Custom Events are Pretty Cool

Callbacks are one way to keep JavaScript functionalities cleanly separated, but they aren’t always enough. Using custom events are easier, more flexible, cleaner, and can make more obvious readable code.

Play Music on Your Site with the Grooveshark Streaming API

Grooveshark is a web app for listening to music. You can search for any play just about any song there is. With an account you favorite stuff, build playlists, do social stuff, you know the drill. Perhaps less known is …

Progressively Enhancing HTML5 Forms

This is what I’m thinking is the best current way to progressively enhance forms. That is, use HTML5 features when they are available and fall back to JavaScript alternatives when they are not. …

Animated Knockout Letters

I was watching some commercial the other day and they had these letters fly in over a black screen and reveal an image beneath them. It was a pretty cool looking effect and it reminded me how WebKit has that …

So You Need To Fill a Dropdown Dynamically

You have one dropdown menu, and depending on the user’s choice in that one, a second dropdown gets filled with choices. Let’s cover three different ways you can go about that.…

Parent Selectors in CSS

Let’s be clear here, just in case someone is finding this from a search engine: there are no parent selectors in CSS, not even in CSS3. It is an interesting topic to talk about though, and some fresh talk …

Fluid Width Equal Height Columns

Equal height columns have been a need of web designers forever. If all the columns share the same background, equal height is irrelevant because you can set that background on a parent element. But if one or more columns need …

Make a ‘View Source’ Button

Remy Sharp’s cool site for HTML5 demos has a “View Source” button on each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire source code for the page you are looking at. It’s not a popup or …

Box Sizing

The “box model” in CSS works like this:

width + padding + border = actual visible/rendered width of box
height + padding + border = actual visible/rendered height of box

It’s a little weird, but you get used to it. …

Fix Inserted HTML5 Content with HTML5 innerShiv

When working with HTML5 today, many of you know that you’ll need to include the “HTML5 shiv” to ensure that CSS will recognize and be able to style those elements in browsers that aren’t yet hip to HTML5.

<!--[if IE]>
…