Page 20 of 21 of the Unsolicited Advice Archives

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Why ActionScript 3.0 should be your first programming language

   Last week, a Twitter friend asked about learning programming and where to start. I suggested ActionScript 3.0, but 140 characters isn't enough to explain why. That's what blog posts are for. ActionScript sounds like a weird choice, right? It's client-side, not server-side. You can't connect to a database or

9. The HTML5 video progress event: Redux

   In my first post on HTML5 video and its progress event, I wrote: Only Firefox provides a means to calculate the amount of the video that has been loaded. The progress event object includes total and loaded properties that reflect the total size of the video file, and the amount