Sam-I-Am's Builder Blog

Work type stuff - handy urls and notes on the trials and tribulations of a web builder.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

bin2hex - script to convert data files into source code arrays
Handy perl script that outputs a hex string of a binary file.

Thursday, March 14, 2002

CGI Script.net - Browser Based WYSIWYG HTML Editor
with a downloadable backend for handling save/create/etc functionality ($850).
I'm informed (by WebEdit Professional) that these guys are rip-off artists and are reselling other people's code. I can't verify that but I've removed the link in case it's true... .

Thursday, March 07, 2002

Browser-based rich text/wysiwyg editors
I went hunting again. There's lots of ideas out there but almost all require winIE (typically 5.5+) Maybe thats not such an unreasonable requirement, but I'm on a mac mostly at home and it just kills me that I can't find *anything* that will work there. Yes I know about liveconnect (script - movie/embed communication) and I know this is not available in MacIE5, but there's got to be a way...

anyhow some urls:
http://openwiki.com/ow.asp?OpenWiki%2FSuggestions
in-page rich editing, and wikis.

http://standardbrains.editthispage.com/
uses DOM methods, not browser specific?? But doesn't work in macIE. Would be interesting to find out why - is it the events, the selection ranges...

http://htmltea.sourceforge.net/
java1.3 applet with liveconnect
I'm still leaning towards this kind of model, and this one's open source so there's hope there. But without liveconnect on macIE it gets complicated. There are ways to workaround this though. The problem with any DOM based live editing is that in winIE everything gets MSHTML-ized, i.e. turned into crappy proprietary html. If you can generate clean html in your applet, and somehow get that into hidden form values, those can just be posted to the server and it's relatively straightforward from there.

http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/cms/ttw.html
annotated list of "TTW WYSIWYG Editors" .. through the web wysiwyg.
most are commercial, and winIE only.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Authoring/HTML/WYSIWYG_Editors/
googles directory of wysiwyg editors - some are browser based, most of those winIE only

http://sourceforge.net/projects/richtext/
winIE only js and scriptlet based configurable in-page editor.

Monday, March 04, 2002

Remove Columns Homesite script
I finished and posted this to my homesite section a while back and forgot to announce it anywhere. One of the big features Homesite is missing is a column mode. I wrote this as a poor man's column-mode delete and it has been quite handy. A prompt accepts a range and deletes these text (character) columns from the selection.

Friday, March 01, 2002

MacIE5 CSS Hack
I'm testing out this macIE5 CSS quirk which seems to allow isolating and targetting of a rule for macIE5 only. Handy, as that browser has some other annoying quirks -like its tendency to miscaculate the width of scrollable divs/iframes/windows and display a horizontal scrollbar. Setting margin-right: 16px just for macIE5 will fix it, but until now I've not had a way to do that without doing browser sniffing and setting the property with javascript.
Anyway, let's hope it holds. Fingers crossed.