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This month has been very busy conference-wise. I had 4 conferences in a row, so I was flying from country to country and giving talks for 2 weeks. As I usually do after conferences, this post sums up my experiences and feedback I got from these conferences, in chronological order.

FromTheFront

This was a rather low-budget Italian conference that took place in Cesena, a city near Bologna. Despite the extremely low ticket price, they managed to pull off a very decent one day conference, which is very admirable. Italian food is so good that I’d recommend visiting this country even if it’s just for the food! They were very nice hosts, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

My talk was right after Jeremy Keith’s, who is a very well-known and experienced speaker that knows how to make audiences delirious (in a good way), so I was naturally a bit nervous about the unavoidable comparison. Despite my fears, my talk was very well received. Here’s a sample of the twitter feedback I got:

JSConf EU

Next stop was Berlin and JSConf’s European sister conference. This was one of the most well organized conferences I’ve been to: The food, the coffee, the afterparties, the wifi, the projectors, everything was top notch. Also, it had a get-together the day after the conference (called “hangover.js”) which I think is great and more conferences should start adopting this tradition. It eases the pain of the conference being over and you get to say goodbye to a few folks you weren’t able to catch at the afterparty. It also featured many cool ideas, like a gal drawing live visualizations of the talks (Here’s mine) and a singer to open the conference in the first day singing a song to …Brendan Eich (!). I made new friends, had lots of fun and everything was awesome.

I was a bit more nervous about my talk for two reasons: Firstly, it was my first JavaScript talk, and secondly, it had no live demos like my CSS talks, which is a big part of why people like them. It went much better than I expected, and I got very good feedback and even though I went hugely overtime (I had 30 minutes and did 55!) nobody complained. Thankfully, it was right before lunch so I didn’t eat up another speaker’s time (which is part of the reason I love the pre-lunch spot so much).  I didn’t get the super-enthusiastic feedback I get from my CSS talks, but it was good enough to not be disappointed. Here’s a sample:

You can find my slides on Speakerdeck , Slideshare or the HTML version on my website.

Fronteers

I was looking forward to Fronteers the most, since it’s my favorite conference. It might not be the one with the most money or the biggest, but it has a special place in my heart for a number of different reasons (not all of which I can write in a public blog post). It was the first international conference I ever attended (in 2010) and I’ve met there so many people I used to only know (and admire) as a name & avatar before. It’s the conference I’ve had the most fun at, in both years I’ve been there. Everyone, the volunteers, the attendees, the speakers, everyone is awesome. There is something magic about this conference, as most of its speakers and attendees think about it in the same way (Christian Heilmann for example calls it “his special conference” and he goes to A LOT of conferences). It doesn’t just feel like a professional conference, it feels like a big, loving, open, web development family that gets together once a year to celebrate the advances in our field.

But this time, I wasn’t just an attendee. I wasn’t a regular speaker either. I was also hosting a workshop, my first full day workshop. I was super stressed about that, and in retrospect, it was the most exhausting thing I have ever done. Some other speakers told me it felt so exhausting because it was my first, I really hope they’re right. Luckily, attendees loved it, and they didn’t seem to notice my progressively getting tired after the 4th hour. Here’s some of the feedback I got:

https://twitter.com/V\_v\_V/status/121511282758258688

My talk was the next day, and even though I was afraid it would be bad due to being tired from the workshop and the pre-party, I think it was my best talk ever. I was much more relaxed, and I got the most enthusiastic feedback I ever have. My hand literally got tired favoriting tweets, and I’m pretty sure I missed some. Here’s a small sample:

https://twitter.com/addy\_osmani/status/121885202581684224

https://twitter.com/Georg\_Tavonius/status/121888702678044672

My slides are now online at Speakerdeck, Slideshare and the interactive version on my website.

Frontend 2011

Oslo is a city I’ve been to many times in the past, so there was nothing new to see there. I didn’t make it to the speakers dinner & pre-party due to my late flight, which kinda sucked but it’s my fault since it took me a long while to decide on my flight dates. The conference itself was a bit more design-focused that I’d like, but very well organized. It took place in the same hotel the speakers were staying at, which is always a good thing. It also had the best coffee I’ve ever drank at a conference, and one of the best I’ve tasted in general. I also loved the idea of having multiple projectors, so that everyone in the audience can see clearly. They had the very original idea of not only drawing caricatures for every speaker (here’s mine, I also got it in a nice frame) but also having the artist in the venue to draw caricatures for attendees as well!

