Until recently, the only ways to maintain a user’s data between visits to your site have been to store it on the server, or use cookies in the browser. Both present significant security challenges and quite a good deal of effort for us as developers. Cookies are designed for communication between the browser and a […]
It’s that time of the year again when John and I start writing ideas and names on post it notes, shuffling them around, and coming up with the program that will be Web Directions South, this October 18 and 19. The only thing that scares us is that 2011 was just so good, we really […]
One of the most powerful features of CSS3 are transforms, which allow us to take any element in an HTML document, and while not changing its effect on the page layout, rotate it, translate it (move it left, right, up and down), skew it and scale it. CSS3 provides both 2D and 3D transforms, but […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve had my fair share to say about the direction HTML5 has been taking, in particular being quite critical of the entire approach taken to adding richer semantics to HTML, as well as specific language choices. It must be said though, that nothing has quite riled me like the […]
In the infancy of JavaScript, there was little if any concept of an HTML document object model (DOM). Even though JavaScript was invented to enable web developers to manipulate parts of a web page, and in the original implementation, in Netscape 2.0, developers could only access the form elements, links, and images in a page. […]
Get yourself along to John Allsopp and Pasquale D’Silva’s workshop at Web Directions South: Animating Your User Experiences. A brief history on Animation of the Web If you’ve been developing for, or even just using the web for more than about 15 years, you’ll likely remember a time when animated effects were the bomb. Animated […]
Hard perhaps to believe, but the world wide web began without an image element. That’s right, there was no way to include images as part of the content of a web page before Mosaic implemented them (here’s Marc Andreesen proposing the img element at the beginning of 1993). The img element ushered in the age […]
Getting your head around CSS3 radial gradients We recently took a detailed look at linear gradients in CSS3. If you’ve not read that, you might like to spend a few minutes doing so, as the concepts are very similar, and I don’t spend quite as much time in this article on the fundamentals of gradients […]
Taking your web sites and apps offline with the HTML5 appcache There’s a general (and understandable) belief by even many developers that web sites and web applications can only be used when the browser has a web connection. Indeed, this is routinely cited as one of the real advantages of “native” apps over web apps. […]
It’s been a while since we posted anything particularly technical to the Web Directions blog, but that’s something we plan on changing. Here’s the first in a series of technical articles on CSS3 features (along with tools to help you lean and use them). We’re starting with linear gradients. We’ll take a look at where […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
