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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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The CSS3 transform property can do some really cool things – with it, web designers can rotate, scale, skew and flip objects quite easily. However, in order for designers to have fine-grained, pixel level control over their transforms, the matrix() function is hard to beat. This post explains what it does and the math behind the code. It also includes a tool to help you create matrix() transforms easily using HTML5 Drag and Drop for the user interface and the Sylvester JavaScript library to do the mathematics needed to calculate the matrix values so you don’t have to (in case you have difficulties with math, or if you just are lazy and don’t want to be bothered).

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Ruby Characters, although used originally to help people read complicated Chinese and Japanese characters, can also be used to annotate all types of information to written text. This article shows how you can use it in browsers that support it, but also in ones that don’t using a simple stylesheet.

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Next generation web forms using HTML5 is hard to do today due to spotty browser support. I demonstrate how a suite of JavaScript libraries can be used to help us use HTML5 Forms today.

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One thing HTML5 forms can’t do is dynamically show and hide form elements according to the data that the user has already entered. My new library, visibleIf gives you a very easy way to do this using the HTML5 data- attributes.

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HTML5 Drag and Drop is one of the least understood modules of the HTML5 specification and it can be a pain to implement in a cross browser fashion. This article is for those who want to use it today in their web applications and goes into a lot of detail so you can “get the job done”

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