Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
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 »
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Pages Cached By The Cache Manifest Do Not Need To Reference The Cache Manifest
Posted: June 23, 2010 at 9:35 AM by Ben Nadel
In last night's post, I discovered that non-cached pages could not make use of resources cached within the application cache . As I was experimenting with that concept, I found that when I added a cache manifest reference to the non-cached page, it both became cached and was granted access to the other cached resources. This is, of course, the ex... read more »
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Non-Cached Pages Cannot Access Resources Cached In The Cache Manifest
Posted: June 22, 2010 at 8:03 PM by Ben Nadel
In my previous post on HTML5's Cache Manifest , Ray Camden and I got into a great discussion about how pages would interact with resources cached by the Cache Manifest file. I was explaining to him that in my experience, any file that linked to the cache manifest was itself automatically cached even if it (the calling page) was not explicitly d... read more »
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Using The Cache Manifest With iPhone's App Mode For "Native" Web Applications
Posted: June 22, 2010 at 11:01 AM by Ben Nadel
After playing around with HTML5's new Cache Manifest for creating offline web applications , I thought a good next step would be to play around with the Apple iPhone's "App Mode" that allows web applications to be run more like native iPhone applications. This includes the ability to run in full-screen mode as well as use a homescreen icon and a ... read more »
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Experimenting With HTML5's Cache Manifest For Offline Web Applications
Posted: June 21, 2010 at 10:06 AM by Ben Nadel
After playing with Safari's SQLite support for use with creating client-side databases , I thought I would try looking into HTML5's "Cache Manifest" for creating offline web applications. The Cache Manifest is a text file that lists out all of the application resources that need to be cached in order for the given application to work without an i... read more »
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Refactoring My Safari SQLite Local Database Example
Posted: June 15, 2010 at 10:20 AM by Ben Nadel
The other day, I played around with Safari's SQLite support for the first time , creating a very simple, single-table example. This really opened my eyes up to some of the possibilities of creating very rich, very responsive web-based apps geared towards mobile deployment (via the various WebKit implementations). Of course, the exploration only c... read more »
