April 22, 1999

What are frames used for?

Question: What are frames used for? Answer: Frames came on the scene a few years ago as a way to display information from more than one HTML page at once. Frames can be a mixed blessing if not coded properly. It can be difficult to coordinate the various frames in

ASP’s Advantages Over CGI

Question: As a Web designer, I’ve used HTML, JavaScript, and DHTML in my projects. But now I see the need for server-side programming/scripts for my near future projects. I did a little bit research on CGI and ASP. I found that ASP seems to be easier and faster, but can

Managing Your Links

Question: I have a Web site with a large number of links broken down into categories. This directory has become a nightmare to manage. Is there a way to automate the process of managing links on a Web site? When you go to Yahoo.com, they have the links in categories,

GIFs vs. JPEGs

Question: What is the difference between GIFs and JPEGs and when would you use either in Web development? Answer: GIFs are seen most often on Web sites. They are usually used to display drawings, diagrams, and other less-than photo-quality images. GIFs are also used to show simple animations. GIF files

Caution: Service Pack has Arrived

No product is perfect when it heads out the door. Sooner or later a service pack will be released. When using SQL Server, you should always be on the lookout for a new service pack–not just for SQL Server but for NT. However, I recommend that you do not install

Cross-Platform Line Separators

When your application generates multiple lines of output and is responsible for manually separating those lines, you may be inclined to insert an instance of the linefeed character (usually represented as ” “). For example: java.io.Writer wr;…wr.write(“First line”);wr.write(” “);wr.write(“Second line”); While this code may work for many applications on some

Detecting Browser Plug-Ins

Browser plug-ins, such as RealPlayer, Shockwave/Flash, Quicktime, and others, can add multimedia functionality to a Web site and help attract and retain visitors. If a particular visitor doesn’t have a particular plug-in, however, the savvy Web designer will want to provide a different experience–an animated GIF, a Netscape sound, or

Specifying the Size of a Vector During Construction

It is possible to specify the requested storage size of a vector during construction like this: #include using namespace std;int main() { vector vi(1000); //initial storage for 1000 int’s //vi contains 1000 elements initialized by int::int()} Remember that vector::reserve() allocates raw memory without initializing it. The constructor, on the other