07 May 2006

Displaying a chess board

For a week I've been blabbering on about this, that, and the other thing. It's time for some real chess.

It's almost impossible to discuss chess without using a chess board. Given no other option, I could just use a FEN string to represent the board, but the web is a visual medium. It's better to show a diagram when discussing a chess position. To do this I'll have to address a few minor technical issues:-

  • Choosing an image format - I'm going to start with the same format I use on About Chess and its related Forum: copy/paste from ChessBase Lite to Paint Shop Pro 3. Fellow cheapskates might recognize the thread uniting those two choices of software. There are certainly classier methods of displaying a chess board, but I don't want to tackle too much on this first attempt. I can always review the decision later. As for file format, line art displays well in GIF format.

  • Hosting the image - I see that blogger.com (the tools side of blogspot.com) has an image hosting service. Once again, I don't want to make this first image effort more complicated than it has to be. I'll use the same technique that I use on the About Chess Forum and host the image on my own mark-weeks.com domain.

  • Writing a post in HTML - This should be a no-brainer, but since computer technology has a knack of biting you when you least expect it, I won't try anything fancy.

Here's the first effort...





...It appears to have worked! Writing in HTML was incredibly clumsy. I usually prepare my work offline and then paste the HTML into whatever tool I'm forced to work with. In this case the blogger.com software insisted on changing my HTML to suit its own purposes. I'll need to become more familiar with it to avoid wasting time. All in all, I'm pleased with the first result.

In tomorrow's post I'll explain why I chose that position.

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A few minutes later...

I see on the published page that something has added a thin line around the image. When I look at the HTML source in compose mode, I don't see a BORDER attribute on the IMG tag. The only odd thing I see, other than rearranging the order of my IMG attributes, is a stray slash before the closing greater-than character. I'm not familiar with that and will have to investigate. While composing the post, the image displays without the thin line. Strange; not really WYSIWYG, is it. I'll look at the source for the published page when I have a moment.

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