Archive for July, 2005

Nick Rigby discovers and writes that Opera 8 has a maximum text-indent value of 32697 pixels.

Clearly this is an edge case and not all that common, but those that use the "off-left" technique might find something familiar in his quote:

There would be no need to ever use a value this large, but I happened to be using -9999em originally, which, depending on the default font-size of the document, is a lot more than this limit value. Hence, it did not work in Opera 8.

Anyways, just a little tip for your toolbox.

As Microsoft’s IEblog points out, their Faster DHTML is 12 Steps isn’t entirely new but does have some valuable information. Obviously some of the info is quite IE-specific, but it’s still worth a read.

Here are the tips included in the article:

• Batch Your DHTML Changes
• Talk to Your innerText
• Use the DOM to Add Individual Elements
• Expand Your Options in a SELECT Element
• Use the DOM to Update Tables
• Write Once, Use Many Times
• Don’t Be Too Dynamic with Your Properties
• Data Binding is Good for You
• Keep Your Expando Properties Off the Document
• Avoid switching classes and style rules
• Collapse a Text Range Before Finding the Parent
• Related Topics

Once again the fine folks at the Web Standards Project are helping us all move the industry forward, this time with the launch of their DOM Scripting Task Force as announced in their buzz archive today.

"The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third," said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. "These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support."

They have a press release, a manifesto, and of course a website.

These topics aren’t anything new necessarily, but it’s good to see more and more developers picking up the torch. For more reading on this/these topics, check out these other posts from my blog: The Behavior Layer, Unobtrusively, and Semantic Markup - Create, Support and Extract.

If you eat and breath these topics, I’d love to hear from you and your resume.

After three fantastic months backpacking across Asia, I’m back in a cube at Yahoo digging my way out of my inbox and out from under my feed reader. (There was significantly worse net access on the road than I expected. I’m doing my best to catch up, but if you want to hear from you soon you’re better off sending me a fresh email.). The trip was excellent (check out some of the pics: flickr.com/photos/natekoechley/sets/), but it’s great to be back in the Bay Area.

Now for the new adventure: plug back into the world of Web Development / . Care to help me out? What have I missed? Any "best of’s" from the last three months? What do you see coming next? What should I be paying attention to right now? What’s dead? What’s hot?

Stay tuned as I try to answer those questions for myself, and please forgive me if I post anything in the next few weeks that’s old news to you.

Thanks!

Once again the fine folks at the Web Standards Project are helping us all move the industry forward, this time with the launch of their DOM Scripting Task Force as announced in their buzz archive today.

“The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third,” said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. “These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support.”

They have a press release, a manifesto, and of course a website.

These topics aren’t anything new necessarily, but it’s good to see more and more developers picking up the torch. For more reading on this/these topics, check out these other posts from my blog: The Behavior Layer, Unobtrusively, and Semantic Markup - Create, Support and Extract.

If you eat and breath these topics, please send me your resume.