I’m not really sure what I was expecting from The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications. Having learned more about web security in the past year, I suppose I was hoping for a more in-depth treatment of common web application security issues. In my mind, I pictured a chapter on Cross-Site Scripting... […]

I’m very excited to announce that Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 3rd Edition is now shipping and available in bookstores. Over six years, the first edition was released and it changed my life in ways I never could have anticipated. It was through this book that I ended up at Yahoo! and was invited to... […]

A new version of CSS Lint is now available both on csslint.net and through npm for NodeJS. Version 0.9.2 focused on improving validation support (full support is planned for v1.0.0) and stability. As part of that, 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 were quickly rolled out after 0.9.0 to address some flaws in the validation logic. Other changes... […]

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about CSS media queries lately. I’m a big fan of media queries, as I think they bring a sense of sanity to feature detection. That’s a big reason why I was investigating CSS media queries in JavaScript1 and will continue to do so. I think we’re only scraping... […]

Early in 2011, I was working on a project where I was doing some feature detection in JavaScript. Some tinkering led to the thought that using a CSS media query would work much better and so I spent some time coming up with a function to use CSS media queries in JavaScript. My thought process... […]

One of my principles of Maintainable JavaScript1 is to separate your configuration data from your application logic. Configuration data is hardcoded information that your JavaScript uses to work properly. This could be anything such as a URL or a UI string. For example: function validate(value) { if (!value) { alert("Invalid value"); location.href = "/errors/invalid.php"; }... […]

It had been a while since I’d read a book that didn’t have to do with JavaScript or something very computer-sciency, so when I was asked to review HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett, I was interested to see how these books have changed. I learned HTML back in 1996, and honestly... […]

Timer resolution refers to how frequently a clock is updated. For most of their history, web browsers used the default system timer for functionality such as setTimeout() and setInterval(). This meant browsers could only schedule code to run as frequently as the system timer would fire. Internet Explorer also used the system clock for seeding values in... […]

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are an important part of Internet infrastructure that are frequently used without a full understanding of what’s happening behind the scenes. You’ll hear people saying, “oh, we put that on the CDN” or “make sure static assets go on the CDN,” when they have only a rudimentary idea of what CDNs... […]

I have to admit that I couldn’t remember who Michael Bolin was when he first contacted me to review Closure: The Definitive Guide. The embarrassment turned worse when he reminded me that he interviewed me at Google almost five years ago, before I joined Yahoo!. Having had the chance since then to grab lunch with... […]