Web Design Articles

Every Time You Make a Good Business Decision, a Puppy Gets Cloned

By Louis Lazaris / February 15, 2012 / 9 Comments

A List Apart’s Issue #344 went live yesterday with a focus on the recent vendor prefix drama. I didn’t get a chance yet to read the entire Meyer/Tantek interview, but I did read Lea Verou’s piece.

First of all, congratulations to Lea for getting published in ALA. She’s certainly one of the most talented web developers I know, and deserves to be featured in such a context. I hope Zeldman and company continue to use new and fresh authors like her.

So what’s the point of my post here? And what’s the deal with the hyperbolic title that resembles Lea’s? Well, in many ways, this post is a response to what Lea wrote in her article. But this is not to say that what I’m going to write necessarily contradicts or opposes what she’s written. For the record, I agree with the spirit and forward-thinking approach in her post.

A Call For Better Fragment Identifiers

By Louis Lazaris / February 2, 2012 / 11 Comments

Where would the web be without links? Links are what hold together what we know as the World Wide Web. Without links, the World Wide Web would be more appropriately called the World Wide Set Of Unrelated Pages, or, incidentally, WWSOUP.

While it’s great how simple and effective the process is of “linking” pages together, I think there’s room for improvement.

New CSS3 Properties to Handle Text and Word Wrapping

By Louis Lazaris / January 27, 2012 / 20 Comments

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about CSS3’s word-wrap property. The angle of the article was the fact that it was a feature that was new in CSS3 that didn’t exist in CSS2.1 and it worked in just about every browser, including old IE.

Well, now that’s all changed, which I discovered while researching additions to my CSS3 Click Chart. The word-wrap property has been removed from the CSS3 spec and other related properties have been added.

The All-New CSS3 Click Chart

By Louis Lazaris / January 17, 2012 / 11 Comments

Over the past month or so I’ve been slowly working on a redesign and revamp of my CSS3 Click Chart.

A whole slew of things have changed. Here’s a summary.

Things We Wish Clients Would Say

By Louis Lazaris / January 6, 2012 / 27 Comments

Yesterday I tweeted the following: “On current client project, client says CSS only needs to work in Chrome. Let me know how jealous you are.”

The results weren’t too surprising. Below I brainstormed a list of some other things we wish clients would say. I guess this is the polar opposite of what you find here, except these quotes aren’t real. Enjoy.

Why Use jQuery for Simple JavaScript Tutorials?

By Louis Lazaris / January 2, 2012 / 24 Comments

A trackback on one of my previous posts (yeah, trackbacks aren’t just for spam) alerted me to an interesting point brought up by a blogger named Matt Pass. In his post entitled Walnut, Meet jQuery Sledgehammer he politely explains why he feels it’s overkill to use jQuery in a simple tutorial post.

His main point is summarized in this quote: “Do you really need a 90k JavaScript library (and thats the minified version) to toggle the size of a menu?”

Redirect Wildcard Subdomains to Primary Domain on Media Temple’s (dv) Hosting

By Louis Lazaris / December 26, 2011 / 19 Comments

In a recent post wherein I questioned the legitimacy of W3schools’ subdomains, someone pointed out that my own site was suffering from a somewhat related problem.

Basically, if anyone typed a random subdomain in place of the “www”, the subdomain would remain in place in the address bar without any redirection occurring. So for example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.impressivewebs.com, the site would display as normal, except with the “peanutbuttersandwich” part still intact.

What’s worse is that I have other domains on my current hosting plan, and impressivewebs.com is the primary domain. So if someone typed in a subdomain for one of the other domains, they would actually see the impressivewebs.com home page. For example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.animiationfillcode.com, you would see the impressivewebs.com home page with the animationfillcode.com URL still in the address bar.

Skills for Front-End Developers

By Louis Lazaris / December 20, 2011 / 214 Comments

As a web professional, I’m constantly trying to learn new skills for front-end developers, along with various technologies related to the field in order to add to what I already know. Front-end developer job postings, however, vary from posting to posting so the list of different languages, libraries, and technologies that could theoretically fall under the category of skills for front-end developers is quite large.

Some HTML5 Resources Worth Checking Out

By Louis Lazaris / December 14, 2011 / 6 Comments

As the weeks go by, I find tons of new developer resources, tools, and things worth looking into.

I wrote a similar roundup of JavaScript resources, so this time I’m covering stuff related to what we commonly call “HTML5” (even though a lot of this stuff could easily fall under a “JavaScript” umbrella too).

Are Web Development Search Results Being Manipulated?

By Louis Lazaris / December 13, 2011 / 65 Comments

I’m not entirely sure what to think of this situation, but it seems to be yet another strong piece of evidence that the people behind W3schools don’t have our best interests in mind.

I’m currently in the process of revamping my CSS3 Click Chart app and I was doing my usual cursory searches for simple JavaScript methods that I often forget the syntax for. Notice what I stumbled across, as shown in the re-enactment below.