Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

XML: Characters that require replacement

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

I was generating some html based e-mails and due to some changes I made in the text, my mail stopped being sent. I found that it was not liking some of the characters that were being placed in my generated emails. I tried some of the standard replacemnt methods, but found that the XML file was the issue. The Greater than(>) and less than (<) and the Amersand(&) and the apostrophe(') and the quote(") all have special meaning to XML and can cause these issues. Once I replaced the following characters in my email variable, my e-mails began to flow again.

Here is a table of the characters and their XML representations that can be used for replacement:

Name Character XML replacement
Ampersand & &
Apostrophe ' &apos;
Greater Than >r &gt;
Less than < &lt;
Quote " &quot;

This is by no means the complete list of replacements. This is only that characters that were needed by the calls to Java Mail that my program was using.

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HTML: How to use an external StyleSheet

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

There are two ways to include an external stylesheet.  Using a <link> tag in the <head> section of your web page or using the @import tag in a <style> section.  The @import tag can also be placed inside a CSS file to include other CSS files.

Example of an externally linked stylesheet named anyname.css

<head>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" name="anyname.css" href="url" media="all">

</head>

The name field is the filename and can be set to any path that is available to your Web Server. The media type can be specified in the link tag.

An example of a @import statement to include a CSS file:

<style>

@import('anyfile.css');

</style>

You can also specify the type of stylesheet with the @import statement:

@import('anyfile') screen;

@import('anyfile') print;

The @import statement is not understood by many older browsers, Netscape 4 ignores them completely and Internet Explorer 4 requires you to use parenthesis, even though they are optional.  Luckily, there should be very few people still using these browsers and this is a useful technique to not include features that would not work in those browsers.

The @import directives must be the first items in your CSS. Even comments should not appear before these statements.

Internet Explorer versions 4-7 have the limitation that they do not like specifying the type on the @import line.  I have not researched if this is the case with versions 8 and above.

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Posted in CSS, html, Web Design | No Comments »