wdvltalk Roundup June 2002 - Page 23

Please note that any suggestions and/or recommendations regarding Web hosting companies, software, etc. are solely derived from the members of the list and do not necessarily constitute a recommendation from the editors of wdvl or internet.com. Links are provided in the comments and suggestions for additional help or information.

Can someone tell me the difference between PHP, Perl, GNU and Reg Ex?

• PHP and PERL are programming languages.
  
  PERL (http://perl.com/) stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language", and is excellent for general-purpose scripting jobs - if you need to parse a text file quickly, for example, then PERL is for you. It's quick 'n' dirty, but it gets things done. Real masochists build whole websites with it :-)
  
  PHP (http://php.net/) stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". It's a language that borrows many concepts from C and PERL but is designed specifically for doing web-based work. If you've been on this list longer than a month you've probably seen me boring everyone to death by telling them how good it is over and over again.
  
  GNU and Regex aren't languages. GNU (http://gnu.org/) ("GNU's Not Unix!") is a suite of programs. Stick it together with a kernel - for example, Linux or HURD - and you have an operating system.
  
  Regex is a shorthand for "Regular expression", and it's a very powerful way of matching characters and patterns within strings. A good example of Regex use is for validating email addresses - you can set up a rule that says "it's valid if it has one @, at least one ., a TLD on the right, and everything is a letter or number" with just one line of code. There are loads of tutorials dedicated to Regexs all over the net, and an excellent O'Reilly book.

I added a rollover button feature to the front-page of my website. My question is: Do any of you feel it is necessary to have alt tags when rollover buttons are being used?

• Alt tags are very important to people using a text-only or text-to-speech browser to access your site, e.g. those with impaired eyesight. Otherwise they have to guess what the image is for. The only real reason to want to leave out alt tags (laziness isn't a real reason) is if you want to stop the yellow alt tag tooltip popping up and obscuring the image, but the title tag takes precedence so you can set a meaningful alt tag and an empty title tag and you won't get the yellow popup.

  <img src="xxx" alt="Image of a button - click to go to the help page"
  title="">
  

I have been asked to convert a mpeg, or video, into an animated image. Is that possible? If so, does anyone have any information or urls on how to do it?

• The program you want is Konvertor, which can convert almost anything to almost anything else... including, it looks like, AVIs or MPEGs to animated GIFs
  
  Free fully functional evaluation download from http://www.logipole.com/konvertor_us.htm
• I heard the new Flash can import and convert mpeg into flash movie.
• Thanks for your info. I was able to convert the mpeg into an animated *.gif file using Paint Shop Pro.

Is there anyway by which I can change the title of an HTML page dynamically using Javascript/Jscript at the Client Side?

• <Script Language=JScript>
  document.title= 'Name';
  </script>
  

  
  
  Replace the Name with the Title you want...

Is there away to change the chmod on all the files on a server via WS FTP?

• Highlight all the files first that you want to chmod, then click FTP-Commands>CHMOD

I'm doing a multi language site. I had the text translated into European languages and was able to code them using Homesite. However, my client also wants sites catering to Japanese and Chinese clients. I can have someone translate the text professionally. The problem is how to code them into html. Is there a way to do this?

• The answer is definitely "yes". Please visit http://portalfreeportal.com and check a link on the first page "Internationalization (i18n)".
• At the company I worked at last, the solution was to place page text phrases into a database. As the page was built (using ASP), it would select the correct fields for the particular language and insert them into the HTML. It required a DB setup that recognized multibyte characters (SQL Server). To add a new language all that had to be done was to get it translated and another column with the translation items added to the table.
  
  Not very pretty, but fast and scalable. Would be a chore for a very large site, but any language conversion method would be, anyway. Chinese and Japanese are a little odd in that you have to have additional character sets or something (I wasn't directly involved in it) loaded on the machine. One advantage to the DB method is that you can have translators work online through update pages.

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