Yesterday I found that proper hyphenation of text is now supported by Firefox, IE10, and Safari. So I added it to my main style sheet and it should work in these browsers across my site. I also advise you to add it to your sites straight away.
Notes about HTML, CSS or JavaScript coding techniques.
| Contest | Memory leaks | Touch events | Viewport | XMLHTTP |
Yesterday I found that proper hyphenation of text is now supported by Firefox, IE10, and Safari. So I added it to my main style sheet and it should work in these browsers across my site. I also advise you to add it to your sites straight away.
20 October 2012
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| in Coding techniques
6 comments
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During my media query test I found out that min-resolution: 0[unit] does not work in any browser for any unit. I find this weird.
11 July 2012
Last week I got annoyed at the large differences in syntax for vendor-prefixed device-pixel-ratio media queries. I said, half in desperation and half as a threat, that it might be better to have only the WebKit rendering engine and ditch the rest.
Meanwhile I’ve had some time to think about it, and I find that I still support the idea of multiple rendering engines. Competition is still good, just as it was ten years ago.
HOWEVER. There’s an important exception.
OK, I’m now officially fed up with vendor prefixes, and to a lesser extent with Firefox and Opera who’ve gone batshit crazy on us all once more.
It occurs to me that my recent post about devicePixelRatio was a bit cryptic and short. So I will givde some extra examples in this post. Also, I did some additional research that takes screen.width into account.
Remember the definition:
devicePixelRatio is the ratio between physical pixels and device-independent pixels (dips) on the device.
devicePixelRatio = physical pixels / dips
I did some research around the window.devicePixelRatio property that all WebKit browsers, as well as Opera, support, and for once the news is good. This property’s definition makes sense, and it is implemented almost universally.
Yesterday I finally researched window.outerWidth/Height in the mobile browsers, and here are my conclusions.
A few months back James Pearce published research that shows that the use of window.outerWidth on iOS devices allows you to read out the true orientation; something that screen.width does not.
Yesterday I came to the conclusion that this is far and away the most interesting use window.outerWidth has, and that James also missed a completely idiotic effect that Apple provides. The rest of the browsers are much more boring in their implementation.
Now that iOS, Android, and BlackBerry all have a new implementation of position: fixed let’s see what changed since the last time we looked.
Because it’s fairly hard to describe what mobile and tablet browsers do to position: fixed I decided to make four short videos, both to help you understand the issues better, and to practice a bit with shooting videos of mobile browsers.
Last week I did some research on the resize event on mobile and tablet browsers. Executive summary: it’s a mess. And the best browser, surprisingly, is Samsung’s Dolfin.
My conclusions are, summarised:
Yesterday James Pearce published important research into the nature and measuring of the mobile browser viewports. One finding is so important that I write this quick entry even though I haven’t yet fully researched it.
On a hint from Vasilis I did some quick research into dynamically changing the meta viewport tag. Turns out that this works in nearly all browsers that support it in the first place, with the exception of Firefox. This entry gives the details and explains why you should care. See also the inevitable compatibility table.
W3C unveils the Touch Events Specification. It’s a rough draft, I guess — it doesn’t even have an official URL on www.w3.org yet. But I like it a lot.
Web developers are quite annoyed that position: fixed doesn’t work on mobile browsers, but mobile browser vendors cannot afford to support it. This dilemma is unsolvable by the means we presently have at our disposal.
To offer a way out, I’m proposing to create a new position: device-fixed declaration better suited to the mobile scenario with its tiny screen and its zoom. The zoom aspect, in particular, is completely ignored by the spec, and so far mobile browsers haven’t found a good solution, either.
With a new value, fixed positioning could be split into a desktop and a mobile variant, and browsers could decide which one to support. That would allow web developers to devise separate solutions for desktop and mobile.
15 September 2010
As we all know, media queries are by far the best way to distinguish between desktop and mobile browsers, or, more generically, between the dozens of different screen sizes our users can have. Media queries are the future of the web.
Nonetheless, the fact that they are the future doesn’t mean that there are no problems. One is particularly tricky: what do we do for browsers that don’t support them?
14 September 2010
If you want to make your websites ready form mobile, it’s best to combine <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> with width media queries. That will give your site the optimal width (as determined by the device vendor, who really ought to know), and your site will look the better for it.
