Monday, January 31, 2005
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Starter Kits
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Home Page
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Home Page
The new version of ASP.NET Web Matrix is now available as a free 1.3mb download. Web Matrix is a community-supported, easy-to-use development tool for building ASP.NET Web applications. New features include: Access database support, J# support, design time enhancements including improved table editing and user-control rendering, many bug fixes, and much more!
Download the new version of Web Matrix today!
The new version of ASP.NET Web Matrix is now available as a free 1.3mb download. Web Matrix is a community-supported, easy-to-use development tool for building ASP.NET Web applications. New features include: Access database support, J# support, design time enhancements including improved table editing and user-control rendering, many bug fixes, and much more!
Download the new version of Web Matrix today!
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Home Page
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Home Page
The new version of ASP.NET Web Matrix is now available as a free 1.3mb download. Web Matrix is a community-supported, easy-to-use development tool for building ASP.NET Web applications. New features include: Access database support, J# support, design time enhancements including improved table editing and user-control rendering, many bug fixes, and much more!
Download the new version of Web Matrix today!
The new version of ASP.NET Web Matrix is now available as a free 1.3mb download. Web Matrix is a community-supported, easy-to-use development tool for building ASP.NET Web applications. New features include: Access database support, J# support, design time enhancements including improved table editing and user-control rendering, many bug fixes, and much more!
Download the new version of Web Matrix today!
Visual Web Developer
Visual Web Developer
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is a lightweight, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn development tool focused exclusively on Web development. Inside, you will find everything you need to begin building exciting, dynamic Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0.
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is a lightweight, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn development tool focused exclusively on Web development. Inside, you will find everything you need to begin building exciting, dynamic Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0.
ASP.NET Web: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site : Home Page
OpenOffice.org 1.1 Product Description
Monday, January 17, 2005
W3C I18N Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS (Draft)
W3C I18N Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS (Draft): "
'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'>
"
'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'>
"
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Kozma prutkov
nice context managment script - my little homepage - Scripts � phpSQLiteCMS
Wikipedia
Monday, January 10, 2005
Useful PHP script
php code
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Credit cards payments
cheap php web hosting, web hosting php mysql, php web hosting, mysql php hosting
Web Hosting Articles
Accepting credit cards without merchant account.
If you are looking for ways to accept credit card online without using any merchant account, consider the few companies in this article. Be prepared to pay a few percentage commissions to the company from your sales. This article provides some basic information on adding credit card payment facilities to your website.
Accepting credit card payment allow you to take advantage of the following types of customers:
Impulse buyers. After reading your advertisements and hype on your site, buyers would be all fired up about your product. If they have a means of making a purchase immediately, you've secured that sale. If you only allow cheque payments, the additional time it takes for them to get their cheque book and mail out the cheque may be a deterrence. They may also have second thoughts later.
International customers. Credit card payment is a tremendous convenience if your customers are overseas. It automatically takes care of the problems of currency differences as well as the time it takes for a cheque to travel to the vendor. You will lose a large number of overseas customers if cheque payment is the only way you can accept payment.
Methods of Accepting Credit Card Payments
There are actually two ways in which you can accept credit cards on your site.
Using Your Own Merchant Account. To do this, you will need a bank that will allow you to open a merchant account. Requirements for this will vary from country to country, and you should check with your local banks for more information on this.
Through a Third Party Merchant. There are numerous companies around will are willing to accept credit cards payments on your behalf in exchange for various fees and percentages.
2checkout.com
This is one of the fastest growing credit card processing company on the web. Prepare to pay 5.5% commission from your total sales! There is no setup fee involved.
Charge.com
Customer service is good, but payment period seems to be inconsistent. Research carefully before you sign up.
ClickBank.net
There is a one time setup fee (US$49.95) and a transaction fee of US$1 plus 7.5% of sale price. There are no other monthly fees. This is only for people who sell services or deliver products over the internet (not for those who need to ship physical products).
WorldPay.com
WorldPay enable thousands of businesses to accept payments on the internet, by phone, fax or mail. Credit and debit cards, bank transfers, instalments - even mobile payments.
