The application has a very simple design and extremely easy to use.
The index page is simply just a field where I put the word.
In response application gives me a number of available article where the word was found,
as the resource uses more than one dictionary.

Information retrieved contains
- several explanaions of the or or phrase;
- trancription;
- thesaurus;
- sound;
- list of available synonyms (separately from thesaurus section)
- feature of to look through related searches;
- html anchor tag ( if anybody wants to put this information as a link on a web page_)
- bilingual dictionary
- Reference dictionaries

2. http://ecoder.gmeditor.com/#
A very nice on-line code editor, very handy and extremely useful, as public computers (for example Bond ones)
do not have IDE’s installed (except for Bluej, which is useful for Java only).
The application has easy navigation, heaps of example programs from different languages,
it’s always possible to get some frameworks directly from there as well as look up for some syntax I do not remember

the application has a document tree of a current user, based on the cookies, of a current computer, as far as I understand, because
there’s no register option available.
Application uses multicoloured syntax highlighting for many languages, and set of nesessary functions as
undo, redo, switch syntax highlight on\off, search, goto line. There’s a availability of saving files to the application
and feature of switching to the simple text editor which runs much faster

http://depositfiles.com/en/
A very useful application for sharing files on the internet which are too big to be sent by email
It’s firly easy to use and have the minimum functions.
You simply browse your folders on your desctop or laptop and paste the link to the file you want to share
to the resourse, the limitation for file uploading is 2gb. After this file is being downloaded to the system and after it’s finished the link to the file is generated,
there’s also an option of sending the link straight away to people you want to share your file with without getting to your mail box and doing it automatically.
Shared file could be easily downloaded by clicking that link

• Each document can be up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image.
• Document formats available for editing: HTML,txt,doc,docx,rtf,odt
• Limit: 5000 documents and 5000 images

The documents are converted to html format once uploaded, and size limits are applied to html documents,
therefore sometimes when document is large but is less than 500 kb it could not be uploaded and used in Google Docs

Spreadsheets:

• Each spreadsheet can be up to 256 columns or up to 200,000 cells  or up to 100 sheets
• Each spreadsheet can have up to 20,000 cells with formulas.

-  1,000 GoogleFinance formulas
-  1,000 GoogleLookup formulas
-  50 Import formulas

The overall limit for spredsheets is 1000
Simultaneously opened – 11
Supported formats: xls, xlsx, csv, or ods, txt, tsv, tsb
File size limit for a spreadsheet is 1 mb

Presentations:

• Supported formats: ppt, pps
• Size limits: 10MB or 200 slides.
• Upload limits: 2mb
• Folder limits: 5000 documents and 5000 images

Files could be uploaded in zip format as well.
Files could be edited online with a a lot of useful functions similar to any offline appliacation, such as:
word count, hyperlinks, syntax check, fonts, colours, lists etc.
Google allows to establish offline access to it’s features, although not all the languages are available there
Uploaded google documents could be shared, published and accessed by other people.
Service is multilingual and available in the most of common languages
All google services are free of charge

Google provide users with key shortcuts for easy editing:
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=66280&ctx=sibling&topic=15119
additional information:
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=15114&hl=en_US

Microsoft Office Live Workspace

Free file sharing and online storage.
Although some advertising could be send as it’s free, the current verson is beta, and vendor claims
to make some services not free (Knowing Microsoft I’m pretty sure taht’ll be soon enough and for sure)

Supported formats:
doc, xls, ppt, pdf, different kind of pictures
only doc, xls, ppt are avaliable for editing
The files and workplaces could be shared and viewed by other users for collaboration
Files are monitored, checked for viruses, and denied in downloading of suspicious files (any .exe files are prohibited)

Files are protected byMicrosoft Forefront Security for SharePoint and they can only be accessed with a Windows Live ID and password
Storage permissions: 5 gb;
Individual document can be up to 25 MB.
Service is not accessible for any operating systen except for Windows and Mac OS.
Languages supported: Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian,
Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Individual documents could be accessed for not more than 100 people of online collaboration

In conclusion: i’m a fan of google, actually, and recommend this service to everybody.
Comparing these services, it’s obvious that google is way better, support more types of documents for editing, has a bunch of services additionally such as gmail, google maps etc. and everything is totally free and there are no plans of doing it. Additionally google provides a lot of information on features and use of its services with video tutorials which is very easy to find. Ironically, I had to ‘google’ to find some information on MSLW. The only benefit of Microsoft Office Live Workspace is the larger size of a file available to download – 25 mb.

