Recently my mother, while going through junk accumulated over the past 30 years, found a contract I made at age 11. I’m astonished that 1: it has so little spelling errors, and 2: this seems to be a legally binding contract. It has a date, the city where the document was signed, the names of […]
On public speaking
This week Zach Holman and Chiu-Ki Chan wrote about public speaking. While I’m not claiming to be a very experienced speaker, I have my two cents to add after being involved with some conferences, etc. Here’s my take on slides, rehearsing, introductions, Q&A and more. I’m mixing some practicalities in here too, things I do […]
Using Sass’ @each to create DRY selectors
Just a quick article based on a post by Natalie Weizenbaum in the Sass Google Group on how to use the @each directive to create selectors. Someone there was looking for a way to use @each while keeping a DRY output. I haven’t used @each in this way yet (I usually use it when the […]
Don’t use class names to find HTML elements with JS
Don’t forget to read the follow-up too! In the days before HTML5, when we wanted to bind JavaScript events to an element, we would find the element based on its class name (or the rel attribute). After all, using a class name won’t invalidate your HTML, is easy to target (specially with a library such […]
Modernizr & the Sass parent reference
This technique is very simple, but often overlooked because the parent reference & is mostly used at the beginning of a selector, like:
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a { color: #000; &:hover { color: #f00; } } |
Since & does nothing more than repeat the parent selector, it gives us an excellent way of easily implementing custom styling based on features detected by Modernizr. Just have Modernizr add […]
My ArrrrCamp talk: Stop Swashbucklin’ and Shipshape yer Front-end
A few days ago I spoke at ArrrrCamp in Ghent, Belgium. I had heard of the conference before, but never went there during it’s prior four years of existence. If those editions were of the same level of quality, I should have. Excellent talks, three tracks, mojito’s (no, really) and a proper lunch. With the […]
Stop abusing the placeholder attribute
The placeholder attribute saves web developers from using JavaScript solutions to tackle a simple task: display a placeholder text in a form input. Right now though, the bulk of all forms using this attribute is doing it wrong. By using this feature in a way that was never intended developers create confusion amongst visitors, sometimes […]