Digipay.com
This service is intended for software authors only. They charge 13.9% per transaction. I'm not sure if there are any other charges.
Kagi
There are no setup or monthly fees with this merchant. Kagi "charges 6.5% up to a maximum of [US]$3.00... plus 3.5% plus [US]$0.50 for processing costs".
PayPal
If you are a Premier or Business account user, you get charged US$0.25 for transactions of US$15 and below, 1.9% plus US$0.25 for transactions above US$15 when your customers pay by credit card. They require your customers to sign up for their services before they can pay you. This can be a deterrent for your customers.
ProPay.com
A new competitor to PayPal (see elsewhere on this page) that currently only caters to US residents. You have to pay a $35 fee to sign up, but there are no monthly charges.
RegNow.com
Designed for software authors to sell their ware, this merchant deducts 20% of your sale price with a minimum of US$2.00 for their commission. There are also other charges for sales generated by your affiliates, etc.
Verza.com
There are no setup or monthly charges. Transaction charges range from 4.9% to 6.9% of your sale price plus US $0.99.
CardPay.net
One of the competitive credit card processing companies in the internet industry yet without compromising quality.
cheap php web hosting, web hosting php mysql, php web hosting, mysql php hosting
Bannerless Free Web Hosting Services 100% Ads Free
The Object Oriented Improvements of PHP 5
Using SQLite for Simple Database Storage
International PHP Magazine - Cutting-Edge Technologies for Web Professionals - Online Articles
�International PHP Magazine - Cutting-Edge Technologies for Web Professionals - Online Articles :
"$db = gb_open();
gb_show($db);
?>
Add a comment!
Listing 6: new.php
$db = gb_open();
if (isset($_POST['ADD'])) {
gb_add($db, $_POST['name'], $_POST['email'],
$_POST['comment'], $_POST['web']);
header('Location: http://'
. $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/guestbook.php');
exit;
}
?>"
"$db = gb_open();
gb_show($db);
?>
Add a comment!
Listing 6: new.php
$db = gb_open();
if (isset($_POST['ADD'])) {
gb_add($db, $_POST['name'], $_POST['email'],
$_POST['comment'], $_POST['web']);
header('Location: http://'
. $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/guestbook.php');
exit;
}
?>"
PHP: Downloads
Moodle - A Free, Open Source Course Management System for Online Learning
MySQL on IIS
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Formating XML in the HTML document
< iframe id="RSSIFrame" name="RSSIFrame" src="http://www.google.com" >what</iframe>
var textXML = window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerText;
var inerHTML = window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerHTML
window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerText = inerHTML;
var textXML = window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerText;
var inerHTML = window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerHTML
window.frames['RSSIFrame'].document.body.innerText = inerHTML;
Finding Elements by Content in a DOM Document Using XPath (Java Developers Almanac Example)
Finding Elements by Content in a DOM Document Using XPath (Java Developers Almanac Example)
This example demonstrates some common uses of expressions that use element content; for more information on XPath, see the specification at http://www.w3c.org/TR/xpath. In the example, the result of an XPath expression is shown next to the expression; the numbers are ids of elements in the sample file shown at the end of the example.
// Get all elements that equal the string cat
String xpath = "//*[.='cat']"; // 2 6
// Get all elements that equal the string dog
xpath = "//*[.='dog']"; // (none)
// Note that element #3 does not match because its
// content is " dog " rather than "dog"
// Get all elements that contain the string cat
xpath = "//*[contains(.,'cat')]"; // 1 2 4 5 6
// Get all elem3 elements that contain the string cat
xpath = "//elem3[contains(.,'cat')]"; // 6
// Get all elements that contain the string cat,
// ignoring the contents of any subelements
xpath = "//*[contains(child::text(),'cat')]"; // 2 4 6
// Get all elements without subelements and whose contents contains the string cat
xpath = "//*[count(*)=0 and contains(.,'cat')]"; // 2 6
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Learning JavaScript - Object Hierarchy and Using Objects (Lesson 11)
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
ActiveWidgets Grid :: dhtml grid, javascript tables, .net datagrid, asp controls, php widgets
Internationalization (i18n) Gurus: Character Encoding Converters
Monday, January 03, 2005
How to Encode XML Data
How to Encode XML Data
How to Encode XML Data
By Chris Lovett
Microsoft Corporation
March 2000
Summary: This article explains how character encoding works and specifically how it works in XML and the MSXML DOM.
