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Popular tags in this category: CSS, CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Techniques, Essentials, Tools.
Imagine that your biggest client calls because they are having trouble retrieving their email. Or they want to know what their best-selling item is right now. Or their most popular blog post. Perhaps their website has suddenly gone down. You can hardly reply, “No problem, I’ll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours.” And yet DNS gets away with it! If you need to move a website or change the way a domain’s email is handled, you’ll be faced with a vague 24 to 48-hour delay.
This is quite an anomaly in a world of ultra-convenience and super-fast everything. This article explains what DNS is, how it works, where that pesky delay comes from, and a couple of ways to work around it. DNS is the “domain name system.” It translates human-friendly website addresses like www.cnn.com into computer-friendly IP addresses like 157.166.224.25. Try visiting http://157.166.224.25 if you’d like to verify this.
Read more...By now you’ve probably heard at least something about animation in CSS3 using keyframe-based syntax. The CSS3 animations module in the specification has been around for a couple of years now, and it has the potential to become a big part of Web design. Using CSS3 keyframe animations, developers can create smooth, maintainable animations that perform relatively well and that don’t require reams of scripting. It’s just another way that CSS3 is helping to solve a real-world problem in an elegant manner.
If you haven’t yet started learning the syntax for CSS3 animations, here’s your chance to prepare for when this part of the CSS3 spec moves past the working draft. In this article, we’ll cover all the important parts of the syntax, and we’ll fill you in on browser support so that you’ll know when to start using it.
Read more...Despite contemporary browsers supporting a wealth of CSS3 properties, most designers and developers seem to focus on the quite harmless properties such as border-radius, box-shadow or transform. These are well documented, well tested and frequently used, and so it’s almost impossible to not stumble on them these days if you are designing websites.
But hidden deep within the treasure chests of browsers are advanced, heavily underrated properties that don’t get that much attention. Perhaps some of them rightly so, but others deserve more recognition. The greatest wealth lies under the hood of WebKit browsers, and in the age of iPhone, iPad and Android apps, getting acquainted with them can be quite useful.
Read more...With the arrival of IE9, Microsoft has signalled its intent to work more with standards-based technologies. With IE still the single most popular browser and in many ways the browser for the uninitiated, this is hopefully the long awaited start of us Web craftsmen embracing the idea of using CSS3 as freely as we do CSS 2.1.
However, with IE9 not being supported on versions of Windows before Vista and a lot of businesses still running XP and reluctant (or unable) to upgrade, it might take a while until a vast majority of our users will see the new technologies put to practice. While plenty of people out there are using CSS3, many aren’t so keen or don’t know where to start. This article will first look at the ideas behind CSS3, and then consider some good working practices for older browsers and some new common issues.
Read more...I believe in the power, speed and “update-ability” of CSS3. Not having to load background images as structural enhancements (such as PNGs for rounded corners and gradients) can save time in production (i.e. billable hours) and loading (i.e. page speed). At our company, we've happily been using CSS3 on client websites for over a year now, and I find that implementing many of these properties right now is the most sensible way to build websites.
Until today, all of that was based on an assumption: that I can produce a pixel-perfect Web page with CSS3 quicker than I can with older image-based CSS methods, and that the CSS3 page will load faster, with a smaller overall file size and fewer HTTP requests. As a single use case experiment, I decided to design and code a Web page and add visual enhancements twice: once with CSS3, and a second time using background images sliced directly from the PSD.
Read more...The hard work of front-end designers never ceases to amaze us. Over the last months, we've seen Web designers creating and presenting a plethora of truly remarkable CSS techniques and tools. We have collected, analyzed, curated and feature latest useful resources for your convenience, so you can use them right away or save them for future reference.
Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use HTML5, JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well. Thanks to all featured designers and developers for inspiring, hard work.
Read more...Recently we’ve been receiving more requests for carefully selected, useful round-ups. We try to avoid round-ups on Smashing Magazine, but sometimes the format is useful and — if the resources are relevant — can be extremely helpful. Besides, we are glad to drive traffic to some obscure, yet useful resources and thus support the developers of these resources.
In this round-up, you'll find some of the useful JavaScript and jQuery tools, libraries and plugins that we have stumbled upon recently. Hopefully, you'll find them valuable for your upcoming projects. Among other things, you'll find handy services and online utilities, recently released JavaScript libraries and jQuery plugins.
Read more...One of the numerous advantages brought about by the explosion of jQuery and other JavaScript libraries is the ease with which you can create interactive tools for your site. When combined with server-side technologies such as PHP, this puts a serious amount of power at your finger tips.
In this article, I’ll be looking at how to combine JavaScript/jQuery with PHP and, particularly, PHP’s GD library to create an image manipulation tool to upload an image, then crop it and finally save the revised version to the server. Sure, there are plugins out there that you can use to do this; but this article aims to show you what's behind the process. You can download the source files for reference.
Read more...CSS3 is a wonderful thing, but it’s easy to be bamboozled by the transforms and animations (many of which are vendor-specific) and forget about the nuts-and-bolts selectors that have also been added to the specification. A number of powerful new pseudo-selectors (16 are listed in the latest W3C spec) enable us to select elements based on a range of new criteria.
Before we look at these new CSS3 pseudo-classes, let’s briefly delve into the dusty past of the Web and chart the journey of these often misunderstood selectors.
Read more...
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