xhtml 1.0 vs html 4.01 - My Head Hurts

The hands down winner in my case is xhtml 1.0. I know there’s a lot of debate out there about what Doctype to use, but after running into error after error with html issues, I’m finally mading the switch to xhtml 1.0 and wow, it works! What a concept.

Oh here’s been my dilemma; most of my site was coded in html and I made an initial error on my pages which causes the entire site to be viewed as html 1.0 transitional and an encoding scheme of windows-1252. I found my error and started the massive conversion over to html 4.01 and also fixed the encoding issue to iso-8859-1.

My thought process was simple. If my site was already coded with html tags, why go through the hassle of adding closing forward slash tags, such as page breaks, etc. Simple enough I thought, a few header changes and all would be good. Turns out I was grossly mistaken. Once I made the switch from html 1.0 to html 4.01, all the paragraph segments on my pages lost their formatting. Some worked in Internet Explore while others worked in Firefox. The fundamental problem is, html does not require you to close smart tags, even if you try to force it, sometimes it just doesn’t work.

In my stylesheet, I had my paragraph statement setting the up, down, left, and right margins using the div statement. In IE one paragraph would be ok, followed by the next paragraph; but in Firefox, because there was no paragraph smart tag closure before then next opening p tag. The second paragraph would be shifted over twice; that is it would nest the two smart tags together. Gurrrr! Not want I had intended.

So, in light of these really annoying issues I’m finally making the switch to xhtml 1.0 which does allow me to close the tag when I want, rather then leave it up to the browser. My advice, make the switch! It just makes sense. You get to control when things are open and when they are closed, it’s that simple. And let’s face it, I’m not a true coder by no means. I’m a hardware and EM guy so all of my discoveries here have been extremely painful to include a lot of WTF moments.

Cheers all.

Revisiting and Revising html 4.01 Code

Errors, and invalid code mixing between html and xhtml has cause me to stop in place with any new content development and revisit all the current uploaded pages on the site to make any necessary corrections. One big issue I ran into was the Encoding error that I detected using the w3c validation service.

Such a minor mistake, but often catastrophic in the coding world was the content-type declaration, where I had the following: charset=ISO-8859-1. Turns out in both html 4.01 and xhtml 1.0, the ISO in this instance can not be capitalized, it must be: charset=iso-8859-1. If it is not, web browsers will default to using windows-1252 in my case. So any formatting items maybe lost for this silly mistake.

I also unfortunately mixed both html and xhtml code which has caused a lot of errors, event to the extent where some pages are defaulting to the doctype: -//W3C//DTD HTML 1.0 Transitional//EN rather then the html 4.01 or xhtml 1.0 versions I had intended.

AC Circuit Analysis Lab Graphics and PSpice Simulations

All three lab experiments for the Analysis Lab Course on the site, I added both the lab notes which provides measured results and hand calculations for the individual labs along with the Pspice simulation outputs and in most cases the PSPICE code. You will even see some of the errors I made during these labs such as running a .tran analysis rather then a .AC analysis in Pspice which did effect the output resultant. You can find all these added lab notes at:

Lab Write Up - Circuit Response to Time Varying Signals
Figure 1.1: 100Hz Triangle Wave
Figure 2.1: Squarewave R-L Circuit
Figure 3.1: Sinewave R-L Circuit
Figure 4.1: Simple R-C Circuit
Figure 1B: PSpice Part B, Section 1
Figure 2B: PSpice Part B, Section 2
Lab Notes Page 1 of 8
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RLC Series and Parallel Circuits Lab
Graph 1: Input Voltage vs. Output Voltage for 1kHz
Graph 2: Input Voltage vs. Output Voltage for 10kHz
Graph 3: Vo vs. Frequency
Graph 4: Io vs. Frequency
Graph 5: Output Current / Voltage vs. Phase
Graph 6: High Pass Filter Analysis
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Equivalent Circuits Lab
Graph 1: Series RLC Circuit
Graph 2: Series Equivalent Circuit
Graph 3: Parallel Equivalent Circuit
Graph 4: Parallel RLC Circuit
Graph 5: Parallel Equivalent Circuit
Graph 6: Series Equivalent Circuit
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RF and Telecommunication Student Experiments

Just Added; no I’m not a late night TV commercial. But seriously, I just added to ClassNotes123.com this evening three more student experiments dealing with radio frequency (RF) and telecom systems. I will be adding the solutions in the coming weeks but for now I have just posted the baseline experiments. They can be found at:

RF Transmit and Receive Link
Measuring Antenna Characteristics using a Network Analyzer
Characterizing a Voltage Controlled Oscillator

FET Capacitance Affects Notes Added

I uploaded several notes pertaining to Field Effect Transistor, Capacitance Affects and Frequency Response to ClassNotes123.com which is part of the Analog and Semiconductor Devices class; an undergraduate course that introduces the topic of nonlinear device. I also added another Satellite Communications homework assignment dealing with look angles. These pages can be located at:

Output Capacitance of a Source Follower Amplifier
Low Frequency Response of a FET Circuit
FET Capacitance Effects
Output Capacitance of a Drain Loaded Amplifier
Satellite Look Angle Problem

I am finishing up two digital logic laboratories which should be online in the next few days. Stay tune for this and more content from ClassNotes123.com

Satellite Communications Course Problems Added

For the graduate level Satellite Communications course, I’ve added seven homework problems and solutions dealing with topics as station keeping, orbital dynamics, data transmissions, shallow angle earth stations, and sat to sat data links. These pages can be found at the following links:

Satellite Data Relay
Satellite Propagation Time
Satellite Orbit Position
Satellite Orbit Variables
Satellite Orbit Characteristics
Satellite Earth Station
Satellite Elliptical Orbit

For more on these topics and other electrical engineering course topics, notes, exams, and laboratory experiments visit: ClassNotes123.com

New Technologies are Shifting Telephone Keypad Alphabetic Notation

Expedia.com, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Comcast Cable are three companies out of thousands whose telephone number is also the spelling of the company name when dialed from the keypad of your standard telephone. Most would agree this marketing technique is beneficial to the customer and provides a level of name recognition to the company. But are these companies ready for the technology shift this marketing strategy bases itself on?

We have seen in recent years many people, especially younger individuals, have been moving exclusively to cellular telephones and ditching the landlines of old. While this trend is very well known, a simple yet often overlooked factor is the technology shift from the standard keypad telephone to full text keyboards on many cellular telephone models. Take the Blackberry, or the iPhone; neither device has the standard number / letter combination companies use to denote their telephone number.

For example, on a standard keypad the number 2 is also associated with the letters A, B, and C. However, on a Blackberry with its full keyboard, the number 2 is associated with the letter E.

So what is the solution; simple! Many companies already employ the fix with or without knowing it. Just publish the number itself along with the company name and letter combination. On expedia.com customer support page; both 1-800-EXPEDIA and 1-800-397-3342 are posted. However, on Carnival Cruise Lines webpage, I have been unable to find anything but their 1-888-CARNIVAL number.

By: FreeClassNotesOnline.com