Apple have finally unveiled a tablet computer, the iPad. The anticipation leading up to this launch and the speculation surrounding it has been truly staggering. Yet I find myself strangely underwhelmed by the device.

Continue Reading…

Netbooks are the endpoint of four decades of computing — the final, ubiquitous manifestation of “A PC on every desk and in every home”. But netbooks are more than just PCs. If the Internet is the ultimate force of democratization in the world, then netbooks are the instrument by which that democracy will be achieved.

Following Jeff Atwood’s recent catastrophe with his Coding Horror website, he asked his readers if anyone could help with or suggest ways in which he might recover the images that had been lost when his web-server’s hard disk went off to its final resting place. One of Atwood’s readers came up with a remarkably elegant and clever way of recovering some of those images from the browser caches of Coding Horror readers (complete with code samples). This is the sort of hack I love: clever, imaginative, effective and single-minded. Awesome stuff.

Another reminder folks that we should all be obsessive about doing our backups and restores.

Preloading images is a great way to improve the user experience. When images are preloaded in the browser, the visitor can surf around your site and enjoy faster loading times. This is especially beneficial for photo galleries and other image-heavy sites where you want to deliver the goods as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

A well-written and informative overview of the request/response communications between client and server over the HTTP protocol.

A great article which documents how to overcome the following IE issues:

• Centering a Layout
• Staircase Effect
• Double Margin on Floated Elements
• Inability to Have Elements with Small Heights
• Auto Overflow and Relatively Positioned Items
• Fixing the Broken Box Model
• Setting a Minimum Width and Height
• Misbehaving Floated Layout
• Space Between List Items

Joen Asmussen presents a method of directing IE8’s rendering engine:

The new rendering engine of IE8 was supposed to be more standards compliant, yet the CSS engine still follows Microsoft’s own rules, so the net result is that IE8 still can’t render advanced CSS layouts. The solution is to add a meta tag to tell IE8 to use the IE7 rendering engine; then you don’t have to target two browsers.

Then Google launched Chrome Frame which embeds Google Chrome’s superior rendering engine to IE. But it’s a plugin so it has to be installed and it has to be invoked using a meta tag.

Combining the two meta tags, so that we use Chrome Frame if available, but fall back to using IE7’s rendering engine if not, results in this meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1; IE=7" />

Joen tested this on a recent site and tells us that it works as advertised.

Handle IE8: Use Chrome Frame If Available, Fallback To IE7 originally appeared on Noscope on November 2^nd, 2009.

Anyone who has visited YouTube.com in the past four years knows that you can embed video in a web page. But prior to HTML5, there was no standards-based way to do this. Virtually all the video you’ve ever watched “on the web” has been funneled through a third-party plugin — maybe QuickTime, maybe RealPlayer, maybe Flash. (YouTube uses Flash.) These plugins integrate with your browser well enough that you may not even be aware that you’re using them. That is, until you try to watch a video on a platform that doesn’t support that plugin.

HTML5 defines a standard way to embed video in a web page, using a <video> element. Support for the <video> element is still evolving, which is a polite way of saying it doesn’t work yet. At least, it doesn’t work everywhere. But don’t despair! There are alternatives and fallbacks and options galore.

And Mark Pilgrim goes on to explore this fascinating and long-overdue addition to web-developer’s armoury. As we have come to expect from Pilgrim, all the technicalities are covered and the essay is written in an easy-to-understand manner with exquisite presentation. The “bible” for video-over-web people everywhere.

A JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG’s work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Photo Credit: “Printing Press” by Thomas Hawk

In The Sorry State of WYSIWYG Web Editors, Mike Davidson bemoans the fact that the current crop of web-based WYSIWYG editors are all, in some way, broken — and I agree with him. Now don’t get me wrong, editors such as TinyMCE, YUI and FCKeditor are the result of considerable programming effort and ingenuity and each has its own unique selling points. Yet, despite representing the current state-of-the-art, these editors each suffer from various flaws and I wouldn’t wish any of them on an inexperienced user… because, at the end of the day, they are all kludges!

WYSIWYG editing should be a function of the web-browser - not the web-page! Continue Reading…