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Blogs » Archive for May 7th, 2004
PDML: Portable Document Markup Language
Via Håvard Eide, who has a talent for getting the scoop on what’s new in PHP, (his PHP5 tutorial was the first online publication to take a close look at PHP5s new syntax): PDML: Portable Document Markup Language.
As it says on the cover;
PDML is an informal markup language written in 100% PHP, allowing to create complex PDF documents very easily for people already familiar with HTML. People familiar with PHP can also use it as a way to define templates for dynamic PDF documents.
A very cool idea and great to see effort going into this kind of project in PHP.
There’s a longer blog related to this subject, which is slowly brewing. When it comes to documents, have a hunch there’s too much emphasis on specific markups (e.g. docbook, html, rtf or whatever). Instead, by identifying the common “human intent” behind document markup, think it’s possible to define a set of “rules” which could be used as the basic of a framework that’s capable of transforming documents of any format to documents of any format (given parsers / generators).
Many of the basic rules have already been “captured” by PEAR::Text_Wiki. Might even work nicely with the …
PEAR Power Workshop
Tobias Schlitt has posted a short report on the International PHP Conference 2004 Spring Edition here.
Particularily interesting is the code he posted for MiniWIKI, an application Tobias and Lukas Smith put together during the PEAR Power Workshop, using the PEAR Auth, HTML_QuickForm, MDB2, LiveUser, Text_Wiki and XML_Serializer packages. Although source code isn’t usally quite as animated as it’s authors, the code published goes through five stages so it’s possible to follow it evolution more of less.
An interesting measure of what PEAR is cabable of and how it can help save development time.
Are You Thinking Big Enough?
Hopefully you’ve had the chance to read my latest article on Sitepoint:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/design-firms-think-big.
Today’s blog challenges you to post any of the following thoughts related to that article:
1. Your goals for your practice this year. It would be great to get a sense of the range of revenue goals that Sitepoint visitors have for the web design business — especially from those of you who have BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals, as described in the article). Why not post a realistic goal, and then a stretch goal?
2. What you will do differently to achieve those goals. To really think big, you often have to change what you are doing. The article talks about taking enormous, focused action. What kind of enormous, focused action are you willing to take? What action will be required to achieve your goals?
3. How you plan to achieve leverage beyond trading your time for dollars.
Your posts could inspire others to take action to achieve their most ambitious dreams, so please don’t be shy. Post something bold right now. Along with visitors who post regularly, I’m especially interested in seeing posts from web designers who haven’t posted something in a while (or ever).
Have a great weekend. Next …
Beautiful Iterative Art
As i’ve always followed closely the work of Jared over at levitated.net , I was pleased that he was releasing some of his computer generated art as a series of limited edition prints. Printed on fine quality acid-free watercolor paper and with good quality ink, I ordered a 19″x13″ copy of the Tree Garden I print and received it yesterday. It’s a wonderful piece of work and goes to show that Flash / Processing generated art can be considered alongside conventional art mediums for pleasing aesthetics and compositional quality.
There are 10 limited edition prints (final run of 42 each) that are available and they are well worth a look even if just to see more of Jared’s work in a differnet environment.
Also, if you’ve never stumbled across Jared’s caustic painting images using laser light photography, then click here ; the imagery created by this technique is truly stunning.
Quick and Dirty Way to get Image Dimensions
…posted by davidjmedlock:
img = tk.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(”C:\image.jpg”);
width = img.getWidth();
height = img.getHeight();
#width##height#
I’m by no means a master of all things Java, but this is an easy way to grab the height and width of an image. I haven’t tried it with GIF’s just yet, but I think it’ll work… Enjoy!
