JavaScript’s prototype object generates confusion wherever it goes. Seasoned JavaScript professionals, even authors frequently exhibit a limited understanding of the concept. Angus Croll believes a lot of the trouble stems from our earliest encounters with prototypes, which almost always relate to new, constructor and the very misleading prototype property attached to functions. In fact prototype is a remarkably simple concept.
At the time of this writing, the CSS Regions specification is a working draft and things may change! Techniques mentioned in this tutorial might change in implementation. The aim of this tutorial is to give a basic understanding of CSS Regions and what might be coming to a browser near you.
There’s a new player in town, and he brought new toys: The PHP World welcomes FLOW3, an enterprise application framework written and backed by the community of the TYPO3 CMS. FLOW3 can be used as standalone full-stack framework for your applications. It’s interesting, because it introduces some concepts of software development that haven’t been adapted to PHP before. Among these new concepts is “Aspect Oriented Programming”.
The Web has become increasingly interactive over the years. This trend is set to continue with the next generation of applications driven by the real-time Web. Adding real-time functionality to an application can result in a more interactive and engaging user experience. However, setting up and maintaining the server-side real-time components can be an unwanted distraction. But don’t worry, there is a solution.
While certainly not as well known as Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks is a great tool for creating user interfaces, website designs and mock-ups, wireframes, icons and much more. However, most designers who have been using Photoshop for years may find Fireworks a bit awkward at first. Fireworks does have a slightly different workflow and requires a slightly different approach than you may be used to.
Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these wireframes were primitive shapes drawn to represent various UI elements. Many of us cannot imagine life without them.
BEM stands for “Block”, “Element”, “Modifier”. It is a front-end methodology: a new way of thinking when developing Web interfaces. This article will elaborate on the theory as well as the practice of building websites at Yandex—one of the leading internet companies in Russia. To begin, let’s first put BEM in some historical perspective. Varvara Stepanova first began sketching out the internal front-end framework at Yandex around the year 2007, starting with a robust CSS naming convention, and a file system layout that was associated with it.
The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The new found freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges. Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it’s worth having a look at how the technology comes into play.
Today Mary Lou wants to share a little subtle effect with you: enhancing required fields in a form. Many web forms are designed in a minimal way, i.e. by only collecting the most necessary data from users. Just think of sign up forms where you don’t want to make your potential customer leave because there are just too many things he has to fill out. But there are also many forms where additional information is asked and the user is actually willing to or needs to fill optional fields. You can think of an order form or a classifieds form.
Some type effects are so common that you may not even notice them in design. Bolding and italics, for example, have dedicated keyboard shortcuts in most all editing software. Many font families also include many variations of the same typeface with multiple widths and slant options. So what do you choose? Where do you draw the line when it comes to good versus poor typography? Simply, keep it simple. Limit yourself to two or three typefaces on your site. Then limit yourself some more and try to avoid using more than three additional type variances. The toughest decision you will be left with is which effect(s) to use.