June 30, 2009

HTML Tip: Think semantics

As said in Best Practices for Building Web Applications, one of the things to have in mind when developing Web Applications (or any simple HTML website) is to Think on Semantics. Let's see how this can boost our websites and raise them to the top.

June 18, 2009

CSS Refresh

While developing a web application, I often need to reload a whole site for every change I do in its CSS file, only to test it. Under Firefox I used to change manually the href in links (well, in fact, with Firebug) to add some query string, in order to by-pass the cache and request the brand-new version of the file. This job was often harder than that, since I'm still maintaining some old school applications using frames (Eek!).

While writing my jQuerify Bookmarklet I thought this CSS refresher is the perfect job for a bookmarklet, so I ended writting the CSS Refresh Bookmarklet.

June 04, 2009

Best Practices for Building Web Applications

If there's something I've learned during my developer life, is to make a list of basic rules and to be faithful to them. These rules are the skeleton on which all my own applications shall be built. Of course, these rules also evolved as time goes by, growing stronger or falling into obsolescence, often unpredictably.

Web development is not different from C++ coding, so it also has its own ruleset in order to avoid "bad habits". These are my rules, tell me yours.

swfLink: Simple, unobtrusive, Flash embedding

Update:Now returns the resulting <object> on success

I was in need of some simple Javascript to add SWF objects. Hoping for a simple, cross-browser, ie-proof, eolas-respectful and graceful-degradable solution is a difficult praise to attend, so I began, as always, to write my own.

The routine is so simple because it does nothing more than add a <object> tag so it can embed the flash movie. No plugin or software checks. I didn't need them.