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DavidWalsh
If I were to describe Font Awesome in a word, I think it would be...awesome. The icon font library is massively helpful in using quality vector glyphs instead of separate images. I tend to use a lot of icons within links, as they help users to more quickly visually identify navigation. One side effect of using icons within links is that the icons themselves now use the text-decoration of the link. I really don't want icons underlined like the link -- it looks tacky. Here's how I remove them!
I've found myself in love with CSS content and attr; I've recently written about how you can use the property and expression on a basic level, how you can implement CSS counters, and use for the sake of localization. I wanted to share a few tooltip-style uses of the attr expression and content property.
I've always wanted to interview Eric Meyer. His early CSS books are a big reason this blog exists today and the reason why I'm a web developer. Eric gave me some time to hit the history of CSS, CSS' problems today, and the future of CSS.
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer hacks that were so widespread at the time-this was mid-1996. CSS just felt right-the conceptual model made sense, the syntax was straightforward. It seemed like anyone who could learn HTML could learn CSS and have so much more power at their command.
From there, I think it was mostly the sheer joy of crawling through a new system, pulling it apart, figuring out how it worked, and documenting what worked and what didn't. I don't know exactly why those kinds of things excite me, but they do.
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer hacks that were so widespread at the time-this was mid-1996. CSS just felt right-the conceptual model made sense, the syntax was straightforward. It seemed like anyone who could learn HTML could learn CSS and have so much more power at their command.
From there, I think it was mostly the sheer joy of crawling through a new system, pulling it apart, figuring out how it worked, and documenting what worked and what didn't. I don't know exactly why those kinds of things excite me, but they do.
The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a step in the right direction. I recently shared with you 5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed in the hope that some of them would inspire you to improve your own web apps. I'd like to share with you 5 more lessor known HTML5 APIs -- hopefully you find some of them useful!
Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs. Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop. One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API, providing developers access to the user's camera. Let me show you how to get simple camera access from within your browser!
A large focus of my redesign was improving site speed, and in doing so, I took a look at my site's error_log for the first time in a long time. I was shocked when I found out that 90% of my site errors were either hacking attempts or hot-linked files from hundreds of different tumblr.com subdomains. Thousands upon thousands of PHP fatal errors due to lack of memory saw me seeing red pretty quick -- no wonder I was having periodical speed issues!
As you've probably heard me mention a billion times on Twitter, I've been proudly work on the Mozilla Developer Network revamp. This is my first real experience with working on websites with a fair amount of RTL readers. One thing I quickly recognized when browsing in RTL mode was that text wasn't always lining up on the correct side -- I would see text on the left where the browser should have displayed it on the right. After digging into the stylesheets, I saw explicit text-align:left directives and started queueing up selectors I'd need to change to text-align: right. Before doing so, however, I took the time to research a better way...and found it quickly.
There are, however, smaller features in HTML5 that we can appreciate; one of those would be the new download attribute. The download attribute allows you to set a separate file download name than the actual link endpoint itself.
HTML5 threw a whole bunch of awesomeness at us. Tasks we accomplished with JavaScript and Flash, like basic form validation, INPUT placeholders, client side file naming, and audio/video, can now be completed using basic HTML. Another simple functionality HTML now allows us is auto-focusing on elements upon page load; this is accomplished using the autofocus attribute.
Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came along. Another one of those simple features is multiple background images with CSS.
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during :hover, and we also create keyframe-based animations by adding a className, but did you know you can animate elements using media queries as the trigger? Let's have a look!
Saying the phrase "user agent" or "user agent string" is tantamount to saying a swear word. Developers used to use the user agent to detect if a browser had a given feature, instead of, you know, checking to see if the feature actually existed via object or property detection. Those days are behind us though, but one of the web's dirty secrets is that the user agent still has many uses.