Responsive design is a hot topic of web development these days, and with a simple (and now well supported) way of handling the ‘one site for all clients’ model (and I mean clients as in browsers/platforms/devices, not the people that give you money in return for a web site) it should well be. Redirecting mobile users to /m/ or some other cut-down area of your site is becoming a technique of the past. Using collections of utilities, such as the excellent 320&up, makes building responsively much...
This is our third installment of how to design a clean a minimalist website. First we looked at navigation and how to make an accordion style drop-down menu with pure CSS3. Then we moved on to laying the site out and went over rounding corners and applying drop shadows with CSS3. Now we’re going to look at how to create a gradient with CSS3 and apply that to a few of the elements in our homepage. We left off in part two after we pulled our header, navigation and main image in to our layout. Now that we have...
The latest version of jQuery, version 1.7.1 at the time of writing, has completely overhauled its event system, giving us just two new methods to replace all existing event methods such as bind(), live() or delegate(). Event handling has been a core part of jQuery for a long time, but over the years the jQuery event landscape has flourished and grown, with successive releases increasing the number of methods for handling events. The new event methods on() and off() condense these different methods...
The new HTML5 Markup Language has introduced several new element features not available in HTML4, for example elements like header, section, nav, footer, aside, and article. Where these new tags will work in Opera, Safari, Chrome or Firefox they will not function in Internet Explorer (version 8 and earlier). The problem is that due to the way parsing works in IE, these elements are not recognized properly. This tutorial explains how to get HTML5 tags to work in IE8 and its earlier releases. It is possible...
Last week we discussed how important navigation is to a website and how developing an interactive navigation system will help give a clean, minimalist website a bit of character and make it feel modern and current. It’s too easy to make a clean website look dated and as though it were developed in the 90’s, so by injecting modern user interfacing techniques that are popular today you’re able to put the viewer at ease and reassure them that the content is fresh and up to date. We’ll pick up where...
This is the second part in our introduction to HTML5's video API. In part 1 of this series, I introduced you to the basic markup we'll be using to play the video, then I helped set up a simple script with which we were able to make the controls visible, while ensuring that the native controls will still be visible when JavaScript is disabled. We also touched on the use of JavaScript's addEventListener method, along with our first look at the video API -- the canplaythrough event. Let's dig a little deeper into...
There are two things which look and act similar but are different, gadgets and widgets. Widgets can be referred to any icons or graphical interface element that is operated by a computer or internet use to execute a preferred function online or on the computer. You can add a widget in all kind of web pages. A gadget acts just like a widget, often fulfilling the same purpose, but it is proprietary or called to be self-contained. It only works on a certain website or a specific set of websites. For example, OpenSocial...
Since the late 90s, when embedding media elements like audio and video clips into web pages, developers have had to rely on third party plug-ins. Flash has become the go-to method for nearly all video sites, and has been widely used for audio embedding as well. Because of the nature of the Flash plugin, this has limited the accessibility of embedded media. With the introduction of the HTML5 media elements API, this has all begun to change. Now, many libraries and video players are being introduced that...