Broken Links

Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston

Search

October 2009 Archives - Broken Links Archive

Opera widgets become browser-independent

This is a nice idea: Opera have separated their widgets from the desktop browser, allowing them to be run as standalone applications. They are cross-platform and standards compliant. You can download a Labs release to try it for yourself.


Firefox supports CSS Transitions

Support for the CSS Transitions module, originally proposed and implemented by the WebKit team, has just landed in the nightly builds of Firefox; it’s unsure whether this will make it into 3.6, as this is due to be released in the near future, but should be a feature in 3.7 at least.

The experimental feature will use the proprietary –moz– prefix; I’ve updated the demos in my previous post, Anime with CSS and WebKit, to reflect this.

After performing some brief tests there seem to be a few problems with the implementation; it’s not as smooth as it could be, and the third demo doesn’t work as it should. Update: Found an issue with the browser not recognising a value without a unit (e.g. 0 instead of 0%); fixed the demo, and filed a bug.


Introducing the Flexible Box Layout module

I’ve got a new post up at CSS3.info: Introducing the Flexible Box Layout module. It’s an overview of an alternative layout module which is already implemented in Gecko and WebKit.


Building HTML5 video controls with JavaScript

The HTML5 video element is now included in Firefox, Safari & Chrome, and on its way in Opera. By using JavaScript to access the media elements API it’s easy to build your own custom controls for it; in this article I’m going to show how I built a (very) basic control interface.

Read the full article


Aside

For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.

One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.

[#] 3 Comments . More Asides.

My conferences on Lanyrd