Contents
Cross-Platform Data Formats
XML and Character Encoding
Character Sets and the MSXML DOM
Creating New XML Documents with MSXML
Conclusion
For More Information
A lot of people have been asking me questions lately about how to make their XML files transfer data properly between different platforms. They create an XML document, type in data, stick a few tags around it, make the tags well-formed, and even put the declaration in for good measure. Then they try and load it up but get an unexpected error message from the Microsoft® XML Parser (MSXML) saying that there's something wrong with their data. This can be frustrating to the new XML author. Shouldn't it just work?
Well, not quite. It's likely that when you receive the unexpected error message from MSXML, the platform that is receiving your data stores it differently than the platform from which you sent it, resulting in character encoding problems.
Cross-Platform Data Formats
Creating cross-platform technologies and allowing different platforms to share data is an area that computer software and hardware industries have struggled with ever since they managed to connect two computers together. Since the early days, things have only become more and more complex with the explosion in the number of different types of computers, different ways of connecting them, and different kinds of data that you might want to share between them.
After decades of research into cross-platform programming technologies, the only real cross-platform solution today (and probably for a long time to come) is that which is achieved by simple standard data formats. The success of the Web was built on exactly these formats. The main thing that passes between Web servers and Web browsers today is HTTP headers and HTML pages, both of which are standard text formats.
In the next few sections, I'll discuss character encoding and standard character sets, Unicode, the HTML Content-Type header, the HTML Content-Type metatags, and character entities. If you are familiar with these concepts, you can skip ahead to the tips and tricks of encoding XML data for the XML Document Object Model (DOM) programmer. For details, see XML and Character Encoding.
A Lesson in Character Encoding
Standard text formats are built on standard character sets. Remember that all computers store text as numbers. However, different systems can also store the same text using different numbers. The following table shows how a range of bytes is stored, first on a typical computer running Microsoft Windows® using the default code page 1252, and second on a typical Apple® Macintosh® computer using the Macintosh Roman code page.
Byte Windows Macintosh
140 Œ å
229 å Â
231 ç Á
232 è Ë
233 é È
For example, when your grandma places an order for a new book from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/, she is unaware that her Macintosh computer stores its characters differently than the new Windows 2000 Web server running www.barnesandnoble.com. As she enters your Swedish home address in the ship-to field of the Internet order form, she believes the Internet will correctly deliver the character å (byte value 140 on her Macintosh), unaware that her message will be received and processed by computers that translate byte value 140 as the letter Œ.
Unicode
The Unicode Consortium decided it would be a good idea to define one universal code page (using 2 bytes instead of one per character) that covers all the languages of the world so that this mapping problem between different code pages would be gone forever.
So if Unicode solves cross-platform character encoding issues, why hasn't it become the only standard? The first problem is that switching to Unicode sometimes means doubling the size of all your files-which in a network-bound world is not ideal. Some people therefore still prefer to use the older, single-byte character sets such as ISO-8859-1 to ISO-8859-15, Shift-JIS, EUC-KR, and so forth.
The second problem is that there are still many systems out there that are not Unicode-based at all, which means that on a network, some of the byte values that make up the Unicode characters can cause major problems for those older systems. So Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF) have been defined; they use bit-shifting techniques to encode Unicode characters as byte values that will be "transparent" (or flow through safely) on those older systems.
The most popular of these character encodings is UTF-8. UTF-8 takes the first 127 characters of the Unicode standard (which happen to be the basic Latin characters, A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, and a few punctuation characters) and maps those directly to single byte values. It then applies a bit-shifting technique using the high bit of the bytes to encode the rest of the Unicode characters. The result of all this is that the little Swedish character å (0xE5) becomes the following 2-byte gibberish Ã¥ (0xC3 0xA5). So unless you can do bit shifting in your head, data encoded in UTF-8 is not human readable.
