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Closed 10 years ago.
I've fooled with many blogging platforms, and develop in Ruby right now...I'm tired of dealing with databases and upgrading applications--so for my personal blog, I'd like to stick with pure html.
Is this a bad idea?
The only dilemma is if I have a lot of entries...
If you were to do something like this (given that you answered 'no' to the previous question), how would you go about formatting it and how would you deal with many entries?
No, it's not a bad idea at all. Reasons to use it:
No need to install a server-side language or anything, or worry about compatibility
Reduces the load on your server
No databases to set up, nothing to debug, just generally lightweight.
Reasons you may not want to:
Duplicated code. If you want to change something about your entire site, it may be difficult to change it in all pages.
But go for it, it's simple and effective. You can name things whatever you want, and backup is as easy as just copying all the files. It works on any kind of server, too.
Have you looked at static blogging platforms like Jekyll?
See minitech's answer, static HTML is good for all the reasons he lists, and also:
improved performance! Servers serve static files REALLY fast, and to well under load
reliability. There's very little to break besides your Apache or nginx.
Without being truly static, I can say that PHP certainly makes a mostly static page highly convenient:
<?php include('/path/to/header.inc'); ?>
<h1>Not much boilerplate</h1>
<p>Considering that only two lines are needed</p>
<?php include('/path/to/footer.inc'); ?>
A number of alternatives can be used. I use one internally that takes advantage of the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable and parses markdown, with 16 lines of PHP code and PHPMarkdown.
There's nothing particularly wrong with using static HTML for a website, so long as you understand that any site-wide changes will be tedious and slow compared to a dynamic system.
You should read about jeckyl, hyde, octopress and all other static pages generators.
Generally it's not a bad idea and a lot of people are doing this generating their blogs as static pages and adding js commenting via disqus.
Those solutions allows you to pretty quicly change layout, add widgets with latest post etc.
Related
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Closed 11 years ago.
In various forums and blogs, I see some people promoting HAML and some promoting HTML. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using HAML vs HTML?
I just want to understand what I'm missing out on if I use HAML in favor of HTML (if any).
You are trying to compare Apples to Oranges. Browsers only understand HTML. HAML is just a templating language that gets transformed into HTML (e.g. same final output). If you find the HAML syntax to be easier than HTML then go for it. However IMHO - abstracting away what actual elements you are generating just makes applying CSS and doing JavaScript navigation that much more difficult.
Personally if I wanted to "trim" my HTML, I would put content into tags (depends on your serverside technology)
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
<x:awesomeListThing data="$foo"/>
<x:foreach data="$bar">
<x:renderBazWidget/>
</x:foreach>
<div>random content that hasn't been "tagified" yet.</div>
</body>
</html>
Then inside any tag's template you'll be able to see the actual HTML structure that is being generated.
On Stackoverflow - HTML has 65k followers. You WILL get an answer, most likely many answers, in a very short amount of time. HAML has 157 followers. Simple math.
The main disadvantage of using HAML over HTML is simply that HTML is just about universal among web developers, where as the HAML community is still a relatively small community. This would undoubtly make finding developers to work on your project in the future a more daunting task.
But if you have the resources, you could argue that to be an advantage. Ensuring you only hired developers that were capable and experience in HAML.
The other major down side I can see is that if you have graphics/web designers working on your templates, separate from your development team, they would also have to be familiar with HAML. As you can imagine there are very few graphics/web designers who capable of it, and few tools to help them.
Google HAML. I am sure, you will get relevant stuff to understand it.
Haml is:
Easy to read and visually expresses your DOM hierarchy
Easy to learn
Ported to other languages
Well-maintained and has a huge community
Popular with designers because it borrows CSS syntax
Almost as fast as plain ERB
Makes many types of error impossible (or very difficult)
See here :
Your attitude to Haml?
When major IDEs (such as Aptana) learn to parse HAML, we can return to the question. Right now I see HTML's superiority in that it's widely supported and understood by common parsers. You get proper syntax colouring and any errors or validation problems get marked instantly. This is not true of HAML.
Additionally, consider web templates. They're usually (X)HTML + CSS, be them ready templates for hire or the designs your designer cuts for you. What are your odds of getting a, say, HAML+SASS template instead of the usual XHTML+CSS?
HAML needs to gain more field and its community needs to grow much more before it's a viable alternative to HTML. Currently most web coders don't even know what HAML is, not to mention writing anything in HAML.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Is there a free open source software for protecting HTML from "select all", "copy" and "save as".
No. Neither is there non-free nor non-open source software to do it in a reasonable way.
