http://simonwillison.net/2004-03-21T21:34:09+00:00Simon Willison2004-03-21T21:34:09+00:002004-03-21T21:34:09+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2004/Mar/21/zendGoodies/#atom-tag

<p>Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> 5 tutorials via their <a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/">PHP5 InfoCenter</a>:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-xmlphp.php">XML in PHP 5 - What's New?</a> by Christian Stocker</li> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-SOAP.php">PHP SOAP Extension</a> by Dmitry Stogov</li> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-sqlite.php">SQLite Introduction</a> by Ilia Alshanetsky</li> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-tidy.php">Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5</a> by John Coggeshall</li> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-dotnet.php">Com_dotnet</a> by Wez Furlong</li> <li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-mysqli.php">Using ext/mysqli: Part I - Overview and Prepared Statements</a> by Zak Greant and Georg Richter</li> </ul> <p>The <a href="http://www.php.net/tidy">Tidy functions</a> look particularly useful, especially if you are interested in maintaining clean markup within your <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> applications.</p> <p>One thing that I would like to see addressed with the full release of <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> 5 is the increasing fragmentation of the <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/">PHP manual</a>. The single online manual now covers every version of <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> from 3 upwards, making it increasingly difficult to use effectively if you are targetting older versions of <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym>. The Python site maintains archived versions of <a href="http://www.python.org/doc/versions.html">previous documentation snapshots</a>, making it easy to refer to the documentation of the version of the language you are using. With the major changes between versions 4 and 5 of <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> a similar approach could be highly beneficial.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/php">php</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/php5">php5</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/zend">zend</a></p>

2002-11-03T20:58:52+00:002002-11-03T20:58:52+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2002/Nov/3/zendRedesign/#atom-tag

<p>Zend (the commercial company behind the <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</acronym> scripting language) have launched a redesign of <a href="http://www.zend.com/">Zend.com</a>. My verdict on the new design ... <em>terrible</em>.</p> <ul> <li>Non-standards compliant code and a huge mass of nested tables</li> <li>The main site navigation is a bunch of pull-down menus that don't work with javascript disabled (or in Opera)</li> <li>The fonts are tiny, and are sized using pixels meaning they can't be resized in IE.</li> <li>They haven't cleaned up the information architecture, which has been the worst part of the site for ages (there is still very little distinction provided between Articles, Tips, Columns, Tutorials and Code Gallery Spotlight)</li> <li>A lot of the navigation on the front page is images <em>with no alt attribute!</em> - navigating the site in lynx is a case of trying to guess which [LINK] goes where</li> </ul> <p>The positives? Well, it works in Netscape 4. Wake up and smell the coffee guys, 1996 was a long time ago.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/information-architecture">information-architecture</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/php">php</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/zend">zend</a></p>