Technology, Web Development, Browsers, CSS, HTML5, JavaScript

Learning All About HTML5 June 25th, 2010

So one of the latest and greatest buzzwords in Web Development Land is “HTML5″ and some folks may be wondering exactly what the deal is. Long story short, it’s a work in progress, it’s being created in the open, and it’s features are being tested by browser vendors already. Mozilla, Apple, Google, Opera, and Microsoft all have their efforts going at the same time, some of them with overlap, some of them without. Finally, there are features which can be reliably used today. There’s plenty of information out there if you’re looking.

Web Content Management, Web Development, JavaScript, jQuery, Sitecore

Avoiding jQuery’s noConflict() Mode with Prototype and Sitecore April 5th, 2010

The brevity of the Prototype JavaScript library’s $() (i.e. the “dollar” function) is without a doubt a handy tool and easy to type over, and over, and over again. It caught on quickly as JavaScript frameworks took off and John Resig’s jQuery library used a version of it from the start as well. Of course, this had issues where from time to time both Prototype and jQuery might show up on the same Web page.

The pros and cons of loading more than one JavaScript library over HTTP is of course a whole other article in and of itself. Please always consider the implications of such a move. It’s all about page weight and performance.

jQuery has been the JavaScript framework of choice at NavigationArts for quite some time. It has, for as long as I can remember, featured a method called noConflict() which returns control of the $() function to whatever it was previously defined as. What does that mean? Well, in jQuery, $() is just an alias to the jQuery object, so it removes that alias. It’s done this way:

Application Development, Web Development, CSS, JavaScript, performance

Shinkansen for ASP.NET-based CSS and JavaScript GZIP Compression February 10th, 2010

I recently saw an innocent enough tweet about something that just happened to be exactly like something I’d been looking for for quite some time: a server-side ASP.NET CSS and JavaScript file concatenator and GZIP utility called Shinkansen. It’s from Milan Negovan and it’s hosted over at CodePlex. Looking over the documentation, it looks easy enough to set up and configure. He’s blogged about it here.

User Experience Design, Web Development, Browsers, CSS, JavaScript

JavaScript-CSS Compatibility Layers to Save You Some Money? January 25th, 2010

Andy Clarke recently wrote about a new CSS JavaScript compatibility layer called IE-CSS3.js. The library allows users to write CSS using pseudo-element selectors, and have it work natively in IE8 via JavaScript. The JavaScript parses the linked CSS, and dynamically adds rules to the document. This means that the shortcomings of the browser’s CSS display methods can be automatically overcome by creating custom CSS with JavaScript. All users will thus see the same thing. Great.

Web Development, CSS, JavaScript, Microsoft, MSIE, Web Standards

IE9 Standards Support Work Underway, To Support Rounded Corners! November 19th, 2009

So Microsoft is starting to release information on the next release of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), IE version 9. The IE team posted on their blog about the ongoing progress … but it covers everything from some of the performance profiling that they’re doing (which is an interesting read), to their current performance in the Acid 3 test, to some of the new Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features that they will be supporting.

Application Development, Web Development, JavaScript

Google Releases Closure JavaScript Tools November 9th, 2009

This past week the “almighty” Google released what looks like a very interesting set of Web Development tools for JavaScript development. It’s a set of tools they’ve created to build rich user interfaces and increase the performance of the scripting involved.

The release consists of the following:

Web Development, CSS, Front-end Engineering, HTML, JavaScript

The Road to Front-end Engineering November 6th, 2008

Opera has been on something of a roll lately (at least on the development front). They recently released a bundle of research into the “state of the web” as it is from their MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) search engine, and a few months ago started a wonderful set of educational resources for front-end people with their Web Standards Curriculum.

Web Development, CSS, Front-end Engineering, HTML, JavaScript, user interface

Professional Front-end Engineering September 2nd, 2008

Yahoo!’s Nate Koechley recently posted slides and audio from a presentation he gave on Professional Frontend Engineering.

Yahoo! is a big site, and it works really well. As an example of cutting edge excellence in modern browser technologies, you’d be hard pressed to find many better examples today. Their mail application alone is an exceptional example of modern browser-based Web applications in action. Additionally, their YUI libraries are exceptional.