Developer Blog

the progress we are making

Jul 10 2008 - Xopus plays Tic-Tac-Toe

Usually Xopus keeps you within the bounds and rules of a structured document: bold is allowed in a paragraph, but not in a header, or a header must be followed by the name of the author.

Feb 29 2008 - Validating your HTML/CSS for use in Xopus

In Internet Explorer Xopus relies on the contentEditable feature. But unfortunately activating contentEditable will change the look and feel of the HTML output of your XSLT. The goal of most of our CSS and HTML best practises is to prevent or workaround these effects.

Feb 25 2008 - Incompatible Markup Pointers Revisited

Last December I wrote about the Incompatible Markup Pointers exception in IE. I've been able to pinpoint the source of the exception more exactly: it occurs if you want to paste HTML into a TextRange, and the window the parent element of the TextRange belongs to does not have focus.

Feb 21 2008 - prettyPrintLargeNumber

The last few months have been extremely busy. We are working with many clients and partners to enhance their integrations. There is always a steady stream of support and forum questions. Development of the Xopus 4 platform uses a lot of our resources. And last but certainly not least Mark Wubben is following his dream to live and work in Copenhagen.

Jan 24 2008 - How to style unknown elements in IE

Two days ago I posted what I thought was just a little tip on the weblog of Sam Ruby. He was trying to style the new elements from HTML5 in Internet Explorer. Here at Xopus we have known for several years (since about 2002 or 2003) that you have to do document.createElement(elementName), which somehow lets the CSS engine know about that new element. But apparently we were the only ones who knew this. Ian Hickson even called it the most noteworthy news of the day.

Dec 11 2007 - Picky dates

When using xs:date as a type in the schema for a node-value Xopus might give you some trouble when editing that. Say for example that you use a value-of to print the value and you put your cursor in it and start typing a new value. Xopus will be very picky about that value: only valid xs:date values will be accepted by Xopus so you could probably overwrite a couple of numbers to ge t a new date, but it is not likely to win this years' prize for most user-friendly date editing.

Oct 30 2007 - Creating an inline lookup

I was implementing Xopus for a project and they have a lot of values that need to be looked up from a settings file. They look up values for places, provinces, types of organizations, people in organizations, programs of organizations and so on. On top of that they have the standard lookups for images and links (standard because you can easily copy them from the simple demo).

Aug 28 2007 - The Craziest DHTML Hack Ever

Hi, my name is Mark Wubben and for the past six months I've been working on the craziest DHTML hack ever. Now, to be fair, that's not six months full time, so perhaps not as crazy. And I only really got started this summer, so let's make it eight weeks.

Aug 27 2007 - Javascript Obfuscation

Every now and then we get a question about our Javascript obfuscation tools. There are some tools out there that claim to be able to obfuscate any Javascript, but we haven't been able to find a tool that could hit the sweet spot between human and machine readability. The results were either human readable (though, admittedly, not by most humans) or not machine readable. So we set off to build our own.