A Permanent Wreck

If we could stack pseudo elements (e.g. :after:after) we could build a whole website with no HTML other than . Probably good we can’t.

In contrast with the previous section, the selector ‘::before(2)’ represents a pseudo-element before another, both of which are contained at the start of an element.

Yesterday evening, a geekier chunk of the Internet hivemind started buzzing about this article over at Which?. The author raises a few rather interesting questions: what happens to the digital downloads you’ve purchased when you die? Why are we not allowed to pass them on to our loved ones?

Designing straight into the browser isn’t an option for me though, I still need to go through that creative process in my graphics editor away from the structure of div’s and presentational code, but after getting some initial designs down on paper. Thankfully, I know I’m not alone, I’ve spoken to various others in the industry who all feel the same. Frustrated creatives with no real answers.

JavaScript is an object oriented (OO) language, with its roots in the Self programming language, although it’s (sadly) designed to look like Java. This makes the language’s really powerful and sweet features stay covered by some pretty ugly and counter-intuitive work-arounds.

Emulating background image crop, background image opacity, background transforms, and improved background positioning. A few hacks relying on CSS pseudo-elements to emulate features unavailable or not yet widely supported by modern browsers.

One of the benefits of a long car trip with my wife is the opportunity to have really great and insightful conversations with the smartest person I know. Yesterday, on the first leg of our trip, we spent some time discussing Microsoft’s many missed opportunities. The failure to take the iPhone seriously. The failure to take the iPad seriously. And, on. And on…

Public service announcement: Every time you call a proprietary feature “CSS3,” a kitten dies. Any -webkit- feature that doesn’t exist in a specification (not even an Editor’s draft) is not CSS3. Yes, they are commonly evangelized as such, but they are not part of CSS at all. This distinction is not nitpicking. It’s important because it encourages certain vendors (*cough* Apple *cough*) to circumvent the standards process, implement whatever they come up with in WebKit, then evangelize it to developers as the best thing since sliced bread. The shiny new toys dazzle us and we start promoting them too, contributing to the echo chamber.

Eric Meyer of A List Apart, CSS wizard and fan of vendor prefixes, interviews Tantek Çelik, Mozilla’s web standards lead, on Mozilla’s controversial plan to support -webkit- prefixed properties. Tantek precipitated the current crisis in Web Standards Land during a public meeting of the W3C CSS Working Group, in which he noted the predominance of WebKit-only mobile sites, thereby creating a browser monoculture. Tantek discussed Mozilla’s solution — having Firefox Mobile pretend to be like Webkit and support a few -webkit- CSS properties — which inflamed many in the standards community, especially when representatives from Opera and Microsoft immediately agreed about the problem and announced similar plans to Mozilla’s. The following discussion was conducted via EtherPad, instant messaging, e-mail, and telephone calls. – Ed.

Chrome 17 is out with a new prerendering feature designed to make your pages load faster, and both Firefox and Opera have also released speedy new versions since our last round of speed tests. So, we’ve once again pitted the four most popular web browsers against each other in a battle of startup times, tab loading times, and more, with more surprising results.

The latest CSS Selectors Level 4 Working Draft was released on 29 September 2011. Lots of new and exciting additions in the Level 4 draft. Below is a walk-through of the new stuff in Selectors Level 4.

“Touch icons” are the favicons of mobile devices and tablets. Adding them to your web page is easy, and I’m sure you already know how this works using HTML:

I’ve seen quite a bit of confusion from developers about what the real differences are between the jQuery .bind(), .live(), .delegate(), and .on() methods and when they should be used.

This is the fourth installment of Mission:Mozilla, a series of interviews that link Mozillians, the technology they produce and the Mozilla mission. This time, We’re interviewing Tantek Çelik, a long-time Web standards contributor. He started working on web standards at Microsoft in 1998, while leading the development of Tasman, the IE Mac rendering engine, and subsequently founded independent efforts like microformats.org, BarCamp, and most recently, IndieWebCamp.org.