My talk went smoothly, and received very good feedback:

https://twitter.com/gustaff\_weldon/status/123741227563753472

https://twitter.com/gav\_taylor/status/123742248646094848

https://twitter.com/ken\_guru/status/123744573666246656

That’s it. I now get to rest for a while. Next stop is SWDC in November, which will host the première of my new talk “CSS in the 4th dimension: Not your daddy’s CSS animations” which will be about CSS transitions & animations, from the basics all way to badass secrets.

Thanks to all the conference organizers for inviting me and for the attendees for attending and giving feedback on my talks. You are all awesome, and it was the best 2 weeks ever. :)

My newest article on Smashing Magazine’s coding section is for the geekiest among you. It’s about how you can pack long lists of boolean values into a string in the most space-efficient way. Hope you enjoy it :)

I always loved Github’s ability to publish pages for a project and get the strain out of your server. However, every time I tried it, I struggled to keep the gh-pages branch up to date. Until I discovered the awesome git rebase.

Usually my github workflow is like this:

git add . git status // to see what changes are going to be commited git commit -m ‘Some descriptive commit message’ git push origin master

Now, when I use gh-pages, there are only a few more commands that I have to use after the above:

git checkout gh-pages // go to the gh-pages branch git rebase master // bring gh-pages up to date with master git push origin gh-pages // commit the changes git checkout master // return to the master branch

I know this is old news to some of you (I’m a github n00b, struggling with basic stuff, so my advice is probably for other n00bs), but if I had read this a few months ago, it would’ve saved me big hassles, so I’m writing it for the others out there that are like me a few months ago.

Now if only I find an easy way to automate this… :)

I wrote this script while at the airport travelling to Oslo and during the Frontend 2011 conference. I think it’s amazing, and it makes authoring CSS3 a pleasure.

Read my announcement about it on Smashing Magazine.

Hope you like it!

I’m writing this blog post while eating some of the amazing Lindt chocolates I got for free 10 days ago at Frontend conference in Zurich. But it wasn’t a good experience only because of them!

First of all, it gave me the opportunity to visit Zurich for free, and meet an old friend for the first time. A girl we used to be penpals with at primary school & junior high when she was still living in Athens and I in Lesvos. She is now living in Zurich and doing her PhD in ETH. I arrived in Zurich a day earlier and stayed in her place that first night. We caught up and I had a great time.

Secondly, the rest of the speakers are great people and fun too, it was a pleasure to meet them. Especially Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman. He’s a very kind guy, nothing like what you’d expect from somebody so successful. I also got the chance to meet Robert again, who was lots of fun as always. Those Swedes have a great sense of humor!

The conference itself was very nice, although small (only 200 people). Many inspiring talks, although I couldn’t attend them all because they were split into multiple tracks in one day. I would very much prefer it if it had 1 track and was 2 days. The 2nd day was an unconference, where attendees could speak, about whatever they wanted. I decided to get some sleep the second day, so I arrived a bit later, and didn’t attend many talks. It was kinda sad that it finished so early, around 4pm almost everyone was gone and most speakers were flying back the same day.

My talk went great, although I had the most technical glitches I’ve ever faced in a talk. That was my fault, not the conference’s. I guess I should learn to stop tweaking my slides at the last moment, cause things might break (and this time they did). Despite those glitches however, the audience loved it. Here’s a small sample of the twitter feedback I got:

https://twitter.com/smash\_it\_on/status/112107410155515904

If you read the above carefully, you might have noticed that my talk was recorded, so you can see it too. :) Enjoy!

A week ago, I released Chainvas. It was a spin-off script I wrote while developing my cubic-bezier tool, to make using the Canvas API a bit less painful. However, unlike similar attempts to make the Canvas API chainable, most of my code was written in a very generic manner, and was actually able to make every API chainable. However, when I released it, even though I mentioned that it can be used for other APIs and provided some examples, practically everyone that shared the link on twitter or other means (thank you .net magazine for the newsletter mention btw!) focused on what Chainvas did for Canvas.

Actually, while using Chainvas myself, I found it immensely more useful for chaining DOM methods and setting multiple element properties at once. Chainvas had a lot of potential, that most people were missing. And then it dawned on me: I should modularize the library! A generic chaining library at its core and additional modules for making the different APIs chainable. And I did it.

