Blog
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.
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.
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.
The Entifyr
Posted by Steven Wake on November 04, 2008
The Entifyr is a small web application that started life as an personal experiment to automate the removal of problem characters from client supplied content (usually Microsoft Word documents). The offending characters are replaced with corresponding entities (hence the name) allowing the content to display correctly.
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.