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31 Mar
Fight Div-itis and Class-itis With the 960 Grid System
CSS, Code, Programming
30

Years ago, HTML tables were the standard for laying out web pages. CSS and semantic thinking changed that, and today CSS frameworks make designing relatively easy.
But they can also generate a surprising number of superfluous elements.
The 960 Grid System encourages the addition of <div> elements and class attributes, especially on complicated pages. Is this really an improvement over nested tables?
Creating cleaner code means going beyond the framework and thinking about what it really represents.
Read more
15 Mar
CSS Bugs and Inconsistencies in Firefox 3.x
Code, Firefox, Programming
38

There aren’t many articles covering incompatibilities, or CSS differences in Firefox alone — and for good reason.
Firefox has always done an excellent good job of supporting both CSS and JavaScript in a standards-compliant manner without too many awkward bugs.
There are, however, a few CSS properties and selectors that aren’t supported by one or more of the versions released since version 3.0., which I will cover here.
This article will cover bugs, inconsistencies, and nonsupport. So, if you’re having trouble with a CSS property or selector in Firefox and it’s not listed here, then you’ll probably have to rethink your layout and reconsider what the culprit might be. Read more
5 Feb
How to Plan for the Absence of JavaScript
Code, How to, Programming
34

Though the methods used to gather website traffic statistics call into question the validity of the stats themselves, the fact is that some of your website’s visitors will have JavaScript disabled.
You could divide your traffic sources into four broad categories:
Search engines, mobile visitors, visitors using screen readers and visitors who have JavaScript turned off.
When planning your information architecture and design, you must figure out how to deal with these special groups.
I have assembled a few recent real-world scenarios to find clarity on the issue. Read more
18 Jan
CSS Transitions 101
CSS, Code, Programming
72

Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.
A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.
This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.
Yes, we can use DHTML and leverage the jQuery library for transitions, but this requires a lot of code for something that should be very simple.
What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them. Read more
14 Dec
Solutions to 5 Common Ajax Problems
Ajax, Programming, Web Development
40

The modern web developer who does not consider Ajax when planning or building their websites is potentially missing out on a powerful tool to enhance usability.
There are however, challenges in implementing Ajax functionality on a web page.
In this article we’ll discuss solutions to five of the most common challenges that a developer faces when using Ajax to enhance the content on their website.
Although there is a lot more to discuss and research on all five topics, this post should give beginners and intermediate Ajax developers some solid tips on implementing Ajax functionality in a more user-friendly and accessible manner.
Read more
20 May
10 Best CSS Practices to Improve Your Code
CSS, Code, Programming
157

It’s really easy to find yourself wondering how your CSS got to be such a mess.
Sometimes it’s the result of sloppy coding from the start, sometimes it’s because of multiple hacks and changes over time.
Whatever the cause, it doesn’t have to be that way. Writing clean, super-manageable CSS is simple when you start off on the right foot and make your code easier to maintain and edit later on.
Here are 11 tips for speeding up the process, writing CSS that is slimmer, faster and less likely to give you a headache. Read more
5 Feb
Is Google Chrome The New IE 6 For Web Designers?
CSS, Code, Programming, Validation
123

Just when you thought you were done with IE 6 and its hacks and exceptions, now you’ve got a new browser to consider: Google’s Chrome.
The good news is that Chrome is a lot more compatible with web standards than IE 5 and 6. However, Chrome has its own idiosyncrasies and bugs.
No one knows if Chrome is here to stay, but it has already captured a surprisingly decent share of the web browser market in a short period of time.
Here are some tips to get your web pages working in Chrome and hopefully looking the way they were designed to look.
Read more
14 Jan
6 Reasons Why Designers Should Code
Accessibility, Programming, SEO
140

I know, I know…none of us creative types want anything to do with coding past the very basic HTML/CSS we need to know to get our designs to the developers.
Doing development is something for those programming grunts, those code jockeys, those geeks.
Why should we enter the trenches of development when it’s so nice up here with the Photoshop brushes, afternoon tea, and MacPros?   Because you’ll be a better designer for it.
Skeptical? Read on and discover 6 reasons why designers should code… Read more
20 Dec
Quick and Easy WordPress Development on a Mac with MAMP
Code, Programming, WordPress
47

Ready for some WordPress development on your Mac? First, you need to be running Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
Although Mac OS X comes with Apache and PHP, you don’t want Apple’s automatic software update to break your development environment by changing your working versions of PHP and Apache. Plus, do you really want to spend time tweaking MySQL?
In this guide, I will show you how to quickly install and configure a working WordPress environment including Apache, PHP, and MySql. Read more
2 Dec
20 Excellent Free Rich-Text Editors
Programming, Rich Text Editors
100

Rich-text editors, also known as online rich-text editors, are web components that allow users to edit and enter text within a web browser. Rich-text editors are used in numerous ways such as in enhancing your comment input form or as part of a web application that allows entry of user-generated and formatted content. Rich-text editors are essentially web-based WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editors.
There are many rich-text editors out there. What’s even better than a lot of choices? Many of the best rich-text editors currently in the market are free.
In this article, we present 20 exceptional (and free) rich-text editors. Read more
11 Nov
How Ajax Works
Ajax, Code, Programming
19

In traditional JavaScript coding, if you want to get any information from a database or a file on the server, or send user information to a server, you will have to make an HTML form and GET or POST data to the server. The user will have to click the “Submit” button to send/get the information, wait for the server to respond, and then a new page will load with the results.
Because the server returns a new page each time the user submits input, traditional web applications can run slowly and tend to be less user-friendly. With AJAX, your JavaScript communicates directly with the server, through the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object.
With an HTTP request, a web page can make a request to, and get a response from a web server, without reloading the page. The user will stay on the same page, and he or she will not notice that scripts request pages, or send data to a server in the background. Read more