On the way to that, I added IE8 compatibility, and tested in many other browsers, thanks to Browserstack. I actually found that Chainvas’ core even works in IE6! I also wrote unit tests, a much more extensive documentation, added a script generated table of contents and designed a logo and a Chainvas pride banner.

Also, since it was now modular, it needed a build script. I badly wanted to make this client side, so I followed this architecture:

• Every module is included in chainvas.js and chainvas.min.js, along with a header comment that follows a specific syntax.
• The user selects a compression level and then, the relevant script is downloaded through XHR and split into parts according to the module headers. Then a module list is generated with checkboxes for the user to select the ones they want to include.
• When the user checks and unchecks those checkboxes, the URL of the download link changes to a data URI that contains the script.

This approach has the disadvantage that there is no default filename, and the “Save page as…” link is deactivated in Chrome (why Chrome??). However, I like the idea so much, I don’t mind these shortcomings.

That’s about it. Enjoy and let me know about any bugs.

A few days ago, I had a talk at a conference in Zurich (I’m going to write more about it in another post). The talk was about “10 things you might not know about CSS3”. The first of those things was how you can do bouncing transitions with cubic-bezier() instead of an easing keyword. As usual, my slides included a few live demos of the functionality, in which I edited the cubic-bezier() parameters and the audience could see the transition produced.

However, in the case of cubic-bezier() that’s not enough. No matter how much you see someone changing the parameters, if you don’t picture it in a 2D plane, it’s very hard to understand how it works. So, the night before, I searched for a tool I could use to show them how bezier curves are formed. I found plenty, but all of them restricted the the coordinates to the 0-1 range. I’m not sure if the cause is ignorance about the spec changes or that Webkit hasn’t caught up with those changes yet (but it will, soon). The only one that supported values out of range was this one from the Opera Dragonfly developers, but I found it kinda impossible to adapt.

For my talk, I tried to adapt one of them but it was late so I gave up after a while and ended up just showing them a screenshot. And the day after the talk, I started adapting this to my needs (ever tried coding at a conference? It’s awesome, you get to ask questions from very knowledgeable people and ger replies straight away). And then I started cleaning up the code, changing how it worked, adding features. At this point, I think the only thing that’s left from that tool is …the HTML5 doctype. After 3-4 days, I finished it, and got it its own domain, cubic-bezier.com (I was surprised it was still free).

So, in a nutshell, what makes this better?

Lots of things:

• It supports y values out of range, as per the latest version of the spec (and shows a warning for Webkit)
• It’s fully accessible from the keyboard
• You can move the handles not only by dragging but also by clicking on the plane or using the keyboard arrow keys
• You can mouse over the plane and see the progression and time percentages that correspond to every point
• You can save curves you like in your “Library” (uses localStorage to persist them)
• You can import and export curves to/from your library to share them with others
• You can share a permalink to every curve. For example, here’s a bouncing transition (FF & Opera only)
• You can compare the current curve with any in your library, setting the duration yourself
• Custom favicon that reflects the current curve

Cool stuff used

Given that this tool is not only for developers, but for badass developers that care about stuff like cubic-bezier(), I think I can safely assume they’re using a top notch browser. So, I went crazy with using cool modern stuff:

• HTML5: Canvas, localStorage, History API, range inputs, oninput event, output, classList, data- attributes
• ES5: Accessors, Array#map, Array#forEach
• Selectors API
• JSON
• CSS3: Transitions, gradients, media queries, border-radius, shadows, :in-range pseudoclass, box-sizing, transforms, text-overflow

I also used my tiny chaining framework, Chainvas throughout this project.

Browser support

So far, I’ve tested it in modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and it seems to work. I haven’t tested it in IE10 (too lazy to open vm), although I want it to work there too, so if it doesn’t let me know. :)

Enjoy! cubic-bezier.com

It’s definitely not the first time someone writes a script to make the canvas API chainable, as a quick Google search will confirm.

However, I think my attempt has merit, because it’s not really focused in chaining canvas methods, but just about every API you use it on and because it’s super small, only 1KB!

You can find it here: chainvas

Enjoy!

Thought I’d let you know that my Smashing Magazine article with that title was published today. It discusses why, how, when and where to report browser bugs, as well as how to make a good bug report.

Get comfortable and make a big cup of coffee before you dive in, as it’s quite long (4000 words).

steps() is a relatively new addition to the CSS3 animations module. Instead of interpolating the values smoothly, it allows us to define the number of “frames” precisely. So I used it to create headers that have the well-known animated “typing effect”:

As you can see, the number of characters is hardcoded in the steps() function, but that’s the only place. Everything else is totally flexible. Apart from the font: It has to be monospace, so that every character has the same width.