(x)HTML and CSS
DOM (Document Object Model)
XML, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or Plain Text
XMLHttpRequest Object
JavaScript

http://www.asp.net/ajax/about/
http://www.w3schools.com/Ajax/Default.Asp
A very good article of Ajax
http://www.infotoday.com/online/nov06/Clark.shtml

A (Asynchronously) means that when the request to a server made via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and
continues to process other data while waiting for the response

XMLHttpRequest is a DOM API that is inside a web browser scripting language, such as Javascript, to send an HTTP request directly
to a web server and load the server response data directly back.
Once the data is within the scripting language, it is available as  XML document or plain text.
The XML data can easily be used to manipulate the currently active document in the browser without loading a new web page.

Main benefits of XMLHttp to Http request:
- Updating a web page with new data without refreshing the page
- Request data from a server after the page was loaded
- Receive data from a server after the page was loaded
- Send data to a server in the background

A small tutorial of XHR
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ajax/what_is_xmlhttprequest.htm
A simple explanation of XHR
http://www.oliviertravers.com/archives/2004/12/15/what-is-xmlhttprequest/
http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Usability/XMLHttpRequest-guidelines/
list the memners exposed by the XMLHttpRequest object.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535874(VS.85).aspx
Listing of Mozilla tools of for handling XHR object
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XMLHttpRequest

Cross Browser

The XMLHttpRequest object is initialized differently in firefox and IE of versions 5,6,7

IE 7 and Firefox: new XMLHttpRequest();

IE 5 and 6 there wene no embedded XHR, tehrefore the object should be initilized like that:
new ActiveXObject(‘Msxml2.XMLHTTP’);
new ActiveXObject(‘Microsoft.XMLHTTP’);

A generic try catch block for IE 5,6,7 and Firefox

try {
var objXHR = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (e) {
try {
var objXHR = new ActiveXObject(‘Msxml2.XMLHTTP’);
} catch (e) {
try {
var objXHR = new ActiveXObject(‘Microsoft.XMLHTTP’);
} catch (e) {
document.write(‘XMLHttpRequest not supported’); }
}
}
Differences of IE and Mozilla
http://blog.techsaints.com/2007/09/10/xmlhttprequest-difference-between-firefox-and-internet-explorer/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/282831/differences-on-how-xmlhttprequest-behaves-with-different-browsers

Ajax works through event-driven model of programming where user actions referred to as events are calling functions, loading webpages, etc.
Interactivity is achieved with forms, buttons and hyperlinks. DOM allows to link elements and to extract data from XML files from server.
To retrieve data from the server XMLHttpRequest provides two methods:
- open: create a connection.
- send: send a request to the server.

Retrieved Data could be then founf in the attributes of the XMLHttpRequest object:
- responseXml for an XML file or
- responseText for a plain text.

ReadyState attribute indicates the state of data and state of interaction with teh server.
For example, to make some actions on the data it is necessary for the data to be fully loaded,
and some actions could be made when it is (code:4). Actually, really useful state is state code 4,
simply it could be done with the condition
if (satte == 4) do something
else (wait);

States of readyState follow:

0: not initialized.
1: connection established.
2: request received.
3: answer in process.
4: finished

Some information on readyState attribute
http://www.xul.fr/en-xml-ajax.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534361(VS.85).aspx
http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_xmlhttprequest.asp

In summary, as mentioned previously the main benefits of XHR:
- Updating a web page with new data without refreshing the page
- Request data from a server after the page was loaded
- Receive data from a server after the page was loaded
- Send data to a server in the background

Also, downloading from these websites for free involves has a time extension 0.5-1 minute (In my opinion just to make the life of free users harder and make them purchase an account) Some other services like http://www.keepandshare.com/ provide filesharing access as application which you install on your computer, although it’s more like shareware and user can run it with limited options for free some time.

