Software As She’s Developed

Z-index is the CSS property governing how high in the stack an element is, if you visualise the elements as appearing in a 3D stack coming out of the page. The actual value of an element’s z-index doesn’t matter; just its value relative to other elements on the page. Elements with higher z-indexes appear on [...]

[Read more →]

I’m here at Google’s London office, where they’re streaming the IO keynote. Eric Schmidt talks about Ajax, always-on, simplicity, and how it’s improved life. Vic Gundotra’s on. We spent too long not fully using XML, CSS, etc., i.e mid-late ’90s they were there, but really started using them to the max around ~2005. Let’s not wait so [...]

[Read more →]

Why a Chameleon File? While most browsers support SVG, IE's unique brand of interopability does not extend that far; even the latest and greatest, incarnation v. 8 of IE, has no sign of SVG. And so, we citizens of the innernets are left with two vector graphics formats: VML for IE, SVG for standards-compliant browsers, which [...]

[Read more →]

This is how the official olympics medal tally looks: It's not only the official tally, but the one linked from google each time you type "olympics" and terms like "australia olympics". Thus making it an absurdly popular page at this time. As you can see, the design is reedeeeculous. The thing you want to see the [...]

[Read more →]

Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Favicon, HTML, Javascript, Web, Web 2.0 I updated the favicon library a while ago, for a couple of projects I haven't released for various reasons. Anyway, Phil asked me about it, so I thought it's a good time to package it up and release it properly. And in the process wrote up Taking Browser [...]

[Read more →]

CSS coding style doesn't get a lot of play. Most people are happy to stick with the convention of one property per line, like this: PLAIN TEXTCSS: #score {   background: yellow;   width: 12em;   border: 1px solid orange   padding: 2em;   margin: 3em 0;   display: none; } I, for one, can't stand that style. I'm heavily biased towards information-dense coding [...]

[Read more →]

It's an attribute as in <img alt="this is an *attribute*, not a tag"> and not <alt>, but 603,000 matches on Google (which apparently means about 750 pages) use the term "alt tag" along with countless other people, including me on occasion.

[Read more →]

Browsers would automatically pull in CSS and JS according to the filename and I would no longer have to look for an example every time I need a link or script tag. In the absence of any other spec, /abc/def.html would cause the browser to look for /abc/def.css and /abc/site.css and /site.css. And then it would [...]

[Read more →]

Tableless forms are painful. Every time I start trying to create them, I wonder why I am going through the motions. Some vague sense that it will be "more accessible" and I'll be able to tick an abstraction of a "web standards-compliant" box. But really, these table-less constructs are supposed to make page authoring easier, [...]

[Read more →]

.... Wherein our protaganist awakes to the power of CSS ... CSS is as important to Ajax as Asynchrony and XMLHttpRequest. Which is to say, it's very useful, even though it's not essential. Due to an accident of the English language, JJG's creative mind, and the propensity of certain terms to rise to buzzdom, it doesn't [...]

[Read more →]