I’ve always believed that you should never write production code that is based on an incorrect implementation of something. Yet, tons of developers rushed to use Internet Explorer-specific CSS hacks to make their pages look consistent across multiple browsers. For a complete list of CSS hacks, check out CSS Filters – CSS Only Hacks. Now... […]

A lot of people have been asking me lately about the upcoming book, Professional Ajax, and what it will cover. Well, here’s a brief outline of the chapters: What is Ajax? – Background of Ajaxand its rise to prominence. Ajax Basics – How to use XMLHttp, hidden frames, and more. Ajax Patterns – Design patterns... […]

Today the company I currently work for, VistaPrint, went public, trading under the VPRT symbol. This is the first time I’ve been with a company through an initial public offering. The first company I was at never made it to IPO; I joined MatrixOne long after they had already IPOed. It’s sort of an interesting... […]

Reading through Foo‘s postings, I came across this article entitled,AJAX using a stylesheet. The basic idea is that instead of using XMLHttp, hidden frames, or other such techniques, the author creates a dynamic style sheet that outputs information into the background-image property of a hidden <div/>. This information is then extracted using JavaScript and used... […]

I was just reviewing the list of updates made to Safari 2.0.1 and was shocked to see the amount of proprietary extensions that Safari has implemented. I’m a little mixed in my feelings about this. Afterall, if it weren’t for recreating proprietary functionality, we wouldn’t have the wonderful XMLHttp object in every browser. It also... […]

It’s become quite fashionable to badmouth Microsoft, their proprietary extensions to Web languages, and their lack of standards support, but really they were just responding to Netscape. Way back when, Netscape was ruling the roost and doing unspeakable things to the infant HTML. Netscape introduced several non-standard tags that only it supported, the most obnoxious... […]

The IEBlog latest post spells out some interesting additions being made to Internet Explorer 7 that developers will be happy about: Native XMLHttp – IE7 will have a native XMLHttp object, meaning that you don’t need to create an ActiveX object at all. This is especially useful when the user’s security settings forbid creation of... […]

I’m an avid Gmail user, and have been pretty happy with the service in general aside from needing to get an invite from someone to get in. Google recently announced that you can sign up for a Gmail account using your cell phone. You then get a text message with an invitation code. I found... […]

Fini Alring posted a nice roundup of the top Web development extensions for Firefox. Lots of cool extensions that I didn’t even know about, but am very glad to have picked up from this posting. View your headers, edit your cookies…it’s all there. I noticed one of the things on the list was an extension... […]

After going through the process of another Web site design, I decided to sit back and think about my ultimate Web architecture. The result was a pretty simple idea separated into a few steps: Semantic XML – Start out with data that has semantic value to it. Leave out any thought of formatting, just describe... […]