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Archive for the 'web development' category.

The Survey for People Who Make Websites 2009

Dec 16 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

A List Apart's third annual survey:

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.


I took it! And so should you. The Survey for People Who Make Websites.

Hue reference chart

Nov 23 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Inspired by Molly Holzschlag at Standards.Next, I created a simple hue reference chart for working with HSLA.

Live blogging Standards.Next: CSS3 for Working Web Designers

Nov 20 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Håkon Wium Lie

Photos and discussion of CERN and Tim Berners-Lee. How the web was actually developed by Tim at CERN. Pretty hilarious.

CSS a response to potential destruction of HTML's markup language with presentation elements. Currently CSS still relies too heavily on images and the occasional table hack.

HTML5 + CSS3 = WEB8. CSS3 is not a single specification, a series of specifications.

CSS1 could style text in an element. Some borders. A revolution when it came out.

For this presentation, Håkon is using a special build of Opera that isn't publicly available.

text-shadow. Web font: Safari, Firefox and Opera.

Håkon believe web fonts is going to be the big new thing. Will create a pre- and post-font Web.

@import url(path/to/font);
font-family:Cardiff;

IE is the only one that does not not support this. Argument now breaks out between Håkon and Pete LePage

IE has supported a broad range of fonts since IE 4, but .EOT. However, the above @import is all TTF. IE uses .EOT because font foundries want support for DRM. Check out Fontdeck and Typekit.

At Standards.Next, IE pledged support to add support to TTF along with EOT.

rgba()

background: rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.4); See Molly's presentation.

A review of Opera's support for the CSS 3 features discussed by Andy Budd.

Opera Unite

Turns browser into a server. Allows people to access your machine via http://. Can be quite useful.

It's not the cloud. This service is close to machine and useful for local collaboration. Millions of phones use Opera. Peer-to-peer model. Can take picture and easily

Question/Answer

Q: When will the geolocation build be integrated with the shipping version?

A: Not sure; no date yet. Will probably not occur until the standard is more fixed.

Live blogging Standards.Next: Future of Internet Explorer

Nov 20 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Pete LePage
Senior Product Manager, Developers & Security for IE

IE 8

IE 8 is a hybrid, has two engines; IE 9 will have three engines: IE 7, IE 8 and IE 9. This way can ensure site works in future versions of the browser.

IE 8 supports session and local storage (see presentation by Marcus Lofthouse to the New York Web Standards Meetup). Added addition to spec: a way to remove all.

Mutable DOM prototypes: take a DOM element and add properties/methods to it. Add method to img. There are a number of things not implemented in IE 8. Can write a chunk of JavaScript that adds functionality to browser. This will be used by people writing the JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Dojo).

Native JSON support.

Network events

CrossDocumentMessaging and CrossDomainRequest

Selectors API

Fixed getElementById.

Demos at ie8demos.com (browser-sniffs and only wants to work in IE 8).

IE 9

  • Faster; speed is important. Finally comparable to FF.
  • A lot of work on standards-support. Will implement border-radius. Acid3 score went from 20 to 32. IE 8 Current CSS3 support is vertical-text. Hope to more than double it in IE 9. ;)

Questions/Answers

Q: Why always trying to play catch up? Why not just adopt Webkit?

A: A lot of things that make adopting Webkit or Gecko more difficult than it seems.

Q: Any release date for IE 9?

A: No dates as of now

Q: Still trying to get Canvas out of the spec for HTML5?

A: Not sure; might be a miscommunication

Q: Any major updates planned for IE 8?

A: Probably not; next major version will be 9. Security updates will be released for 8, but the rendering engine will not change.

Live blogging Standards.Next: RGB, HSL and Transparency in CSS3

Nov 20 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Molly Holzschlag

RGB: Additive synthesis

Red, Green, Blue: Add colors to get result color. In print world, subtractive. Remove color to get result. R + G + B = white

RGB color notation

RGB in percentage values or RGB in integer values. Not equivalent; so don't use both (mix in a single rule)!

NOT rgb (60, 100, 50%);

Firefox and Opera will ignore the incorrect rule. Safari and IE (5–now) will attempt to correct and end up with a severely washed-out result.

HSL color

Hue, saturation and lightness. Easier and more intuitive way to get to colors we want as designers. Value from 1–360, then adjust saturation and lightness.

  • Hue value comes first, using the hue's angle on the color wheel as represented by an integer.
  • Saturation comes next, using the percentage of saturation you'd like
  • Lightness is next, using the percentage of lightness you' like

HSL advantages

  • Not CRT specific
  • Easier, more intuitive to work with
  • Working with a set of colors allows for easy palette creation
  • Reduces errors
  • Reduces dependency on charts and other value lookup tools

As adjust saturation, lightness, base-hue remains the same.

RGBA and HSLA

Alpha transparency for both RGB and HSLA.

Notation is the same in both. a value is alpha transparency from 0–1.

Allows for fully opaque to fully transparent.

hsla(0, 100%, 50%, .25)

Supported by Firefox, Webkit and Opera.

Questions/Answers

A: Best article out there on HSLA is Wikipedia. Useful to have the color wheel.

Q: Why is a value decimal instead of percentage?

A: Not sure. No one remembers a discussion about it.

Q: Is this part of the spec?

A: Yes. It is all part of the CSS3 color module.

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