement
solutions for their users. Adobe PDF IFilter lets
you index Adobe PDF documents with Microsoft
indexing clients so that your users can easily
search for text within Adobe PDF documents.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Browser Resolutions http://www.axistek.com/browserresolutions/
Browser Resolutions is freeware utility that
helps webmasters to see how their sites looks
in different resolutions. Available resolutions are
640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864,
1280x1024, 1600x1200 and WebTV. There is no
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