July 23, 2006, 8:43 pm
This article will cover the importance of keeping content, design, and coding elements seperate. I will then explain how you can use advanced techniques to apply Javascript to an element (such as a link) without ever changing the HTML.
Before I begin, I would like to say: I hate CSS. It’s a necessary evil, but I really hate focusing my time and energy on design issues. You see, in an ideal world, designers would design, content providers would provide content, and programmers (that’s me!) would glue it together with backend stuff.
However, this was not how the world spun, my friends. That is, until today.
Continue reading ‘Designing without Javascript’ »
July 23, 2006, 6:25 pm
Hello and welcome to my new blog. While it’s hard to predict exactly how this site will turn out, needless to say, I plan to focus a lot of energy into it for the long term. While I did maintain another web journal, it occured to me that the site no longer accurately represented who I am. In short, I’ve graduated from the kid journal and I’m moving on to writing more techincal, thought-out posts. I am in no denial that this journal will contain humor, bad movie reviews, or small tidbits about my daily life, but the intention is to keep this blog insightful and less about the personal, mundane aspects of my life.
July 23, 2006, 2:51 pm
Welcome. This is my technical blog. If you are a LAMP web developer with an interest in business this is the blog for you.
Here, you will find 100% original articles related to one of two things: IT news or programming. I try to write as many good programming articles as I can, but as you can imagine, it is very hard coming up with original programming posts day after day. As such, the majority of the time, I cover IT business news. I try to refrain from simply summarizing, and I rarely post an article if I can’t find an interesting observation to make. For you programmers, I write about JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL the most. I try to post at least one article a day on weekdays.
You’ll notice this site uses a couple of JavaScript effects that are entirely unnecessary. While I don’t regularly add effects such as these for commercial sites I do, I thought it would be an interesting challenge. For example, the right two navigation links on top of my home page use “AJAX” (loads content without refreshing the page). But to make things more interesting, I added conditions to the project:
- The AJAX links had to work without javascript
- The content would not be duplicated (no ajax-only versions of a page)
- The site must be XHTML 1.0 compliant
- There must be no Javascript markup inside the content except in the footer and header as include files
- Must integrate with the blog
- Must work in the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, and IE and look nearly if not exactly identical
- No tables for layout placement
Any seasoned web developer knows these requirements are rediculously hard to meet — especially getting AJAX functionality without marking up the links. =) This was a fun challenge. I will eventually document how these obstacles were overcome and update this page. I plan to buy a Mac soon, but until then, I’m afraid I can’t be certain if Mac browsers are supported. I made the tough decision that this site would require javascript. While many commercial entities always have non-javascript versions of their content, I think we’re getting to that point where Javascript is becoming an integral ‘net technology that is pretty much as standard as HTML tags. As such, since this is a personal site, Javascript is “required.” However, as condition #1 said above the site is fully functional without Javascript (although PNG images break in IE).
Article 1: Designing without Javascript
Article 2: A Brand New Way to Hide Your Email Address