Web Sites That Provide Other Facts You Should Know About

You'll find helpful Web sites in every chapter of the book. However, some Web sites didn't quite fit in any of the chapters, yet they supply useful information for your Google Web Services experience. For example, the "Sending Special Characters Using URL Encoding" section of Chapter 3 discusses the need to URL encode special characters before you send a request to Google Web Services. Equally important is the need to escape special characters in some types of HTML and XML output by converting them to numeric sequences. The quote ( ˜) and double quote ( ) often cause problems, as do the angle brackets (<>). You can escape these characters as &#39, &#34, &#60, and &#62. The HTML Character Codes site at http://home.online.no/~pethesse/charcodes.html contains a good list of these codes.

Web accessibility is an extremely important topic and I hope that you take it as seriously as I do. You can find multitudes of statistics on Web sites that specialize in accessibility such as http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-REC-fact. An ExtremeTech article entitled "The State of Web Accessibility" (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,11774,00.asp) says it all by stating that accessibility is for everyone ”the 180 posts for this article provide some interesting insights as well. These additional Web sites provide some pointers you can use to make your site accessible and yet keep development costs to a minimum.

• Policies Relating to Web Accessibility http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

• Safe Web Colors for Color-Deficient Vision http://more.btexact.com/people/rigdence/colours/

• Usability and Accessibility ”Everyone Learning http://www.cdlr.tamu.edu/dec_2002/Proceedings/david_peter.pdf

Once you learn about Web services and understand how valuable they can be, you'll want to try out other Web services to learn whether they can help you with your application. One of the most interesting places to learn about new Web services is the Macromedia Flash site at http://www.flash-db.com/services/.

Sometimes you can find individual sites that include some Google Web Services material. I like browsing these sites because many of them include insights and perspectives you won't find on mainstream sites. Of course, some of them just repeat material you find elsewhere. Here are a few of the more interesting selections.

• Charon Internet Tutorials http://www.charon.co.uk/content.aspx?CategoryID=4

• How to Use the Google API in Movable Type http://www.10500bc.org/code/mt_howto_googleapi.php

• Integrating Google Web Services with Your Notes Databases http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/today.nsf/lookup/AWSintegration_pt3

• Steve Sharrock's ASPAlliance Contributions http://authors.aspalliance.com/shark/

• Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog http://www.windley.com/2002/07/18.html