2014 June Archive

Talking about Web Components with Eric Bidelman

In September of last year I asked Google’s Eric Bidelman some questions about web components for a feature I was writing. Unfortunately it turned out there was no room in the article for Eric’s answers, but I recently stumbled across them again and decided they are too good to go to waste, so here they are.

Thanks very much to Eric for answering my questions, and apologies if the passage of time has outdated any answers.

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CSS Blending – a Five-minute Introduction

With the release of version 30, Firefox becomes the latest browser to support CSS Blend Modes (Chrome has had them for a few months, and support is on the way in Safari 8). But what are blend modes? What is blending, for that matter?

If you’ve ever used image editing tools like Photoshop, Sketch or GIMP, you’ll probably already be familiar with blend modes. For everyone else, they are methods of mixing two visual layers so that the two are combined. This could be an image layer with a colour layer, or two image layers.

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Voyeurism: Mutation and Object Observers

I don’t write much in the way of production-ready code at the moment, so some of the cooler recent developments in JavaScript have passed me by. In this post I want to address that with a look at a couple of nice new(-ish) features: mutation observers and object observers.

I remember reading about mutation observers a little while ago, but didn’t pay them too much attention as they didn’t have broad browser support and weren’t immediately useful to me. When I recently saw object observers land in Chrome (36) Beta, I realised that I should go back and learn about them. So I did.

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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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