Update: This was an old post, but it's still at the top so I've reinstated the code for this year as well. Take 40% any purchase on the site.

USE [master]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_TruncateLogs] 
       @databaseName nvarchar(1024)
AS
BEGIN
 SET NOCOUNT ON;

 DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(1000)
 DECLARE @logfilename NVARCHAR(1000)

 SELECT @logfilename = b.name
 FROM sys.sysdatabases a 
  INNER JOIN sys.sysaltfiles b
   ON a.dbid = b.dbid
 WHERE fileid = 2
  AND a.name = @databaseName

 IF @@rowcount = 1 BEGIN
 
  SET @sql = '
  USE ' + @databaseName + '
  BACKUP LOG ' + @databaseName + '
  with truncate_only
  dbcc shrinkfile (' + @logfilename + ', 1)'

  EXECUTE sp_executesql @sql
 END

END

Next, just add it to the loop in the original ColdFusion scheduled task script:

<cfstoredproc datasource="master" procedure="dbo.sp_TruncateLogs">
      <cfprocparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#ListGetAt(variables.databases, variables.i)#" />
</cfstoredproc>

On the other hand, some things look like they were tacked on as an afterthought, and the overall interface is not as user-friendly as a basic Windows program should be that has been around for as many years as it has. The title bar is gone and the path to the current file has been stuck into a little spot that is reserved for page tabs. It sounds like a minor thing, but it's one of the most important parts of coding in a multi-tab editor. As soon as you open more than a few pages, the file path is cut off, and with a few more open, it disappears. Major step backwards here:

The other obvious usability problem here is the black text on dark grey in the tabs. On a laptop it's impossible to see, as is the white text on the dark grey. Also, the individual pages have a close button (X) which is a great bonus, but it would have been nice to have a close button on the frequently used panels (like Find/Replace) so you don't have to right click to pick a menu item to close a panel. Also, the entire border of the program is gone, making it blend into other open programs on your desktop. I understand this is the new "owl" interface, but owls should be left in the woods to live in trees. We really don't need the artsy fartsy stuff in a code editor.

But all in all, I would recommend the program. I use Eclipse all day long at my place of employment, and it is simply not as intuitive or easy to use as DW. Code view in DW has come a long way since the days of Ultradev. Download it and try it out, and by all means make suggestions in the forums on things that can be made better.

My latest book, "The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP", has just been published, and is now shipping from Amazon.com (and possibly other places). It's a major rewrite of "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8", and has six chapters devoted to working with Spry, including one that shows you how to combine Spry with PHP to make an accessible online gallery. Roughly 60% of the material in the book is new. For more details, see my site:

http://foundationphp.com/egdwcs3/

I recommend it highly to anyone interested in Dreamweaver and/or PHP.

TODCON is always a key event for the Dreamweaver community, despite it's small size. I should say because of -- not despite -- it's small size. Everybody is accessible, and by the end of the conference everybody ends up knowing each other. This year it was even better, as Adobe sent over a dozen representatives to meet with the attendees to gather feedback. They sent some of the top-level people on the Dreamweaver team, including the product manager Kenneth Berger. I got to talk shop for quite a while with Randy Edmunds (formerly from the Drumbeat team) and former Interakt guys Lucian and Christian. I also met and reconnected with some people I've known through the newsgroups and the Dreamweaver community. Being Vegas, there was also gambling, drinking, and eating. I played a bit of poker and went down a little, but didn't get to play very much. Mostly I was preparing presentations and socializing, with a little poolside relaxation mixed in.

I also didn't see a lot of the presentations, but of the ones I saw, the keynote was the most interesting -- showing the cool new features of Photoshop CS3 and Fireworks CS3, which I have not used yet. I was sorry I didn't get to see any of the Flex presentations, but CFUnited at the end of the month will have quite a few of those.

Next year TODCON will likely return to Orlando, but if you have a chance to get to one you really should check it out.

There are many companies out there with shopping cart software, and some have come and gone. I'm sure many of them are great products, too. One thing about me that you might know if you've purchased extensions from this site is that I try to stand behind my code. I came to Cartweaver after version 2 had already been out, and translated the complete existing cart to PHP. I have complete ownership of the PHP code for Cartweaver, having translated or written every line of code in the product, and complete ownership of support for that product. For me, a product is like a child. You might send them off when they grow up, but you are always there for them. Now I have ownership of the CF code as well. Although I didn't write most of it, I am imtimately familiar with it. It's another of my children. Some of the larger companies that sell cart software stand behind their products, but you never really know who wrote what, or who to contact regarding problems. To me, writing code for a large project like this is like writing a novel or giving birth. This one was a douzy. I probably should have gotten the epidural.

