Continuing with the roundup and reading list theme this week, below is a list of tools that might be of interest to front-end developers.
As always, if you have a tool, book, or script you’d like to share, add it to the comments.
Links for Advanced JavaScript Reading
Due to the lower traffic holiday week, and the fact that I’m busy with other stuff, this week’s posts will consist of reading lists and roundups.
Today the focus is on some heavier JavaScript stuff. Feel free to add any others in the comments.
New Book: Learning CSS3 Animations
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of assisting as a technical reviewer for a book by Pearson Education called Learning CSS3 Animations and Transitions.
The book is authored by Alexis Goldstein who also co-authored HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World with Estelle Weyl and me.
USB Usability
Never forget that usability lessons can be learned from virtually anything you use. This concept has been discussed extensively in Don Norman’s famous book, and I thought I’d discuss something specific in this area in this post.
Last week I sent out a tweet regarding an annoyance with USB plugs.
Differences Between CSS2.1 and CSS3+
Most of us know that with the introduction of what we customarily call “CSS3”, there have been changes and additions to CSS, compared to what we had in CSS2.1.
Putting all cross-browser issues aside, I thought it would be nice to be able to document all these changes into a single post and keep it up to date.
So if you want a list of everything that’s been introduced into the CSS spec since CSS2.1, here it is.
New Book: HTML5 Boilerplate Web Development
A couple of weeks ago Packt Publishing contacted me and gave me a free e-book version of Divya Manian’s new book HTML5 Boilerplate Web Development.
For a while now I’ve been wondering who was going to write a book on HTML5 Boilerplate. Although much of what’s in Boilerplate is “plug and play” (i.e., it just works, even if you don’t know what it does), I think many people are intimidated by it and would like a deeper understanding of what’s going on, and what is the optimal way to employ this popular framework. So a book on this topic is a great idea.
IDs Will Not Make Your Documents More Semantic
Before I get into the meat of this post, I’ll just provide some context. Last week, Harry Roberts posted a fantastic article discussing his view of bad CSS. In that article, as he’s done before, he disourages the use of IDs as selectors.
In response, Jeffrey Zeldman tried to defend the use of ID selectors. I posted a few comments in response to Jeffrey and another commenter, explaining why their views were wrong.
IE10 CSS Hacks
Last year, Microsoft announced that IE10 will not be supporting conditional comments. With their history, this is obviously a risky move. Up to now, to target quirky behaviour in IE6-9, developers have been using conditional comments, conditional classes, and other IE-specific hacks.
But without conditional comments in IE10, the only options we’re left with to target CSS problems are hacks or browser sniffing — and we certainly don’t want to resort to the latter.
Interestingly, there have been a few posts and code snippets floating around that apparently do target IE10 specifically using a hack. Below is a summary of these three techniques, for reference.
CSS Things That Don’t Occupy Space
In most cases, when you place an element on the page in your markup, if you don’t specify any special styles, it will occupy exactly the same space that it appears to occupy visually.
In other words, if you place a box sized at 200px by 200px on your page, anything you place after it in the source order, with no further styles added, will occupy the space below or beside the green box, outside of those set boundaries.
But not everything on an HTML page occupies space that is honored by other elements. I thought it would be interesting to list and describe all the things in CSS that don’t occupy this kind of physical space in an HTML document.
Custom Zenburn Theme for Sublime Text 2
For a while now, I’ve been using Notepad++ with a customized version of the Zenburn theme, which was originally created for Vim.
This week I finally started fiddling around with Sublime Text 2, and I like what I’ve seen. Although I like the default Monakai theme, I prefer my old customized version of Zenburn from Notepad++. So I forked the Zenburn repo and made my alterations.
