In September 1995 I started my first job in the IT world as technical support at a local university. The internet was young and I remember the first time I started a copy of Netscape, I was blown away. I just wanted to create my own pages, so I went on line and taught myself how to write HTML, JavaScript and classic ASP, and have been developing web sites and applications ever since.

I'm sure, like many other web developers and designers I'm often asked by people how to get started in this business. Obviously there is a lot more options and information around now than when I started out, but I think you can learn a almost all you need to know without paying a penny.

So here are 10 essential internet resources you should check out if you want to start a career in web development.

Converting HTML & JavaScript to an ASP.Net control

In the last post we created a image gallery control using HTML and JavaScript using the jQuery library. In this post we are going to take this control and turn it into an ASP.Net control that can be used in an ASP.Net website or web application.

There are number of steps we are going to have to go through to wrap the HTML / JavaScript construct we created in the last post and render it out from an ASP.Net control.

The control needs to allow the web site designer to be able to modify various settings, such as the period between image changes and the fade out time. It needs to allow definition of the different images within the array and, lastly, render the modified the HTML and JavaScript.

Why start using jQuery with ASP.Net?

I have been working with internet technologies now for over ten years and for most of those I have worked with Microsoft technologies, such as ASP or ASP.Net.

For most of this time there has always seamed to be a massive disconnect between the backend ASP or ASP.Net code and the front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have often found that when people build sites using technologies like ASP.Net they ignore the power of JavaScript especially, instead either doing things through backend code or using another technology, such as Flash.

This is, I think, because:

• As most screen readers do not support JavaScript, any critical functionality that is implemented in JavaScript needs to also be implemented in backend code. This increases the development time.
• Documentation on how to access the HTML rendered by ASP.Net controls via front end JavaScript is very limited.
• Most people find JavaScript development tools limited in their functionality and therefore development is more difficult than backend development using tools like Visual Studio.
• Various browser implementations of JavaScript are massively different, this causes many compatibility headaches.

This is why I was very interested in the announcement announcement that Microsoft where going to start shipping jQuery, the JavaScript library, with Visual Studio. This should be a real boast to JavaScript integration with ASP.Net and means ASP.Net developers have no excuse now not to learn JavaScript.

The first question that most people have asked me is, ‘Why would you want to?’

The answer is because I want to cause a form post back and the control needs to be styled like a hyperlink.

If you build websites using ASP.Net and C#, you have three controls that can do this, the standard form button, the image button and the hyperlink button.

The obvious choice would be the hyperlink button. This, however, has a fundamental flaw; it does not work when the user has JavaScript disabled. Many disabled Internet users require the use of applications that do not support JavaScript. This is why the WCAG accessibility guidelines say that the site should still be useable without JavaScript. This is practice means that JavaScript can only be used for non essential functionality and cannot be used for submitting a form.

What web browsers will this work with?

The following CSS has been tested with Internet Explorer 6 and 7, FireFox 2 and 3 and Safari 3, all on Windows. These are the standard supported browsers platforms most developers need to support, however I cannot see a reason why it should not work on other operating systems.

I have been building web sites now for about ten years. About three to four years ago I was introduced to the world of best practice web design, accessibility and search engine optimization. Now we have the dawning of the so called semantic web, where search engines understand what an web page’s content is about. It has slowly been dawning on me that the HTML and XHTML standards seam to have a few gaps when it comes to ways of structuring a web page’s content.

How to structure a web page’s content.

Currently, the only ways to designate headers and signify the start of sections within a web page’s content is to use the H1 – H6 tags.

Numerous blog posts and best practice tutorials and guidelines always say that headers should be used in the following way;

• Headers should be used to specify the document structure.
• There should be only one H1 tag.
• And that subsequent headers should be in order, i.e. an H3 can only come after an H2, an H4 after an H3, etc.

The problem with this is that it implies that anything marked with an H2 or higher tag is related to the main document content in a parent-child relationship.

This was fine in the days when each web page was effectively either one document, or one chapter of a larger document. Every thing in the web page was content, there where no left hand or right hand columns filled with navigation controls, adverts, quick links and other widgets and controls.

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