See Cartweaver 3 in action at http://www.cartweaver.com/demos/. Existing CW 2 customers get the current upgrade price of $100. If you purchased within the last 60 days, the upgrade is free. To get your free upgrade, go to the Cartweaver site and add the product to your cart. After you login, the purchase price will be reduced to $0.00 so that you can add the product to your purchases and download it. Address any purchase questions to the support site at http://support.cartweaver.com/.

To purchase, go to http://www.cartweaver.com/

In the coming weeks and months I hope to have some articles and add-ons for Cartweaver 3.

For more information on the acquisition, check these links:

• Scott Fegette's blog
• Alexandru's blog
• Bogdan's blog
• Interakt FAQ
• Discontinued extensions

What does this mean for extensions and extension development? I'm not quite sure yet, but having someone in Adobe familiar with the extension development community cannot be a bad thing. Interakt has already provided much of the code that has become part of DW 8.

One of the key problems with the company Macromedia before being integrated into Adobe was that the program APIs would change from version to version. This was true in Dreamweaver, as well as Flash. After Adobe took over Dreamweaver, we had a huge API change from 8.0.1 to 8.0.2 that broke many extensions. Dreamweaver is a volatile program, patched together with hundreds of thousands of lines JavaScript and HTML, and has become in some ways even more volatile with the multi-user configuration setup introduced in DW MX 6.0. I can only hope that this situation will eventually change as the program becomes more stable and standardized, and the core team of JavaScript programmers from Interakt, familiar with advanced extensibility and the various problems of past Dreamweaver code, becomes part of Adobe.

Congrats to Interakt and Adobe.

Some Dreamweaver 8.0.2 issues have been reported specific to the PHP/MySQL server model. Adobe has created a Dreamweaver extension fix for both Windows and Macintosh that resolves these issues. You should only install the extension fix if you are using the PHP/MySQL server model and experiencing one of the specific issues listed below:

• SQL queries with the MySQL CONCAT function are rewritten  (Ref. 207218)
• XSL Transformation server behavior doesn't work with PHP 5.1.4  (Ref. 207225)
• PHP simple recordset writes incorrect code with filter using "Entered Value" and LIKE clause  (Ref. 207462)
• Backslashes incorrectly added to GET and POST data when magic quotes are turned off  (Ref. 208374)

The fix is not available as a download, but you can read the details at http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=b6c2ae2a and contact Adobe tech support at the address given at that page to receive the download.

Note that the fix is ONLY for the PHP server model, and does not address the numerous issues with the other server models that I have blogged about in the past here and here. The main issue with the 8.0.2 updater is that it does not allow a programmer to write a dynamic query for searching or sorting using Dreamweaver recordset functionality, as outlined in the previous posts. This is a huge limitation that did not exist in previous versions of Dreamweaver (8.0.1 and earlier). My search and sort extensions have addressed the issue, but for people who write their own code, Dreamweaver is essentially still broken. This hotfix addresses some minor issues that a few users might encounter.

• Recordset Navigation Suite
• Detail Page Navigation Suite
• Horizontal/Vertical Looper
• and most others.

The bad news is that some extensions that rely on dynamic SQL strings are affected:

• Sort Repeat Region (all versions)
• Dynamic Search Suite (ASP and PHP versions are affected -- ColdFusion version is not)

The Dreamweaver 8.0.2 updater effectively renders it impossible to write certain kinds of queries in Dreamweaver and take advantage of the following built-in Dreamweaver functionality:

• Recordset testing
• Ability to drag/drop fields to the page
• Ability to use recordset fields in other areas of the program (property inspector, behaviors, other extensions)
• Ability to edit a recordset after it has been written

Basically, this also renders it impossible to write queries using the Dreamweaver recordset dialog box that do dynamic sorting (using a link, dropdown list, or other mechanism) or dynamic search strings. Also, David Powers points out that certain MySQL functions like CONCAT() are stripped out of the query when it is added to the page.

I'll use PHP as an example in the following, because I have already examined the problems in the updater for PHP. There are also similar problems with the other languages with the same results.

