We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

Don your glad rags and party hats, it’s time to celebrate! Microsoft have announced that their new interoperable release of Internet Explorer (IE8) will be standards compliant by default.

Their explaination for change still hints at their stubborness though: “While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.”.

So what does this mean for us as designers?

Don’t misconceive me – I’m not primarily a designer, but I do design all sites I build …in pure CSS. This change will mean that we should know that our designs will render the same in all mainstream browsers such as FireFox, Opera, Safari and of course IE8 (provided we use valid CSS1, 2 or 3 [when fully supported] code). The days of running both FireFox and IE6/7, uploading your new CSS file and hitting F5 to find that the bug you just fixed in IE6/7 has now broken something else layout-wise should now be gone.

IE8 will support standards compliant mode as default, but will be backward compatible with our already ‘IE Bug-Fixed’ CSS files. So, to save us backtracking to make our previously written CSS files – which have no doubt taken us hours upon hours to write thanks to IE7- rendering modes – we can insert a meta tag into IE8 to set it to “Quirks Mode” for this exact purpose.

A final note

All in all, I don’t have much confidence in Microsoft and the web. This confidence decreases even more after hearing any one of Steve Ballmer’s semitars, especially the one about Microsoft winning the web. In my opinion, they never will, but this is a fantastic step in the right direction which leads me to say two things; Well done Microsoft, and two, Let’s get used to the days of IE7-.

Wow. This was definately a gig to remember! I’ve seen these guys a few times, but the amount of effort they’ve put into the release of their album has been phenomenal. The energy on stage was amazing, the music was spot on and everyone in the venue were on their feet.

I really hope these guys make it. They deserve it.

UPDATE: Please see my newer atricle on how to retrieve a random row, faster, without RAND().

This post assumes you know how to create and use a connection to a MySQL database in PHP and have a table named ‘quotes’ as shown below. In this post, I will aim to teach you how to use PHP to pull random quotes from a MYSQL table of quotes. This can be easily extended to pull a random banner as will be explained at the end of the post.

Let’s firstly assume we have a MySQL table similar to the following:

+----+------------------------------------------------+
| id | quote                                          |
+----+------------------------------------------------+
| 1  | I know Karate... and many other Chinese words! |
+----+------------------------------------------------+
| 2  | w00t this is geeky                             |
+----+------------------------------------------------+
| 3  | You're CLINICALLY MENTAL!                      |
+----+------------------------------------------------+

Now, in your PHP code, we need to:

1. Build a suitable MySQL query to obtain a random result from the ‘quotes’ table.
2. Store the result of the query to be used in the HTML somewhere.
3. Output the result in the HTML somewhere.

So, for step one we’d use something like the following:

$sSQLQuery = "SELECT quote FROM quotes ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1";
$aResult = mysql_query($sSQLQuery);
$aRow = mysql_fetch_array($aResult, MYSQL_ASSOC);
$sQuoteOfTheDay = $aRow['quote'];

There, the variable ‘$sQuoteOfTheDay’ now has the value of our randomly pulled quote. Let’s just analyse each line of the code above to see what it does.

$sSQLQuery = "SELECT quote FROM quotes ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1";

This line stores the MySQL query we’re going to use against the database. It says, in laymans terms, “Select just one random value of the quote field from the table named quotes”. All this line does though is store the query into the variable ‘$sSQLQuery’.

$aResult = mysql_query($sSQLQuery);

This line runs the MySQL query, storing the result of running the query in the variable ‘$aResult’. It’s important that we store the result of the mysql_query in a variable, as the result of running a successful MySQL query using PHP’s function ‘mysql_query’ doesn’t return a nicely formatted array that we can necessarily use.

$aRow = mysql_fetch_assoc($aResult);

This is probably the hardest line for me to explain. Firstly, many of you may have seen a similar line like this used in a ‘while’ loop. However, our MySQL query used the ‘LIMIT 1′ string, so we know we’re only going to get ONE result, hence no need for a loop. The function ‘mysql_fetch_assoc’ takes one parameter: the result of the successful ‘mysql_query’ which as we know is ‘$aResult’. My biggest tip here is to use the ‘assoc’ method wherever possible, as it creates the array in such a way that we can reference each element by the column name, not a number. This is particularly useful if you ever update the MySQL table to have more columns.

Anyway, this line basically says ‘Fill the variable ‘$aRow’ with the CURRENT row of the returned query’. We know that the CURRENT row of the returned query is the ONLY row, hence (again) the lack of a loop. As the result of our query would return something like:

+-----------------------------------------------+
| quote                                         |
+-----------------------------------------------+
| You're CLINICALLY MENTAL!                     |
+-----------------------------------------------+

Our variable (or array) would literally look something like:

Array ( "quote" = "You're CLINICALLY MENTAL!" )

Which leads us on to our last line:

$sQuoteOfTheDay = $aRow['quote'];

Which just assigns the value of ‘$aRow['quote']‘ to the variable ‘$sQuoteOfTheDay’. In other words, ‘$sQuoteOfTheDay’ now has the value of a random quote pulled from the database of quotes.

To use this in an HTML page, we would simply just use this (AFTER the above code has grabbed the random quote from the DB for us):

echo $sQuoteOfTheDay;

Which will output the quote of the day somewhere in the HTML code.

As I said at the beginning, this can be extended easily to pull an image for a banner by simply changing the quotes table to store image paths such as ‘images/my_image.png’ which can then be pulled in the same way, and then output similar to the following:

Obviously we changed the variable name here to $sImageOfTheDay just to keep things constant.

Hope this has helped someone!

Easy to follow PHP class tutorial (which is Object Orientated Programming – OOP). I’m not sure how to start this one… It can be quite difficult to understand PHP classes at first, but hopefully I’ll make everything seem easy! Let’s just get stuck in shall we…

Read More…

Wooo! Well I’ll be moving house on Tues 12th Feb, right before my birthday too!

Not that there have been lots of posts recently, but just so you know that there won’t be many over the next week or so.

I recently saw an image demonstrating What Beautiful HTML Looks Like. I’ve decided to do my own What Beautiful PHP and AJAX Looks Like image. You can also play with the actual application that this image demonstrates if you so wish!

The Source

This example makes use of the Prototype JavaScript library. I’m using this, as it simplifies AJAX calls, and keeps this tutorial simple. You can view the full source here, which you can view, copy and include in your AJAX applications. It contains suffice comments which should help you understand how everything works.

Credit for the email validation goes to ILoveJackDaniels. It’s not bullet-proof, but suffice for this example.

Comments would be much appreciated on this blog entry. Positive and constructive only.