Entries Tagged as 'Technologies'

Animations made with requestAnimationFrame appear less jumpy and stuttery than those using setTimeout or jQuery.animate by ensuring that animation frames are generated at the most optimal times according to the CPU load, what the browser is doing, what the graphics card is doing, etc. Recently, I researched a bit about how it works, how different browsers behave with it, and how well browsers are at animating both Canvas and SVG. This article will be a brain dump of all I have learned so far. Some of what I discovered may surprise you.

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I have updated my html5Widgets package (now called html5Forms.js) so developers can create great looking, easy-to-use forms that can validate each field as a user types. It also has updated validation widgets so older browsers can display error messages like native HTML5 Form implementations do, and even allows developers to style error message bubbles in all browsers even in browsers like Firefox that don’t allow it natively.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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