Vikash Gounder

I have never been a big fan of Microsoft FrontPage or any of the web editing tools by Microsoft. But i had a first look at Microsoft Expression 4 and honestly it is quite impressive, it is nothing like Microsoft FrontPage, must must better and faster in lot of facts (I don’t have any benchmarking results to confirm my claims). To top it off, it has support for HTML5 and CSS3 with it’s impressive IntelliSense (Can easily be accessed by typing Ctrl+Enter on the keyboard).

Okay back to the tutorial. By default DOCTYPE for HTML5 is not enabled in Microsoft Expression 4. Here are the following steps to enable it:

1. Open up Microsoft Expression 4 or older version
2. Click on Tool on the menu and select Page Editor Options…


Access Page Editor Options on MS Expression 4

3. Once the Page Editor Options… windows has popped-up, select the following settings as shown. Select HTML5 for Document Type Declaration and XHTML 1.1 for Secondary Schema. These settings could change in the future as HTML5 becomes more stable and acceptable by most browsers.


Page Editor Options in MS Expression 4

4. Create a new HTML to see the HTML5 DOCTYPE for a HTML Document in MS Expression 4.


DOCTYPE in MS Expression 4

Finally got a invitation to test Google Wave and first impression of it is just awesome. It runs very smoothly via Google Chrome even on a 256KB Broadband in Fiji.

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More information coming later

Just yesterday while trying to login to Gmail, i noticed on the Gmail Home Page on the New Feeds that Gmail Zurich office has rolled out themes which was so long overdue. Previously i used to Greasemonkey to rollout skins when login into Gmail.

This morning when i logged into one of my Gmail accounts, a popup came up mentioning the themes into my account and i used for the preset themes Gmail provides and one word to describe it “AWESOME”. The theme plugin seems to be light and hardly any overhead especially since I’m checking my email from Fiji on 256KB Broadband.

I think they are rolling out themes on the account creation time basis or maybe on the server, since i have another email account with Gmail and the themes tab doesn’t appear under Settings yet. Just looking around to find a way to port own themes and uploading to the server or maybe someone has already done.

But the new theme feature is really nice and superb way to customize your own Gmail account. Excellent Work Gmail Team.

One of my former workmates and good friend Marijke Wilhelmus had a problem with a flash file and a drop-down menu. Okay here is a problem, the website she was working on a drop-down menu and below that was a flash file, on IE the drop-down menu seems to work fine without any overlapping. On Firefox, the flash file would overlap the drop-down menu. The original HTML flash code:

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<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="570" height="200" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="quality" value="high" />
         <param name="LOOP" value="false" />
         <param name="src" value="someflash.swf" />
         <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="570" height="200" src="someflash.swf" loop="false" quality="high"></embed>
</object>

I surfed on Google, found few solutions and recommendation, most didn’t seem to work. The solution is within the flash embedding code rather than the layout. The original html code was missing the

which actually helps and makes the drop-down menu/flash file behave the way we want. With some small tweaking, here it is:

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<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="570" height="200" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
	<param name="quality" value="high" />
	<param name="LOOP" value="false" />
	<param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
	<param name="src" value="someflash.swf" />
	<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="570" height="200" src="someflash.swf" wmode="opaque" loop="false" quality="high"></embed>
</object>

And another factor to note is the order which always is a problem, but with most older browsers it may be a problem. Seems to work fine on IE/Firefox/Safari.

Below is the Before:

This is after the tweaking: