Travails of an ungeeker

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

I love Firefox

I've been a fan since pre-release days, but it just keeps getting better and better. It's another Christmas (presents anyway) to discover wonderful new extensions. First and foremost are the developer extensions. Just in time, Microsoft are now offering something similar for IE. But it's difficult to see how Microsoft will be able to catch up with the success of FireFox extensions.

My current favourites:
  • JavaScript debugger (Venkman - currently requiring a fudge for 1.5)
  • LiveHttpHeader (see the trace of HTTP GETs etc in the side bar)
  • ProxySwitcher (currently not available for Firefox 1.5 ouch)
  • HTML validator (show validation summary of current page in status bar)
  • DOM Inspector (useful but needs work)
  • ColorZilla (allows you to sample a page to identify the colours used - beats using PhotoShop)
  • MeasureIt (allows you to measure distances in the browser - beats using PhotoShop)
  • ForecastFox (even though it insisted on snow all last week - for virtually nothing)
Just installed some new ones to try FireFTP, LinkChecker, TamperData, TestGen4Web

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Dreamweaver MX File_Save.htm Javascript error in File_Save.js

A colleague of mine was having this for 2 days. My suggestions were along the lines of Internet suggestions included reinstalling Dreamweaver and even reformatting! We didn't get to reformatting, but did get him to reinstall twice including a purge of files and registry keys missed by the uninstall first. No use.

Guess what? The problem was a corruption inside a file. Not a program file, but one of the files in a Dreamweaver project. Took too long to find because after all this was only a text file (.css). And we had already tried creating a whole new file and pasting the contents from the old one via a fresh copy of notepad. This copied whatever the corruption was. Doesn't make much sense, and how did the corruption get in into our file anyway. That's the kind of problems I used to get 10 years ago, seldom now.

Moral of the story: next time this Dreamweaver error happens, don't reinstall. Create a clean new file in the project with no content and rebuild the file. Don't paste the old text in.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

DotNetNuke 3.2/4 HTML validation failures

I am using DotNetNuke for more and more customer CMSs - instead of using big commercial products. However one area that really needs "tidying" up is the HTML quality. Now that the Microsoft ASP.NET team have addressed this I am really looking forwards to the DotNetNuke team doing likewise. Lets hope for full pages served with XHTML compliance, valid HTML and accessibility issues improved. Add TABLE-less design. I reluctantly added a table to a design of my just-finished skin because I could not get the menu to "live" inside a DIV. All the modules should be subjected to an HTML review.

This is really important if more big clients are to move to DotNetNuke. They care about these things.