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…
Good news for DOM scripters: Firefox 3 is to support getElementsByClassName. Fingers crossed the other browsers follow suit soon, so we can stop using 20 lines of code where one will do.
Good news for everyone: Microsoft look as if they’re taking web standards seriously. First came the news that standards guru Molly E. Holzschlag has signed up to work on standards and interoperability for the next release of Internet Explorer, then the Web Standards Group announced that they have had talks with the IE team about the five most-wanted features in IE.
All positive news; very nice to report it!
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.
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