There are a couple of tricks you could try (generating all the content via obfuscated JS, checking the URI with JS, and so on), but they are easily bypassed and have unpleasant side effects (not least of which is making it impossible for search engines to index the content).
As David Dorward said, you effectively cannot do this, but there are a few approaches you can take as long as you're willing to abandon pure HTML. All are ugly and I do not advocate their use for a multitude of reasons. Most of those reasons should be pretty obvious.
I mention them only because I have been in situations where I have been required to do this by the business requirements of a customer. I could either lose the customer or figure out a way. Since most business folks aren't software purists, they simply didn't care how it was done. If you're in this situation, I sympathize.
You could generate an image on the server side and display the information as an image. This approach was once used by the local sheriff's office, but they eventually went back to HTML since images are costly in terms of server resources and bandwidth. There are many open source ways to generate images.
You could use a technology like Flash or Silverlight to display the information. You would then have much greater programmatic control over disabling the copying of the information. I strongly prefer the HTML/CSS/JS approach to web programming due to its far reach and simplicity, so I don't recommend this approach either. Also, since it isn't open source, it's probably not an option for you.
Good luck.
To put it bluntly there is nothing that will piss me off faster about a web site than the developer trying to take control of what I can do with my browser. I'm not alone in this regard so do realize that many people will eventually just say to he'll with the web site and whatever business it is trying to support.
The simple way to deal with this is to simply avoid showing the nonsubscriber the data in question. Rather feed the nonsubscriber dummy info or good info that gas critical parts obscured. What you don't want to do is to screw around with code that hamstings somebodies browser or worst makes that browser unstable.
Basically it comes down to this do not cause harm and do not impact normal operation of a browser. There are perfectly sane ways to show a nonsubscriber what he might get if he where a subscriber with out risking vast amounts of content.
Dave
This is absolutely no way to achieve your underlying aim, which is (apparently) to stop a non-subscriber copying or saving data. If a user can see the data, then they can copy it. End of story.
They can take a screenshot and use OCR. They can always get out a pad of paper and a pencil and copy it down. This might seem like a lot of effort, but you have to ask yourself: is it worth the effort to evade what you're charging for subscription?
The best advice is to find another way to do business.
If you allow something to be readable by users on the web, it will be possible to copy.
One can always take screenshots or simply write the text again while looking at the original.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I think most template engines are hard to use for designers and front end developers leaving you, the programmer with the burden of maintaining them.
And frequently updating the templates after the designer updates the html mockup is a nightmare because your templates are no longer compatible with the original htmls.
I had this problem for very long time, recently I had an idea, but I don't know if I'm not reinventing something or if something better exists.
So, I'm asking if you found better solutions for this problem and if so which one?
Since I've switched to full separation of content from presentation, I've never looked back, and here's why:
Your business logic becomes very clear. Without HTML tags and presentation logic mixed in, the code takes ½ the space and less than ½ the time to maintain. The burden of maintaining the link between code and presentation can be mitigated by specifying a formal interface between the two, even as a text file or a Wiki note, listing all the variables and values presented to/required by the presentation layer.
Frequently updating the templates from designer's changes means that your presentation layer should be sub-divided to various "blocks", such as menu block, page layout block, and content block. On most pages, only the content block is different. When properly divided and implemented using CSS and other modern web techniques, reasonable changes in design will have minimal impact on your presentation code.
CMSes automate this process even further, and are now at the point where even 5-10 page sites can benefit from using a CMS vs. hand-coded HTML from both consistency and ease of support perspectives.
Code security - Smarty is not PHP, so your designers can have a lower level of trust on the site (they can't mess with the underpinnings too much, although they can mangle the presentation to the same effect as a DoS would have, so don't mess with them anyway); if you don't care about security that much, PHPTal and others run almost at "native" speed.
As for my working solutions, I have two recommendations:
Develop a projectwide folder structure and naming convention, and stick to it. Given a name of your business logic file, I should be able to tell you what the presentation files are, and vice versa.
Have an explicit interface spec (again, a text file or a Wiki entry is all you really need) between business logic and presentation. Knowing which vars are available, and how they should be (programmer) / are (designer) formatted, makes both of them very happy when they have to maintain the page a year later.
Yes, but only if they are as close to Native HTML as possible.
Dreamweaver templates (ignoring the editor) basically accomplish this pretty well since they basically markup a plain old HTML (POH™) page with some HTML Comments.
I personally like how some CMS solutions enable me to break my templates into very small pieces. SiteCore does this well through placeholders and renderings which map to usercontrols.
