Recently, PPK stated that he hates Google Chrome’s automatic updates. I disagree. In fact, I think that all browser vendors should enforce automatic updates as violently as Google Chrome does. There should be no option to disable them. For anybody.
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.
As you probably know already, when browsers implement an experimental or proprietary CSS property, they prefix it with their “vendor prefix”, so that 1) it doesn’t collide with other properties and 2) you can choose whether to use it or not in that particular browser, since it’s support might be wrong or incomplete.
When writing CSS you probably just include all properties and rest in peace, since browsers ignore properties they don’t know. However, when changing a style via javascript it’s quite a waste to do that.
Instead of iterating over all possible vendor prefixes every time to test if a prefixed version of a specific property is supported, we can create a function that returns the current browser’s prefix and caches the result, so that no redundant iterations are performed afterwards. How can we create such a function though?
Categories
CSS3 border-radius, today
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.
Math.round, Math.ceil and Math.floor are very useful functions. However, when using them, I find myself many times needing to specify a precision level. You don’t always want to round to an integer, you often just want to strip away some of the decimals.
We probably all know that if we have a function to round to integers, we can round to X decimals by doing Math.round(num*Math.pow(10,X)) / Math.pow(10,X). This kind of duck typing can get tedious, so usually, you roll your own function to do that. However, why not just add that extra functionality to the functions that already exist and you’re accustomed to?
Categories
JS library detector
Ever wondered which JavaScript library (if any) is hidden beneath the bells & whistles of each site you gazed at? Since I am a curious person, I find myself wondering every time, so after a bit of research, I wrapped up a little bookmarklet that instantly told me the answer every time.
Categories
Check whether a CSS property is supported
Sometimes when using JavaScript, you need to determine whether a certain CSS property is supported by the current browser or not. For instance when setting opacity for an element, you need to find out whether the property that the browser supports is opacity, -moz-opacity (MozOpacity), -khtml-opacity (KhtmlOpacity) or the IE proprietary filter.
Instead of performing a forwards incompatible browser detect, you can easily check which property is supported with a simple conditional.