The home page of your site is not unimportant—it’s hugely important as a first impression. But Derek Powazek looks at the numbers, and writes this article about getting more bang out of tweaks to the more frequently visited atomic element pages than the home page.
A List Apart’s Matthew Lavine declares his personal quest for web design’s “Holy Grail” — a three column layout with fixed width sidebars and a fluid centre that is simple to implement and works across all browsers — to be at an end, and shows us how to find it, too.
The normal way for a website to define a shortcut key is to use the accesskey attribute on an element that may have such an attribute, specifying a character that becomes the shortcut key in combination with one or more other keys as implemented by the browser (typically Alt in Windows and Ctrl in Mac OS X).
That doesn’t leave the user with any way to change the accesskeys defined by a website. Well, now there are at least two ways that web developers can offer that possibility.
Read the full article — “Giving the user control over accesskeys” — here.
Various people have, over the last few years, done studies into the popularity of authoring techniques. For example, looking at what HTML ids and classes are most common, and at how many sites validate (and yes, we know that we’re not leading the way in terms of validation). We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.
SkimCSS is a subject-specific (in this case, CSS) Digg-like site. Submit your favourite CSS-related sites, tutorials, references, and articles, and let the readers decide how good (or not good) it really is.
Ajax applications are praised for their richness, interactivity, and responsiveness, which are achieved by loading data dynamically using the XMLHttpRequest object instead of loading new pages. Among the hype and excitement, a few critical voices have pointed out that Ajax applications break several important browser features, including support for the back/forward button.
This article begins with an explanation of why the back/forward button and other browser functionality will not work unless explicitly built into an Ajax application. The article will then outline how developers can address these issues. Finally, we will look in detail at how the Backbase Ajax engine provides support for the back/forward button and other standard browser functionality.
Marko Samastur provides this handy tip about what might be causing your XMLHttpRequest object to unexpectedly return status 0.
FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
Other fun features:
Note that this is not a “final” version of the extension, so caveat emptor.
In JavaScript, we have functions and we have arguments that we pass into those functions. But how JavaScript handles what you’re passing in is not always clear. When you start getting into object-oriented development, you may find yourself perplexed over why you have access to values sometimes but not other times…
Read the full text of JavaScript: Passing by Value or by Reference.
JavaScript (the language, not the browser bindings for the DOM, etc.) can be either brutally hard or refreshingly flexible. It’s difficulty is directly related to how well you grok a couple of core concepts. I’m going to just list them…