http://www.nicollet.net Go crazy with computers Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:38:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I explained earlier a few things about writing reusable CSS code, and how it interacted with PHP. Let's start with this basic HTML for generating two columns, with the right one being flexible and resizing to fill all available space: <div class="col2"> <div class="col2-l"> [Content of left ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/03/php-closures-as-block-literals/ Lorem Ipsum is a sample phrase used as a filler in typesetting, to illustrate how some text would look. Here's a sample paragraph: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/03/lorem-ipsum/ Woe unto CSS, for it provides no refactoring-friendly tools! The CSS beast has neither functions nor variables, and its definition of inheritance is perverted beyond words. Pain and suffering await those who hope to keep their CSS from one project to the next, or even share the CSS between pages ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/02/reusable-css/ You're hunting your codebase for bugs, and doing some refactoring and cleanup along the way. You stumble across a classic WTF, if (x == true), and decide to replace it with the shorter if (x). The trouble is that you're playing with JavaScript here, and the two are not the same. This ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/02/javascript-unmaintenance-trick/ The basic philosophy of jQuery is to start with some existing HTML sent over vanilla HTTP by the server. That HTML should be all you need (so that people without a JavaScript-enabled browser can still use the web site). Then, jQuery enhances that HTML by adding new behavior (usually changing ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/02/jquery-build-page/ Earlier this month, I pondered what looked like a bug in JavaScript/DOM/jQuery: removing an element from the DOM with jQuery (either manually with remove() or by setting the html() of its parent to something else) kept most of the data bound to the element around, but removed all event handlers ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/01/that-dom-removal-thing-again/ Design and development is turning the great unknown chaos into tiny bits of controlled functionality with promises about what the result will be, and expectations about what the input should be. There is an interesting duality between two categories of expectations, depending on whether they are the responsibility of the user, ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/01/shouldnt-happen/ Let's try something... go to a page with jQuery enabled (such as this one), and run the following code in your Javascript debugger console (such as Firebug): var button = $('<button>Click me</button>') .click(function(){alert('Clicked!')}) .appendTo('body') In case you were wondering, this creates a brand new button, causes it to display ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/01/dom-removal-and-events/ The most common way of investing money is putting it in a savings account. You lend a fixed amount of money to someone, and they pay interest over that money at a predetermined rate. Let's say you lend 1,000 € at an interest rate of 3%, paid every year: at ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/01/interesting-rates/ All file formats follow the same evolution. They start by grouping together some static content, with some nifty features for presenting and editing that data. Think text files, bitmaps, RTF documents... The file format is reasonably easy to understand, and the reader/writer is so simple that it would take a bad ... http://www.nicollet.net/2010/01/december-2009-pdf-vulnerability/