Also, this particular way requires a solid background and an extra <span>. You can avoid these limitations by directly animating the width of the heading itself, but this requires a fixed target width hardcoded in the animation, so 2 things that need to be changed for every heading:

If you’re having trouble understanding how it works, take a look at this simpler example, with just the cursor.

Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit only at the moment, since other engines haven’t implemented CSS animations yet. However, both examples degrade very gracefully in other browsers (IMO at least).

Whenever I wanted to convert a CSS named color to RGB, I used to open the CSS3 colors spec in a new tab, search in the page and copied the values. Every time it felt even more tedious. I didn’t want to search in long tables, I wanted to type the color somewhere and get the values back, in an easy to copy format. So, after yet another color lookup earlier today, I decided to scratch my own itch and do it myself.

Of course, I didn’t plan to include a whole database of CSS colors in the website. My idea was much simpler: Use the named color to draw a rectangle in a <canvas> and then read the R,G,B values through ctx.getImageData().

I got the core functionality done in under 10 minutes, so I started adding stuff. I added a hex and HSL representation, I used canvas.toDataURL() to get a data URI of the rectangle and use it as a dynamic favicon*, I made the colors sharable and bookmarkable by using an old-fashioned hash. Also, I realized it actually supports any CSS supported color represenation by design, not just named colors.

Regarding the color conversions themselves, I took extra care to avoid redundancy. So values < 1 don’t have leading zeroes (.5 instead of 0.5) and when the hex color is in the format #xxyyzz it gets converted to #xyz. When it’s an RGBA color, it still converts it to hex, since those values will be supported in CSS4.

Since it’s for developers, I didn’t bother at all with fallbacks.

Cool stuff used:

• HTML5: canvas, autofocus, output, oninput event, hashchange event
• CSS3: gradients, media queries, box-sizing, background-clip, border-radius, shadows, RGBA
• ES5: Array#map()
• Selectors API

The reason the input’s border appears weird on Webkit is this long standing Webkit bug. Also, for some reason my nice dynamic favicons don’t display on Firefox, although they display fine in Webkit and Opera.

Enjoy: CSS.coloratum

Happy color sharing! Let me know of any problems or suggestions you may have.

PS: In case you’re wondering about the domain, I’ve had it for ages for another project and I thought it was quite fitting.

*Thanks to @milo for giving me the idea of using a dynamic favicon

Yesterday, I was watching some season 6 episodes of Futurama (btw, this is their best season ever!) and I noticed the URLs in the website I was in (let’s call it foo.com). They were like:

http://foo.com/futurama/season/6/episode/9

I thought to myself “hey, this looks very clean and readable”. And then I noticed that it only has 1 less character than its non-rewritten counterpart:

http://foo.com/?futurama&season=6&episode=9

However, I’m pretty sure you agree that the second one is much harder to read. I asked for opinions on twitter, and got many interesting replies. Apart from the ones that completely missed the point, these were the core explanations:

• = and especially & are more complex and look more like letters, so our brain has trouble tuning them out (@feather @robert_tilt @rexxars @mrtazz @manchurian)
• Slashes have more whitespace around them, so they are less obtrusive (@feather @stevelove @kenny1987 @janl)
• They’re all visual noise, but we always have slashes in a URL, so using the slash to separate keys and values as well only introduces 1 separator instead of 3 (@bugster @craigpatik @nyaray)
• Slashes imply hierarchy, which our brains process easier than key-value pairs. Key-value pairs could be in any order, paths have a specified order. (@sggottlieb @edwelker @stevenhay @jwasjsberg @stazybohorn)
• Ampersands and equal signs are harder to type than slashes. They’re both in the top row and ampersands even need the Shift key as well. (@feather)
• Ampersands and equal signs have semantic meaning in our minds, whereas slashes not as much (@snadon)

Regarding hierarchy and RESTful design, the first example isn’t exactly correct. If it was hierarchical, it should be foo.com/futurama/seasons/6/episodes/9. As it currently stands, it’s key-value pairs, masquerading as hierarchical. However, it still reads better.

So I’m leaning towards the first three explanations, although I think all of them have a grain of truth. Which makes me wonder: Did we choose the wrong characters for our protocol? Could we have saved ourselves the hassle and performance overhead of URL rewriting if we were a bit more careful in choosing the separators back then?

