Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
Understanding CSS Transitions And Class Timing (Revisited)
Posted: March 20, 2013 at 9:37 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I looked at CSS transitions and examined the timing in which the transitions would take effect . And, again, I don't mean the duration of the transition; or knowing when the transition ended. I mean, when does the browser actually initiate a transition in relationship to your mutation of an element's CSS properties. In the comments to ... read more »
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Understanding CSS Transitions And Class Timing
Posted: March 19, 2013 at 9:55 AM by Ben Nadel
UPDATE : @Ron, in the comments, pointed out that this demo does not work as expected in Chrome. Apparently Firefox (my dev environment of choice) and Chrome handle this case somewhat differently. I've only just started to use CSS transitions; but, I already love them. They seem like a great way to augment the behavior of your application user ... read more »
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Using CSS Pseudo Elements :before And :after
Posted: January 21, 2013 at 9:38 AM by Ben Nadel
The CSS pseudo elements, :before and :after, have been around since IE8. So, this is probably not news to many of you. But, for me personally, I just started using the :before and :after pseudo elements and I've been absolutely loving them! They making it much easier to keep design-centric elements out of your markup and in your CSS (where they be... read more »
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Are HTML FORM Tags Required To Display Form Input Controls?
Posted: October 26, 2012 at 3:45 PM by Ben Nadel
When I got into web development - before AJAX was a thing - I used HTML FORM tags where ever and when ever I needed to display a form input control. This was because all forms actually needed to be submitted back to the server for processing. In the last 10 years or so, I've never really questioned this approach. Even in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScr... read more »
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Mapping CSS Sprite Image Coordinates With ColdFusion
Posted: August 7, 2012 at 10:19 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I got the idea to upload a CSS Sprite image and have ColdFusion scan the image in order to calculate the coordinates and dimensions of individual sprites contained within the image. And, about five attempts later, I had nothing! What I had assumed would be a rather simple task turned into a complex task, fraught with stack overflows, ex... read more »
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Using The RequireJS Build / Optimizer To Concatenate Modularized CSS Files
Posted: January 10, 2012 at 10:19 AM by Ben Nadel
A little while back, I started looking at RequireJS as away to organize and modularize my JavaScript code . And, while I am still getting my feet wet in modular JavaScript web application development, I can tell you that I have really enjoyed using RequireJS - and, that I plan to continue to integrate it into my development process. The asynchron... read more »
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Disabling Auto-Correct And Auto-Capitalize Features On iPhone Inputs
Posted: January 5, 2012 at 9:29 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend, I read Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski . In his book, Wroblewski mentioned that in order to create the most usable experience on a mobile device, one should probably turn off the auto-correction and auto-capitalization features for input fields that don't require them. This way, users don't have to worry about their email addres... read more »
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What CSS Properties Are Supported When You Drop IE6 Support
Posted: January 4, 2012 at 9:48 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the new year's holiday weekend, I read Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski . In the book, Wroblewski talks about leveraging the contraints of mobile development in order to think more holistically and effectively about your users and your software. In his explanation, he suggests using CSS effects instead of images wherever possible in order to ... read more »
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Scalable And Modular Architecture For CSS (SMACSS) By Jon Snook
Posted: December 12, 2011 at 10:58 AM by Ben Nadel
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, has made formatting our web content much easier than it used to be. And while it is relatively simple to get up and running with CSS, it is a technology that appears to be a bit more art than science. As our applications grow in size and complexity, keeping rules clean, organized, siloed, and DRY (Don't Repeat Yours... read more »
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Using Google's Targeted Site Search Protocol To Search My Site
Posted: September 16, 2011 at 10:49 AM by Ben Nadel
The search form on my site (top-right at the time of this writing) used to display Google Search results directly within the context of my site. At one time, it did this with an embedded IFrame widget. Then, for a while, I was using an XML API. Then, a few months ago, I got an email from Google explaining that the particular service I was using wo... read more »
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Using Four-Sided Positioning In CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Posted: August 22, 2011 at 9:41 AM by Ben Nadel
Typically, when it comes to positioning elements with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), I am used to using two-sided positioning; that is, I define two of the four offsets on a given element. This is most often "top" and "left"; but, I make frequent use of the "bottom" and "right" offsets as well. Recently, however, as I was going through some of the ... read more »
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Empty SRC And URL() Values Can Cause Duplicate Page Requests
Posted: August 4, 2011 at 10:54 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I spent a good four hours trying to track down a super frustrating problem. I had a page that needed some additional security features added to it. Basically, I wanted to make sure that once the given page was loaded, only one link on said page could be used. To do this, I stored a random value in the user's session. Then, I would pass ... read more »
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A Book Apart: HTML5 For Web Designers By Jeremy Keith
Posted: September 17, 2010 at 10:13 AM by Ben Nadel
When the buzz about HTML5 started to spread, my first thought was, " Dang it! " This reaction was not a reflection of the technology itself; rather, it was a frustration that a technology I had previously thought of as, "being in the bag," was now evolving and required further exploration. In an industry that is growing so rapidly, it was comforti... read more »
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Experimenting With CSS-Based Animations And Transitions
Posted: July 26, 2010 at 10:13 AM by Ben Nadel
After seeing Ray Camden tweet this weekend about playing with jQTouch , I was inspired to revisit the jQTouch project myself, although from a slightly different angle. I've played with jQTouch before and found it to be awesome for a particular type of application; and, somewhat frustrating for everything else. Part of that frustration, I believe,... read more »
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Detecting iPhone's App Mode (Full Screen Mode) For Web Applications
Posted: June 24, 2010 at 10:11 AM by Ben Nadel
As I have been experimenting with HTML5's new features ( SQLite , Cache Manifest , Offline Application Cache ), I've started to build up a vision in my head of some very cool mobile web applications for my iPhone. In particular, I'm in love with the idea of creating a rich, offline web client for my Dig Deep Fitness web application . Ideally, I... read more »
