Splat | WiseTome.com

The past series had been on creating websites.  Let me just summarize them and have the links in one place to each of them.

• Creating Websites - Options - When you intend to create websites, you need to be aware of your options.  To help you choose one of the options, you need to plan out the purpose and various cavets about it.
• Creating Websites - Personal Online Presence - If you want to just create a personal websites, you have several free choices (in terms of budget) available for you.  There are webpage hosters, blog hosters and forum hosters.  The choice again would be based on the purpose of your personal website.
• Creating Websites - Paid Web Host Service - If you need to create a business website, then you would usually need to go for a paid hosting service. The choice of the service provider would be based on reliability, cost, and technology requried.
• Creating Websites - Ways To Build Webpages - Once you are settled with your options, the choice of how you build the webpages is narrowed down.  Webpage hosting service providers usually provide you with option to build pages out of templates.  If you are hosting it yourselves, then you have several options like simple HTML pages, blogging engines, forum softwares and general CMS.

For the past two weeks, there have been quite a handful of basic posts on XML here at Splat. Here is a round up and links to all of them.

About XML

• XML - Extended Markup Language

XML Applications

• XML Application - XHTML
• XML Application - RSS And Atom
• XML Application - SVG
• XML Application - MathML
• XML Application - OOXML And ODF

In terms of XML application, I could just keep going on. Some of the other things that are worth a look are WSDL and SMDL. WSDL or WebSerivce Description Language is a major key player already even though it has not yet become a W3C recommendation yet. SMDL, Standardised Music Description Language is for marking up musical notation. It is presently a ISO standard. As I said, there are a lot of applications of XML and you can visit the Wikipedia page for it to get an exhaustive (and volatile) list.

Blogs and Sites

• W3C XML page
• O’Reilly XML

Let me know if you would like to know more or anything in particular about XML. You just need to leave a comment.

If you found these posts helpful, do subscribe to our feeds: Splat Feed. Copy this or the orange icon link to your feed reader. (Want to know more about feeds?)

SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is an application of XML. SVG is a markup language (based on XML specifications) for describing static and animated vector graphics. It is an open standard drafted by W3C - World Wide Web Consortium, that released the XML specifications.

History

The SVG 1.0 become a W3C recommendation in 2001.  In 2003, the specification was extended to SVG 1.1 to allow for modularization. Thus, the two subsets, SVG Tiny and SVG Basic became profiles of SVG 1.1. SVG Tiny 1.2 was released in 2006.  The SVG Full 1.2, that is said to contain specification for multipage documents is not released as of date.

Features 

The vector graphics have the distinctive feature of being scalable.  And hence, the word “scalable” seems to have been included in the acronym.  In actuality, vector graphics in general, and SVG in particular allows for other transformation than scaling like translation and rotation.

There are three types of elements that can exist in a SVG document/file.

• Vector graphic shapes like lines (straight and curved), circles/elipses, and bounded shapes like polygons
• Raster images
• Text

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In the last post on feeds (Feeds - RSS), we discussed about the brief history and the use of Feeds. This post, we will look into the little (and sometimes rather large), feed icons themselves.

As the Feed technology caught on, people started using different icons to provide the link to these Feed files. And apart from the RSS feeds (discussed in the previous post), there were other feed formats like the Atom format, and that caused a lot of confusion.

To counter this, the Mozzilla Foundation, around the end of 2005, proposed the common feed icons for RSS and Atom feeds, and the guidelines for its usage was published by the mid of 2006.

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It was sometime back when I was writing a tutorial to create crystal orbs at KalaaLog, that I realized the same technique can be extended to other elements - one of them being buttons that can be used in web design.

In this tutorial we will go through some simple (and few advanced) steps that would let you create a button for web pages with a crystal or glassy look to it.

I have used Inkscape myself, but I will try to be as generic as possible so that you may reproduce the results in other graphics utilities like PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Photo Paint.

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We come to the end of ‘CRAP design series‘. It has been quite a long series that any other that I have authored before. (The only other series posted here was the ‘SQL Basics Primer Series‘).

To state again what was stated in the first post of the series, there are 4 principles in designing that helps us design any document or web page to look aesthetically good. They are the Proximity, Alignment, Repetition and Contrast principles.

Now one may ask, can we just not use one of the principles and make the design look good? Or some may ask, which is the most important of these principles that one can focus on, in order to save from more work?

Well, there is no one important principle among the four, else there would have been only one principle and all else would have been just expressions of the one principle. That is not the case.

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