DMX|ZONE
Register Login

Premium Content


Premium Content articles are the very best articles from the world's leading internet technology, subject-matter experts. We have many categories of content below on a wide variety of subjects that have all been commissioned from big name authors.

Explore the Premium Content

Design and Accessibility: Part XIV

W3C, Section 508, & PAS 78: Web Legalities and Standards

Over the past few months, Linda reviewed several points that are included in accessibility standards set forth by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the U.S. Section 508, and the new PAS 78 (Publicly Available Standard) as she covered various accessibility and usability Website problems. In this article, Linda will touch on all three documents, and you’ll learn what each document is about, what it addresses, who is affected by their legislations or recommendations, and the document’s reach outside any particular agency or country. You’ll also learn whether your Website design and/or development – and you by association – are free from any legal claim against an inaccessible site.

Read More
Linda Goin
1673

ASP.NET DataSet Tips & Tricks

Technically part of the ADO.NET object library, the DataSet is one of the most fundamental and widely used data objects in the .NET framework. Used as an in-memory representation of database/XML data, it supports a plethora of handy methods, properties and contains various other object references for working with tables, rows, columns, relationships and more.

Because the DataSet supports so many features and contains so many references to other objects in the ADO.NET library, it can take quite some time to figure out just what is available to you as a developer when working with this object.

The DataSet object is also directly bindable as a data source on the various GUI components that support data binding. It works very nicely with the ASP.NET DataGrid object since both objects were designed to contain data in a similar tabular format.

In this tutorial we’ll focus on 3 key examples to explore some of the lesser known features of the DataSet object. The first example will be manual construction of a DataSet object from scratch. This example will get you familiar with the various object types that compose the DataSet object itself. By constructing the object from scratch you’ll have an idea of what happens when a DataSet is constructed from a database source.

The second example we’ll explore a handy object in ADO.NET that allows you to sort data in the DataSet object by using simple SQL like commands. We’ll build an example that sorts one of the columns of our DataSet from ascending to descending through auto-detection.

In the final example we’ll see how we can index our DataSet by creating a primary key, which then allows us to search through our DataSet for specific rows matching the values on the index we created.

Note: This example requires Visual Studio .NET with ASP.NET 1.1 capability. Both VB.NET and C# code samples will be provided

Read More
Kevin Koch
3722

Design and Accessibility: Part XIII

Usability: Navigation & Info Stress II

In the previous Design and Accessibility article, Linda explored how Flickr and The Book of Cool used navigation on their home pages through compatible screen resolution, readability, visibility, content, and link structure. These two sites were chosen as they had won the 2006 Webby Awards for Navigation/Structure; however, Linda discovered that both sites neglected to use some usability and accessibility standards in their applications, omissions that could create navigation problems and info stress for some viewers. Now she goes past the homepages in both sites to explain what tools you can use to improve your site’s navigation and how you can avoid the use of what is known as “mystery meat navigation,” (MMN) or the “Where am I?” syndrome in your site construction.

Read More
Linda Goin
1563

Consuming the Adobe developer news with Flash Lite 2.0

Consuming the Adobe developer news with Flash Lite 2.0

In a previous article, I showed you how to work with Flash Lite 2.0 – the latest version of Flash Lite for mobile devices such as cell phones. In this article, I’m going to show you how to consume an XML news feed using Flash Lite 2.0. I’ll create an application that consumes the Adobe developer news and displays one item at a time in a mobile phone. You’ll see how to configure the soft keys for the phone to move to the next and previous items.

In this tutorial, I’ll target the Nokia 6680 mobile phone. I’ll use the Flash Lite 2.0 emulator in Flash 8 to test the content. You will only be able to complete the tutorial if you have Flash 8 with the Flash Lite 2.0 update. You can install this by downloading it from http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html and double-clicking to install.

You can download the resources for this tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file.

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options… and clicking the Delete Cookies… button on the General tab.

Read More
Sas Jacobs
3983

Building Rich Text Editor. Part III

Introduction

In this article we will continue developing cross-browser compatible Rich Text Editor. In the first and the second articles of the series we have designed the layout for our editor and developed most of the text editing and formatting features.

In this iteration we will add the functionality that would allow user to insert HTML elements both arbitrary (such today’s date) as well as natively supported by the designMode feature (images, links, etc).

Read More
Alex July
3397

Dynamic Form Display with RadioButtonList

When developing user interfaces it’s often key to remember all the tricks and tools available to you so that you may combine them in creative ways in order to implement more advanced features. Given the sometimes limiting postback mechanism it’s important to make every refresh count, and to provide a unique experience by taking advantage of the postback server processing.

There are 2 particular server components that work together quite nicely to form a creative user interface experience: The RadioButtonList and the floating DIV tag. When combining these components we can create an almost wizard-like interface using some advanced GUI tricks in tandem with the postback events.

In this tutorial we will build an ASP.NET application with 2 dynamic pseudo “forms”, and we will then implement a RadioButtonList to simply flip between the 2 forms dynamically on the page. Although the forms will appear as layered on top of each other we’ll see how we can design the forms side-by-side in the design environment and then layer them together in server code.

By implementing AutoPostBack on the RadioButtonList we’ll show how we can create post backs and dynamically display the selected form to the user, creating a dynamic space in a small amount of screen space allowing for multiple entry screens without using the entire width and height of the page.

Note: This tutorial requires Visual Studio .NET and both VB.NET and C# code samples will be provided

Read More
Kevin Koch
6430

Flash Optimizing, Bettering Your FLA & SWF

Flash performance means everything. With Adobe's name on Flash, there's bound to be floods more inexperienced Flash users publishing animations that aren't bandwidth and CPU friendly. As industry professionals, we have a responsibility to not let Flash backfire on us. You may have experienced this already with a client, refusing a feature because of bad personal encounters. Features are one part of the battle, performance is always part of the battle.

