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WidgetPad – HTML5

November 4th, 2009 R No comments

widgetPadExampleWidgetPad describes itself as :

“collaborative development environment for developers to develop fully-interactive, stand-alone, downloadable SmartPhone applications in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.”

This is a wonderful initiative to share and modify already built code. I hope they reach a level where all of these components can be bundled into a framework library like Dojo. You might say that there are libraries such as JQTouch which are already out there. But I found that the CSS based animations are aimed solely at the iPhone and iPod touch. Android devices such as G1 had much trouble rendering the swipe and slide animations.

Interestingly the 3D photo example using HTML5 and JavaScript makes the Iphone slower reminding that its not only plugins but embedded manufacturer supported technologies can also slow down when the limits are tested.  Only toggling the screen lock would un-freeze mobile safari out of its task in rendering the wall.

Categories: Web Development Tags:

Why Browser makers will still play a big role in standardizing the web.

September 13th, 2009 R No comments
firefoxup_thmb.png
A Recent trend has been for browser developers to start displaying pages that warn you about plugins that can potentially cause security as well as stability issues. While a browser crash to the normal user completely is the manufacturers fault, there are 3 things that the developers are doing
  • Startup pages that tell you that although your browser is up to date, your plugins are not so the next visit to youtube could send your CPU usage to 150%. They are also very vocal about specifying whose mistake it is , see the attached and here
  • Safari will let the plugin malfunction but the browser will not fail – This seems the best idea but is yet to be seen at work. Although I feel Firefox 3.5 crashes more than Safari 4.
  • Extensions/Add-ons that Mozilla supports seem bigger culprits as users do anything from hiding Search engine ads to full blown 3-D photo walls. Un-tested extensions are grayed out until you give explicit consent that you are ready to “experiment”

The revolution is both way and the term “Open Web” seems more realistic now as everyone starts behaving responsibly.

Categories: ProtoThink Tags:

Losing a Sale with a bad website design.

August 24th, 2009 R No comments

Looking for a Intel SSD, I thought I could just go to intel.com and click on the SSD link under their products/ hard drive section. One,  their SSD page is buried under products/netbooks/”Solid-State Drives and Caching” category and two this is what happened on my browser:

Intel SSD Error on their webpage.



Update: Works in Firefox. Safari still has a 10% market share and should be supported or at least tested.

Intel, you lost my business as I got distracted writing this post rather than trying to buy a SSD from you.

Categories: Web Development Tags:

Why not to mimic Browser rendering

April 30th, 2009 R No comments

Why a website completely done in Flex or for that matter Flash may not be a good idea for intermediate to power users on the web.

Click to continue reading “Why not to mimic Browser rendering”

When custom attributes conflict with validation

August 8th, 2008 R 1 comment

I must confess, I am not a validation freak. Semantics and pixel perfection are my primary goals. Forgetting to specify a “type” on a javascript is not the biggest crime.

However I went ahead and validated the page I made for this telecom major. A social media campaign microsite which we created in five using restful calls and jquery in the front.

Back to validation, 11 validation errors awaited me, apart from the missing “type” attributes, I had custom attributes, ouch!

I was using those attributes among others for parameters, Ajax url’s. I knew the solution was a custom DTD, I remembered from a previous oroject where we had used adobe spry widgets, the software would drop a custom namespace on top of the header. Searching on the adobe site I figured that they had a tough time too and suggested having a entity tag in the header for the valufator and remove it when going to production.

Code samples in my case are in the next post.

Oh and other than that I had a custom live chat code that had reserved keywords and unescaped characters.

So what did I do? read my next post for the answer.

Simulating the Click Event on Firefox

August 4th, 2008 R No comments
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	if(navigator.appName.indexOf("Explorer")== -1)
	{
 
		// Simulates the click() event for gecko based browsers
 
		HTMLElement.prototype.click = function()
		 {
			var evt = this.ownerDocument.createEvent('MouseEvents');
			evt.initMouseEvent('click', true, true, this.ownerDocument.defaultView, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
			this.dispatchEvent(evt);
		 }
	}

Source : Unknown

Drop me a line and I will provide credit :)

Categories: Web Development Tags:

OuterHTML snippet

August 4th, 2008 R No comments

Here is a simple snippet that enables OuterHTML in Firefox.

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if (document.body.__defineGetter__) {
 
       if (HTMLElement) {
 
              var element = HTMLElement.prototype;
 
              if (element.__defineGetter__) {
 
                     element.__defineGetter__("outerHTML",
 
                           function () {
 
                                  var parent = this.parentNode;
 
                                  var el = document.createElement(parent.tagName);
 
                                  el.appendChild(this);
 
                                  var shtml = el.innerHTML;
 
                                  parent.appendChild(this);
 
                                  return shtml;
 
                           }
 
                     );
 
              }
 
       }
 
}

Originial Credit : Snipplr

Categories: Web Development Tags: