Since I’m no longer running a group I don’t have to worry about any of the administrative type things (“this is what the company is about,” “this is what we do,” etc.) That’s good as it just allows me to test people on technology. That’s really my favorite part of the interview process anyway. Win.
The following is a tiny snippet I’ve been using to test people’s knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals.
Why share it here? For one thing it’s kind of interesting to me since it’s a very small snippet but it can expose a lot about the way the person approaches the language. Basically, if you can get this and you’re still pretty inexperienced you’ve probably read a book, taken a class or read a blog post or article written by someone smart. That’s a bonus.
And then there’s the Easter Egg part. Meaning, I’m still going to be using this going forward with the answer sitting right out here in the open. Why?
The latest version of HTML5 Boilerplate was released and the build script I worked on is included as a beta feature. I’m happy to see it in the wild even though it reminds me that I’ve got a couple of outstanding enhancements I want to take care of at some point (soon? *fingers crossed*)
Anyway, check it out and definitely take the build script for a spin. Know Ant and want to help out? Want to port it to another build system (that would be awesome)? Dive in. We’re happy for the help.
Sorry, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy at work, I’ve been wringing every last bit out of summer on my bike, and I’ve spent a lot of my free time on my upcoming CSS presentation, so I haven’t been posting as much as I would like. Fall is here. Which means I should have more time for writing. That’s cool.
Anyway, to break the ice here are a few articles that have recently caught my attention. Read the rest of this entry »
Quick, if you were to guess a technology I’d be making commits on an open source project using, would Apache Ant be at the top of the list? I didn’t think so. But yet, here I am committing an Ant Build script to Paul’s excellent HTML5 Boilerplate project. It makes sense since I’ve done work on concatenation, minification and other performance enhancements using Ant, but it’s still a weird technology to be contributing to such a cool project with…
Let’s face it. Marketing in the digital age is hard. Where will you put your efforts? How do you know it will pay off? The Isobar 50 is our list of the top 50 challenges that online marketers are grappling with today, and our recommendations for dealing with them. If you’re an online marketer, this is the place to get answers to your most pressing marketing and online business questions.
I provided answers for three of the questions and I even sound like I know what I’m talking about: Read the rest of this entry »
We continue with our examination of CSS with some real basics- formatting, writing rules, organization and the like. Nothing groundbreaking, but the basics are important in any endeavor, so here they are.
Formatting
During development I format my CSS with selectors on one line and then each property on its own line. The declarations are indented 4 spaces. I like this style because my interest is always in the properties, not the selectors. I can find any selector I need with CTRL+F and then I can easily scan down the list of properties to do my business.
Continuing our examination of HTML5, this time we’ll take a slightly deeper look at the state of HTML5 support in browsers. We’ll step through several major features, examine the technical hurdles in place, identify the level of browser support and finally provide some recommendations on whether or not to pull the trigger with that shiny new feature.
New Semantic Elements
HTML5 has added many new semantic elements. These both codify existing, common patterns and offer new, meaningful ways mark up your content. So, for example, going forward, instead of using <div id="header"> we will now just use <header>. Some other examples (with definitions culled from the specification) include:
section
The section element represents a generic document or application section. A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content, typically with a heading.
Examples of sections would be chapters, the various tabbed pages in a tabbed dialog box, or the numbered sections of a thesis. A Web site’s home page could be split into sections for an introduction, news items, contact information.
footer
The footer element represents a footer for its nearest ancestor sectioning content or sectioning root element. A footer typically contains information about its section such as who wrote it, links to related documents, copyright data, and the like.
nav
The nav element represents a section of a page that links to other pages or to parts within the page: a section with navigation links.
article
The article element represents a component of a page that consists of a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is intended to be independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.
That’s far from a complete list, but it should serve to give you the flavor of what’s available.
Support
This is a curious case. If, by “support” we mean “doesn’t break anything” then the support here is broad. Using the HTML5 Shiv code snippet or the full blown Modernizr library every browser that matters supports the HTML5 elements. If you’re expecting user agents to do something interesting with your new elements, then the support level is much lower. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to be presenting my Intro to CSS talk at Design Camp Boston on November 6, 2010. It’s at NERD. If you can’t make my Boston PHP Meetup version of the presentation, here’s your chance. Failing that, make sure to say hi if you’re there, because I’ll be around all day taking in the goodness.
One of the most important things in CSS is understanding the way rules are inherited and applied in the browser. This is one of those things that many developers “get” intuitively but don’t necessarily understand at a granular level.
There’s actually an algorithm, so if you’re stumped, you can actually count it out. It works like this:
