CSS, JavaScript and XHTML Explained

Estelle Weyl’s Blog of quirks, random thoughts and funky finds discovered in day-to-day coding

 

View Source has a Posse: SXSW March 9, 2010

Filed under: Browsers — Estelle Weyl @ 11:08 pm

If you are going to be in Austin for SXSW this weekend, make sure to come to our panel discussion: View Source Has a Posse.

The “view source” functionality of browsers is near and dear to my heart, as it’s how I learned to code, it’s how I judge who to hire, and it’s how I help trouble shoot bugs and quirks when developers ask me for help.

Here’s the summary from the the interwebs:

View Source Has a Posse - http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/5005

“View source” is a feature of all modern browsers that few people use, and that more probably wouldn’t miss if it disappeared. Still, viewing other people’s source code has played an undeniable role in the Web’s development, spurring a culture of creativity and sharing, and cementing values of openness and transparency in developer practices.

However, as the Web becomes increasingly dedicated to social interaction and applications rather than static documents, the value of viewing machine-generated source code raises a critical question: will view source be relevant to the next generation of Web apps? And what might be lost if new Web applications refuse to include its functionality?

Panelists include  Aza Raskin from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from Microsoft, Michael Lucaccini of Archetype, and Alex Russell of Dojo & Google, and ME!.
Questions addressed will include:

  1. what is View Source?
  2. how have web developers and designers use View Source?
  3. what were the original intentions of the feature?
  4. how has view source functionality changed with things like Firebug and Web Inspector?
  5. what alternatives exist to support iterative hacking on other people’s code?
  6. how might tools and communities like GitHub augment or replace View Source?
  7. how important is view source to learning to program complex web applications?
  8. UserStyles, UserScripts, JetPacks and similar end-user web customizations - will these kinds of innovations be stifled if View Source goes away?
  9. how can view source functionality be added to other “non-web” software? How would it be different than open source software?
  10. is there a larger point to be made about the relevance of open source in the social/cloud era of computing?

The panel is 3:30 on Saturday in room 12AB. I hope to see you there. Please do say ‘hi’.

 
 

CSS3 Border Properties, etc. March 2, 2010

Filed under: CSS (including hacks) — Estelle Weyl @ 3:38 am

At this blog you’ll find my summary article on all the CSS3 properties, values and browser support. CSS3 has many different components, and I am digging into each category. I just posted CSS3 Border Properties & Browser Support tonight, and CSS Background Properties: possible values, default values, browser support and DOM last week…. but at my new blog.

I will continue to maintain this blog, but Standardista.com will hopefully be better organized, and less of an eyesore.

Here are some of the CSS3 articles you’ll find in my new online home:

CSS3 Border Properties & Browser Support

Border radius, border image and box-shadow are now supported in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. Take a look at all the border properties of CSS3 and how all the browsers handle all the values. Everything you could ever want to know about CSS3 border properties, values and browser support, in grid format. CSS3 Border Properties »

CSS3 Columns & Browser Support

Developers have been dividing their code, creating 3 <ul>s and floating each left, followed by a clear, to better use screen real estate. CSS3 solves this issue with the ‘Multi-column Layout Module’. We can now maximize the use of a large screen real-estate, by including limited-width columns of text placed side by side. Well, at least we can in non-IE browsers. Here is a grid of the CSS3 Multi-column Layout Module, all the properties, values and current browser support.

@font-face browser support & browser support

Up to now, web developers were limited in what typography they could use on a website to what the client had installed in their environments. Now that we have finally convinced designers to not include any fonts outside of georgia, helvetica, arial, times roman, and a handful of others because of the awfulness of text images, @font-face allows us to retrain designers to use unique fonts, only if they have the legal right to post those fonts on the web. This article explains how to do it, and what features are supported in the various browsers.


CSS3 Selectors & Browser Support

A list of all of the CSS3 Selectors (which includes all the CSS1 and CSS2.1 selectors), with a grid of every modern browser, and the support for each browser of each selector. Included at the bottom is a commentary on each browser and their quirks in handling a selector, if there are any.