Page 19 of 21 of the Unsolicited Advice Archives

1. What is HTML5?

   My super-short post that attempts to answer this question as completely and accurately as possible in three presentation-friendly bullet points. HTML5 … re-imagines HTML as an API ~~with objects, events, interfaces, and methods~~ or a collection of interfaces. defines an algorithm for generating a consistent, cross-browser friendly DOM tree, regardless of

2. Dispatching Custom DOM Events

   Apparently while I wasn't paying attention, the big four browser vendors (more or less) implemented DOM Level 3 events. And what, exactly, is the big deal about DOM Level 3? Custom DOM events. Custom events are especially important in game development. Let's say we were developing Pong using JavaScript. We

3. HTML5 for AS3 Developers: cross-domain.xml and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

   This is the second post in an occasional series designed to bridge the gap between ActionScript 3.0 and emerging front-end technologies. Flash, like JavaScript, more-or-less adheres to a same-origin policy by default. Under a same-origin policy, requests for data must come from the same scheme, hostname, and port. If

4. Toggle 'blind' effect with CSS3 transitions

   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

5. Class manipulation with classList

   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

6. Meet the Selectors API

   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

7. Quick PHP Tip: Uploading multiple files in HTML5

   One of the neat things about HTML5 is that it allows for multiple file uploads in one file upload field. Of course, you have to have a browser that supports such a feature. Currently Opera 11.10 does. So do Firefox 4, the latest version of Chrome, and Safari 5

8. On being 'Black' versus being 'African-American'

   African? American? Both? Or neither? “Black” seems to be an accepted hybrid term that falls short of claiming either entity yet still denotes exceptionalism in this society. Nonetheless, this ambiguity isn’t entirely neutral, as black people generally seem prone to distance themselves more from Africa, than America — either consciously

9. Relational database design explained — sort of

   Click through for a larger version. The text: It helps ensure data consistency and integrity. This may not seem important at first. But it becomes critical when you want to query or sort that data. For example, we have three books by Toni Morrison in the database. if we stored