It’s nice that at least you’re moving your site to mobile device. It’s really important. Now if you’re using PHP the question is how to detect the mobile browser.
Every PHP developer knows that $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] string optionally contain the browser that access your site, but what are the possible values of this string?
in that really really full list of user agent strings: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html
Now continuing from the JavaScript libraries post, let me ask you who’s your server side language of choice?
Please feel free to share your opinion!
Lately most of the web developers are talking more and more about optimization. One of the practices everybody’s supporting is to use cookie free domains for static content. First of all, what’s static content. That, in breve, are all images, JavaScripts and CSS. That’s everything that’s transmitted to the client with no change from the server at all. In a typical PHP/MySQL site everything generated on the server site is considered dynamic, while every component that’s given to the client with no change is static. That’s why they don’t need cookies in the request.
That’s what Yahoo! YSlow says:
In a short example, lets say you’ve a web page with 10 background images used by its CSS file. Here’s a good practice to combine them in one or even use base64 for them, but that’s another talk. So in that scenario you’ll send all the cookies you’ve on the site with this images, but actually they don’t profit at all from this. The question is why you should send all this data with no need? Won’t you benefit from sending it with no cookies.
As it sound logical I read some articles recently describing that the benefit from putting the static content on a non-cookie domain doesn’t pays back. OK it may be strange, however every 40 ms or whatever of page load is important, aren’t they?
The problem is that if you’d like to setup a cookie free domain the things are becoming a bit harder. You’ve two options:
All this indeed a bit tricky! So let me proceed with the next topic.
A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a term become famous with the growing web. Now big sites have servers in almost every continent and perhaps country. CDN is an abstraction of all this. The good thing is that there’s supposed to be stored static content. Think about the YouTube’s video files. Another good thing is that this domains are cookie free by default. The thing is …
You’ll benefit from both ideas. Cookie free domains with CDN. In one side the web page will benefit from the closest location of the server and the CDN and in other side all this will come with no cookies to you. That’s really nice and most of the time people thing of CDN for only storing large scale data, such as video files, but no one says you cannot put your CSS, JavaScripts and background images there!
Have you ever mentioned the existence of the LABEL tag? Have you ever used it? I guess the majority of us don’t. Let’s take a look of the following chunk of code:
<label>username:</label> <input type="text" name="username" /> |
It looks familiar to every web developer, but the most common usage in web forms is:
<div>username:</div> |
or
<span>username:</span> |
In fact if you use LABEL for the form instead of DIV or SPAN you’ll get the exactly same result as layout, beside that most common usage is a DIV or SPAN in place of the forgotten LABEL?! Why is that?
Can you see the difference between LABEL and SPAN?
For me the usage of DIV has become critically enormous. It may sound strange that there is a debate about the usage of one or another HTML tag, but don’t you think every little text label in a web project is surrounded by a DIV. Actually that makes clear that if you’d like to be semantically correct, than you should use LABEL.
The funny thing is that almost every project is loading its labels in a PHP array or object or whatever and there they are called “Labels”, but when it comes to HTML they are put into a DIVs.
In fact this is important because this is really good for web robots. If this is not important for the human eye it is for a machine “eye”. That’s why there are two tags for bold text.
You can see that most of the browsers display both tags exactly the same by default.
Why’s that? Because STRONG is semantically more important than <B>.
So if you want to make a text simply looking bold, wrap it in <B>, but if you want to make it important both for the human eye and for the machines, than use STRONG.
Source: complete demo.
A typical web developer knows exactly how a PHP if statement looks like:
if ( expression ) { // if the expression was true proceed here } else { // there was a false expression } |
When it comes to merge PHP and HTML the things are becoming ugly. Indeed most of the template systems as Smarty are improved and developed to overcome this issue, however when working with a native PHP code with no template system or with template system where the PHP code is allowed the things are really bad.
Let me show this in a breve example. Image you have to show different formatted HTML depending on a PHP expression. Something like that
<?php if (expression) { ?> <div class="message">OK. Your registration is successful</div> <?php } else { ?> <div class="error">Something went wrong! Please try again later! </div> <?php } ?> |
Now you can see how difficult to maintain this code is when it doesn’t make use of only one code of HTML markup. Imaging you’ve to print differently formatted tables! Indeed the PHP curly brackets are different to follow.
So there is a PHP syntax that tries to help you manage this. You can write more human readable code like this:
<?php if ( expression ) : ?> <div>message goes here</div> <?php endif ?> |
Thus you get the ENDIF instead of only one curly bracket. That’s indeed readable enough. In fact you can use this syntax with any conditional or loop statement in PHP:
<?php foreach($array as $key => $val) : ?> <div class="message"><?php echo $val ?></div><br /> <?php endforeach ?> |
To return in the previous example the code above should be transformed in that:
<?php if ( expression ) : ?> <div class="message">some message here!</div> <?php else : ?> <div class="error">some error here!</div> <?php endif ?> |
