Continuing with the roundup and reading list theme this week, below is a list of tools that might be of interest to front-end developers.
As always, if you have a tool, book, or script you’d like to share, add it to the comments.
A couple of weeks ago Packt Publishing contacted me and gave me a free e-book version of Divya Manian’s new book HTML5 Boilerplate Web Development.
For a while now I’ve been wondering who was going to write a book on HTML5 Boilerplate. Although much of what’s in Boilerplate is “plug and play” (i.e., it just works, even if you don’t know what it does), I think many people are intimidated by it and would like a deeper understanding of what’s going on, and what is the optimal way to employ this popular framework. So a book on this topic is a great idea.
Before I get into the meat of this post, I’ll just provide some context. Last week, Harry Roberts posted a fantastic article discussing his view of bad CSS. In that article, as he’s done before, he disourages the use of IDs as selectors.
In response, Jeffrey Zeldman tried to defend the use of ID selectors. I posted a few comments in response to Jeffrey and another commenter, explaining why their views were wrong.
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.
For a while now, I’ve been using Notepad++ with a customized version of the Zenburn theme, which was originally created for Vim.
This week I finally started fiddling around with Sublime Text 2, and I like what I’ve seen. Although I like the default Monakai theme, I prefer my old customized version of Zenburn from Notepad++. So I forked the Zenburn repo and made my alterations.
Recently, I’ve bookmarked a bunch of animation-related scripts, libraries, and plugins. Although CSS3 has certainly made animation easier for us, sometimes we need a little bit of help.
There are other libraries that are more popular than these (like Raphaël.js), but these are some mostly lesser-known scripts that I’ve stumbled across in recent months.
While I usually try to write stuff that’s geared more to experienced developers, I don’t want to neglect those who are just starting out.
I’ve been collecting links to beginners resources for web development for some time now, so I thought I’d share that list here. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Parallax scrolling sites have been a pretty hot UX thing of late, being showcased on various blogs. Although the “ooooh! aahhh!”-ness of it all has subsided, I think this type of site is certainly a legitimate design and development option for many brands.
To help you choose a JavaScript or jQuery library or plugin for doing this sort of thing (unless you’re a masochist and want to write one from scratch!), in this post I’ve put together a list of plugins and scripts to choose from.
Here’s a collection of videos that I’ve stumbled across in recent months.
I haven’t watched all of them, but they’re on my current to-watch list and what better way to remind myself to watch them than to blog them. Enjoy.
Whether we like it or not, ads on the web (in some form) aren’t going anywhere. And because of the responsive web design movement, more and more discussions are taking place surrounding how to handle ads (especially large ones) at certain breakpoints.
In addition, some developers have suggested new methods for creating ads using HTML and CSS, instead of images. Some have even incorporated animation with CSS3.
