All posts tagged ‘wiki’

File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Loop

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A loop is like a programming thought. Say you’re a police officer using a radar gun to catch speeding motorists. If the speed limit is 55 miles per hour, you might say to yourself: “If a car makes my radar gun display a higher value than 55, I’ll pull them over, but until then I will continue to take readings. And perhaps snack on this cruller.” In programming, the statement of this loop would be the action (firing up your motorcycle and chasing the speeder), and the expression would be the evaluation of whether or not the passing car made your radar gun read higher than 55. This is an example of a “while” loop: 

  while (carSpeed < 55) {

  carSpeed = readRadar();

  // note:readRadar() should return the latest carSpeed

}



pullEmOver();  // this will only execute once carSpeed is >= 55
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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Outline Font

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An outline font supplies a geometrical description of each character so that the font can be rendered in a variety of sizes. Since they are scalable, outline fonts can make the most of an output device’s resolution. The greater the resolution of the monitor, the sharper the characters will look. Popular languages for defining outline fonts are PostScript and TrueType.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Segmentation

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Akin to the notion “divide and conquer,” segmentation is marketingspeak for breaking your audience down into definable subcategories. For instance, Coca-Cola may segment its audience based on frequency (one can a month or five cans a day), location (Bangkok or Bangladesh), and many other criteria. On the web, segmentation is useful not just to marketers but to site designers as well, since the segments we track – IE vs. Mozilla, first-timer vs. repeat visitor, domestic vs. international – shape the way we develop and deploy our websites.

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File Under: Cheat Sheets, HTML
Feb
15
2010

Color Charts

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When you’re adding a color to your web page with HTML, sometimes you can just type in the name of the color. But more often than not, you’ll need to use what’s called the hex code, which is something that the browser will be able to understand. Choose a color from the list below and look to its left to get the hex code. If we wanted our background to be red, for example, we’d type bgcolor=”#FF0000″. Try it out!


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File Under: UI/UX
Feb
15
2010

Mulders Stylesheets Tutorial – Lesson 1

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Building Web pages with HTML is like painting a portrait with a paint roller. Only truly determined and tenacious souls can achieve the exact result they want. It’s just not the right tool for precision and flexibility.

Anyone who’s used HTML for more than a week knows it isn’t a very effective tool for making Web pages. That’s why we sometimes resort to making large GIFs when we want just the right font or layout. That’s why we’re forced to use convoluted table tags and invisible spacer GIFs to push things around on a page.

It’s ridiculous, really. Our code gets too complicated, our GIFs too numerous, and our final pages too bandwidth-heavy. It’s not exactly optimal Web page construction.

But in late 1996, stylesheets quietly entered the scene. Officially called cascading stylesheets (CSS), it was an elegant cousin to HTML that promised:

  • more precise control than ever before over layout, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and other typographical effects;
  • a way to update the appearance and formatting of an unlimited number of pages by changing just one document;
  • compatibility across browsers and platforms; and
  • less code, smaller pages, and faster downloads.


Despite lukewarm support from many of our favorite Web browsers, CSS is starting to make good on these promises. It’s transforming the way we make Web pages and is the cornerstone of Dynamic HTML.

We’ll spend the next five lessons taking a tour through the land of stylesheets. You’ll learn the basics of how to create and use cascading stylesheets within your Web pages as well as what’s possible with fonts, typography, colors, backgrounds, and positioning.

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