The most famous resource for photos sharing is http://flickr.com where you can create an account for free and upload/download any amount of photographs. A lot of magazines, actually find this resourse very useful, because you can get a lot of photographs from there for free. Another resources like that are http://www.snapfish.com.au/ or http://photobucket.com/. It’s actually very nice when instead of sending heaps of photos via email you can just send a link to your albums which are accessible for everyone or under the restriction for the usage of priviledged people.

Internet giants, such as google provide a useful applications that allow you store your files and even manage them with word processing tools or even spreadsheets. The service if fully free, the only thing you need is google account http://docs.google.com or Yahoo Briefcase http://briefcase.yahoo.com/ but the latter will be closed soon. Some blogging tools like http://www.myspace.com/ or even http://www.wordpress.com allow you store some information (primarily photos and videos) for free as the part of your accounts. The most famous Russian resourse, which is also available in English is http://vkontakte.ru/ Some mailing systems and extranets provide the options of e-disks, the type of FTP where you can keep your data, but this is usually available for people who belongs to some organizations that provide an extranet, similar to Bond Remote Access, where we can access our information from any place

- write
- writeln
- open
- close
- getElementByName
- getEelementById
- getElementByTagName

Functions could be nested and connected together, sometimes it could be quite long strings.
It is also possible, while accessing nodes to get all the properties of the node, the most recent ones are:
innerHTML, .nodeName, .nodeValue, .parentNode, .childNodes, x.attributes.

Document.all could be used to access all the nodes on the page and in fact all[] is an exclusive array that contains of all the elements on the page. This standard was introduced and supported by Internet Explorer. The “Good Javascript Practice” is to use this feature as last resort, as it’s not the standard DOM feature in contrast to getElementsById() method which is the better way of accessing an element on the page that has a unique ID assigned to it.
http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/

KeyPress is used for handling events with printable keys, letters, in contrast to KeyDown is raised for non-printable (shift, enter, alt etc). These events are often used when it is necessary to filter different types of keys pressed

http://bytes.com/groups/net/649131-difference-keypress-keydown-event

Event Bubbling occurs when an event raised by child controls is handled by the parent control

The events in Javascript could be stopped with cancelEvent() and stopEvent() functions

http://www.webdevelopment2.com/the-secret-of-cancelling-and-stopping-events-using-javascript/

Some sources I found interesting and useful:

List of tags and classes of JsDOM
http://krook.org/jsdom/

Another good place with specific information on JavaScript and DOM
http://www.javascriptkit.com/domref/

A useful tutorial which is build in form of a document tree and shows teh structure of DOM
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/domstructure

A tutorial on basic concepts of Js and DOM
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/dombasics

Quite interesting video tutorial on using Javascript DOM objects, where all the basic concepts are explained in less than 10 minutes. Everything is explained through examples which shows how it works straight away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URF2sVQWuxU

Disadvantage of Javascript and other script languages is that they are slower than system ones, the latter has a compiler which convert plain text into binary code. Javascript is a client-side language, thus it’s executed by the browser, and the actual code of a webpage could be retrieved by any user which wants to do that. Server-side languages like PhP do not do that all the scripts are executed on the server side and then sent to the user.

Javascript implements standard number of operators and operations, such as /,*,-, +, %, ++, += etc. Every language has different syntax; however principles and basic operators are the same but could be written in another way. For example Java incrementing would be i++, Javascript one is ++i; Additionally Javascript implements another comparison operator ===, it’s used for comparison of two variables and the types of variables, for example “5″==5 is true, however “5″===5 is false. This operator is not implemented in System languages due to impossibility of comparing different types; the program just would not be compiled. Another additional operator is operator in the form of “variable = (condition)? value1:value2″, where value is assigned according to true or false value of a condition.

Conditional statements, such as if and if .. else, usual for many languages are present in Javascript. They are executed by blocks inside “{}”, although if there’s only one line after if, it will be executed without curly brackets.

