best practices
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is at Release Candidate 1, which means it will be released very shortly. IE8 is a brand-new browser and will represent a considerable shift from IE7/IE6; it will follow standards more closely and will offer much improved CSS 2.1 support. However, because of some
excanvas
excanvas.js is a script that enables developers to use the canvas element in Internet Explorer; since IE doesn’t support canvas or the canvas API, the excanvas script converts (most) canvas commands to Vector Markup Language (VML), the only vector rendering language supported natively in Internet Explorer. excanvas is
@font-face
Like many other web professionals, I’m tired of the limited font set we have to work with. Gee, should I use Verdana on this site or Georgia? Maybe Arial? Meh. Bor-ing. The merits and legal implications of CSS3’s proposed @font-face are being hotly debated, which means the proposal
Project Updates
A year ago this week, I launched the not-for-profit and ad-free pipwerks E-Learning Development Forum. It was mostly intended to be a way for me to answer questions about some of my projects, such as the SCORM API wrapper, SCORM ActionScript classes, and my many Captivate hacks. The forum wasn’
canvas
As part of my ongoing experiments with <canvas>, I decided to convert an image-based progress bar to an image-free canvas-based system. I just finished whipping up a proof-of-concept; it uses MooTools to generate the canvas and CSS code. No images were harmed in the making of this progress
canvas
In my previous post Fun with canvas and MooTools: a Rectangle class, I explained that I wanted to make a modal window for a project at my workplace. I was interested in using MochaUI, but felt it was a bit heavy for my needs. I started playing with the canvas
backtick
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of encountering the Hawaiian language, it’s a very simple but elegant language. The written form is largely phonetic (cooked up by American missionaries in the 1800s) and makes use of two diacritical marks: the ‘okina, and the macron (also
canvas
Greg Houston’s uber-cool MochaUI has led me to experiment with the canvas element the last few days. I first saw MochaUI sometime in 2007. While I was duly impressed, I couldn’t quite find a use for it and filed it away in my bottomless “play with this later”
A while back, I posted my method for defeating spambots that harvest email addresses. This post is an update to that original method. It explores cleaner, less obtrusive code approaches and more accessible/usable HTML markup. If you’re impatient and want to jump to some working examples, here you
ramblings
The new whitehouse.gov site has received a lot of press since its unveiling a few days ago. Many have rightly given it kudos for bringing a modern sense of design and “Web 2.0”-style social practices to the White House. I agree the new site is a big
Adobe Captivate
Adobe has officially announced Captivate 4 and the Adobe eLearning Suite. http://www.adobe.com/products/elearningsuite/ http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez/2009/01/new_year_new_adobe_elearning_s.html http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/01/announcing_elearning_suite_and.html The eLearning Suite is basically a version
Tips and Tricks
I recently emailed a shortlist of good SCORM development resources to a colleague, and figured I should probably post a list here, too. This is a quickie list, and I’m sure I’m leaving someone out. If you know of any resources I’ve missed, please add a link