English Club Interested In Adu

February, 2006 -- English Chelsea Blues chairman Bruce Buck recently acknowledged that the club has scouted the Ghanaian-born U.S. teenage soccer sensation, Freddy Adu.

The 16-year-old Adu currently plays for the U.S. Major League Soccer club, D.C. United. D.C. United, currently in training in Florida, recently faced Chelsea in a pre-season scrimmage. Adu confirmed that Chelsea is interested in him and said he would like to play for the English club someday, but that may be a couple of years away still.

Rather than worry about his future prospects in England, Adu is currently focused on making the U.S. roster and playing well to improve his World Cup chances. "A lot of people think it's a longshot ... (but Arena) pretty much told me my best shot at making the World Cup team was being a regular starter for D.C. United, and just playing really well come the months of April and May."

Olympic Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler

Accomplishments

• 2006 Olympic silver medalist in halfpipe
• 2003,2005 Winter X Games superpipe champion
• Dominated in 2003, winning virtually everything including World Championships, X Games and the overall Grand Prix
• Three-time Vans Triple Crown of Snowboarding champion (2001-03)

Facts About Gretchen

• A knee injury during practice in 2003 cut her season short and required ACL surgery to repair. After a year of rehabilitation, Gretchen returned to win at the 2005 X Games.
• Gretchen tied for the final 2002 Olympic Team slot, but lost out on a triple tie-breaker.
• Earned the U.S. National Halfpipe title in 2001.
• Finished first or second in 18 out of 21 competitions the 2002 and 2003 seasons.
• One of only four female athletes invited to the Artic Challenge in Norway.
• Voted the "Female Reader's Choice" award winner in Transworld Snowboarding's 6th Annual Riders Poll twice, once in 2003 and again in 2004.
• Nominated for the prestigious Laureus Award "Alternative Action Sports Person of the Year" category and the "World Alternative Sportswoman of the Year" in 2004.
• Featured in one of four commercials advertising the 2004 X Games and gained some commentating experience as the EXPN Today men's halfpipe finals commentator.
• Graced the cover of FHM's Girls of Winter X edition and was featured in the X Games edition of ESPN The Magazine.
• Joined the U.S. Snowboard Team straight out of high school in 1999.
• Enjoys mountain biking, hiking, reading and yoga.

Trivia

Bleiler gave herself a black eye while trying to perfect her Crippler, an inverted spinning trick, in an icy pipe before the final Olympic qualifier in 2002.

Growing up, Gretchen wanted to go to the Olympics as a swimmer and a diver. However when she later moved to Colorado, she thought her way into the Olympics would be through hockey. Now she hones all of her athletic skills in the sport of snowboarding where she has really blossomed.

Gladiator Windowing Component

Try it!

Here are some things you can try on this page:

• Click on a window to focus it.
• Double-click on the title bar to shade a window.
• Click and drag the title bar to move a window.
• Click and drag the small circle to resize a window.
• Click on the icons in the title bar to dock [*], minimize [-], maximize [+], or close [x] a window.
• Select a different stylesheet from the dropdown list in the upper left corner of the page.

A Modern Way To Increase Web Presentation Space

Because "screen real estate" is limited, in a traditional web layout a visitor generally sees only one page of content at a time. A number of techniques are commonly used to overcome the "screen real estate" problem with varying degrees of success. One common approach is to use a tab card layout. Another approach is to use some sort of collapsible menu or collapsible divs. In both of these approaches, all content in the collapsed divs or hidden tab cards is obscured from view, except for the tab labels or div titles themselves.

Another problem has been that web developers are often forced to use snippets of Javascript code from different sources in a piecemeal fashion. And developers often limit the amount of Javascript code they put on a page, due to the difficulty of implementing true cross-browser solutions. A few sites, like Peter-Paul Koch's QuirksMode site, Douglas Crockford's Wrrrld Wide web site, and Michael Foster's Cross-Browser.com site have documented and done much of the hard work to make Javascript actually work across different browsers, allowing the rest of us to see how it is done with nice documentation and examples. But even the work of Koch, Crockford, Foster and others does not really solve the biggest problem for web-based application developers: Microsoft Internet Explorer's abysmal record of conformance to the W3C's set of standards.

A New Approach for the New Crop of W3C Browsers

With the Gladiator set of components, we are taking a different approach:

First, we are creating a set of integrated components that work together seamlessly.

Secondly, with a healthy crop of freely-downloadable W3C-standards-compliant browsers led by Firefox in the field, (and with IE falling farther behind by the day), we have chosen to focus on getting the most out of W3C-compliant browsers rather than scaling down our vision in order to make components that work in Microsoft's inferior browsers.

And thirdly, because the internet is a global platform for communication, we are insuring that all of our components are internationalized from the ground up. Globalization is not an afterthought.

One of our efforts in this direction is the Gladiator windowing component shown here. Windows have been used in thick clients in graphical user interfaces for ages, but until recently have rarely been seen working inside a web browser window. Our windowing component works in all W3C-compliant browsers we have tested --specifically, the latest versions of Firefox (1.5), Safari (1.3.2), Opera (8.51), and Konqueror (3.4.2).

Notice how a windowing approach provides one solution to the problem of limited "screen real estate." With this approach, you can actually see the partial contents in many of the windows simultaneously. One cannot achieve that with a tab-based or collapsible-div-based layout.