December 22nd, 2009
In Javascript it often makes sense to attach a stylesheet rather than style a bunch of individual attributes. Appending a stylesheet to the DOM has a number of advantages:
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Stylesheets can be easier to work with than Javascript—it’s just more natural to use CSS syntax for styling.
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It’s nice to avoid the cross-browser headaches associated with Javascript styling. Compare CSS’s simple float: left to Javascript’s style.styleFloat = ‘left’ and style.cssFloat = ‘left’.
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Appending a stylesheet is better for performance when styling 15 or more elements.
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CSS allows you to leverage pseudo-classes and define styles with the simple a:hover selector instead of both onmouseover and onmouseout event listeners.
There are a couple ways to append a stylesheet. Although it’s usually best to attach an external stylesheet, there are times when you need to build a stylesheet on the fly with Javascript. Let’s walk through the code we’ll need to append … Read more…
Tags: append, best practices, cross-browser, CSS, DOM, front-end, javascript, on-the-fly, unobtrusive, web standards, webdev
Posted in front-end | 3 Comments
August 12th, 2009
My favorite thing about web development is the wide variety of skills it uses. Being a good developer means staying on your toes and always learning, because there are so many important skills and these are constantly changing.
Here’s a checklist of 10 skills that are some of the most important for good web developers to have. These focus a bit on front-end skills, but they apply to all developers:
(more…)
Tags: apache, back-end, best practices, checklists, cross-browser, cyber law, debugging, education, front-end, image processing, javascript, optimization, regex, SEO, version control, web standards, webdev
Posted in webdev | 10 Comments
January 1st, 2008
It’s a new year, and what better way to start off than with a lengthy rant. Strap yourself in.
People often ask me why I am so concerned with writing standards compliant HTML, and they have good points, mainly that it takes longer to develop something that is compliant, and the only people who really know if it is are other developers. I’ve always been in favor of standards compliant code, but to be honest, for a long time I didn’t even know why I did it, it was really just nerd lore to me, the big nerds wanted it, and I agreed blindly. You might think that a production environment with constantly encroaching deadlines would make me throw my compliance to the wind, well to a certain extent it does (although I write standards compliant XHTML out of habit, I do not have time to fix other people’s … Read more…
Tags: CSS, web standards, WYSIWYG
Posted in webdev | 4 Comments
July 29th, 2007
I switched jonraasch.com, yogaenergyheal.com and artbyanes.com over to XHTML transitional. Validation wasn’t too hard: since I naturally code pretty well with proper nesting and lowercase tags, and I use mainly floated divs and CSS, I only had to close a few image tags and entities. XHTML makes the code tighter than HTML does, and clean code is something I am focusing more and more on these days. Plus now all three sites can be viewed on blackberries! (who cares hehe)
Tags: web standards, XHTML
Posted in webdev | No comments
