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.
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…
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 »
After a long break, I’m finally back with the long-awaited CSS portion of this little series.
In this article I’ll go over some core concepts. Next post I’ll outline one poorly understood, but vital part of CSS. More posts full (yes, full) of tips, tricks and best practices will follow.
Core concepts
CSS is a style sheet language used to determine the formatting of an HTML document (although it could be used to style other XML documents like SVG and XUL.) Before we had CSS (and before it was widely adopted) all of this presentation information was embedded in the document, either in the form of attributes like width or bgcolor or in the form of purely presentational tags like font. Combined with the abuse of the table tag to create complicated layouts, the landscape for layout and design on the web was an unmanageable mess.
CSS fixed all that. Using separate style sheets for an entire site and leveraging semantic markup, and identifiers like ids (for unique page elements) and classes (for multiple, like elements) a developer can apply styles to an entire site while updating a single, cacheable file. Read the rest of this entry »
As someone who started out doing JavaScript in the 1990s, I’ve been through the dark ages of debugging. Alerts, logging application data into DOM elements, etc. After having been through all that doom, I’m clearly a fan of console.log. I use it all the time. I bet you do too. It’s super useful.
The one downside? Leaving calls to console.log into code that’s being tested (as in, QA) or is destined for production (as in, emergency bug fix.) With Firebug or a similar tool running, you’re fine. Without it?
Before I jump into the proper way to use tables, I’m going to share an anecdote that should bring a smile to the face of anyone who’s done this stuff for a while.
A few months ago I was both pleased and surprised to discover a web developer who didn’t really know how to lay out a page using tables. He had a sense of how it might work, but had never really done it. I was having him help out with an HTML email (where tables are still the safest bet) and the whole thing was a novelty for him. Looking at it, this makes sense as he’d been at the job for only a few years so he learned entirely in the modern era and he was lucky enough to only learn from good sources. Still, it was a new phenomena for me- encountering a developer who was purely from a CSS-based layout world.
Yes! We’re winning.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about tables for layout, move along. There’s nothing to see here.