Also, some food for thought: Where do you think the following URLs stand in the legibility scale?

http://foo.com/futurama/season=6/episode=9

http://foo.com/futurama/season:6/episode:9

http : //foo.com/futurama-season-6-episode-9  (suggested by Ben Alman)

Do you think there are there any explanations that I missed?

And I’m not referring to learning.

For example, yesterday I was trying to write code for something and it ended up beng harder than I expected. It’s one of those rare cases where you can fully imagine how the solution should work, enough to tell it to another person, but you can’t put your thoughts to code and you feel you’re not smart enough.

I find that in those cases, it helps a lot to open a new editor window and try to write code that just works. Without being elegant, fast or maintainable. Just something that works properly. And after you manage to put your thoughts into (bad) code, it’s easy to refine it from there and end up with good code.

Just don’t stop at the bad code, like many beginners do. It’s like when designers sketch a rough draft for a logo, before drawing the digital version. Could you imagine how horrible it would be if they wanted to stop there and give the rough sketches to the client instead? :)

For ages, we couldn’t utilize the sibling combinators (~ and +) to ease the pain of creating star rating widgets, because of this stupid Webkit bug. Nowadays, not only it’s fixed, but the fix has already propagated to Chrome and Safari 5.1. So, we can at least use the sibling combinator to make coloring the stars easier.

But can we use no JavaScript for a rating widget and make it just with CSS?

Actually, we can. By adapting Ryan Seddon’s technique for custom radio buttons with CSS, we can turn a series of radio buttons into stars that change colors (for the purposes of this demo they’re just unicode characters that change colors, but in your case they may as well be images) and use the sibling combinator to color the previous stars. A series of radio buttons is what many people use as a star rating widget fallback anyway, so the markup required is not necessarily more than usual. The only thing that needs to be done differently is their reverse ordering: The highest ratings need to go first, due to the way CSS3 selectors work (this limitation might be removed in CSS4, but that’s a long way ahead).

Of course, you’d still need JS to attach an event handler if you want the votes to be registered through AJAX, but that’s not part of the rating widget per se (it could still work as part of a regular form).

What’s best is that it’s fully keyboard accessible (focus and then use keyboard arrows) and screen reader accessible (although VoiceOver will also pronounce the generated stars, but that won’t happen if you use images instead of unicode stars). I’m guessing it could become even more accessible with proper ARIA, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the commenter :D

In browsers that don’t support :checked (essentially only IE < 9), it degrades to a series of radio buttons (haven’t verified that it does, but it should do).

So, here it is:

Legal note, for those who need it: This code is MIT licensed.

I was thinking today how blessed I feel for being a part of the worldwide web development community (and the broader programming community). In a world where throwing shit at others is an acceptable way of climbing to the top, our industry is a breeze of fresh air. Here are a few reasons why I find our industry unique, in a very good way:

• In which other industry is it common for people to spend several hours, days or in some cases even months, working on something to give it away for free, just to help people?
• In which other industry do people help you and promote you just because they think you’re good, without getting anything out of it?
• In which other industry do people listen to you, not because of your titles, degrees and “decades of experience”, but because of what you actually know?
• In which other industry can you go to a big professional conference with jeans and a t-shirt and be in the majority? (And the best part is, even if you don’t like that kind of outfit and you prefer to wear a suit, you still fit in, cause appearances just don’t matter)
• Judging whether someone’s work is good is a very rational and objective process (unlike arts). Sure, the various criteria have different weights for every person, but the criteria are the same for everyone, more or less (correctness, speed, maintainability, readability etc).
• Even though it’s a male dominated field, I’ve never* experienced any discrimination or lack of respect due to my gender. Quite the contrary actually.
• I’ve yet to meet a developer that lacks a sense of humor.
• Work for us is our passion, not a chore. Yes, there are passionate people in every field, but in our industry it’s the norm, not the exception.
• You don’t need to hide your geekiness. Instead, you’re encouraged to embrace it.

Yes, I know that not all of them are true for every single person that happened to be a web developer. I’m talking about the part of the industry that’s active and that I meet in conferences, meetups, twitter etc.

So, what are your reasons for liking our industry, if any? Lets keep this post happy and not whine about what we DON’T like please. :)

*Well, except one bad joke once, but he recently said he’s sorry and his intentions were good throughout, so I don’t count it.