December 2010
57 posts
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How To Write Unmaintainable Code →
Ensure a job for life ;-)
General Principles
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
- Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He
has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it.
He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and
...
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Less Framework Becomes More Powerful With Version... →
Less Framework is a cross-device CSS grid system that uses inline media queries. […]
It first creates a default layout normally and adds additional layouts using inline media queries. Any browsers incompatible with media queries will simply ignore all the additional layouts, and will only use the default one.
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URL Design →
You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience.
URL Design is a complex subject. I can’t say there are any “right” solutions — it’s much like the rest of design. There’s...
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Mathematically optimal HTML →
Now that all of the major browser manufacturers are adopting an identical parser, invalid HTML will be parsed in the same way by each of them. If, for example, you omit a closing </p> tag in your HTML, you’ll know with certainty exactly how all of the browsers will react. Theoretically, we can take advantage of this to compress our HTML — emitting the bare minimum amount of markup for...
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History of the tilde →
So I was researching the history of the tilde, because D told me that her company just installed a new web proxy that denies access to any URL with a tilde in it. Presumably because the presence of a tilde indicates with remarkable accuracy a personal site, and apparently her employer believes that reading personal sites is not an appropriate use of company time. Which, to be honest, is probably...
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“JavaScript is, without a doubt, the world’s most misunderstood programming...”
– Douglas Crockford: The JavaScript Programming Language - A four part lecture.
Kod →
Kod is a programmers’ editor for OS X.
Fully concurrent — loading files, syntax highlighting, etc is distributed across available CPU cores. Minimal waiting time.
Integrated scripting environment based on Node.js.
Written from scratch with modern OS X 10.6 APIs providing maximum OS integration while avoiding reinvention of the wheel.
...
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Radi →
Radi is the design application that brings together everything visual on the web.
Images, animations, vector graphics, video clips, realtime visual effects, JavaScript programming…
With Radi, publishing moving images using modern web standards is suddenly incredibly easy.
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WatchThe progress bar illusion
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What are some tips for designing a good set of... →
If you already have your domain name: Short over long Consider removing useless words from the url like http://www,quora,com/tips-for-designing-good-urls Concise To the point, describe the page content from the url Use lowercase Generally the best idea, for sharing links and technical issues (Apache is case-sensitive sometimes) Consistent Stay consistent, make a style guide for URL’s if...
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☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝.ws →
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24 Ways →
24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.
I should have linked to this at the start of December. They’ve been publishing really high quality articles.
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HTTP/1.1 Server Header Status Codes →
A complete list of HTTP/1.1: Response Codes. HTTP Status Codes like 200, 301, 302, 304, 307, 404, 410 and 500 are being returned in the server (e.g. Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, GWS,…) headers.
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Crafty →
A lightweight, modular JavaScript game engine to easily produce high quality games.
Includes a large variety of components such as animation, event management, redraw regions, collision detection, sprites and more.
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Title Junk →
That’s a good rule of thumb for designing and writing page titles: pick a name (and, for CMS templates, a pattern) that makes sense as the name of a bookmark for that page. Most bookmarking tools — the ones built into web browsers, and bookmarklets for third-party apps — do use the page title as the default bookmark name. Tools that help people tweet links to articles use the page title as the...
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Ultimate Guide to Microformats: Reference and... →
This guide discusses popular microformats that can enhance the semantics and interoperability of your website.
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Creating Triangles in CSS →
Few people realize when a browser draws the borders, it draws them at angles. This technique takes advantage of that. One side of the border is colored for the color of the arrow, and the rest are transparent. Then you set the width of the border to something large […]
For example:
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Thinking in Color: the HSL Model and Munsell Color... →
nikography:
Having a deep understanding of the HSL color model and where it comes from will allow you to construct color instead of picking it. If you have a web or creative background, you are probably familiar with the Photoshop color picker or have read/dreamed about HSL notation in CSS3 endeavors….
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* { CSS:resetr } →
The lean, mean, CSS-reset machine.
CSSresetr is easier than sleeping. Here’s how it works:
Select a CSS Reset from the left dropdown menu
Select a web page from the right dropdown menu
Experiment and have fun! :)
Your chosen CSS Reset will be applied to your chosen content.
There are many different types of HTML content available, so
have fun experimenting. To clear a reset, just...
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Blinking text with CSS →
Blinking text was one of the most dreaded homepage effects in the 90’s. It was easily achieved by using the <blink> tag and was viewed upon as a real newbie thing to do. The <blink> tag is now a deprecated HTML element, but in the name of moving presentation/style to CSS, there is now a CSS equivalent.
According to the CSS standards by W3C, this is an optional feature of CSS....
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In Defense of the Blink Tag →
Then the blink tag is the HTML tag that truly makes use of the dynamic possibilities of the digital medium beyond what’s available in a conventional (e.g., paper) 2-d setting. The <marquee> tag is technically just a bastardization of positioning—not to mention it makes text less readable. But a properly used blink tag could be useful and graceful to boot.
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BallDroppings →
This is a Chrome Experiment. A description for the app version says:
BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. Alternatively this software can be taken seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound,...
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Using CSS without HTML →
A few days ago, Chris tweeted: If we could stack pseudo elements (e.g. :after:after) we could build a whole website with no HTML other than <html>. Probably good we can’t. In response to this, I created this quick demo (view in Firefox or Opera), illustrating that technically you don’t need any HTML at all to use CSS.
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“There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so...”
– C.A.R. Hoare
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How to Centre and Layout Pages Without a Wrapper →
The number one suggestion I see from the
proprietor of
html5gallery.com to submitters is not to use the
“<section>” element as a glorified
“<div id="wrapper">”. Here, I shall demonstrate that
“<body>” is already a wrapper and can be hacked to
achieve some pretty remarkable layout and clean code!
Let me just repeat that. The body element is already a wrapper. It can have...
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Link Relations →
In this article:
What are link relations?
How can I use link relations?
Changes to link relations since HTML 4
rel=alternate
rel=archives
rel=author (and the removal of the rev attribute)
rel=external
rel=feed?
rel=first, last, prev, next, and up
rel=icon
rel=license
rel=nofollow
rel=noreferrer
rel=pingback
rel=prefetch
rel=search
...
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Web Do's & Don'ts →
Tips & tricks for the modern day web designer
WebD&D offers free top-notch tips, tricks, best practices and resources for your reading pleasure. It is brought to you by web enthusiasts who enjoy their contribution in making the WWW a better place.
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Rubular →
A Ruby regular expression editor
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CamelCase Seriously Sucks! →
CSS is a hyphen-delimited syntax. By this I mean we write things like font-size, line-height, border-bottom etc. So why then would you introduce another format?
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The History of CSS Resets →
When artists begin a new painting, they don’t immediately reach for the cadmium red and the phthalo blue. They first prime the canvas. Why? To ensure that the canvas is smooth and has a uniform white hue.
Many web designers prefer to use a CSS “reset” to “prime” the browser canvas and ensure that their design displays as uniformly as possible across the various browsers...
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