Eventually we'll see the day when we can purely use HTML5 and CSS3 and have no fear that anyone who actively browses the web will have such an ancient client that they can't see what we've intended. Unfortunately that day isn't today, so we still need to have options...
I've been using PHP for years. In some ways it's a messy language, but it gets the job done and is widely adapted in the web community. How about another programming language called, "Ruby on Rails"? Let's have a comparison between the two. For those not familiar with...
HTML5 has a lot of new features. One of the coolest but not often utilized is the newelement. It allows pages to embed video files without requiring the user to download a plugin. By default YouTube videos use HTML5 if the user's browser supports it, and use Flash...
If you're using special (non-Latin) characters in your pages or emails, you'll want to convert those characters to HTML Entities. This naturally raises a few questions. What are HTML Entities? Why does it matter? What will happen if I don't? How do I do it? If you...
Out of all the various online services provided by Google, few have seen as many major updates as Maps. From in-browser Google Earth to public transportation and Walking directions to Live Traffic, and now 3D route preview, also known as Helicopter View. Paul Yang...
Everyone who accepts credit/debit card payments online needs to be familiar with and implement the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This is easiest for merchants who don't directly handle any cardholder data. For example, if your store hands the shopping...
Recently I've been working with image manipulation in PHP, using GD and ImageMagick. Both libraries are very useful but they're quite different in a number of ways. I thought I'd take this opportunity to go over some of the differences and provide some suggestions on...
A great website design is an important part of a good marketing strategy. However, it's also important to realize where the website fits within that strategy, and that it isn't the whole strategy. Even within the website itself, a great design is useless if nobody can...
We've covered almost everything we need to create QR Codes. The next thing we need is version information blocks. The version information blocks simply tell the reader what version the symbol is, and therefore how many modules wide and tall it is. Table 11 shows the...
Now that we've got the data and error correction sorted out, we're almost ready to place it in the symbol. As seen in Part 2, the data and error correction modules basically go everywhere that isn't taken up by something else. The reason we're not quite ready to place...
I had planned on holding off the error correction until later, but it really fits better right here. Before error correction is done, the data that we've generated must be broken down into "code words", which are just 8-bit bytes. All we have to do is take our "bit...
Now we'll cover how the data is encoded. There are several steps involved. First, the encoding method is chosen, then the raw data is converted to binary based on the encoding method, then the error correction algorithm is applied, and then the data is placed in the...