Smashing Coding

Category: Coding

This extended category features articles on client-side and server-side programming languages, tools, frameworks and libraries, as well as back-end issues. Experts and professionals reveal their coding tips, tricks and ideas. Curated by Keir Whitaker.

Popular tags in this category: CSS, CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Techniques, Essentials, Tools.

The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands

We do more reading on the screen today than we did even a year ago. If we are ever to have a golden age of reading on the screen, this might be the start of it. Tablets, Nooks and Kindles make buying a book or magazine for the screen almost unavoidable. With smartphones, we carry our reading material with us and enjoy instant Web access, enabling the reading experience to flow smoothly from one device to another.

And those devices probably have stunning HD reader-friendly screens. Throw in companion services like Readmill and 24symbols, which allow us to share our reading experiences, and we have perfect screen-based access to all aspects of the written word. So, why isn’t Web and screen typography keeping up?

Introduction To Linux Commands

By Paul Tero
January 23rd, 2012
Linux, Sysadmin
63 Comments

At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the text-based computer terminals of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s.

Mac, Linux and Windows computers today are mainly controlled through user-friendly feature-rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with menus, scroll bars and drag-and-drop interfaces. But all of the basic stuff can still be accomplished by typing text commands into the terminal or command prompt. Using Finder or Explorer to open a folder is akin to the cd command (for “change directory”). Viewing the contents of a folder is like ls (short for “list,” or dir in Microsoft’s command prompt). And there are hundreds more for moving files, editing files, launching applications, manipulating images, backing up and restoring stuff, and much more.

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Resolution Independence With SVG

By David Bushell
January 16th, 2012
CSS
52 Comments

In this article, we’ll look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), one of the most underused technologies in website development today. Before diving into an example, let’s consider the state of the Web at present and where it is going. Website design has found new vigor in recent years, with the evolving technique of responsive design.

And for good reason: essentially, responsive website design moves us away from the fixed-width pages we’ve grown accustomed to, replacing them with shape-shifting layouts and intelligent reflowing of content. Add to that a thoughtful content strategy and mobile-first approach, and we’re starting to offer an experience that adapts across devices and browsers to suit the user’s context.

Adventures In The Third Dimension: CSS 3D Transforms

By Peter Gasston
January 6th, 2012
CSS, CSS3
23 Comments

Back in 2009, the WebKit development team proposed a new extension to CSS that would allow Web page elements to be displayed and transformed on a three-dimensional plane. This proposal was called 3D Transforms, and it was soon implemented in Safari for Mac and iOS. About a year later, support followed for Chrome, and early in 2011, for Android. Outside of WebKit, however, none of the other browser makers seemed to show much enthusiasm for it, so it’s remained a fairly niche and underused feature.

That’s set to change, though, as the Firefox and Internet Explorer teams have decided to join the party by implementing 3D Transforms in pre-release versions of their browsers. So, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see them in IE 10 and a near-future version of Firefox (possibly 10 or 11, but that’s not confirmed yet), both of which are slated for release sometime this year.

Create A Christmas Wish List With PHP (For Beginners)

By Daniel Pataki
December 22nd, 2011
MySQL, PHP
29 Comments

’Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

This tutorial is meant for beginners who already grasp HTML and CSS, know a bit of PHP and have seen phpMyAdmin before. I will not go into best practices, safety and all the rest of it; let’s just have fun with this one!

Six CSS Layout Features To Look Forward To

By Divya Manian
December 15th, 2011
CSS, CSS3, Layouts
37 Comments

A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. Several articles have been written on finding the holy grail of CSS layouts, but to date, not a single solution works without major caveats.

At the W3Conf, I gave a talk on how the CSS Working Group is attempting to solve the concerns of Web developers with multiple proposals. There are six layout proposals that are relevant to us, all of which I described in the talk. Here is a little more about these proposals and how they will help you in developing websites in the future.

An Introduction To Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS)

By Louis Lazaris
December 12th, 2011
CSS
128 Comments

Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site. From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.

Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas. In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.

Auto-Save User’s Input In Your Forms With HTML5 and Sisyphus.js

By Alexander Kaupanin
December 5th, 2011
JavaScript
19 Comments

Editor’s note: This article is the third in our new series that introduces new, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework that helps you build prototypes and production code. This time, we’re presenting Sisyphus.js, a library developed by Alexander Kaupanin to provide Gmail-like client-side drafts and a bit more.

Have you ever been filling out a long form online or writing an eloquent and spirited comment when suddenly the browser crashes? Or perhaps you closed the browser tab accidentally, or your Internet connection cuts off, or the electricity goes down (and, being ever obedient to Murphy’s Law, you had no backup power supply). If not, then you’re lucky. But no one is protected from such minor catastrophes.

Imagine the storm of emotions felt by a user who had to add just a bit more information before submitting a form and then loses all data. Horrible, huh? Now, if only there was a way to recover that data, rather than undertake a Sisyphean pursuit.