Lanyrd, Simon and Natalie’s latest brainchild, uses exactly this technique, and it establishes the perfect mobile browsing baseline. Try it on as many mobile browsers as you can, and you’ll see. No frills, just a simple user experience that just works.
In order to understand why we should use exactly this combination we should briefly repeat what meta viewports and media queries are all about.
On Tuesday Jason Grigsby challenged the conventional view that media queries are all we need to make a website mobile-friendly. Although he’s right when he points out some serious problems, I do not think that media queries are the “fool’s gold,” as Jason says. The message seems to be more that media queries alone are not enough to make your sites mobile-friendly. An additional component is required.
About a month ago I release part one of my series “A tale of two viewports,” where I discuss the widths and heights of the viewport, the <html> element, and related issues on desktop browsers. Today I release part two, which deals with the mobile browsers. And of course there’s the inevitable compatibility table.
Back in November I started complicated research into measuring the widths and heights of various interesting elements in mobile browsers. This research kept me occupied for months and months; and frankly I became a bit afraid of it because the subject is so complicated.
Besides, when I re-did some tests in March I pretty quickly figured out I’d made some nasty mistakes in my original tests. Back to the drawing board.
However, after a review round by some browser vendors and some rewriting it’s done now.
Today I present
A tale of two viewports — part one.
I explain CSS vs. device pixels, the viewport, several interesting JavaScript properties,
and the media queries width and device-width.
This piece is about the desktop browsers, because the mobile story is much easier to follow if you know exactly what happens on desktop. Later on I’ll publish part two, which is exclusively about mobile.
For my DIBI presentation I need a dropdown menu (in order to compare it on desktop and mobile), so I wrote one.
Point is, it took me thirty lines of JavaScript, nine of which only contain a closing },
and three of which deal with the fact that bloody Firefox still doesn’t support contains().
Net amount of lines: 18. Can somebody please remind me why we all used to think dropdowns are so extremely complicated? I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
Right now Jason Grigsby’s excellent summary of the orientation media query is making the round of blogs and tweets, and that’s well deserved. Media queries will become extremely important in the near future, when we have to build websites that work on any device resolution from 300px to 1280px or more.
Still, there’s one tiny nitpick I’d like to make, so that you fully understand when to use orientation and when to use device-width.
One reaction I received about my touch research was: Do we really need the touch events? Can’t we just fire the mouse events when a touch action occurs? After all, touch and mouse events aren’t that different.
That’s a fair question. It deserves a fair answer.
It turns out to be possible to handle the touchmove and touchend events with data obtained from the touchstart event object. It is not necessary to access the touchmove and touchend event objects, as long as you continue to have access to the touchstart one.
Apparently, the touchstart event object persists in browser memory even when the event has long ended. More importantly, it continues to be updated with information about the current touch action.
This is interesting. It’s also profoundly different from the desktop, where a similar trick with the mousedown, mousemove, and mouseup events definitely does not work.
Both iPhone and Android display this behaviour. Therefore future implementations of the
touch events should, too.
Update: I’ve been given to understand that this behaviour will disappear from WebKit. So don’t build your scripts with this behaviour; they’ll misfire sooner or later.
Over the past few weeks I have done some fundamental research into the touch action and its consequences, and it’s time to present my conclusions in the form of the inevitable compatibility table. I have also written an advisory paper that details what browser vendors must do in order to get by in the mobile touchscreen space. Finally, I discuss a few aspects of my research in this article.
Disclosure: This research was ordered and paid for by Vodafone. Nokia, Microsoft, Palm, and RIM have helped it along by donating devices to me.
When a user touches the screen of a touchscreen phone, sufficient events should fire so that web developers know what’s going on and can decide what actions to take. Unfortunately most mobile browsers, especially Opera and Firefox, are severely deficient here.
The touch action is way overloaded, and most browsers have trouble distinguishing between a click action and a scroll action. Properly making this distinction is the only way of creating a truly captivating mobile touchscreen browsing experience.
The iPhone’s touch event model is excellent and should be copied by all
other browsers. In fact, these events are so important that I feel that any browser that does
not support them by the end of 2010 is out of the mobile browser arms race. There’s only
one problem with the iPhone model, and it’s relatively easy to fix.
I have created a drag-and-drop script that works on iPhone and Android
as well as the desktop browsers,
a multitouch drag-and-drop script that works only on
the iPhone, and a scrolling layer script that
forms the basis of faking position: fixed on iPhone and Android, who do not
support that declaration natively.