In the past, you would be able to do something like this:

SELECT field1, field2 FROM mytable ORDER By someparam

and then set up the parameter in the recordset dialog box to use your own variable for the dynamic sort, like the following sample:

<?php
function tfm_cleanOrderBy($theValue, $defaultSort) {
  if (preg_match("/^[\w,]{1,50}\s+(asc|desc)\s*$/i",$theValue, $matches)) {
    return $matches[0];
  }
  return $defaultSort;
}

$tfm_orderby =(!isset($_GET["tfm_orderby"]))?"SKU_ID":$_GET["tfm_orderby"];
$tfm_order =(!isset($_GET["tfm_order"]))?"ASC":$_GET["tfm_order"];
$sql_orderby = $tfm_orderby." ".$tfm_order;
$sql_orderby = tfm_cleanOrderBy($sql_orderby, "field1");
?>

The reason this does not work any more is that Adobe has included a new function in every PHP page that uses a recordset, whether the page requires it or not: GetSQLValueString(). Every parameter that is added to the recordset dialog box has to pass through this function. The problem with this is that Adobe did not provide any mechanism for user defined variables. Basically, you can use a number or a text string, but the text strings will always have quotes added to them whether needed or not, and the numbers will always be stripped of any text.

Adobe could have easily provided a mechanism to do this by adding a "passthrough" or "user-defined" type for the parameters, but the updater was hastily released with little testing or regard to the different user situations in dynamic programming.

Hopefully Adobe will come up with some sort of fix for the many thousands of Dreamweaver users who sort their recordsets dyamically or create dynamic search queries.

Previously: Adobe releases DW Updater -- problems, more problems, and yet more problems

I have not had a chance to test the updater yet with any extensions, but if you are one of my customers and have an issue please let me know via the contact form. Apparently some extensions are not working well with the new updater. This was posted in the Dreamweaver forums by Alexandru from Interakt:

Hi guys,
If you use InterAKT's extensions a lot, please refrain from upgrading to
Dreamweaver 8.0.2 for a week or so.

We have discovered several incompatibilities and we're working on some
fixes that will be released next week.

http://www.interaktonline.com/Company/News/
Details/Dreamweaver+8.0.2+incompatible+with+our+products.html?news=283

We apologize for any inconvenience,

Alexandru

Other users have reported issues with recordsets in ASP. Some users couldn't run the updater because it requires the CDROM. I'm sure more problems will pop up. Keep an eye on the Macromedia forums. I usually advise updating DW, but in this case I would say DO NOT UPDATE, unless you have read all the technotes and think that the update will not affect you adversely.

Adobe has also posted some technotes regarding the updater. The following lists the general fixes in the updater:

Resolved issues with Dreamweaver 8 update (8.0.2)

Make sure you read these technotes before updating. Some of these potential problems are severe:

• Server-side parameters have incorrect capitalization after active content conversion
• Dreamweaver 8.0.2 JavaScript API changes
• Adobe active content JavaScript fix fails in some installations of Internet Explorer
• Active content JavaScript file not created for existing files that already have active content reference
• Dreamweaver was unable to convert all of the tags on this page
• Converting Active Content with the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 Update

Also, the following technotes describe the SQL injection fixes in the updater:

• ColdFusion
• PHP
• ASP VBScript
• ASP JavaScript
• JSP

The full list of changed files in the Dreamweaver updater (for those of you who care) courtesy of Beyond Compare is at http://www.tom-muck.com/blog/samples/dw8updaterreport.cfm.

The other issue with these updaters is that you have to disable all extensions before running the updater, which takes a lot of time if you have a lot of extensions. Someday MacrAdobe will release an updater that doesn't require all this nonsense. It's the only program I know that makes you jump through hoops to run a simple updater.

Update: At least two of my extensions are incompatible with the DW 8.0.2 updater -- Sort Repeat Region and Dynamic Search -- but not in all server languages. Sort Repeat Region seems to work fine in PHP, but not ASP. I will try to get these updated to work with Adobe's code changes as soon as possible.

Update: Alexandru from Interakt asked me to change his quote from above to the following:

1. Everybody should upgrade to Dreamweaver 8.0.2, and start editing and reapplying their recordsets for adding the security measures. You should do this for all your sites - and re-upload them to your live servers.

