This is the third post in an occasional series designed to bridge the gap between ActionScript 3.0 and emerging front-end technologies. Both ActionScript and the front-end stack have mechanisms for sending data from a page or movie to a server without requiring a page refresh. In most browsers, we can use the XMLHttpRequest object. In [...]
[31 Oct 2011]
During my three years at Armchair, I worked on a few ActionScript 3.0 projects. I knew some ActionScript 2.0 when I started, but ActionScript 3.0 was new for me. It is object-oriented and requires event-driven thinking — two skills frankly, that I am still developing. They’re also two skills you should be developing, as they’re [...]
[3 Oct 2011]
Transitioning between an ‘open’ state and a ‘closed’ state when the height of your content is variable (making a transition of the height property inadequate). What makes the magic? Using height: auto, and transitioning the min-height and max-height properties instead. View the demo, or study / steal the code. This example makes use of CSS3 [...]
[26 Sep 2011]
Many features of JavaScript/DOM frameworks are being incorporated into the browser natively. In my last post, I talked about the Selectors API. In this one, we’ll look at classList. classList makes it much easier to work with elements and class names. With it, you can: Add, remove, and toggle classes; Retrieve the class name at [...]
[15 Aug 2011]
DOM Scripting is sometimes clunky. Consider the retrieval of elements with a particular class name. The code might look like this: var p = document.getElementsByTagName(‘p’); var newsitems = []; var i; for(i = 0; i < p.length; i++){ if( p[i].className == ‘newsitem’ ){ newsitems.push( p[i] ); } } In the example above, we’ve retrieved all [...]
[12 Aug 2011]
UPDATE: Thanks to zcorpan’s comments, I have posted a follow-up entry that should clarify the current status of the video element and its properties. I have been playing around with the HTML5 video interface lately, trying to understand what can be done with it, and how each browser supports its features as set forth in [...]
[5 Jul 2010]
So Apple announced the iPad, and it won’t support Flash. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch support Flash. Indeed most mobile platforms don’t (yet) support Flash. Even the smartest of smart phones have limited processing power and storage space compared to laptops and desktops. According to Steve Jobs, Apple doesn’t [...]
[4 Feb 2010]
Building on the work of Christian Heilmann,* and his SITESEARCH 1.0, I present a modified version of his site search script that supports paginated results. View a working example Download the JavaScript What do you have to do differently to make this work? The good news is not much . The major difference is the [...]
[20 Feb 2009]
Three years after the Acid2 test was released, the WaSP has developed Acid3. What’s Acid? It’s a reference test designed to help browser developers determine whether they are complying with W3C specifications, and how well they handle invalid code. Acid1 and Acid2 tested for compliance with CSS 1 and CSS 2 specifications. Acid3 also tests [...]
[3 Mar 2008]
Digital Web has two articles that are related to this post. Check out Excerpt: Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs and Libraries and jQuery Crash Course As the number of web-based applications grow, so do the number JavaScript frameworks and toolkits with the goal of making cross-browser development an easier process. But which to choose? [...]
[4 Oct 2007]