There are many different types of microformat such as hCard, RDFa, eRDF. A simple hCard information is added through classes in span tags. For example:
hCard
<span class="tel"> <span class="type">phone</span>: <span class="value">01234 56789</span> </span>
Would create telephone information on a business website say. Read the rest of this entry »
Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development
Understanding what it is that the client needs is an integral part of software development. The client will usually help you out by telling you what they need the system to do. What you will have then is a big list of the things that the system should do. Rather than explain the difference between the terms "function requirements" and "non-functional requirements" to the client, you can save time by using MoSCoW. This is an abbreviation for Must, Should, Could, Won’t and can also be written as MSCW or a number of different ways. I prefer the addition of the o’s as it makes it seem more friendly. The idea behind MoSCoW is to go through everything that the client wants the system to do and applying one of the four terms to that feature. Lets break each word down.
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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development
Performance is a big issue on the web, if you pages take too long to load then people will go elsewhere. Sometimes your problems can be solved with cache control on your server, but still some cases require optimisation of your code. For this task, you should be using a technique known as ‘profiling’ – essentially a debug log of what your script or program did during execution, which functions were called and how long it took. It gives you a great glimpse into what it is that is taking too long to execute which means you have something concrete to look at when you need to optimise your system.
Fortunately Read the rest of this entry »
Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development
AJAX has been hard to miss over the last few years, but if you still haven’t played around with it you could be missing out. If you don’t even know what it means, then it supposedly stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML – but don’t let that catch you out. It is simply a means to communicate between a user’s browser after they have loaded your page and your web server – Javascript and XML need not be involved! I’m more of a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) man myself, preferring it to XML due to its smaller footprint and closer relation to programming data structures. For this quick tip, I shall be using it along with PHP and some rather neat Javascript code made possible by the great framework jQuery. Read the rest of this entry »
Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development
