I consider CSS3’s text-shadow one of the most exciting CSS3* properties, which offers us a lot more effects than it’s name suggests. Of course, it can be used for creating drop shadows for text, and it carries out that task very well, but it’s inherent flexibility allows it to be also used for glow effects, outlines, bevels, extruded text, inset text, fuzzy text and many others (until browser bugs and backwards compatibility come into play… 
). This post is about various findings of mine (and others’, where a source is provided) regarding this property, including browser bugs and inconsistencies, effects that can be achieved with it, compatibility woes etc. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘browsers’
Exploring CSS3 text-shadow
Monday, September 14th, 2009On native, single-input, multiple file uploads
Sunday, March 8th, 2009If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple:
<input type="file" multiple>
or, in XHTML:
<input type="file" multiple="multiple" />
You might not know that Opera supported multiple file uploads for a while now, based on the earlier Web Forms 2.0 standard in a slightly different (and more flexible) format:
<input type="file" min="1" max="9999″ />
20 things you should know when not using a JS library
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009You might just dislike JavaScript libraries and the trend around them, or the project you’re currently working on might be too small for a JavaScript library. In both cases, I understand, and after all, who am I to judge you? I don’t use a library myself either (at least not one that you could’ve heard about 
), even though I admire the ingenuity and code quality of some.
However, when you take such a brave decision, it’s up to you to take care of those problems that JavaScript libraries carefully hide from your way. A JavaScript library’s purpose isn’t only to provide shortcuts to tedious tasks and allow you to easily add cool animations and Ajax functionality as many people (even library users) seem to think. Of course these are things that they are bound to offer if they want to succeed, but not the only ones. JavaScript libraries also have to workaround browser differences and bugs and this is the toughest part, since they have to constantly keep up with browser releases and their respective bugs and judge which ones are common enough to deserve workaround and which ones are so rare that would bloat the library without being worth it. Sometimes I think that nowadays, how good of a JavaScript developer you are doesn’t really depend on how well you know the language, but rather on how many browser bugs you’ve heard/read/know/found out. 
The purpose of this post is to let you know about the browser bugs and incompatibilities that you are most likely to face when deciding againist the use of a JavaScript library. Knowledge is power, and only if you know about them beforehand you can workaround them without spending countless debugging hours wondering “WHAT THE…”. And even if you do use a JavaScript library, you will learn to appreciate the hard work that has been put in it even more. (more…)
Silent, automatic updates are the way to go
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Recently, PPK stated that he hates Google Chrome’s automatic updates. I disagree. In fact, I think that all browser vendors should enforce automatic updates as violently as Google Chrome does. There should be no option to disable them. For anybody. (more…)
