Software As She’s Developed

Mahemoff’s Podcast/Blog – Web, Programming, Usability from the Author of ‘Ajax Design Patterns’ (AjaxPatterns.org)

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Entries Tagged as 'HTML'

HTML5 is a Brand

May 3rd, 2010 · 5 Comments · SoftwareDev

HTML5 has conflicting definitions.

If you go by the official WHAT-WG spec, HTML5 is a list of specific features, including Canvas, Video, Audio, the new form controls, the new semantic markups, and microdata.

If you go by the media and Steve Jobs, HTML5 is simply a new platform that lets us do rich, interactive, applications without the [...]

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What’s the Maximum Z-Index?

June 3rd, 2009 · 9 Comments · SoftwareDev

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 [...]

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Google IO Keynote, 2009

May 27th, 2009 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

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 [...]

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SVG and VML in One Chameleon File

May 1st, 2009 · 12 Comments · SoftwareDev

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 [...]

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The official olympics medal tally is broken. Let’s fix it.

August 18th, 2008 · 2 Comments · HumansAndTech

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 [...]

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Dynamic Favicon Library Updated

January 31st, 2008 · 5 Comments · SoftwareDev

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 [...]

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CSS Coding Style and the Unbearable Tendency for People to Adore Whitespace in their Source Code

October 22nd, 2007 · 8 Comments · SoftwareDev

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 TEXT

CSS: #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 [...]

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There is no alt tag

June 25th, 2007 · No Comments · HumansAndTech

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.

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If HTML Used Convention Over Configuration …

June 2nd, 2007 · 5 Comments · Links, SoftwareDev

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 [...]

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Tables – The Secret Behind Every Simple CSS Form

February 12th, 2007 · 20 Comments · SoftwareDev

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, [...]

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