Eran Nachum's Blog

How to render non supported fonts on HTML?

eranachum@hotmail.com (Eran Nachum) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:33:00 GMT

Did you ever get from your graphic designer a request to build a website of a web application according to his/her design including the strange (but nice and designed) font called “Myriad Pro” or some else non supported fonts by the common browser?!?

The common answer that I've responded always is: “Let go for Arial or Verdana – it’s supported by all browsers!!, or if you want let’s put an image text with your design – but remember it will affect SEO badly…!”

It seems that there is a beautiful solution for this “problem” which let you the ability to render every kind of font in the world in your website in order to get special, clean and “other” font layout.

The free online solution for this scenario is typeface.js. This solution let you upload your font declaration file into their website and the output will be a JavaScript file that hold all declarations of how to render the special non supported fonts.

Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site's graphic text in the font you want, you can use this solution and write in plain HTML and CSS.

I recommend to give it a try – I did!

http://typeface.neocracy.org/

Is Windows 8 Apps to be built on Javascript & HTML?

eranachum@hotmail.com (Eran Nachum) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:13:00 GMT

Is it seems to be that Microsoft is going to let developers use an open source in order to build Windows 8 applications?

I read a post on TNW that says Microsoft is going to do so – this approach will be called “New Windows” and will let an easy way to develop mobile and desktop apps using traditional JavaScript and HTML 5 for the UI layer.

It is important to say that Silverlight wasn’t mentioned in the Microsoft enouncement…!!!

I think that these are great news, which will open doors not only developers of all kinds (not only .Net developers and MS dedicated technologies developers), but to all “kinds” of developers.

Google Chart API - Another Great Thing from Google

eranachum@hotmail.com (Eran Nachum) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:47:56 GMT

Is Google is so kind or what? One more great tool and FREE of course that leashed by Google is the Google Chart API.

By their introduction, The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

If you want to generate charts, graphs, pies etc. this is a great tool for you - the web developer. This tool gives a good fight to all other charts generator like .NET Charting for example and other unwanted ActiveXs modules that need to be installed on the client (we always want to avoid this action - at least me), because it is FREE and also because it is Google.

So I already generated myself:

You can find it here.

An Introduction to HTML 5

eranachum@hotmail.com (Eran Nachum) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:46:09 GMT

First a small introduction to the HTML 5 introduction; If you are wondering why I didn't published during the last 2 weeks, the reason is a great vacation in New York - in one simple word - Insane. (pics will be delivered on the following days).

Now to our topic - HTML 5. We all used to (and still) work and know greatly HTML 4 - which actually is exists something like a decade, but HTML 5 is stands in front of us (but is still to come - the work is still on progress according W3C) and comes to simplify our life (as client developers - side by side to the server hard work of course).

Indeed, HTML 5 will going to introduce a whole new set of elements that will make out lives to much more easier, also based on the fundamentals of HTML 4. The main innovations comes to replace the HTML 4 basic elements as DIV for an instance (which is one of the most used elements) with simplify elements that will use to represent the purpose of each one of them, like header, footer, section etc. - each one of then is a new well known element in the new language. A page rendered with HTML 5 could be shown like the following code snippet:

One of the new innovations is the language definition. It means that HTML 5 is being defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM) as a tree representation that will be interpreted by the browser. This definition came from the idea of separating the language itself from its syntax, which can be defined independently.

As we know from previous HTML formats (HTML 4), there are 2 kinds of syntaxes: the HTML itself which is serialized as plain HTML or XHTML which is serialized as XML.

The coin has two sides - each holds its benefits (you also aware of it right? ;)).

The benefits of using HTML 5 (which based on the familiar HTML) are the compatible of existing browsers and the second thing is the acquaintance of it by the authors (in our case - people like me and you!).

On other hand, using XHTML 5 will encourages authors to write well-formed markup, which some authors may find easier to maintain and Integrates directly with other XML vocabularies.

This is still under consideration, so we have to wait to the decision...

Some more tutorials and information regarding HTML 5 you can find in the W3C site here.