Imagine you create software for a client. You do a good job, you are proud of your work, and you put your name and contact info in the heading of the code’s comments. I’ve done it many times with both code that I have been paid for as well as stuff I open-source and share with the community. If you are a web developer (or any type of developer for that matter) you probably have done the same thing. Who would have thought you could be sentenced to death for it? Please read this article and find out how you can help a web developer who is in this unfortunate situation.

HTML5 Progress Bars are cool, but where would you use one? If you are have a page with a lot of images that are being animated, you may not want to the content to be visible until is all loaded into memory, so why not use a progress bar to show the load progression? This article will show how to make a simple slideshow with a progress bar that updates as images are loaded. Proof that HTML5 progress bars are useful and not just a bunch of eye-candy with a fancy name.

As a web application developer, progress bars are great when you want to show the user that some action is happening, especially when it can take a long time. Creating them is easy with the HTML5 <progress> tag. This article will discuss how this tag is rendered by default in all operating systems and browsers and how to style the progress tag with CSS, even in browsers that don’t officially support the it. It will also show some interesting examples using advanced CSS3 techniques.

When used properly, custom CSS cursors can add a little bit of polish to your web sites and applications. However, doing this in a cross browser way can be a little confusing unless you know all the gotchas, and this article will go into depth about them. We will also explore issues such as when to use custom cursors, performance, what makes good cursor design, cursor file formats, and cursor size.

Up until now, if a developer needed to clip an image in a non-rectangular shape, it was necessary to save the image as a PNG with an alpha channel. If the image is a photograph, the file-size balloons up to unacceptable levels. My new library, polyClip.js, allows developers to clip these images using photograph friendly JPEGs instead. This article guides you step by step on how to use it yourself.

Using CSS3, developers can create simple, glowing and blurred box-shadows in all modern web browsers. But what about IE6-8? This article will discuss how you can simulate them using a variety of Visual Filters to simulate them. This article will cover a few CSS3 box-shadow effects, the equivalent Visual Filter recipes for IE 6-8, and the differences between them.

While researching the possibilities of using text-shadows in IE, I noticed that there wasn’t any silver bullet that produced multiple CSS3-like text-shadows in IE. However, combining my cssSandpaper script with a refactored version of a text-shadowing script by Kazumasa Hasegawa, we can now have IE text-shadow goodness.

Even though onforminput is deprecated, oninput will allow developers to do dynamic calculations on forms with little JavaScript knowledge. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in IE8 and lower, and there are some small bugs in IE9′s implementation when trying to delete characters inside a form field. So I implemented a fix for these issues with an update to my cross-browser HTML5 Forms polyfill, html5Widgets.

The onforminput event has been stripped out of HTML5, and it makes me sad. This article will show examples of how it works, how you can use it today in browsers that don’t support it, and hopefully will also present a good case as to why it should be put back into the HTML5 specification. Should something this useful and easy-to-use be abandoned?

Last week, I discussed several strategies web developers can use to simulate CSS text-shadow in IE. In that article, I mentioned that there was no way that I knew of to simulate text-shadow with a blur-radius in IE without JavaScript. Since then, I have discovered a way to simulate the CSS text-shadow effect in IE9 that does not use JavaScript and does not add extra elements to the DOM.