I’m having a bit of a love affair with jQuery, the Javascript library, at the moment. I know my way around JS but am far from an expert, so jQuery’s simple syntax is a godsend for me, and provides huge savings in my development time.
One quick technique I used yesterday was to make three elements of equal height; it’s very simple and won’t cope with dynamic content, but is perfectly suitable for simple page layouts.
Recently I was chatting with Rapha Martins, and he mentioned a feature he’d like to see in CSS: a ‘default’ value for properties; that is, if you change the value of a property, a keyword that would change it back to the browser default rather than you having to specify that value again.
That has been proposed for CSS 3, with the ‘initial’ value, and it’s been introduced into the latest preview of Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso), with the browser-specific –moz– prefix. I’ve put together a quick couple of basic examples of how it will work (you will, obviously, need the latest preview to see them).
I’m back from my holiday, with a quick look at some of the links I would have discussed in more detail had I been here…
One technology that’s ready to take the step up onto the big stage is SVG. If you’re not sure what that is, its Wikipedia entry provides a good summary:
SVG is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated.
That’s a pretty big deal; static or animated images which are marked up with XML, meaning you can use the DOM to manipulate them. Interactive images; imagine the possibilities!
Gecko is the rendering engine used in browsers such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, Epiphany, Netscape, and more.
The next version (1.9, currently available as a preview release) introduces a whole load of new features and fixes to the engine. In my last post I mentioned the speed increase thanks to the move to a new graphics layer and changes to rendering order, as well as support for the APNG format and fixes to the CSS to allow it to pass the Acid2 test. But there’s more. Here are some new features of interest to developers:
I made my first forays into web development back in 1998, with my own Geocities homepage (now sadly defunct). It was after I developed my first ‘proper’ website (an unoffical guide to the FIFA Club World Championship 2000; please don’t laugh, this was eight years ago…) that I decided I wanted to be a professional developer.
I’m mostly self-taught, but there’s no way I would have been able to make a career out of it — and keep interested in it — without the aid of the books below.
Please note: I’m not saying that these are necessarily the best books available, just that they have been — and continue to be — inspirational to me. OK, in no particular order…
Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
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