I've also used UserControls heavily in the past to break out common functionality like login, menu, footer links, etc to make it easier to modify or replace functionality in the future. (ASP.NET)
What template-engines are you using? Something like Smarty for PHP?
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Closed 9 years ago.
I have to choose an online WYSIWYG editor. I'm pending between TinyMCE and Xinha. My application is developed in Asp.Net 3.5. Could you help me with with some pros and cons?
Haven't tried Xihna myself, but I have experience with TinyMCE and FCKeditor. In my company we switched to TinyMce (from FCKeditor) due to the superior support for pasting from word documents and the (relatively easy to work with) plugin architecture which we used to add some custom modules (links browser, simple file browser). TinyMCE also converts the text to xhtml code which is usually better.
I'd recommend FCKEditor over TinyMCE. I've had much better luck with it (better markup, better managers, better extensibility, better speed, better compatibility, etc)
Try SPAW Editor. File Manager is included. Editor is generated from server side code, meaning it's lighter on client side processing.
Of course TinyMCE :)
I found Xinha to be much better and more functional than FCKEditor. If you know PHP and a dab of javascript you can customize the file manager, and there is a lovely set of plugins on offer. I am also impressed with what I have seen of TinyMCE and due to wider adoption you may find it to have more options.
I've never used Xinha, but I can vouch for TinyMCE. It's fast, scales well, and is infinitely customizable. I particularly like the dynamic loading of functionality, which means you only take the performance hit for the stuff you use.
It also includes language-specific compressors to further increase performance (C# is supported, along with PHP, Java and ColdFusion) by GZipping components.
Of course TinyMCE it has more plugins to choose from and its easy to make custom plugins.
It only gives issues with ipad(cause of iframes).
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am looking for a text editor to be used in a web page. Where users can format the text and get a WYSIWYG experience. Doesn't need to be too fancy. But has to be easy to use and integrate into the page. Has to generate HTML as output. Support AJAX (one I checked works only with standard form submit) and has to be small in terms of download to the user's browser.
Well it depends what platform you are on if you are looking for server-side functionality as well, but the defacto badass WYSIWYg in my opinion is FCKeditor. I have worked with this personally in numerous environments (both professional and hobby level) and have always been impressed.
It's certainly worth a look. I believe it is employed by open source projects such as SubText as well. Perhaps, Jon Galloway can add to this if he reads this question. Or Phil if he is currently a user.
TinyMCE is the simplest I've found to use. I've never used it in an AJAX-enabled application, but there are instructions on how to do so on the project's wiki.
Try FCKeditor. It supports integration with most popular platforms, and it's fairly lightweight.
You might also want to look at YUI's Rich Text Editor.
If you're starting your site from scratch or haven't invested a lot of effort into another JavaScript platform, Yahoo User Interface (YUI) is a very complete JavaScript library that could help you add other AJAX elements beyond a text editor.
I just did a full day of evaluation of all the ones mentioned so far (and then some), and the one I liked the best is Obout Editor. I think it might be for ASP.NET only, so it might not work for you, but if you are using .NET, it's great. The HTML output is clean and nicely styled, and the rendered output looks the same in the editor as it does when you output it to the page (something I had trouble with when using the others due to doctype settings in the editor). It costs a few bucks, but it was worth it for us.
I found TinyMCE pretty easy to implement. And it's light on bandwidth usage too.
Using fck for some tine now, after "free text box", or something like that. Had problems only once, when I put fck inside asp.net ajax updatepanel, but found fix on forums. Problem was solved in next release.
I would like to see some nice photo browser in it, because fck comes only with simple browser that displays filename, no thumbs. The other one, that has thumbs costs bunch of money.
Didn't try it with asp.net mvc, don't know how will uploading work. It uses one ascx for wrapping js functionality.
i started out using free text box when i was doing a lot of asp.net programming, but now that most of what i do is php i've moved to the FCK editor.
while the change wasn't necessarily prompted by the language, i feel that the fck editor is a better choice because of it's versatility.
For something minimalist, take a look at Widg Editor, it's truly tiny and very simple. It's only haphazardly supported as a hobby project though.
I'm currently using the RTE component of DynarchLib, which is highly customisable - definitely does AJAX - but a bit complicated and not very pretty. It is actively supported, and you can get answers on their forum very quickly.
I previously tried Dojo's editor, and found it broken and badly undocumented. YMMV.
Edit: In response to other people's answers, I've now tried TinyMCE and found it to be excellent. More easily configurable and far fewer problems than anything else I've tried. Use TinyMCE!