Time for that phrase we all enjoy - production standards. We all need to be responsible with our authoring work. There are some work flow techniques that can be second nature to you when working in Flash. Some may seem simple or common, but do you use them 100% of the time?! I'd hope so. Things like simple asset considerations must be met before importing assets, true, and there are considerations for production when using the assets. Here's where work flow techniques cash in; imagine opening an FLA 6-months later to not know where or what everything is, very unprofessional.

By adopting techniques covered here, you can be assured your published movies and FLA's all well made and maintainable. This article covers techniques I've trained, learned, borrowed, and invented in over 7 years of using Flash.

  • Library & Symbol Commandments - authoring and maintenance standards.
  • Timeline Production Must-do's for Stage & Moveclips.
  • Optimizing Timeline animations and ensuring performance.
  • Movie Frame rate and Filter/Effect recommendations.

A few Flash 8 specific features are covered, but this entire article is for any version higher than Flash 3.

Read More
Chris Charlton
4809

Design and Accessibility: Part XII

Usability: Navigation & Info Stress

In the previous two design and accessibility articles, Linda displayed how colour-blind Internet users view the Web and how designers might compensate for those viewers. Now she turns to an issue that concerns everyone who uses the Internet – Website navigation. Blog designs, Flash, and other formats used for web design, along with operating system and platform issues all determine how a designer or developer deals with navigation within those programs. You’ve seen the results  –  sites that contain an overload of links or – alternately – a dearth of information and a lack of usable structure. How does a designer or developer create navigation that doesn’t create info stress for viewers?  Read on…

Beyond the Woods and into the Minefield

When I wander around the Web these days, I often feel like Goldilocks with three hairy bears behind me. The navigation choices are overwhelming on some sites, and other Web designers don’t offer a clue on how to get around their pages. Will I make the right choice and find what I need? Or, will I click the wrong link and lose my way? I’m supposed to be somewhat skilled in navigating through these woods, so I shudder when I think about the Web navigation experiences relayed to me by some of my computer-illiterate friends. What they experience is way beyond Goldilocks. For them, navigating through some Websites is more like stepping through a minefield.

I’m not going to offer any “bad” navigation examples for this article, because you all know what those Web pages look like and how they (don’t) work. Instead, I’m going to take a peek at the homepages of two of the latest Webby Award Winners to offer examples on what many Web experts and ordinary viewers consider the “best” in navigation and structure.  In the next article I’ll cover more about what’s inside both of these sites. In this article I’ll ask the following questions about the homepages for two sites:

  1. What’s the criteria for winning a Webby award for the best navigation and structure?
  2. Which Websites won and who designed them?
  3. How did the designers use navigation and structure?
  4. Which programs and code did the designers use to develop their navigation and structure?
  5. How did the winners fail (for me) and why?

Many questions above, many answers below and I hope that something here works for you.

Read More
Linda Goin
1480

Building A Rich Text Editor. Part II

Introduction

In the previous article of the series we have built some of the functionality for an online Rich Text Editor.

Today we will continue with the development and add more features to the application.

Before we dive into the development I would like to mention something rather important:

In the previous article I have stated that the designMode feature is not compatible with Macintosh Safari browser. One of the readers has pointed out to me that the Safari compatibility has been in place for a while now and the compatible editors are somewhere out there.
Yes, the “good news” is that the designMode feature has been built into Safari since version 1.3.
The bad news, however, is that the support for the feature is very limited and buggy. You have to go out of your way to build the most basic editor features which are limited to approximately 10% of what you can do in other browsers. So, in my personal opinion it’s just not worth the efforts (as you can tell I am not a huge Safari fan).
Now, I must also admit that I haven’t had a chance to test the feature with the newest Safari 2 (which by the way can be installed only on Tiger OS), so if you are using one and have found that the support for the designMode has drastically improved that really is a very good news.

Read More
Alex July
3319

Import/Export Outlook Contacts in ASP.NET

Import/Export Outlook Contacts in ASP.NET

Integration in applications is quite often a requirement when building larger scale applications. With customers and clients using such a variety of productivity applications there is quite often a need to make use of these other applications within your own, which can cause a headache due to the complexity involved.

One of the more popular productivity suites in use is Microsoft Office. Customers more often than not will want a way to merge their productivity between applications such as Outlook, Word and Excel within your application, which is definitely no easy task.

We’ll be using the built in OleDb data classes for database connectivity and some fairly complex DataSet and DataTable manipulations to accomplish our importing from the CSV file.

Note: Microsoft Outlook, Access and Visual Studio .NET are required to fully complete the entire tutorial. However the code provided will also have value alone if you’re interested in CSV importing.

Both VB.NET and C# code samples will be provided

Read More
Kevin Koch
8261

Navigation Bars in Dreamweaver 8

Central and highly important in any web site is the site’s navigation.  It can consist of anything from simple text links to full blown flash navigation bars.  The most important part of navigation is that it be easy to follow, that it makes sense to the site’s visitor and that it’s more than flashy buttons that just “show off”.  In this article, I will show you how to use the Dreamweaver native navigation bar.

Read More
Nancy Gill
17994

CSS pop-up menus

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a completely functional pop-up menu using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) without knowing how to write any code at all! Below is an example of such a menu;

An example of a CSS menu

This tutorial takes only 25 minutes to complete.

Read More
Joyce Evans
5200
Newer articles Older articles
Currency:
Company Info
Payment & Pricing
Legal Notices
Guides
Copyright © 2001-2025 Dynamic Zones International B.V., All Rights Reserved.