Let’s say you’re viewing different pages in your browser, and in the midst of your browsing you decide to visit a Google’s home page.
The cursor is blinking in the search field. This means the cursor has been automatically focused into the search field, either via JavaScript or using HTML5’s autofocus attribute.
At the recent W3Conf Nicolas Gallagher explained that although pseudo-elements have helped us add decorative content to our pages while keeping our HTML clean, this has led to some maintainability issues.
Developer tools can help to some degree, but oftentimes dynamically added content like pseudo-elements or extra elements added via JavaScript are initially harder to track down.
As Nicolas pointed out, the far-future improvement in this area is the Web Components spec, but I think this is something we can improve on right now.
One of the posts on this website that consistently gets a significant amount of traffic (5000+ page views this month alone) is a ridiculous article I wrote that discusses how to make a child element not inherit the opacity setting of its parent.
As we all know, opacity property can be annoying in this area.
Basically, if a parent element has an opacity value set at, say, 0.5, all of its children will inherit that opacity setting, and there’s no way to reverse that opacity on the child elements.
Most developers nowadays are recognizing that if you’re developing large applications that have different views and states, it is best to take a modular or object-oriented approach to your CSS development.
When you throw media queries into the mix, however, the you can lose some of the benefits of modularity — code that’s easy to read, update, and maintain.
Let’s look at different ways we can write our media queries, starting with what might be the most common approach — especially with those not yet using a preprocessor.
Those of us who have started using modular or object-oriented CSS principles have learned to avoid, as much as possible, the use of the descendant selector (or, more accurately, the descendant combinator).
A selector that uses the descendant combinator looks like this:
JavaScript has a reserved keyword called this that references something different depending on where you are in a JavaScript program.
In this post I’m going to summarize, by example, some different contexts and discuss what “this” would represent in each case. Note that all of these examples assume you’re developing client-side JavaScript in a browser.
With every major JavaScript project, I’ve tried something new, improving on what I’ve written before. Currently, whenever I build something from scratch, I use a variation of what Addy Osmani and others commonly refer to as the module pattern.
Here is my version below, which assumes jQuery, and then I’ll provide some explanation of what’s going on here and how I use it:
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.
The other day, someone asked me the following question: “If I understand it right clear float is automatic in most modern browsers right?”
If you’re new to CSS, then it would seem that the answer to this question should be “yes, of course — modern browsers don’t have these types of bugs!” But the necessity to clear floats is not a browser bug; it’s actually, well, more of a CSS feature. And it’s still needed in so-called “modern” browsers (assuming you’re using floats for layout).
Back in July I wrote a post called JavaScript String Methods Reference, outlining many of the ways strings can be manipulated in JavaScript.
Another area where JavaScript has a number of different methods available for use is Array manipulation, which I’ll cover in this post. As usual, I’ll do my best to keep it simple and accurate, but if I’ve erred or if you think I’ve omitted anything important, please comment.
