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Thoughts

CMYK colors in CSS: Useful or useless?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As someone who dealed a bit with print design in the past, I consider CMYK colors the easiest color system for humen to understand and manipulate. It’s very similar to what we used as children, when mixing watercolors for our drawings. It makes perfect sense, more than HSL and definately more than RGB. I understand that most of us are so accustomed to using RGB that can’t realise that, but try to think for a moment: Which color system would make more sense to you if you had no idea and no experience at all with any of them?

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Articles News

On native, single-input, multiple file uploads

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″ />
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Original Tips

Check whether the browser supports RGBA (and other CSS3 values)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When using CSS, we can just include both declarations, one using rgba, and one without it, as mentioned in my post on cross-browser RGBA backgrounds. When writing JavaScript however, it’s a waste of resources to do that (and requires more verbose code), since we can easily check whether the browser is RGBA-capable, almost as easily as we can check whether it suppports a given property. We can even follow the same technique to detect the support of other CSS3 values (for instance, multiple backgrounds support, HSLA support, etc).

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Articles Benchmarks

“Appearances can be deceiving Mr. Anderson” – a.k.a. short code is not always fast code

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.

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Tips

Quick & dirty way to run snippets of JavaScript anywhere

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Ever wanted to run a snippet of JavaScript on a browser that doesn’t support a console in order to debug something? (for instance, IE6, Opera etc)

You probably know about Firebug Lite, but this either requires you to already have the bookmarklet, or include the script in the page. Although Firebug Lite is a great tool for more in depth debugging, it can be tedious for simple tasks (eg. “What’s the value of that property?”).

Fortunately, there is a simpler way.

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Articles

20 things you should know when not using a JS library

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.

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Thoughts

Silent, automatic updates are the way to go

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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.

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Articles Original Releases

Bulletproof, cross-browser RGBA backgrounds, today

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.

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Original

Find the vendor prefix of the current browser

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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?

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Articles

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.

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