February 20th, 2010
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Web Design, Web Development
(Accessibility, CSS, Rants)
We’ve all seen them, most of us have used them, almost every CSS framework is built on one and you instantly know one is present when you open Firebug and see a hundred levels of CSS inheritance declarations. Reset cascading style sheets (a.k.a. reset.css).
The idea of the reset style sheet is to globally target every markup element and set all of its possible attributes to zero, default or inherit. This gives the developer a “clean slate” with no browser default styles. Many say that this is the first thing you should add when you start building a web page, but I firmly disagree.
I’m sure that I am one of the small minority of web developers who’s saying this, but reset style sheets are bad practice, and it’s time to stop using them.
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February 14th, 2010
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Web Development
(Analytics, JavaScript, Privacy, Rants)
I was once a huge fan of the AddThis social bookmarking widget, it’s a simple device for adding the social network buttons that everyone expects to see on every page on the internet (now-a-days). It has excellent browser support and is very simple to implement, modify and configure. As far as social bookmarking widgets go, it is probably the best.
However, in the latter half of 2008 AddThis was acquired by Clearspring, an online media company. They were able to see the value in having a glorified tracking bug on hundreds of thousands of sites across the internet. It’s grown to such an extent that Clearspring now sees what half of the internet is doing.
I’m no tinfoil hat paranoid, but I was a bit surprised at the scale and power of this system. Personally I congratulate them on their wild success. It was a brilliant idea and has become an internet phenomenon. However, I have no interest in giving Clearspring information on my visitors (for free).
So lets reduce it’s tracking ability with a couple lines of JavaScript.
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January 24th, 2010
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Web Development
(Accessibility, AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery, Rants, SEO)
I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code and I love the language. I have used it on almost every site that I’ve worked on in the last 10 years. It makes web pages and web applications so much better in every way. That is, if it’s used correctly, in moderation.
However, for the last few years it feels like I’ve had to spend more time explaining why we should not use JavaScript than I do actually writing scripts. This is a trend that I’ve noticed more and more as the web matures. An ever increasing number people believe that JavaScript is the solution to everything. Many take this idea so far that they believe it’s okay to say that we don’t support users without JavaScript.
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September 6th, 2009
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Web Development
(.NET, LAMP, PHP, Rants)
For the last few years I have spent more time working in the .NET framework than I do PHP. It’s not that I don’t like PHP, quite the opposite, I love PHP. However, it seems most of the work I’ve been seeing is for the .NET Framework. And there is a reason for that, .NET is more powerful in terms of pure control, the Visual Studio IDE is absolutely awesome for working with large solutions, and the .NET library provides so many powerful tools.
PHP has a lot going for it, it is powerful, scale-able, easy to work with, and free. The LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) solution is the standard on the internet. And for a good reason! It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s memory efficient, and it is very secure (if run by a capable admin). I prefer to work on LAMP systems because I can lock it down so well with tools that are well tested and maintained, and to top it off Linux hosting is cheap!
But PHP does have some drawbacks. A large PHP project can be a nasty endeavor to catch up on. As a developer I always find it difficult coming into a PHP project and trying to figure out what is where. The conventions are simply the whims of whatever the original developer(s) were used to (sometimes none at all).
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