Content-Type Header
Because the older single-byte character sets are still in use, the problem of transferring data is not solved until we also specify what actual character set the data is in. Recognizing this, the Internet e-mail and HTTP protocols groups defined a standard way to specify the character set in the message header Content-Type property. The property specifies a character set from the list of the registered character set names defined by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). A typical HTTP header might contain the following text:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 15327
Content-Type: text/html; charset:ISO-8859-1;
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Location: http://www.microsoft.com/Default.htm
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 00:55:26 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 22:56:30 GMT
This header indicates to the application that what follows after the header is in the ISO-8859-1 character set.
Content-Type Metatags
The Content-Type property is optional, and in some applications, the HTTP header information is stripped off and just the HTML itself is passed along. To remedy this, the HTML standards group defined an optional metatag as a way to specify the character set in the HTML document itself, making the HTML document character set self-describing.
In this case, the character set ISO-8859-1 declares that in this particular HTML page, the byte value of 229 means å. This page is now completely unambiguous on any system, and data is not misinterpreted. Unfortunately, because this metatag is optional, it leaves room for error.
Character Entities
Not every system supports every registered character set. For example, I don't think many platforms actually support the IBM mainframe character set called EBCDIC. Windows NT does, but probably not many others-which is most likely why the http://www.ibm.com home page is generating ASCII.
As a backup plan, HTML allows the encoding of individual characters in the page by specifying their exact Unicode character value. These character entities are then parsed independently of the character set, and their Unicode values can be determined unambiguously. The syntax for this is "å" or "å".
XML and Character Encoding
XML borrowed these ideas from HTML and took them even further, defining a completely unambiguous algorithm to determine the character set encoding used. In XML, an optional encoding attribute on the XML declaration defines the character encoding. The following algorithm determines the default encodings:
If the file starts with a Unicode byte-order mark [0xFF 0xFE] or [0xFE 0xFF], the document is considered to be in UTF-16 encoding. Otherwise, it is in UTF-8.
The following are all correct and equivalent XML documents:
Character set or encoding HTTP header XML document
ISO-8859-1 Content-Type: text/xml; charset:ISO-8859-1; å
UTF-8 Content-Type: text/xml; å
ISO-8859-1 Content-Type: text/xml;
å
UTF-8 (using character entities) Content-Type: text/xml; å
UTF-16 (Unicode with byte-order mark) Content-Type: text/xml; ff fe 3c 00 74 00 65 00 73 00 74 00 3e 00 e5 00 ..<.t.e.s.t.>...
3c 00 2f 00 74 00 65 00 73 00 74 00 3e 00 0d 00 <./.t.e.s.t.>...
0a 00
Character Sets and the MSXML DOM
Now that we've discussed various ways to encode characters, let's look at how to load XML documents in the MSXML DOM and the types of error messages you might get when encountering ambiguously-encoded characters. The two main methods of loading XML DOM documents are the LoadXML method and the Load method.
The LoadXML method always takes a Unicode BSTR that is encoded in UCS-2 or UTF-16 only. If you pass in anything other than a valid Unicode BSTR to LoadXML, it will fail to load.
The Load method can take the following as a VARIANT:
Value Description
URL If the VARIANT is a BSTR, it is interpreted as a URL.
VT_ARRAY | VT_UI1 The VARIANT can also be a SAFEARRAY containing the raw encoded bytes.
IUnknown If the VARIANT is an IUnknown interface, the DOM document calls QueryInterface for IStream, IPersistStream, and IPersistStreamInit.
The Load method implements the following algorithm for determining the character encoding or character set of the XML document:
If the Content-Type HTTP header defines a character set, this character set overrides anything in the XML document itself. This obviously doesn't apply to SAFEARRAY and IStream mechanisms because there is no HTTP header.
If there is a 2-byte Unicode byte-order mark, it assumes the encoding is UTF-16. It can handle both big endian and little endian.
If there is a 4-byte Unicode byte order mark (0xFF 0xFE 0xFF 0xFE), it assumes the encoding is UTF-32. It can handle both big endian and lttle endian.
Otherwise, it assumes the encoding is UTF-8 unless it finds an XML declaration with an encoding attribute that specifies some other character set (such as ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, and so on).
