Posts Tagged ‘HTML’

Organizing a university course on modern Web development

Monday, July 26th, 2010

About a year ago, prof. Vasilis Vassalos of Athens University of Economics and Business approached me and asked for my help in a new course they were preparing for their Computer Science department, which would introduce 4th year undergrads to various web development aspects. Since I was always complaining about how outdated higher education is when it comes to web development, I saw it as my chance to help things change for the better, so I agreed without a second thought.

This is one of the main reasons I didn’t have time to write many blog posts for the past months: This activity took up all my spare time. However, it proved to be an interesting and enlightening experience, in more than one ways. In this blog post I’ll describe the dilemmas we faced, the decisions we made and the insights I gained throughout these 6 months, with the hope that they’ll prove to be useful for anyone involved in something similar.

Table of contents

  1. Content
  2. Homework
  3. Labs
  4. Personal aftermath

(more…)

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Posted in Articles, Original, Personal | 1 Comment »

Tip: Multi-step form handling

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

First of all, sorry for my long absence! I haven’t abandoned this blog, I was just really, really busy. I’m still busy, and this probably won’t change soon. However, I will still blog when I get too fed up with work or studying (this is one of these moments…). Now, let’s get to the meat.

The situation

In most web applications, even the simplest ones, the need for form handling will arise. There will be forms that need to be submitted, checked, processed or returned to the user informing them about any errors. A good empirical rule I try to follow is “Try not to produce URLs that don’t have a meaning if accessed directly”. It sounds simple and common-sense, doesn’t it? However, as Francois Voltaire said, “common sense is not so common”. I’ve seen variations of the following scenario several times, in several websites or even commercial web application software: (more…)

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Posted in Articles, Tips | 5 Comments »

On native, single-input, multiple file uploads

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple:

<input type="file" multiple>

or, in XHTML:

<input type="file" multiple="multiple" />

You might not know that Opera supported multiple file uploads for a while now, based on the earlier Web Forms 2.0 standard in a slightly different (and more flexible) format:

<input type="file" min="1" max="9999″ />

(more…)

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Posted in Articles, News | 3 Comments »