Impressive Webs, Toronto | Web Design Articles & Tutorials

Browser Support for CSS3 Selectors

Browser Support for CSS3 Selectors Now that the numbers for IE6 and IE7 usage are diminishing rapidly, more and more development teams are starting to weed out support for those older browsers.

Most readers will probably have removed IE6 completely from the equation and soon IE7 will follow. Despite IE8 still having the highest share of any single browser version, the demise of IE6/7 now allows us to be more creative with CSS selectors.

This post will provide a comprehensive review of support for CSS3 selectors in the most troublesome browsers (guess which ones?). Each selector links to the appropriate location in the CSS3 spec.

Options for Styling Text Links and Hover States

Options for Styling Text Links and Hover States Because the web is built on links, how we style our links (i.e, anchors, or <a> tags) should always be an important part of a site’s overall design, branding, and feel.

I’ve seen so many variations on the link style/color and hover style/color combination, that I thought it would be interesting to list as many of them here as possible. Some of these will be quite common and humdrum, while others may be ugly and impractical. I tried to stay away from really bizarre animated stuff, but instead chose to stick to those that you might actually see on a web page.

Every Time You Make a Good Business Decision, a Puppy Gets Cloned

Puppy Gets Cloned A List Apart’s Issue #344 went live yesterday with a focus on the recent vendor prefix drama. I didn’t get a chance yet to read the entire Meyer/Tantek interview, but I did read Lea Verou’s piece.

First of all, congratulations to Lea for getting published in ALA. She’s certainly one of the most talented web developers I know, and deserves to be featured in such a context. I hope Zeldman and company continue to use new and fresh authors like her.

So what’s the point of my post here? And what’s the deal with the hyperbolic title that resembles Lea’s? Well, in many ways, this post is a response to what Lea wrote in her article. But this is not to say that what I’m going to write necessarily contradicts or opposes what she’s written. For the record, I agree with the spirit and forward-thinking approach in her post.

Callback Functions in JavaScript

Callback Functions in JavaScript If you’re fairly inexperienced with JavaScript but you’ve used jQuery, then its likely you’ve used callback functions. But maybe you don’t fully understand how they work or how they’re implemented.

In this post, which is based on what I’ve learned about callback functions, I’ll try to enlighten you on this fairly common JavaScript technique. And maybe some of our JavaScript experts can chime in and let me know what I’ve omitted or oversimplified.

Book Giveaway: The Book of Ruby

Book Giveaway: The Book of Ruby I was unsure of what to write about this week and then I remembered that I had been meaning to post something to promote and give away a hard copy of a book that No Starch Press was kind enough to give me for free.

Below I’ll give you some simple instructions on how you can win my brand new copy of The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne. You’ll never believe what you have to do to qualify for this one! (Note the sarcasm.) But first, a description of the book.

A Call For Better Fragment Identifiers

A Call For Better Fragment Identifiers Where would the web be without links? Links are what hold together what we know as the World Wide Web. Without links, the World Wide Web would be more appropriately called the World Wide Set Of Unrelated Pages, or, incidentally, WWSOUP.

While it’s great how simple and effective the process is of “linking” pages together, I think there’s room for improvement.

Learn to Program

Learn to Program In Divya Manian’s controversial post on Smashing Magazine discussing HTML semantics, something that she said got somewhat overlooked in all the debates that ensued.

At the end of the article, she pointed out that rather than wasting time debating HTML tag use, developers should focus on learning how to program. I think this is great advice. So to that end, I’ve compiled a roundup of sources where beginners can expand their skills past HTML and CSS.

New CSS3 Properties to Handle Text and Word Wrapping

New CSS3 Properties to Handle Text and Word Wrapping About a year and a half ago, I wrote about CSS3′s word-wrap property. The angle of the article was the fact that it was a feature that was new in CSS3 that didn’t exist in CSS2.1 and it worked in just about every browser, including old IE.

Well, now that’s all changed, which I discovered while researching additions to my CSS3 Click Chart. The word-wrap property has been removed from the CSS3 spec and other related properties have been added.

The All-New CSS3 Click Chart

The All-New CSS3 Click Chart Over the past month or so I’ve been slowly working on a redesign and revamp of my CSS3 Click Chart.

A whole slew of things have changed. Here’s a summary.

Textarea Auto Resize

Textarea Auto Resize On a current project, I was trying to find a way to auto-resize a textarea according to some content that would be loaded in dynamically via Ajax. I didn’t know the height of the content and the textarea element doesn’t resize naturally like other HTML elements, so I needed to update the height of the element with JavaScript each time the content changed.

It seemed like a simple task. After doing a search to see what types of plugins and scripts were floating around to do this, the examples I found seemed a little overly complex. While most solutions seemed to incorporate some complex math calculations, I thought of a better way.