I will hold a presentation on my research at the DIBI conference, Newcastle upon Tyne, 28th April. It will likely include future discoveries and thoughts.
Yesterday I walked into the local phone store because the “Temporarily Unavailable” sign had been removed from their “Get your iPhone here” poster. To my utter surprise they had six (6!) entire iPhones for sale, and no, there was no waiting list. I walked back home with a shiny new gadget, impatient to start testing it.
Meanwhile I’ve done some tests; now it’s time for a report.
Before we continue, let’s get the bad CSS news out of the way: Safari on the iPhone does not support position: fixed. Certain Other Browsers were ridiculed for this lack; Safari won’t be.
I’ve updated the CSS Table, the Core Table and the Events Table. In this entry I’m going to talk about JavaScript events on the iPhone. They’re — interesting.
14 April 2008
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| in Coding techniques
10 comments
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Nowadays many JavaScripters are aware of the advantages of event delegation. Chris Heilmann and Dan Webb, among others, have discussed its advantages, and I've been using it as much as possible for about two years now.
Event delegation is especially useful in effects like dropdown menus, where lots of events on links may take place that can easily be handled at the root level (an <ol> or <ul> in this case).
There used to be one problem, though: although event delegation works fine for the mouse events, it does not work for the focus and blur events we need to make dropdown menus keyboard-accessible.
In the course of my ongoing event research, however, I found a way to delegate the focus and blur events, too. Maybe one of those frightfully clever JavaScript library authors will use this technique to shave off a few milliseconds of computing time
For all I know they're already aware of this technique; but it was new to me so I publish it anyway.
14 January 2008
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| in Coding techniques
25 comments
(closed)
The previous version of the Find Position script didn't work quite correctly,
since it often ignored the last step in position calculations: the one from the <body>
to the <html> element. Part of the reason was that its code was too complicated.
The problems with this script used to generate a lot of comments. Eight months ago I changed the script somewhat, and comments dropped off to zero, meaning I'd done it right. Meanwhile I've taken another look at it and changed it a bit more.
In any case, the changed script now uses a new approach (that is, it was new to me eight months ago).
It now uses the assignment operator = instead of the equality operator ==
that you'd expect:
while (obj = obj.offsetParent)
I always planned to write a blog entry about this approach, because I feel this little trick should become general knowledge. So here it is (eight months too late, but anyway):
12 March 2007
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| in Coding techniques
22 comments
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While attending Brian Fling's presentation on desiging for a mobile phone, I suddenly had an idea that might solve one of the problems he mentioned. I thought I'd document it immediately, before tonight's beer will cloud my mind and make me forget all about it.
6 February 2007
Permalink
| in Content, Redesign, XMLHTTP
4 comments
(closed)
I added a new page about importing the site navigation on all QuirksMode.org pages. The page is mostly about why I do what I do, and less about the how (besides, technically it's quite easy). The site navigation is a perfect example of what Jeremy calls Hijax.
I also put my trusty XMLHttpRequest functions online for future reference. No explanations on this page; I already treated them in section 10A of the book.
Just now I delivered a project during the making of which I noted a feature of event bubbling that, though totally logical, came as a surprise to me. No doubt someone else will be surprised, too, and may even be able to use it in a project.
In the last days of last year, while I was enjoying a holiday from obtrusive RSS feeds, the JavaScript library discussion seems to have heated up once more. Here's an overview of recent thinking about JavaScript libraries. The remainder of this entry is going to concentrate on the Stuart's and Chris's articles, in that order.
I'm already regretting the publication of my Browser Detect 2.0. From one of the comments I learned that there's a new script making the rounds of blogs, a script that neatly highlights the dangers of using browser detects, but that's been received with glad cries by otherwise sensible sites.
Combine the release of this script with my release, and it might seem to the unaware web developer that browser detects are back in fashion. It's necessary to repeat why browser detects are dangerous, unprofessional and usually badly written, even though those facts have been general knowledge since at least 1998.
20 June 2006
Permalink
| in Coding techniques, Conferences, Theory
9 comments
(closed)
Well, I'm back from @media, and it was as wonderful as last year. I met lots of interesting people, talked about lots of geeky stuff, drank the amount of beer required by British law, and went on stage at a web conference for the first time—but I hope not for the last.
Well, my previous entry Is asynchronous communication really being used? has certainly elicited some interesting comments. The answer was a resounding "Yes"; and the replies allow me to take a first stab at defining a few Ajax use patterns.
