Stubbornella: thoughts about the web.
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Visual Semantics in HTML and CSS
Each layer in the web stack has its own architecture. You wouldn’t expect the DB schema to be used to architect the PHP middleware, and yet people expect that of the HTML and CSS. HTML needs to be written with a sense of the meaning of the data or content, something I call code semantics.…
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CSS Wish List
Don’t get me wrong, I think CSS is awesome. It is a great way of defining the UI, but it could be even better. I’m excited about the special effects, transitions, and graphic elements currently being added to the CSS specification. They will help us write faster pages by eliminating the need for UI graphics…
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Bread
Outerlands is a lovely place to have brunch before a day at the beach. They bake homemade bread which is absolutely yummy. It is a small place run by a lovely couple who are very busy at their successful restaurant. Me (omg!): You have to bake bread every day? Owner (happy smile): No, I get…
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HTML5, who is bad enough to take on canvas?
I recently went to New York to hang with some people who are interested in HTML5 and figure out what I thought about the future of this web standard. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I went into our little quest expecting to be unimpressed by HTML5, but in fact, it isn’t so bad, and…
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Overflow – a secret benefit
Overflow does some cool things you should know about. Creates Block Formatting Context Clears Floats Generating block formatting context Arnaud Gueras called this “contexte de formattage” years ago, and I was kind of surprised when I moved back to the US how few developers here had heard of this “secret weapon”. When the overflow property…
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A loving Indian family
Eight techniques for thriving in a big Indian family. The meaningless ack. You mean that you care about their opinion; you say that you agree with what they are saying. If it ever comes up again, you use one of the following techniques. Distract. Add more or less unrelated information to the discussion, the more…
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CSS Summit – test cases for browser bugs
Speaking the CSS Summit today, I listened as people voiced concerns about browser support and bugs. It might surprise my fellow CSS developers, but many of the seasoned, bearded (ok, I’m making this part up) engineers working on the innards of browsers and rendering engines may not actually write much CSS themselves. They need our…
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The Year of Business Metrics – Don’t make your users run away!
A marked change has occurred since the first Velocity Conference a year ago, and while the effects are not yet obvious, they will be. The web is still slow, but we have something now, that we didn’t a year ago: business metrics. This was the year we quantified the impact of performance choices on our…
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Smush.it finds a home at Yahoo!
Today is a great day for Smush it because Yahoo! decided to accept it into their family of tools. This will allow the tool to run on fanatically maintained servers, with the Yahoo! style quality of service. It doesn’t get any better than that. I feel like my baby is all grown up and going…
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Reflows & Repaints: CSS Performance making your JavaScript slow?
I’ve been tweeting and posting to delicious about reflows and repaints, and it seemed time for a blog post. Opera lists repaint and reflow as one of the three main contributors to sluggish JavaScript, so it definitely seems worth a look. Reflows are very expensive in terms of performance, and is one of the main…
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