Working with source code for years, I have seen much of good code and code that is, well, not quite thought through. The ratio between the two has always been in favor of good code, in my opinion. However, something is changing in the software development landscape and the overall code quality seems to be consistently going down. Now more than ever I find bad code where it should not be.

Unicode is a form of character encoding that represents characters from most human languages, as well as special symbols, such as math symbols or musical notation. In the last few years, more and more companies turn to Unicode to adapt their software to work with languages other than the original language of the application. However, despite seemingly simple concept, Unicode proved for many companies to be a tough nut to crack.

Generating reports in XML has been on my list of things to do for a while and I finally got around to work on it. One might ask, what is so significant about XML and why would an average webmaster be interested in them? Good question.

XML and related technologies provide a neat and powerful way to separate what reports contain, such as hit and visit counts or a list of hosts and URLs, from how reports are presented. As simple as this sounds (and, may be, cryptic to some readers), this separation is the basis for better-looking and much more customizable reports.

FCKeditor is a great application. I cannot say enough of this. However, one little problem for those who need output in HTML is that the editor only generates output in XHTML, which invalidates HTML pages with XML constructs, such as <br />.

Searching through FCKeditor's forums and asking there wasn't much help - some of the FCKeditor folks simply dismissed HTML as something that should not be used in the first place (passionate, but not very smart), others suggested searching for "/>" sequences in XHTML and replacing them with ">". This technique will work for most text input, but may fail for constructs like <input name="in1" value="2 > 1"/>, which is valid XHTML because the right angle bracket doesn't have to be encoded in XML.