Web development

The bleeding edge of web: querySelector() and querySelectorAll()

One thing coming up in the W3C selectors api spec are a couple of new methods for retrieving DOM elements called querySelector() and querySelectorAll() that take a css selector and return a node or list of nodes that match. They basically do the same thing as the css query features of JQuery or Dean Edward’s [...]
Published in Javascript on Saturday, July 12th, 2008

Del.icio.us: not responsible for the cancellation of Stargate

The FAQ on del.icio.us made me laugh: (I wonder if they could do something about the new X-Files movie next…?)
Published in Web development on Monday, July 7th, 2008

Debugging pages in Safari

I’m getting quite interested in Safari because it seems to be where a lot of the early implementations of interesting new standards is happening. It makes me happy to get a little glimpse at what the future of web development might look like. :) The problem is Firefox has really spoilt me with all it’s [...]
Published in Tools on Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Switching opera desktop to hand held mode for testing

Neat little tip I found (in my old, old blog archives) is that you can switch Opera into hand held emulation mode by hitting Shift+F11. It’ll take your site and serialize the design to fit on a small screen like on your phone: It also will honour the @media handheld stylesheet so it’s a convenient [...]
Published in Browsers on Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Firefox mouse gestures

One of the guys at work inspired me to try a mouse gestures plugins for Firefox today. For the uninitiated, mouse gestures are like keyboard shortcuts for the mouse. Instead of holding ctrl+c, you do a little drawing on the screen while holding down the right mouse button to make something happen. For example when [...]
Published in Browsers on Friday, May 2nd, 2008

JSAN open source code repository

Learnt something new today! There’s a repository of open source javascript code called JSAN modelled on the perl version. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff on there like UI widgets, animations and AJAX. I haven’t tried any but it’s nice to know there’s somewhere you can see what other people are doing.
Published in Javascript on Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Objects, event handlers and "this" in javascript

One recurring problem I’ve had when using a function from a custom javascript object as an event handler is that when the event handler is called the “this” property of the function no longer references the object it originally belonged to. To show you what I mean, take a look at this simple javascript object. [...]
Published in Javascript on Saturday, April 26th, 2008

First impressions of gmail – maybe the end of desktop mail for me

Today I found out that gmail supports checking and storing POP3 mail and it made me wonder if I even need a desktop email client any more. It has everything I use in Thunderbird (sorting, filtering, searching, address book) with the big advantage of being on the network and therefore accessible from any computer. So [...]
Published in Web development on Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Focus event handler run in different order in IE than Firefox

I wanted to document a bit of an edge case browser incompatibility that I found: that event handlers aren’t always run in the same order in IE as they do in other browsers. It’s a bit of a strange case where we were doing something not entirely sensible. :) There was an input box which [...]
Published in Browser quirks on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Firefox crash recovery: I am in love

Ok, I’m now officially in love with Firefox. My Vista install has mysteriously become flaky recently and is randomly taking down programs. When Firefox crashed, not only did it remember which tabs I had open, it also remembered the contents of what was in the form that I was filling in at the time of [...]
Published in Browsers on Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Extreme nesting experiment in IE and Firefox

On the ever interesting topic of curiosity over good sense, I had an interesting discussion about how far you can nest HTML tables in different browsers. The person I was talking to had noticed that at a certain point the tables just stopped displaying when they tried to take their web rendering to an extreme [...]
Published in Web development on Saturday, August 4th, 2007

Internet hype technology of the week: Silverlight

Microsoft is amazing. WPF/E has been around for ages. They give it a fancy name and run a keynote about it at MIX and suddenly it’s the biggest thing to hit (Microsoft) web development since someone came up with a catchy name for ajax. This week it seems like its the only thing that anyone [...]
Published in Web development on Saturday, May 19th, 2007

IE bug logging database not being reopened

I was a bit disappointed when I read that public IE bug database isn’t being reopened. The reason given was that the volume of unusable bug reports submitted far outweighed the useful stuff. Apparently some people used it to tell the team how much they hate IE. :) I can understand that being a problem [...]
Published in Browsers on Sunday, May 13th, 2007

Spanning javascript strings across multiple lines

I came across a weird feature of javascript last week, a way of spanning javascript strings over multiple lines. To do it you put a ‘\’ character just before the line break and javascript knows it should keep going on the next line: var mystring = "hello \               [...]
Published in Javascript on Sunday, May 13th, 2007

DIY javascript stack trace

How to use arguments.callee to walk up the javascript call stack when you're doing something that a debugger can't help you with.
Published in Javascript on Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Interesting side affect of creating DOM objects using innerHTML

It’s ER night again tonight so I’m going to update with a totally dorky technical web thing I did today that I thought was interesting. :) I found a strange IE behaviour today in a sample I was looking at. The problem was with a javascript object that had a reference to a DOM object. [...]
Published in Browser quirks on Thursday, March 15th, 2007

View Rendered Source in IE

I’m doing a lot of work with javascript that modifies the DOM so I really like tools like the Firefox rendered source chart plugin so I can see what’s actually going on in my page. Rendered source chart in particular is a very slick plugin. It not only takes everything in the DOM and shows [...]
Published in Tools, Web development on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Javascript lint – saviour of mortal developers

Something I really, really love at the moment is a little application called javascript lint. It’s a javascript syntax checker that’s built on top of the Mozilla javascript engine. You can run it over a javascript include file (I don’t know if it’ll work on inline javascript) and it’ll syntax check it for you without [...]
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Monday, February 5th, 2007

Child and sibling selectors

I was trying to style a bit of html without having to add a new class into the markup and came across two types of CSS selectors that I haven’t used before called child and sibling selectors. You can use child selectors to target the direct children of an element. The syntax is parent > [...]
Published in CSS on Saturday, January 20th, 2007

IE6 is the new NS4.7

I’ve been playing around with CSS support in IE7 all day and I’m so happy to see some of the really, really long standing things that have been finally fixed! The thing that makes me happiest is that you can finally do real work with absolute positioning because it finally supports the bottom and right [...]
Published in Web development on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

I'm finished my new blog engine! (build vs buy)

Yay! Finally I’ve finished all the basic functionality for my new blog scripts after months trying to find development time between visiting Australia, moving house, building Ikea furniture and showing my parents around London. Hopefully I’ll get it live sometime between now and the end of the month. The best part for me is that [...]
Published in Web development on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

Why accessibility is important

Last time I wanted to update my McAfee virus subscription they told me that I couldn’t download the latest version of the software using Firefox. The only option I had to download the software was to use IE. I couldn’t find another way to download the product. So say we take a fairly conservative view [...]
Published in Web development on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

Novel use of google maps

This has to be the most novel use of Google maps ever :D
Published in Web development on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

New link for IE drip memory leak detector

I found a link to a new page for the really useful drip tool which looks for IE memory leaks in javascript code. There’s also been a new revision of the program by the guy who’s hosting it.
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Bookmark: web developer toolbars

Here’s a quick link for myself for the web developer toolbars you can install for Firefox and IE6. I love them because the web developer toolbars make doing clientside work so much easier. They give you tools to find out information about the page that you’re working on without having to do a million alert [...]
Published in Browsers, Tools, Web development on Monday, June 5th, 2006