Sunday, February 8th, 2009
WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!
Today we as web designers and developers get a rare chance to look into the future. The latest nightly build of Webkit (the rendering engine for browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome) includes some new support for CSS3. Specifically, explicit animations using CSS. Up until now, developers have either had to rely on Flash and all its drawbacks, or bite the bullet and write out a long piece of JavaScript just to get a box to slide in elegantly. JQuery alleviated the problem somewhat, but nothing compares to the visual approach of writing a CSS document.
CSS animation will enable developers to spend much less time on animation which, to the end user, may seem trivial. And it will do so with cleaner, simpler, more robust code that will load significantly faster and run smoother for the end user. Read on to see a preview of how it works, and when you can expect to be able to use this on an actual web page.
[click here to read the rest of the article]
Friday, January 9th, 2009
WordPress 2.7 recently came out. For those of you who don’t know, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world, and deservedly so. It is highly customizable and extremely themeable. It’s coded with standard, valid XHTML and CSS. My only real complaint with WordPress is that they, like much of the web, chose to use XHTML instead of HTML when there’s no real reason for it. But that’s a topic for another day. As it stands, WordPress is still the best CMS I’ve ever used by far, and that’s why I use it on my own site and recommend it to all of my clients.
I am going to be upgrading this blog and, if all goes well, my clients’ blogs shortly thereafter. Normally I wouldn’t go to the trouble of updating, but this is a big one. Instead of the usual one or two obscure bug fixes, the WP team has completely redesigned the back-end, and from what I’ve seen they’ve done a really good job of turning a great blogging platform into a truly rich CMS (content management system).
Continue reading to find out what some of these great new features are, and for a video showcasing them!
[click here to read the rest of the article]
Saturday, October 18th, 2008
With this article, I am going to attempt to convince you to stop using Internet Explorer for web browsing on a day-to-day basis. I will start with a brief history of the Internet, just to get you familiarized with the subject if you aren’t already. Then I will move on to the 5 reasons you should switch away from the most popular web browser, Internet Explorer. After that, I will introduce you to my favorite alternatives to Internet Explorer and show you how easy it is to switch (you won’t lose all your favorites!). Well, let’s get going!
A Brief History
I will try to keep this as brief as I know how, since I could easily go into A LOT of detail about it! If you’re interested in reading more in-depth, you should definitely check out this great article: History of the Web Standards Project at WebStandards.org.
The two most popular web browsers at the beginning of the world wide web.
A web browser is what you use to view the world wide web. In the early days of the web, there were two vastly different web browsers duking it out for supremacy: Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator (logos pictured to the right). Each browser was developed completely independently of the other, and as such, the technologies were complex and wildly varying. Pages rarely, if ever, looked the same in both browsers, and as a result the web as a whole was made a less compatible, less accessible, and generally less fun place to be.
[click here to read the rest of the article]