Couple of tutorials on Javascript:

http://www.webteacher.com/javascript/

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/bridge/1998/res/javascript/javascript-tutorial.html#1

A utility on Syntax check of Javascript http://www.javascriptlint.com/

A free Javascript editor with syntax check and debugger. This is a very powerful tool not only for Javascript but for PHP, HTML and some other languages http://www.yaldex.com/Free_JavaScript_Editor.htm

There are several options in providing styles for parts of documents:
- Inlyne styles
- Document level style sheets
- External style sheets

1. Inlyne styles is the simpliest way. This way involves including style attribute in the body of a tag. For example:
<p style=”color: blue; font style: bold>.
This tag makes every letter inside this, and only this, tag be bold and have blue colour.

2.Document level style sheets provide alike design for elements of similar tags within the document. Using <style> tag in the header of the document it is possible to write rules for reflection of elements in a whole document. For example:

<head>
<title> Blue Font </title>
<style>
p {color:blue}
</style>
<head>

This example makes a rule for the body of this document to make all headers <h1> blue.
Although if you have a whole collection of documents that should use the same stile,
this way is not a good choice. To do that it is needed to
type the same number of rules in the header of each html document.

3. External style sheets provide set of style rules that could be easily applied to any number
of documents. The way of providing a style is through creating of a separate .css document
which could be linked to any .html file. If necessary, these rules of could be overridden
in the document via previous methods.
There are two ways of connecting .css document to an html file:
- Through “link” tag style tag
- Through “@import”

Some Browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox provide several basic functions to change and modify the style of visited web-pages.

Explorer provide such functions as font-size (View), different colour schemas (Tools-Internet options-colors), basic fonts used (Tools-Internet options-colors). Also there’s a possibility to manage some website effects, such as picture appearance, music, applets etc. (Tools-Internet Options – Advanced).

Firefox uses the same basic functions as Explorer (font types, size, colours). All this could be managed in Tools – Options-Content. Additionally this browser provides applying an alternative design of the website, if there is one (View-Page Style).

Inside <form> and </form> tags, which denotes the beginning and the end of a form there should be at least two special form attributes, which are necessary and another, third one which is optional. The required attributes are action and method attributes, which specifies the name of the server the form is processed and a method by which the parameters would be sent to the server. The third, enctype attribute, let change the parameters of the way the data is being encoded for the secure transmission over the net.  The regular body content, is also usually included into the form to specify the fields user will input information into.

An action attribute specifies the URL of the application that reiceves and processes the data that is send through a form.  The usual location of the applications that are use to generate an on-the-fly respond in in the folder cgi-bin (Common Gateway Interface).

The typical tag with this attribute looks like this

<form action=”http://www.website.com/cgi-bin/script.pl”> .. </form>

Another required attribute – method – a way by which browser sends information to a server. There are two possibilities: POST – a browser contacts the server first, specifies a URL from action and sends information back via another connection. GET method merges these two steps in one and sends the form data that’s attached to the form’s URL.

<form method=GET action=”http://www.website.com/cgi-bin/skrypt.pl”> .. </form>

The enctype attribute could help to change the parameters by which information is transmitted to the server. The browser encodes the data that is sent for security reasons, and that’s server to decide: to process encoded data directly or decode it first. The standard encoding format is “Internet Media type”, another options are “multipart/form-data” and “text/plain”.

sources used to write this post are: Johnson, “Web Applications”, Musciano &Kennedy “HTML and XHTML: The definite Guide”, books 24×7

As for programming, I did a little bit more in that area than in web in past years.

I had a small course of programming in High school, where we did not actually code a lot, but given an overview, basic approaches such as conditional statements, strings, loops, arrays. We were taught a pseudo language mainly with the practical implementation in Basic.

Than I had another introductory course of programming at the university I studied, we were using Pascal and C++ for some practical number theory calculations mainly.

I had some experience in working with LaTeX, a professional math text editor, which environment is quite similar to basic programming.

I also wrote couple of programs to calculate a number of Gorenshtein 8×8 determinants, which I used in my bachelor diploma paper in Kiev University in C++.

Recently I took a course of “Introduction to Programming” at Bond, where we used Java and this semester I have “Modular Programming” (Perl).