In this post I’m going to share some tips to increase a site’s usability that are very quick to implement. Not all of them are cross-browser, but they are the icing on the cake anyway, nobody would mind without them.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Category: Articles
Helpful (I hope) articles without original content (unless they are also in the category “Original”) that just sum up techniques I’ve read about elsewhere.
Reading Time: 2 minutes
If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple:
<input type="file" multiple>
or, in XHTML:
<input type="file" multiple="multiple" />
You might not know that Opera supported multiple file uploads for a while now, based on the earlier Web Forms 2.0 standard in a slightly different (and more flexible) format:
<input type="file" min="1" max="9999″ />
Reading Time: 2 minutes
I used to take pride in my short, bulletproof and elegant String and Number type checks:
// Check whether obj is a Number obj + 0 === obj // Check whether obj is a String obj + '' === obj
I always thought that apart from being short and elegant, they should be faster.
However, some quick tests gave me a cold slap in the face and proved my assertion to be entirely false.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
You might just dislike JavaScript libraries and the trend around them, or the project you’re currently working on might be too small for a JavaScript library. In both cases, I understand, and after all, who am I to judge you? I don’t use a library myself either (at least not one that you could’ve heard about 😉 ), even though I admire the ingenuity and code quality of some.
However, when you take such a brave decision, it’s up to you to take care of those problems that JavaScript libraries carefully hide from your way. A JavaScript library’s purpose isn’t only to provide shortcuts to tedious tasks and allow you to easily add cool animations and Ajax functionality as many people (even library users) seem to think. Of course these are things that they are bound to offer if they want to succeed, but not the only ones. JavaScript libraries also have to workaround browser differences and bugs and this is the toughest part, since they have to constantly keep up with browser releases and their respective bugs and judge which ones are common enough to deserve workaround and which ones are so rare that would bloat the library without being worth it. Sometimes I think that nowadays, how good of a JavaScript developer you are doesn’t really depend on how well you know the language, but rather on how many browser bugs you’ve heard/read/know/found out. 😛
The purpose of this post is to let you know about the browser bugs and incompatibilities that you are most likely to face when deciding againist the use of a JavaScript library. Knowledge is power, and only if you know about them beforehand you can workaround them without spending countless debugging hours wondering “WHAT THE…”. And even if you do use a JavaScript library, you will learn to appreciate the hard work that has been put in it even more.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
UPDATE: New version
First of all, happy Valentine’s day for yersterday. 🙂 This is the second part of my “Using CSS3 today” series. This article discusses current RGBA browser support and ways to use RGBA backgrounds in non-supporting browsers. Bonus gift: A PHP script of mine that creates fallback 1-pixel images on the fly that allow you to easily utilize RGBA backgrounds in any browser that can support png transparency. In addition, the images created are forced to be cached by the client and they are saved on the server’s hard drive for higher performance.
Categories
CSS3 border-radius, today
Reading Time: 4 minutes
This is the first one from a series of articles I’m going to write about using CSS3 properties or values today. I’ll cover everything I have found out while using them, including various browser quirks and bugs I know of or have personally filed regarding them. In this part I’ll discuss ways to create rounded corners without images and if possible without JavaScript in the most cross-browser fashion.