There are two errors you will see returned from the XML DOM that indicate encoding problems. The first usually indicates that a character in the document does not match the encoding of the XML document:
An invalid character was found in text content.
The ParseError object will tell you exactly where on a particular line this rogue character occurs so that you can fix the problem.
The second error indicates that you started off with a Unicode byte-order mark (or you called the LoadXML method), and then an encoding attribute specified something other than a 2-byte encoding (such as UTF-8 or Windows-1250):
Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported.
Alternatively, you could have called the Load method and started off with a single-byte encoding (no byte-order mark), but then it found an encoding attribute that specified a 2- or 4-byte encoding (such as UTF-16 or UCS-4).
The bottom line is that you cannot switch between a multibyte character set like UTF-8, Shift-JIS, or Windows-1250 and Unicode character encodings such as UTF-16, UCS-2, or UCS-4 using the encoding attribute on an XML declaration, because the declaration itself has to use the same number of bytes per character as the rest of the document.
Lastly, the IXMLHttpRequest interface provides the following ways of accessing downloaded data:
Methods Description
ResponseXML Represents the response entity body as parsed by the MSXML DOM parser, using the same rules as the Load method.
ResponseText Represents the response entity body as a string. This method blindly decodes the received message body from UTF-8. This is a known problem that should be fixed in the upcoming MSXML Web Release.
ResponseBody Represents the response entity body as an array of unsigned bytes.
ResponseStream Represents the response entity body as an IStream interface.
Creating New XML Documents with MSXML
Once the XML document is loaded, you can manipulate that XML document using the DOM without concern for any encoding issues because the document is stored in memory as Unicode. All the XML DOM interfaces are based on COM BSTRs, which are 2-byte Unicode strings. This means you can build an MSXML DOM document from scratch in memory that contains all sorts of Unicode characters and all components will be able to share this DOM in memory without any confusion over the meaning of the Unicode character values. When you save this, however, MSXML will encode all data in UTF-8 by default. For example, suppose you do the following:
var xmldoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
var e = xmldoc.createElement("test");
e.text = "å";
xmldoc.appendChild(e);
xmldoc.save("foo.xml");
The following UTF-8 encoded file will result:
Ã¥
Note The preceding example will only work if you run the code outside the browser environment. Calling the Save method while inside the browser will not produce the same results because of security restrictions.
Even though this looks weird, it is correct. The following test loads up the UTF-8 encoded file and tests whether the UTF-8 is decoded back to the Unicode character value 229. It is:
var xmldoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xmldoc.load("foo.xml");
if (xmldoc.documentElement.text.charCodeAt(0) == 229)
{
WScript.echo("Yippee - it worked !!");
}
To change the encoding that the XML DOM Save method uses, you need to create an XML declaration with an encoding attribute at the top of your document as follows:
var pi = xmldoc.createProcessingInstruction("xml",
" version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'");
xmldoc.appendChild(pi);
When you call the save method, you will then get an ISO-8859-1 encoded file as follows:
å
Now, be careful you don't let the XML property confuse you. The XML property returns a Unicode string. If you call the XML property on the DOMDocument object after creating the ISO-8859-1 encoding declaration, you will get the following Unicode string back:
å
Notice that the ISO-8859-1 encoding declaration is gone. This is normal. The reason it did this is so that you can turn around and call LoadXML with this string and it will work. If it does not do this, LoadXML will fail with the error message: "Switch from current encoding to specified encoding not supported."
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped explain how character encoding works and specifically how it works in XML and the MSXML DOM. Character set encoding is pretty simple once you understand it, and XML is great because it leaves no room for ambiguity in this respect. The MSXML DOM has a few quirks to watch out for, but it remains a powerful tool that allows you to both read and write any XML encoding.
For More Information
Microsoft MSDN Online Library: XML DOM Reference
Character Encoding Model by Ken Whistler and Mark Davis
IANA Character Sets
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) at http://www.ietf.org for a list of RFCs
Microsoft Global Software Development: Compatibility Issues with Mixed Environments
Scripting Iframes - Tutorial and Examples