2. If you use our extensions, you should stop using them until we release a new version - probably today

I should note that the security problem with the Macromedia code has been around for about 6 years, which they posted a partial fix for about 3-4 years ago that took care of most of the issues. I'm not happy about the way they went about making the change and dropping a bomb on us extension developers. Basically, any advanced server behavior that depends on dynamic SQL (even if we code it properly) will break the Dreamweaver recordset. I will have more information about my own extensions next week.

Macromedia uses the naming convention MM_ at the front of their variables and functions. This is a naming convention that is supposed to reduce support problems because it is a name that a typical user would not use. Since Macromedia's code is built for distribution and may be used by many different users, variable name conflicts could easily occur. In other words, if Macromedia named a variable temp, it might conflict with a variable that a user sets up named temp. However, MM_temp is not likely to conflict with a user's variable name. However, this user wanted to keep his names consistent and decided to prefix everything with MM_.

As far as I know, this is not really documented anywhere, however, and is just "common knowledge" among programmers who use Dreamweaver. Similarly, I typically prefix my variables with tfm_ so that they won't conflict. Massimo uses tmt_, and other programmers use other typical prefixes. It is usually not something I do in my own code, but if I think I'm going to distribute code in an extension or as a code snippet, I use the prefix.

The blog entries where I mention bad problems with Dreamweaver are here (mac menus), here (extension virus), and an old one on the help system here (help system). Macromedia, unlike Microsoft, has a bad habit of fixing problems in new versions of programs but leaving the old programs bug-laden. For users of DW MX and DW MX 2004, the Mac menu problem is huge. Also, for users of extensions, the problem with overwriting system files is major, considering the Exchange still hosts these extensions with no warning whatsoever that the file can corrupt your Dreamweaver.

Apparently some of my whining has paid off, as Alexandru from Interakt commented on a previous blog entry that Interakt is working on a patch to remove the corrupted system files left over by their extensions. It's a start, guys, but I won't be happy until ALL system file corruption is eliminated from extensions.

BlogFusion (http://www.countersinkdg.com/)
BlogCFM (http://www.blogcfm.org/index.cfm)
BlogCFC (http://www.camdenfamily.com/morpheus/blog/)

It looks like these blogs are pretty feature-rich. The only thing I could bring to the table would be a way to integrate with Dreamweaver using extensions. Not sure this would be worth the effort, since there do not seem to be too many people using ColdFusion with Dreamweaver as compared to other server models (ASP, ASP.NET, and especially PHP). For PHP, Wordpress is a pretty full-featured blog package.

And of course there are many, many places where you can set up free blogs with limited functionality, or pay a small fee for a full-featured blog with hosting and software. Blogger, Blogit, Typepad, and Tripod are just a few of the many. The ColdFusion/MX community also has a free blog option available from Sys-con, the publishers of MX Developer's Journal and ColdFusion Developers Journal, among other magazines. My blog is also cross-posted over at the Blog-n-Play site at http://tom.mxdj.com/.

So all-in-all, there are many options out there for blogging, and probably no room for another.

http://www.massimocorner.com/validator/

See it in action here:

http://www.massimocorner.com/validator/samples/

Company A
  > Suite 1
  > Suite 2
  > Suite 3
  > Suite 4

They have just added 5 menus to the system, bringing the total to 18. Now Company B releases 4 extension suites. In 2 of their suites, they have submenus:

Company B
  > Suite 1
  > Suite 2
  > Suite 3
    > Option 1
    > Option 2
  > Suite 4
    > Option 1
    > Option 2

Now there are 27 menus - 1 over the limit. Now, every extension that is installed after these will not show up, or show as blank entries in the menu. Let's say Jack's Extension Company releases one extension suite:

Jack's Extension Company
  > Suite 1

Jack's extension will not show up and will not be usable by the Dreamweaver user, not because his extension did anything wrong, but because of the bug in Dreamweaver. Company A and Company B are not at fault here, but the end result is that their extensions are seen by the user because they show up alphabetically before Jack's Extension Company.

This is a bug that Macromedia is aware of (reported by Interakt on their site as well) but have still to this day done nothing about it. At the very least there should be a hot fix for this problem from Macromedia. AT THE VERY LEAST. There is nothing that can be done from the extension developer's point of view, outside of doing away with menus and simply listing all extensions under the main menus. This is not a good option, because the menu will soon become very long.

Macromedia, please fix this. Don't wait until the next version comes out. This is a huge problem for Mac users.

