Font replacement techniques
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.
Posts pertaining to web development and related topics such as web standards, web browsers, and industry news
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.
As part of my ongoing experiments with
I’ve built a simple modal window class named Modal using MooTools. This class combines a dynamic canvas drawing API (my Rectangle class) with dynamic DOM element generation to create on-demand modal windows using no external images. My goal was to make this about as easy to use as a normal JavaScript alert, prompt or confirm window.
This brings me to one of my pet peeves and the purpose of this post: misuse of the backtick (`) character. Many of the afore-mentioned well-intentioned folks mistakenly use a backtick to represent an ‘okina, and it drives me absolutely bonkers.
Recently at work I realized I needed a good modal window that was more extensible than JavaScript’s built-in confirm and prompt windows. MochaUI looked like a handy way to get slick modal windows into my project, but I soon realized that MochaUI is designed to do much, much more than I need, and therefore is (for my purposes) bloated. So, in typical DIY fashion here at pipwerks, I decided to borrow a page from Greg’s book and make my own MochaUI-inspired modal window using the canvas element, CSS, HTML, and MooTools. After evaluating what I’d need for my little modal window, I whipped up a MooTools-based JavaScript class that produces canvas rectangles in the blink of an eye.
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.
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 that the new site is a big improvement, but upon looking under the hood, there are a number of things I’d have done differently. Here’s a quick-hit list (not comprehensive at all)…
While working on a recent web project at work, I wondered if I should go for a fixed-width layout or stick with my preference for fluid layouts. Fixed-width layouts are certainly easier to manage, but they just feel so… rigid. With the boom in larger monitors, I also wondered if fluid sites start presenting a problem due to being too wide. I decided to check around the web to see what others are doing.
Here’s a list of common pop-up blockers with links to the manufacturer’s instructions for handling said blocker. Enjoy.
About six weeks ago, I wrote a post about some issues I was encountering with iframes and cross-domain security. I promised I would write about whatever workaround I decided to use; this post details that workaround.