Who is User Agent Man?

Photo of Zoltan Hawryluk
Photo: Don Kittle

I am Zoltan "Du Lac" Hawryluk (and yes, Zoltan is my real name) and User Agent Man is my blog of all things web development.

I am a web developer born and raised in Toronto, Canada. I do research on all types of web technologies. I am also the author and contributer to all sorts of open source projects including both as a primary author (e.g. Progressive Pushstate and The CSS3 Font Converter) and well as a contributer (e.g. Picturefill, Viewport Units Buggyfill and a Slack plugin for Pidgin and Adium).

When I have time, I like to write about what I learn here so I can give back to the web development community. More about me.

Recent Posts

Cross-Browser Animated CSS Transforms — Even in IE.

April 5th, 2010 by zoltan · 25 Comments

This is a follow-up article to my original CSS3 Transform article where I extend cssSandpaper to support scripting. Now you can animate Css3 Transforms (as well as gradients, opacities and box-shadows) in all browsers, including IE, without a lot of issues. Includes lots of neat examples.

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Cross Browser CSS Transforms – even in IE

March 9th, 2010 by zoltan · 127 Comments

The CSS transform property allows developers to rotate, scale, and skew blocks of HTML via CSS. There are variants that work natively on all major browsers … except for IE. I created a new library, cssSandpaper, that implements CSS3 transforms (as well as gradients and box-shadows) in IE. It also allows developers to use one transform declaration, instead of three vendor-specific ones for Opera, Firefox and WebKit browsers.

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Cross Browser HTML5 Drag and Drop

January 10th, 2010 by zoltan · 68 Comments

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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Introducing: The Type Rendering Project

November 30th, 2009 by zoltan · 1 Comment

Join a project that will allow developers to find ways to make web type look better right now.

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How to Detect Font-Smoothing Using JavaScript

November 29th, 2009 by zoltan · 74 Comments

Not all @font-face fonts look good when font-smoothing is turned off. Now you can detect whether a font smoothing technology is being used and serve alternative fonts for those users.

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Configuring JavaScript Applications With XML

October 27th, 2009 by admin · No Comments

I have been hacking JavaScript for close to 12 years now, and love it.  But just like anyone you have been enamored with for a long time, there are bound to be things that drive you crazy about the object of your affection.  Sure, your feelings are stronger than when you first met, but sometimes, […]

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More @font-face fun

October 9th, 2009 by zoltan · 10 Comments

My first post @font-face in Depth got a huge amount of unexpected attention.  Thank you all for your comments and criticism.  Since the post, there have been quite a bit of information I have read about and thought I should share. SVG fonts for Opera and Chrome Jonathan Snook wrote a great article regarding Opera […]

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@font-face in Depth

September 20th, 2009 by admin · 68 Comments

The fact that we can now choose any font to embed inside our web pages and applications using @font-face is something to celebrate, and removes a long existing set of handcuffs placed on web designers. This article covers how to use @font-face in all browsers, as well as some interesting little-known technical details.

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Optimizing PNG Files, for both Web and Print.

September 16th, 2009 by admin · 2 Comments

Optimizing images is not only important for web applications, it is also important for reducing the size of print documents. This article will show how to optimize images in the PNG format.

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