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