May 2010
1 post
2 tags
stylesheet.onload: or lack thereof
For a version of stylesheet.onload that works cross domain, please see: When is a stylesheet really loaded?by @stoyanstefanov
Loading stylesheets into your page dynamically can be a good way of reducing your initial page download size. You may want to load a print stylesheet in only when a user initiates a print action, you may want to allow your users to change the theme or skin of your site/...
April 2010
5 posts
pseudocode + diagrams = ui interactions on a...
I mentioned in a previous post how I’d been working on the drag and drop module of thud for about 2 weeks. It was definitely challenging, though now that I’ve done it, I think I could do it again in about 2 or 3 days.
Making something on a page draggable without using the new HTML5 attributes and events is the easy part. What are the tricky parts? Setting the coordinates of the drag...
2 tags
the dragging and droppings
For the past two weeks I’ve been working on the drag and drop module for thud. Even though I had read PPK’s: The HTML5 drag and drop disaster. I thought, “Wow! I can use the new HTML5 drag and drop events to build my drag and drop module!” WRONG!!!
I won’t go into everything he’s already talked about in his post, it’s brilliant, and if you haven’t...
1 tag
wtf!? new commodore 64!
I was looking for some design inspiration today when I happened to see this link in my search results.
Seeing the Commodore 64 again made me think how it was similar to the Apple iMac, only it needs a monitor instead of a keyboard. Then I realised, the Commodore 64 was doing this from its beginnings. However, as I’m writing this, I also realised that Apple has also been doing the whole...
1 tag
Hackers and Painters →
Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
2 tags
i see your schwartz is bigger than mine
A week or two ago a perl 6 enthusiast friend of mine mentioned how he’d, “just used a Schwartzian transform to answer a guys question in #perl” during the brief passing of an otherwise routine instant message conversation.
Knowing nothing about the Schwartzian transform — in fact, only hearing of its existence for the first time — and not wanting to look like a narc in front of...
March 2010
6 posts
2 tags
css organisation: putting it all together
Ok, so no series is complete without an example. I’ve created two very simple pages, which should look the same as each other. However, they will degrade gracefully in less capable browsers.
The pages all have their CSS inline, except for the reset CSS. They have been tested on FF3.6, Safari4.0.5, Opera10.5beta, Chrome4 and MSIE6+.
The first page achieves cross browser css using...
2 tags
css organisation: hyphenate classes and ids, use...
In this post we will see how implementing a consistent naming convention for our CSS classes and ids, using hyphen delimiters, will allow us to easily arrange our CSS into concise modules making our style sheets more organised and can also speed up our page loading and rendering too.
For the remainder of this post I will be referring mainly to CSS classes, though the same principles can and...
2 tags
css organisation: alphabetising style properties
I started off alphabetising my style properties very early in my web development career. CSS1 was still relatively new so we were all still using the font tag and spacer images inside nested tables.
My main reason for this wasn’t the orderly, easy to find, easy to read and difficult to duplicate the same property in the same rule structure that was to ensue. It was purely because of a...
5 tags
a.b.a: cross browser css
I first saw this technique in Jack Slockum’s Ext JS framework.
There are a range of CSS hacks and other types of work arounds available to target the inconsistencies in the various CSS rendering implementations of different browsers; and different browser versions.
A lot of developers I’ve worked with vehemently support the use conditional comments — this is, to insert IE specific stylesheets...
2 tags
a.b.a: a better approach
So I had a bright idea — pilfered from my girlfriend’s blog sub-section entitled, microtrend — for a sort of sub-section entitled, a better approach or a.b.a — think Abba — for my blog.
In this sub-section I’ll be talking about the various approaches I have discovered either on my own or from using existing frameworks — credits will be given — that make life a lot easier and your...
4 tags
localStorage/ userData
So I’ve been working on the thud.state package. The package has one class, thud.state.Storage and creates two instances of this class. One is thud.state.cookie (also available as thud.cookie), which as you can guess provides an easy to use interface for dealing with cookies. The other is thud.state.localStorage (also available as thud.localStorage) which provides cross browser interface for HTML5...
February 2010
4 posts
3 tags
modelling javascript
One of the things I like to do before embarking on any large scale development work, is to draw out all the packages, classes, singletons/ objects I will be creating: i.e. modelling my code using UML.
From most of what I’ve seen in the development world, it’s becoming somewhat of a lost art. I feel this is a shame as I have found modelling applications or frameworks I’ve worked...
why another javascript framework?
I know, I know. Why!? But in truth, why not? I’m always complaining about something in each and every framework I’ve used. They all have good, bad and incomplete (at least to me) parts. I want to merge everything I love about every framework I’ve used and then some to see what the outcome is.
The main reasons though, are as a learning exercise and because I want to work on a project where quality...
intro part 2: who the what, where?
As I mentioned previously, “Until the 7th November 2009, I had been working as a user interface developer…”. A few months ago my girlfriend and I decided that we should get out of working for corporate and do more meaningful work for ourselves.
We will be attempting to build 2 web applications over the next 6-8 months — this actually started circa Nov 2009 — one of which is...
intro part 1: salutations
My name is Christos Constandinou. Until the 7th November 2009, I had been working as a user interface developer for various companies in both Sydney, Australia (7 years) and London, England (5 years). I don’t consider myself to be a “guru” to the likes of Thomas Fuchs, Sam Stephenson, Dean Edwards, Jack Slocum, Alex Russell, John Resig, Doug Crockford, Nicholas Zakas, Valerio Proiett, Aaron...