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.
How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 13: The Cascade/CSS Specificity
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:
Continue reading “How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 13: The Cascade/CSS Specificity”
How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 12: Cascading Style Sheets
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.
Continue reading “How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 12: Cascading Style Sheets”
An Ant Task to Comment Out console.log Calls from JavaScript Files
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?
"console" is not defined.
I’ve seen this more times recently than I care to admit.
Continue reading “An Ant Task to Comment Out console.log Calls from JavaScript Files”
I Added Keyboard Navigation to my Site
Kind of a fun little exercise. Now I just need to figure out a nice way to hint to people that they can navigate with the keyboard.
Check it out. Start here and hit your right arrow key until you start to see the same things twice.
Based on shortcuts.js
Continue reading “I Added Keyboard Navigation to my Site”