The Internet Renaissance is back! Google Gears, Dojo, HTML5 spec draft, AJAX, Firefox 3, Air/Flex, Silverlight, that-ugly-flash-thing and lots more! I think my head is going to explode.

Labels: dojo, firefox, flex, gears, HTML, html5, javascript, silverlight

So, my manager gives me a document and says "put this on our website". Wonderful. Not only did they not use the template that I'd given them, but they also tried to convert it to HTML on their own, but had saved the document with all kinds of trash in it. To make things worse, it also contained badly encoded character data...and had half mac and half windows line endings. A horrible recipie for a lot of trouble. I wish they'd used Smultron or another great HTML editor for mac.

Smultron is pretty nice, but Coco/Taco goes even farther in being pretty and very extensible with HTML preview, etc.

And then, if you don't want to deal with HTML code at all, and are looking for a nice simple-as-possible WYSIWYG editor, look no further than Kompozer.

Labels: editor, HTML, Kompozer, mac, OS X, Smultron Coco, Taco, text

Here's a challenge for you: Take an arbitrary-length string of (valid) HTML code and trim it to n (visible) characters max-length while keeping the resulting HTML valid and removing unnecessary tags. I'll also put another input constraint: no layout, images, or script; you can assume that table, img, and script tags will all be stripped out first.

So, say that we have:
<p>Hola mi amigo! <i>como estas?</i></p>
(you can forgive my poor spanish, I'm writing this in an airport in Brazil)

Now, take that sting and trim it to 20 characters, then the result should be:
<p>Hola mi amigo! <i>como </i></p>

Easy enough right? But trimming it to 15 characters should result in:
<p>Hola mi amigo! </p>

Now what do you think about it?

Labels: HTML, max length, trim

I got a few useful replies when I asked for a .NET PDF generating library. Thanks everyone. What about a way to generate diff/compare views for HTML documents? Any ideas? Ideally it would be side-by-side, but as long as I can display a merge-diff between 2 different HTML files, I'll be happy.

Labels: asp.net, difference, HTML, HTML Diff, Microsoft