9 June 2006
Yesterday I attended the 10th Sigchi.nl conference in Amsterdam, during which I had the pleasure of seeing Jared Spool, Jesse James Garrett, Bill Scott, Martijn van Welie, and Steven Pemberton in real live action. (Note to self: Jared and Steven are stiff competitors of Joe when it comes to being The Funniest Man at Web Conferences).
I'm not going to describe the conference in detail. Instead, I'd like to discuss an asynchronous communication question that popped into my head during Jesse James' presentation.
27 April 2006
Permalink
| in Coding techniques, IE
13 comments
(closed)
In a project I'm currently working on I encountered an Explorer bug that depends on the window you open a page with.
I post it here because I know that MSIE team members occasionally read my blog, and I have the faint hope that can they solve this bug, especially since it's messing up one of my projects (and, after all, what in the world is more important than my projects going smoothly <grin>, particularly when I have another important and exciting project that should be finished quickly but is held up by this bug).
27 January 2006
Permalink
| in Coding techniques, Mozilla
13 comments
(closed)
One of my minor irritations with Mozilla is that it doesn't support a few DOM methods and properties that, though not officially a part of the spec, are nonetheless extremely useful and supported by all other browsers. I'm especially thinking of the contains() method and the children[] nodeList. While going through the more abstruse parts of the Level 3 Core spec today I found a way to add contains() to Mozilla.
26 January 2006
Permalink
| in Coding techniques, Professionalism
26 comments
(closed)
Quite recently Google published the results of its Web Authoring Statistics research, in which about a billion HTML documents were parsed for popular class names, used elements and attributes, use of JavaScript and so on.
Sounds fascinating? You bet. There's just one slight problem: the actual data is totally inaccessible.
My last entry The AJAX response generated a few interesting comments, as well as a thoroughly non-scientific and non-representative poll on the use of the various output formats.
I asked which output format people used. Only a minority of the commenters indicated a clear preference, and their "votes" break down as follows: XML 5 votes, JSON 5 votes, HTML snippets 2 votes, plain text 2 votes, and pure JavaScript 1 vote. So it's clear that XML and JSON are currently the most popular output formats. I'd expected JSON to end slightly below XML, but I was wrong.
In the rest of this article I'd like to reply to some points that were made: the name "AJAX", rendering speed, error handling, the "evilness" of eval() and innerHTML and some other remarks.
Since my last AJAX project I've increasingly been wondering about the "ideal" output format for the AJAX response. Once you've succesfully fired an AJAX request, what sort of response should the server give? An XML document? An HTML snippet? A JSON string which is converted to a JavaScript object? Or something else? In this entry I'd like to discuss the three formats, with examples, and ask you which format you've used in your practical AJAX applications.
(This article has been translated into Spanish.)
6 December 2005
In the past two weeks I've again created an Ajax-driven interface, and as usual I discovered quite a few interesting XMLHTTP bugs and problems. This entry contains three Explorer and one Safari bug, and it talks about cloning nodes from HTML to XML, from XML to XML, appending HTML that contains a form, and extremely agressive caching.
In my ongoing quest for memory leaks I've come upon a mystery. A script that should leak memory according to the definitions and the experts, doesn't. Why not? I have no idea.
Since the comments to my previous posts contain a few useful links to memory leaks and closure resources, I thought I'd create a linkdump for future reference. Note that I only included those articles that explain what they're doing and why and give code examples. I ignored the pages that just throw scripts over the fence and leave it to the reader to figure out what they're all about.
20 October 2005
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| in Memory leaks
25 comments
(closed)
I made an obvious error in my previous round of experiments. We're going to start afresh.
20 October 2005
Permalink
| in Memory leaks
14 comments
(closed)
The plot thickens. I now have succesfully created a simple function that causes memory leaks. The problem is, I don't understand why.
Update: Incorrect experiments. This entry is closed.
19 October 2005
Permalink
| in Memory leaks
13 comments
(closed)
It becomes more and more apparent that creating the new addEvent() function is not for the fainthearted. I underestimated the many problems, and in the comments to my previous entry compelling arguments were raised against the winning code.
I've decided to take a few steps back and study the problem before messing about with the solution. I want to write a script that leaks memory. I'd like to judge how bad it is in practice and I'd like to see some practical code examples. Unfortunately I just can't get any function to leak memory. I'm afraid I just don't get it.
