{"id":1795,"date":"2012-06-07T00:39:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T04:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/?p=1795"},"modified":"2014-01-25T17:46:38","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T21:46:38","slug":"taag-reboot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/07\/taag-reboot\/","title":{"rendered":"TAAG Reboot"},"content":{"rendered":"

The HTML Frameset tag is officially obsolete<\/a> in HTML5. Since their inception, frames have drawn the ire<\/a> of<\/a> many<\/a> web<\/a> designers<\/a>, though I’ve always had a soft spot for them. When I first learned how to use the frameset tag back in ’98, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was able to do all sorts of trickery with it, like creating an online midi player and storing data between page loads. When I heard people go on about how they sucked<\/a>, I ultimately knew they were right, but I felt like they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater.<\/p>\n

Times have changed though, and as HTML has evolved, the gap framesets filled has been replaced by better technologies. Knowing their fate was sealed, I decided to overhaul the one app I had here that was still using them – the Text to ASCII Art Generator (TAAG)<\/a>*. The new version was written from scratch, but with the aim to keep the same look-and-feel. This time around I also wanted to implement the full FIGfont spec<\/a>, which surprisingly has a lot to it.<\/p>\n

The main part of the spec that I didn’t implement last time was the vertical layout rules. These rules allow font authors to “smush” letters together vertically. Below you can see an example done in the “Standard” font.<\/p>\n

\r\n  _____ _   _ _   _ \r\n |  ___| | | | \\ | |\r\n | |_  | | | |  \\| |\r\n |  _| | |_| | |\\  |\r\n |_\/ _|_\\___\/|_|_\\_|\r\n  | |_| | | | '_ \\  \r\n  |  _| |_| | | | | \r\n  |_|  \\__,_|_| |_| \r\n<\/pre>\n
This can be fun to play around with, but it’s not always what you want. Therefore, I decided to also allow users to control which horizontal and vertical layouts they wanted a font to use. Exploring what layout looks best is actually kind of fun. <\/p>\n
The other main part of the spec I left out last time was the loading of non-standard letters. Most fonts don’t implement characters outside the normal ASCII range, but the FIGlet spec allows authors to define whatever unicode character they want, and some fonts implement quite a few extra characters. For fun, I went ahead and added unicode character #3232 to a few of the fonts, so that people could make a FIGlet look of disapproval<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\r\n   _____)      _____)\r\n  \/_ ___\/     \/_ ___\/\r\n  \/ _ \\       \/ _ \\  \r\n | (_) |     | (_) | \r\n  \\___\/ _____ \\___\/  \r\n       |_____|       \r\n<\/pre>\n
I’m probably too easily amused. Anyway, there are quite a few other updates, but if you’re interested you can read about them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
I’ve also decided to open source the JavaScript FIGlet driver I wrote for this app. There were no other open source full-spec implementations of FIGlet that I could find, so I figured it could be useful. If you’re interested, it can be found here<\/a> or here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
If you have any suggestions for the app please let me know. Also, I haven’t forgotten about the Keyboard Layout Analyzer<\/a>, so don’t think this reboot means I wont be adding any more to that.<\/p>\n
Oh, and as a final side note, it was interesting to learn that frames can be a drag on the loading of page. The additional HTTP requests should make this obvious, but that combined with whatever else the browser has to do to accommodate them, makes for a non-optimal load time. And interestingly enough, even though the new app has a heavier page weight (190k vs 114k), it loads much, much quicker – though I should say that frames are definitely not the only factor to influencing this.<\/p>\n
* It’s former name was “Text Ascii Art Generator”. I noticed some people calling it “Text to ASCII Art Generator” and thought that was a better name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The HTML Frameset tag is officially obsolete in HTML5. Since their inception, frames have drawn the ire of many web designers, though I’ve always had a soft spot for them. When I first learned how to use the frameset tag back in ’98, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was able to … Continue reading TAAG Reboot<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development-thoughts","category-web-apps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1831,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions\/1831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}