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Popular tags in this category: CSS, CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Techniques, Essentials, Tools.
You've presented the new website and everyone loves it. The design is crisp, the code is bug-free, and you're ready to release. Then someone asks, “Does it work in Japanese?”
You break out in a cold sweat: you have no idea. The website works in English, and you figured other languages would come later. Now you have to rework the whole app to support other languages. Your release date slips, and you spend the next two months fixing bugs, only to find that you’ve missed half of them.
Read more...Here we are again! Smashing Magazine’s Q&A. In case you haven't seen it before, this is how it's done: you send in questions you have about CSS, and at least once a month we’ll pick out the best questions and answer them so that everyone can benefit from the exchange. Your question could be about a very specific problem you are having, or it could be a question about philosophical approach. Go wild and challenge us!
We’ve done a bit of this before with a wider scope, so if you enjoy reading the Q&A, check out my author archive for more of them.
Read more...Many people think of PHP, Ruby on Rails or Python and Django when choosing a language to create a new website or when choosing a language to learn to get that exciting new job. .NET, however, seems to occupy a space somewhat apart from this playground of cool kids. It's always the last to be picked for team sports; it was shouting “Wassup!” at parties well after 2000; and it has been just plain left out in the cold.
I'm not one of these people. In fact, I'm quite a fan of .NET and have found it great to develop with since moving away from PHP in the early days of my career. With its great tools, large community and broad applicability (mobile, Xbox, desktop and Web) it's both powerful and fun.
Read more...You probably know that testing is good, but the first hurdle to overcome when trying to write unit tests for client-side code is the lack of any actual units; JavaScript code is written for each page of a website or each module of an application and is closely intermixed with back-end logic and related HTML. In the worst case, the code is completely mixed with HTML, as inline events handlers.
This is likely the case when no JavaScript library for some DOM abstraction is being used; writing inline event handlers is much easier than using the DOM APIs to bind those events. More and more developers are picking up a library such as jQuery to handle the DOM abstraction, allowing them to move those inline events to distinct scripts, either on the same page or even in a separate JavaScript file. However, putting the code into separate files doesn’t mean that it is ready to be tested as a unit.
Read more...Since our last round-up of useful CSS techniques, we've seen a lot of truly remarkable CSS geekery out there. With CSS3, some of the older techniques now have become obsolete, others have established themselves as standards, and many techniques are still in the "crazy experimentation" stage.
Since the release of the previous post, we've been collecting, sorting, filtering and preparing a compact overview of powerful new CSS techniques. Today we finally present some of these techniques. Please note that many techniques are not only CSS-based, but use HTML5 and JavaScript. Use them right away or save them for future reference. Thanks to all of the featured designers and developers for their fantastic work!
Read more...Classes, classes, classes everywhere. What if we don’t need CSS classes at all? What if we stopped worrying about how many classes we’re using and what we should be calling them and just finished with them once and for all? It would be no revelation to you to say that HTML elements can be styled without recourse to the class attribute, but have you considered the multitude of benefits that come from forgoing classes altogether.
In this article, we’ll demonstrate that the class is as antiquated and inappropriate for styling as the table is for layout, and that omitting them can discipline us to create more usable, reusable content. I appreciate that this is a contentious subject; I’ll meet you in the comments.
Read more...Howdy, folks! Welcome to the new incarnation of Smashing Magazine’s Q&A. It’s going to work like this: you send in questions you have about CSS, and at least once a month we’ll pick out the best questions and answer them so that everyone can benefit from the exchange. Your question could be about a very specific problem you are having, or it could be a question about philosophical approach. We’ll take all kinds.
We’ve done a bit of this before with a wider scope, so if you enjoy reading the Q&A, check out my author archive for more of them. Let's start with the question from Brad Frost: "What are your thoughts on Paul Irish’s idea to apply box-sizing: border-box to every element on the page?"
Your website works. Now let’s make it work faster. Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on it runs. Plenty of services will make your website load faster, from minimizers to CDNs, but making it run faster is up to you.
Little changes in your code can have gigantic performance impacts. A few lines here or there could mean the difference between a blazingly fast website and the dreaded “Unresponsive Script” dialog. This article shows you a few ways to find those lines of code with Chrome Developer Tools.
Read more...This is a story that dates back to the earliest days of computers. The story has a plot, well, sort of. It has competition and intrigue, as well as traversing oodles of countries and languages. There is conflict and resolution, and a happyish ending.
But the main focus is the characters — 110,116 of them. By the end of the story, they will all find their own unique place in this world. This story will follow a few of those characters more closely, as they journey from Web server to browser, and back again. Along the way, you'll find out more about the history of characters, character sets, Unicode and UTF-8, and why question marks and odd accented characters sometimes show up in databases and text files.
Read more...
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