Posts written by Robin Whittleton
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Kyan vs. HTML5, round 2
Posted by Robin Whittleton on February 04, 2010
Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.
That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.
Print stylesheets
At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.
The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper
<div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating. -
Kyan vs. HTML5
Posted by Robin Whittleton on October 12, 2009
Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.
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Currency conversion in JS
Posted by Robin Whittleton on March 20, 2009
I recently had to make a couple of JavaScript currency conversion functions for a current project, so I thought I’d put them up here.
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New additions to the Kyan team
Posted by Robin Whittleton on February 03, 2009
Not sure how long they’ll last in the job though!
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When grids fall apart
Posted by Robin Whittleton on January 12, 2009
Around a couple of years ago the “what screen resolution should we design for?” argument had mostly become irrelevant. 640×480 was out, 800×600 was mostly out and 1024×768 was a reasonable minimum. With this step change over and new grids in place life should be easy, right?
Think again. The intervening time has seen an explosion in web use on mobile devices and the future looks to only diverge from your standard 1024×768 grid you’ve settled on. So what different screens can you reasonably expect your users to view your site on?
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Easy image rollovers
Posted by Robin Whittleton on December 10, 2008
Recently themeforest.net ran a quick tutorial on how to achieve an image slide effect similar to our homepage. I thought I’d go into some more detail about the design decisions we made.
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Unobtrusive scripting with jQuery
Posted by Robin Whittleton on September 26, 2008
Here at Kyan we love unobtrusive scripting: scripting that adds on to the top of an existing web page and extends it to add functionality and interaction niceness.
We often use a Javascript library called jQuery to help us add scripting to our sites, and it’s got a nice extension mechanism. Let’s have a look at writing a small jQuery plugin to add a simple piece of functionality to our site: a print link after a news story.
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The future of CAPTCHA
Posted by Robin Whittleton on July 23, 2008
CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.