Happy New Year 2010!

May the 2010 year bring you happiness and joy. And may all your dreams come true, like IE dissapearing from the face of the Net. This would be nice...

PNG study with CSS Sprites

While writing my first CSS Sprite article, I created a simple, in no way efficient, sprite generator. Last week I needed to show some numbers to the project manager to convince him the sprite technique is worth using, so I modified a bit the program to arrange the icons in different layouts and show the size savings.

Want to know with which layout I improved the file size by 78.6%?

Problemas y números

Inicié este blog hará cosa de 9 meses. No con un deseo comercial ni para obtener visitas a cascoporro, si no como terapia. Mi pretensión era la de practicar mi inglés mientras compartía los problemas que me iba encontrando en mis andaduras con la web. Pero está claro que algo falla en ese enfoque: Si ya es complejo mantener un blog en un idioma que es natural para uno mismo, más complicado es hacerlo en una lengua distinta.

¿Debería seguir, como hasta ahora, publicando en inglés? ¿O quizá ahorrarme molestias y expresarme en mi propia lengua?

Reset your CSS

Ever wanted a website that looks the same in all browsers? Tired of fighting slimy monsters while searching for excellance? Do these differences in UL padding make your head explode? So it's time for you to apply some CSS Reset Magic.

When it relates to CSS reset, there's a bunch of literature, do's and don't's, faqs and howtos, so this one won't take us too long.

Progressive enhancement example: Language Selection

It's easy to get lost in the Internet while looking for information. It's one of its greatest points: There are thousands of millions of websites out there. Information is the key purpose of the net and nobody can deny it.

But, as in many other cases, quantity does not equal quality. Poor designed websites, too bloated, with many inlined styles or little semantics (if none), are begging for trouble: Their information have lost accessibility.

Frames without frames. AJAH selective insertion

And W3C said Let there be frames, and there was frames, and they were used (and abused) and it was good, and W3C said This is right (we're gonna deprecate them soon) and there was much rejoicing.

Is not new that web developers hate all that's made with frames. They're a burden nobody wants to carry, so confusing, so "nineties", so... well, deprecated, that's it. So you may think I'm just delving into the past. Frames, as we know it, are dissapearing into extinction but, the main idea, more or less, is still needed nowadays.

Refactoring code smell

I work every day with PHP, developing management tools for the company where I work, but when I accepted this job I was a pure noob in this language. In fact I was hired for some C++ programming, but soon my tasks evolved so that wherever there's code, I was there too. So, learning PHP was the logical evolution in this case.

As you can imagine, being a PHP developer fresh from the oven, I ended up committing many atrocities in my code. And now is when, with some more maturity and knowledge, I can detect, by sense of smell, where those design flaws are. It's a fact, bad code smells.