Tag Archives: html

Programming, Web Applications, Work

Why can’t Forms PUT?

HTML Forms can declare a method, the HTTP verb that is used when the form is submitted, the value of this method is GET or POST.

The HTML5 spec briefly had PUT and DELETE as valid methods for the form method but has now removed them. Firefox also added support and subsequently removed them.

Recently over the course of Brexit night at The Guardian we got into a discussion about why this was the case and what the “right” way to map a form into a REST-like resource system would be.

The first piece of research was to dig into why the additional methods had been added and then removed. The answer (via Ian Hickson) was simple: PUT and DELETE have implied idempotency, the nature of form submission is that it is inherently uncacheable and therefore cannot be properly mapped onto those verbs.

So, basic problem solved, it also implies the solution for the url design for a form. A form submission represents a user submitting an untrusted data payload to a resource, this resource in turn choose to make PUT or DELETE requests but it would be dangerous to have the form do this directly.

The resource therefore is one that represents the form submission. In terms of modelling the URL I would be tempted to say that it takes the form :entity/form/submission, so for example: contact/form/submission.

There may be an argument that POSTing to the form resource represents submission so the submission part of the structure is unnecessary. In my imagination though the form resource itself represents the metadata of the form while the submission is the resource that essentially models a valid sumbission and the resource that represents the outcome of the submission.

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Java

Google please adopt a humane markup language

What do Google Pages, Blogger and Google Sites have in common? A rubbish HTML WYSIWYG editor component is what. Using the WordPress editor I am consistently impressed at how good the HTML generated is and how rarely I need to go from the Visual view to the raw HTML.

With Google’s version though you never know when you’re going to be dealing with a set of <br> instead of the paragraphs that you might have thought you were working with. In fact sometimes when the visual editor is going wrong I dread to switch views and find out what has actually been going on behind the scenes.

There are two ironies in this, firstly Google Docs actually has a decent HTML editor dressed up as a word processor. It still suffers from switching between paragraphs and break returns but it is generally pretty good at keeping in the same mode once you’ve manually set it.

The second irony is that I have been using Markdown in both Couch.it and Tumblr and I have to say that while there is some overhead in learning the syntax the truth is that Markdown pretty much gets everything right from a HTML point of view and is much quicker to right than a WYSIWYG component that you have to keep double-checking.

Please Google, if you really cannot cooperate internally to create one HTML editor that does the right thing could we please have an option to use a humane markup language. I don’t mind which one: Textile, Markdown, Wiki Creole – take your pick. Throw a power user a bone!

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Software, Web Applications, Work

String Templates, or what I learned from Python and doing nothing

It’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. The same is true of projects (although money generally helps more here; it’s an ill project that is making no-one any money).

I’m currently meant to be doing some work on Accessibilty for some new HTML pages. I thought it would be pretty easy but I was really wrong and it is changing the whole way I look at the View part of the (deceased) MVC web paradigm.

On my last project I was looking at things like Groovy’s Markup Builder and marvelling at how my collegues managed to put together a 30 line Freemarker template that did some pretty compex HTML assembly. In my spare time I have been looking at Haml as a way of escaping the verbosity and monotony of XHTML and to have the code guarantee the correctness of my page structure to avoid validation grind.

That’s because in those projects I was a developer/web designer. I wanted accurate, compliant HTML with minimum effort and which was easy to style without having awful CSS hacks.

On my current project I’m in the utterly baffling (for me anyway) world of .Net. There is no way that I can understand the huge variety of C#, XML and templating overrides that make up my current project. Having code generate HTML is a massive barrier to me being productive because, while I know a far bit of HTML having to root around an entire Visual Studio project to find the fragment that generates the problematic Div element you actually want to work with means I spend the whole day knowing nothing about .Net rather than applying the knowledge I do have.

Now some people are going to say that having a wacky Component model is different from having a nice templating language but look at something like Haml or Freemarker. The former is concise and fun and full of obscure rules; the latter is tremendously powerful, more firmly rooted in HTML and not much less obscure. For power users I agree, they are the bomb. They are a massive barrier to entry though, in a way that HTML just isn’t. People may do HTML badly but they rarely don’t do it at all.

This experience put combined with using Django/Jinja/Google App Engine is leading to me have a huge rethink about the way templating and views are put together. Passing a map of parameters to a template that is essentially exactly the way the output will look on the final device is obviously the way this problem should be tackled.

To try and get the HTML to generate in the current project I spent a day trying to get: SQLServer, BizTalk, Active Directory and Windows MQ to work together. This is utter madness and can only have been created by programmers who have no idea how to collaborate with non-programmers.

Why should I be trying to install BizTalk when what I want to do is actually generate some sample HTML so we can have a quick check of WAI standards? It should be possible to define some fixture data and then just generate HTML from the templates. It really shouldn’t be hard.

This experience is really changing the way I think about web frameworks. I am already determined to learn String Template, then I am going to look at whether my current favourite frameworks allow me to use it. I’m going to look at frameworks that ask you to put the HTML template next to the Java code. I want to know if I can put those templates in the same heirarchy that the actual website uses.

In short if I need to work with people outside the project team on a web project again, how can I get all the good things about templates and combine them with both simplicity and intuition as to how a website is organised?

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Web Applications

Google Sites: What I would like

I am not going to deny that the basic Wiki functionality is all there but there are a few things that I would like to see. Now I know it is a free service but I would actually be prepared to pay for some of this on a WordPress model (i.e. buy what you want when you need it).

  • Categories or page tagging
  • The ability to send a page to Google Docs or alternatively the ability to export to external formats as you can for a Google Document.
  • The comments section should collapse if there are no comments; ditto the attachments. If something does not apply to my page then I just need a simple text link to add it.
  • Most of all, proper HTML markup rather than a massive paragraph consisting of my whole page, with a BR tag… if I’m lucky. If I want to reuse my content then I cannot export it and its not even decent HTML. Blogger is no better but crazily Google Pages does the right thing!

As with Blogger I think Google is having some major integration issues with all the companies it has bought up. If one of the applications or systems has a cool feature then I think it is natural to assume that it will be available in all Google branded applications.

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Web Applications

CSS Table borders hiccup

Question: why do my HTML table cells have a space around them? Why don’t the join up like a normal table?

Answer: the border-spacing attribute is not set to zero by default. Try setting it explicitly to 0em in the style sheet.

I can’t believe this has caught me out twice! I don’t understand why you would not want the border spacing to anything other than zero by default.

I found this site to be really helpful for understanding the table model in CSS.

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