Well, that wasn't what anyone would call fast. Scott, Dean and I all had trouble making time to judge the contest. Besides, the quality of most of the entries was less and their length far greater than we'd expected. We had to wade through dozens of lines of script that didn't really make much sense to us, and that weren't really necessary to perform the job at hand.
Despite this disappointment we have determined a winner.
...<drumroll />...
I know, I know. I'm terribly late, not to say distinctly overdue, in judging the addEvent() recoding contest. The main reasons are that my clients now actively gang up on me to prevent me working on anything but their projects, and that the bit of spare time I've managed to squeeze from them is almost entirely taken by a very exciting new project that I hope to unveil within the next few weeks.
That said, today I finally found the time for the first round. I took a quick look at all the entries and judged them on formal grounds.
26 September 2005
On Thursday my Windows XP computer died. This was not entirely unforeseen, since it had taken to crashing at random instances, and also when I wanted to restart it after a night of inactivity. But now it didn't want to start up at all, and reinstalling Windows XP brought on yet another crash. Time for a new computer.
This thrilling episode of "My glorious life as a web developer" has played havoc on my schedule, which was rather tight to begin with. The main victim turns out to be the addEvent() recoding contest.
21 September 2005
readyState and the eventsAs we all know an xmlhttp script requires the use of the readystatechange event. In theory, using the load event is also possible, but Explorer doesn't support it on xmlhttp requests.
Both these events, and the readyState property, have a few odd quirks when used in an xmlhttp environment, though. These quirks don't impact standard xmlhttp scripts too much, but as soon as you want to use the event objects or readyStates other than 4 you need to know about them.
Remember that the addEvent() recoding contest closes in three days. Thursday is your last chance to submit your script, since I'm going to close comments on my Friday morning and start working on the judging.
12 September 2005
In my continuing quest to understand XMLHTTP I gathered some very intriguing material that I'm quite sure will save somebody else's ass. Today I offer a closer look at the abort() method, as well as an as yet unexplained bug in Mozilla which causes the responseXML to go missing.
My recent entry addEvent() considered harmful generated many interesting comments and technical pointers. It's clear that the original addEvent() function doesn't quite cut the cake any more, and it's equally clear that we badly need a function such as this to keep our scripts simple.
Hence I'd like to take the opportunity to launch an addEvent() recoding contest. Write your own version of addEvent() and removeEvent(), submit it by adding a comment to this page, and win JavaScript fame.
6 September 2005
Permalink
| in Coding techniques, IE
21 comments
(closed)
In a recent article on the IE Blog, Justin Rodgers talks about further CSS improvements in the ever more impatiently awaited IE 7 beta 2. His message is that CSS hacks will start to break in IE 7, and I fully agree.
Nearly two years ago I warned against the excessive use of CSS hacks, because I envisioned a situation like this. Web developers who rely on CSS hacks are going to have serious problems.
Currently I'm working on debugging a very complicated script that's supposed to xmlhttprequest a few pages to be shown in a "Dashboard". I already wrote about another aspect of the project in my previous entry, but now that I'm concentrating on the XMLHTTP aspects of this project I found out a few very interesting things about responseXML, as well as a complicated Explorer bug.
This entry treats these two points, since they should be documented.
Back in 2001 Scott Andrew LePera published the cross browser event handler script addEvent(), which was subsequently copied, revised, and used in many, many websites. I never used it, because I felt — and feel — it is wrong to assume that the W3C addEventListener and the Microsoft attachEvent methods are the same. They aren't, and the slight but important difference can trip up the unwary web developer.
Today I found excellent evidence that addEvent() can be harmful if it's used without intimate knowledge of the differences between the W3C and Microsoft event registration models.
When I first read Jesse James Garrett's article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications my reactions were "What a silly name", and "Not really new, is it?" Although both points of critique have been repeatedly and heatedly mentioned in the ensuing discussion, the concept seems to be taking the Web development community by storm. This can mean one of two things: either it's a promise or it's a hype. To decide the case, I offer an annotated link dump.
Since XMLHTTP is becoming more and more important I thought I'd create a linkdump, both for my own future reference and for other developers. Additions and comments will be gratefully accepted.
Quite by accident I found the article DHTML Leaks Like a Sieve by Joel Webber. It's an interesting read that I can recommend to all JavaScripters. Also, it may have disturbing implications for my current coding practices.
This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer.
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