Office Binary File Formats

Source: slashdot.org/

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn’t. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. “[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office’s binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You’d be wrong on all four counts.”

the info…

10 best CSS hacks

by Dejan Cancarevic

http://stylizedweb.com/

If you are front end coder you must know how important is to make cross browses, valid CSS and xHTML code. And also you must know how much time we are spending in all those hacks and fixes for various browsers.

Here is the list of 10 hand picked CSS hacks and tricks which can help you in your CSS code and also save some time.

mooSlideBox 3

The mooSlideBox v3 is a small and slim ajax based extension or replacement of the common “lightbox” that can be found on nearly every page.
This lightbox clone works in IE 6/7, Opera and Firefox.

Visit mooSlideBox WebSite

Nine Javascript Gotchas

by Patrick Fitzsimmons

1) Comma Caused Coruption

<script>
var theObj = {
city : “Boston”,
state : “MA”,
}
</script>

Notice the comma after “MA”? It will be the source of many woes. Firefox will pay it no heed, but it will create a syntax error in IE. Worst of all, IE will not tell you where the actual bug is. The only soution is to scan through your entire 2,500 line javascript file trying to find that extra comma.