Tuesday, 30th July 2002
Funky stuff coming soon
Peter Van Dijck has unveiled the Secret Metadata Project (here and here), so I hguess it’s time for me to come clean as well :) I’m working with him on a proof-of-concept PHP application for XFML, his markup language for exchanging faceted metadata. So far I’m really enjoying the challenge—I get to play with XML and collaborate on an exciting new project with an extremely talented information architect. The application is shaping up at an impressive rate, and we hope to have something live and doing things within a couple of weeks.
Multi-lingual PHP
A thread on SitePoint got me thinking about how PHP’s little known parse_ini_file() function could be used to easily manage multiple language versions of web site messages. Sections could be set up for each supported language, with message definitions repeated in each section. You could even have a default message section at the top which is used when a message has not been defined for a particular language. The comments on the parse_ini_file manual page suggest that the function is not particularly suitable for large scale use—PHP exits if the ini file is malformed and it can’t handle files larger than 16,382 bytes. That said, rolling a more reliable native PHP version should be a trivial project.
Tabs are not MDI
Dave Hyatt explains why Mozilla’s tabbed browsing is different to (and better than) Opera’s MDI model:
[... 162 words]aqTree2
Stuart has updated aqTree, his excellent unordered-list-to-dynamic-tree script. The script is a clever piece of Javascript that uses the DOM to turn a nested unordered list in to a Windows Explorer style tree, without needing to add any extra HTML code. The new version is rather nice and less crufty now
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