Having had the pleasureable task of cleaning up code, I’ve found using regular expressions with Dreamweaver’s Find and Replace tool to be a lifesaver.

Say you have several links on a page that need to be updated so they all point to the same url. Instead of manually changing every link, we’ll let Dreamweaver’s Find and Replace tool and regular expressions automate this for us.

The magic behind this is using our little expression: [^"]*

Here’s a breakdown of what these characters are doing.

• ^ Match any character starting from this point
• ” Stop once you’ve reached a quote
• * Match the preceding character zero or more times

Basically, this means we want to find whatever information is between the two quotes and replace it.

Regular expressions are a very valuable tool. The expression above is only one way in which they can be used. For an in depth tutorial, checkout ThemeForest’s – Regular Expressions for Dummies.

Just a word of caution… please be sure to make a backup copy first. If you ever need to refer back to the original, or if you accidently replaced code that you shouldn’t have, you’ll thank yourself later.

Fullsize is an attempt to add a new IMG attribute called “fullsize” in the next version of HTML. The idea is simple; create a standardized solution by which browsers handle the image popups rather than javascript/AJAX. Whenever the fullsize attribute is found within the img tag, browsers would tackle the heavy lifting, generating a popup of the full size image.

Although I’m still on the fence about this, there are a few aspects that I find interesting. For one, image popups would continue functioning even for users where javascript is disabled. Because this is handled by the browser, less code would need to be written by the developer.

Sounds great, but what if I want to control this myself using jQuery, Mootools or another javascript framework? No problem! The hundreds of lightbox plugins already out there in cyberspace will continue working as intended. Browsers will only step in when the img tag is accompanied by the fullsize attribute.

Who knows if this idea will ever come to fruition. In the meantime however, a jQuery plugin has been created for all to enjoy!

Posting code within a comment or post can often be a royal pain! Converting every instance of an HTML bracket from “<” and “>” to “&lt;” and “&gt;”, is not only frustrating but a complete waist of time. Fortunately, there are a few websites out there that will do the dirty work for us.