html

PhoneGap is a free and opensource framework for developing mobile applications. It is a great way of creating applications that work across multiple devices including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and others. It works by rendering HTML pages using a browser, which means that you can create applications using just HTML and JavaScript. It also allows you to interact with elements of the phone like the camera and accelerometer through JavaScript using a simple API.

I recently set about trying to use this system to create an application, and as I have an Android phone I started by creating a simple Android app. The PhoneGap website has a number of getting started guides, including what software you need to get started. I found that they were a little wrong for getting started in Android. I am running OSx so the instructions here might not work for you, but they should be fine for most *nix based systems.

To get a webpage to refresh every few seconds you can use a meta tag with the attribute http-equiv and a value of refresh. The number of seconds to delay can be put into the content attribute. This meta tag (as will all meta tags) goes into the head section of the document.

Here is an example that refreshes the page every 2 seconds.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2" />

It is also possible to make the browser refresh to another page by including the string:

url=url or filename

Within the content attribute. Here is an example that redirects the page to google.com after a 5 second delay.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.google.com" />

The reverse of turning ASCII text into HTML is to convert HTML into ASCII. And to this end here is a little function that does this.