TODCON was a great experience, as usual, and I love the fact that it was in Las Vegas. Holding a conference in Las Vegas pretty much guarantees that no sleep will be had. Between the sessions, the eating and drinking, the socializing, the shows, and the gambling, there is little time for sleep. I picked up a cold while I was there, probably from the smoke, dry air, and lack of sleep, but it was a fun time.

One of the sessions that I particularly enjoyed was by Neil Giarratana on using open source software. He showed a presentation of Mambo, the open source content management system for PHP that was awesome. I may be converting some sites to use the system. As part of Mambo, he showed an amazing online HTML editor that is also open source: TinyMCE. This editor blows away all the other HTML editors I've tried in the past, as it seems to work great with Firefox and Mac browsers. I'll have to do some more experimentation with it.

Dan and Angela from Cartweaver gave away a ton of prizes, including copies of Cartweaver, a year of hosting, and a whole box of books. There were also major giveaways from Webassist, Interakt, Kaosweaver, and of course from Ray West, who puts on the TODCON conferences. Chris Flick was there doing the cartooning thing, of which he is the master.

What would Vegas be without gambling. I did a little, but played only Poker. I am not a big gambler and especially don't like playing against the house, so I avoid games like Roulette and Blackjack, and especially the slot machines. Poker, on the other hand, pits you against other players, and a player with a good knowledge of the game can do quite well. Unfortunately, I didn't. You know what they say -- what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. In this case, it was my money that stayed there. We played mostly at the Excalibur, where the conference was, but also tried out the Bellagio, where I have played last time I was there, and saw a few familiar faces in the card room (Johnny Chan, Mel Judah, and Sami Farha, from the WSOP and WPT television shows.) It was fun. I left a few bucks shorter, but it was worth it.

Tuesday night a group of us went to the Zumanity show at the New York, New York casino. What an amazing performance. Some of the performers were tremendous athletes who made it look easy to fly around the arena on a silk scarf or do handstands on one hand on the edge of a plexiglass pool while doing a split. It really had to be seen to be believed. The costumes were great too. ;-) If you saw the show, you know what I mean.

Previously...

More TODCON links:

TODCON Death Match

Some pics...

Christian Cantrell's blog

Kim's blog

Update 5/4/2005: More TODCON links...

Pics from Sheri

Chris Flick on TODCON

John Olson on TODCON

Chris Flick's TODCON strip starts here

Pics from Jim Babbage

Edited 10/1/2007: Fixed link to Mambo.]]> http://www.tom-muck.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=60 http://www.tom-muck.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=60 Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:20:10 GMT Liveblogging at TODCON. More later.

Update 4/26/2005 8:52AM: The rather cryptic earlier entry was made during a session on blogging and building your own blog in Dreamweaver. I did a 4 part series on creating a simple blog using built-in Dreamweaver tools. Part 5 went live today at Community MX, and includes details on how to add sidebar modules.

TODCON is always one of the most enjoyable conferences because of the small, intimate nature of the conference. This it the 8th TODCON conference, and all have been extremely informative, with a great selection of speakers.

My sessions on blogging and SQL code (with sample code, etc) will be online after I get back.

The keynote was by Danny Kastner (from the Apprentice) and was quite entertaining as well as informative. We were a little worried he was going to show up with his guitar (if you saw the Apprentice, or his appearances on Dennis Miller, you know what I mean) but it was fun and he held the audience's interest.

More blogs on TODCON: CMXtraneous

Update 4/28/2005 9:01AM: Just got back in. What a busy week. These TODCON conferences are great, but between the sessions and the fun times, there was not much time for blogging, sleeping, or much of anything else. I will try to get my sessions online later.

More TODCON reports and pics:

Jim Babbage on TODCON
Day 2
Day 3
Scott Fegette from Macromedia
Kim Cavanaugh and more
Pics from Paul Davis

CMX is also having a contest to mark the event. Check the home page at http://www.communitymx.com for more details.

• Report builder
• Application events
• CFDOCUMENT tag
• Flash form

...and many more too numerous to list here. Find out about it at Community MX for a good overview and Devnet for new articles about the server. Download it at Macromedia.

Still no debugger or development IDE, but maybe next time.

• Design. Does the tool help you with a design by providing a design view of your page? Is that design view editable? Is it WYSIWYG?
• Code. Does the tool offer full code editing control?
• Debugging. Does the tool assist in debugging in any way?
• Automation. Are features automated to provide quick generation of code or design?

Programmer tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, and other desktop development environments provide all of the above. Web development tools have typically not provided these. Dreamweaver includes some of these features, but not all. What is the best web development tool out there then? Well, to be honest there hasn't been a web dev environment yet that is up to par with the kinds of technologies we use. Part of the reason is that technology moves so fast and browsers become out of date quickly. That should not be the case moving forward, however, as standards that are many years old are now becoming integral in the most recent browsers. For example, look at a web page designed in 1998 compared to one designed today. The look of the page is entirely different, as is the underlying code.

Dreamweaver has become more WYSIWYG in the most recent incarnation (Dreamweaver MX 2004), but it is still not what you would call a WYSIWYG editor. Macromedia had one WYSIWYG editor in its arsenal several years ago: Drumbeat 2000. Drumbeat offered pixel-perfect design, like a desktop publishing program, but did not offer any access to code view. For that reason, it failed. The next incarnation of tools was UltraDev, which was a horrible program. It did not offer much for a newbie, and was unreliable. . .unless you count the reliable corruption of your code. Dreamweaver MX was a great improvement, and MX 2004 is now even better.

There is still the question: How much should the program do for you? Should it always promote good coding standards? In Dreamweaver MX 2004, the generation of <font> tags was removed, and in its place, generation of inline CSS. This is not optimal, nor is it good coding by any stretch of the imagination. However, what is the alternative? A newbie needs to have a way to change the font on a word or a paragraph easily without having to spend years learning HTML and CSS.

I feel that a program like Dreamweaver should be good for newbies and experienced coders. It should allow the experienced coder the ability to create his own styles, tables, divs, and other elements without interfering. But it should also allow newbies the ability to drag a mouse across a page and create designs like a desktop publishing app, and provide reasonably good HTML in the process. Auto-generation of code will never be perfect, unfortunately. Most of the code will be bloated (like the code produced by Drumbeat 2000) but the alternative for most newbies is to stare at a blank page in dispair, or create something in MS Word and "save as html". I'd rather have someone like Macromedia create an auto-generation algorithm that works.

Auto-generated code is much more critical in server-side code than in HTML. A bad HTML page might load a little slow. A bad piece of server-side code can take down a server. While I'd love to see Dreamweaver prevent people from misusing server-side code, like issue a warning when they use "SELECT * FROM MyTable" in a recordset declaration ("Are you sure you want to retrieve 20 fields of data when all you need is one???"), the bottom line is that I'd rather have the ability to do whatever I want with the program and allow me to make the final decision. Much like having too much government regulating what I can and can't do, a development IDE should not decide that something is "too dangerous for newbies" and not include the feature. The program should provide the tools and allow you to use them as you see fit. Macromedia made a huge mistake when they removed Timelines from the program in MX 2004 because it was a bloated, infrequently used feature only to find that they ticked off people who actually use the feature. They had to put it back in.

When it boils down to it, a page that is bloated from 25K to 50K because of inline styles and other bad HTML code is not pretty to look at for the HTML purist, but does it really matter that much to the vast majority of web site visitors? Does the average user who goes to a web site look at the source code and count the font tags or despair at the use of inline CSS with names like "layer1" and "layer2"?

The bottom line is that the tool should help you get your site online. Period. Web developers have a really bad habit of viewing the source code and calling a site crap if it does not conform to web standards or if it does not meet their high standards. The only real concern should be what is seen in the browser for the particular audience that the web developer is after. When you read a book you don't pull the binding apart and check the chemicals used in the glue, or hold the page up to the light to look for imperfections in the paper. A web site, like a book, is primarily online to deliver content to the end user. Web content can be constructed by Dreamweaver, Golive, Front Page, MS Word, or even Notepad.

On the web, what you see is what you get. I'd like to see the web tools move in that direction as well. With CSS positioning, a web page can be constructed like a desktop publishing page. Divisions can be placed in pixel perfect locations. A computer program like Dreamweaver can aid in that by providing the calculations, functions, and underlying code necessary to make it happen.

The original Horizontal Looper looped through records from left to right, like this:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

The new version will do either horizontal or vertical looping:

1 4 7
2 5 8
3 6 9

The new extension also allows you to use form variables, url variables, or any other type of dynamic data to set the count of rows and columns displayed.

More information can be found at http://www.tom-muck.com/extensions/help/HorizontalVerticalLooperHelp/index.cfm