Chris is a Developer Evangelist living in London, England, who writes about JavaScript development, accessibility, and all things open web. After several years evangelizing at Mozilla Foundation, he’s now working at Microsoft’s EdgeDev team.
Extensible and customizable tools are nothing new. Most of what we use can be extended in one way or another, whether in the form of add-ons, plugins or specialist languages. Christian Heilmann wrote a lot of extensions and toolbars, which very much boosted the productivity of his company back then. Thankfully, these days, companies understand that offering specialist languages is time wasted, when the web stack has grown to become much more interesting to build applications with. If you download Visual Studio Code now, you will see that my autocomplete feature is a part of it. And here is how Christian did that.
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There are a few reasons why our Web is on the chubby side, and most of them actually are possible for us as developers to change. Discover some of the main reasons why the Web is suffering from an obesity problem.
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What do you think about the future of the Web? In this post, Christian Heilmann argues that its future is not as problematic and endangered as a lot of people make it out to be.
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Events in browsers are incredibly useful. In this article, Christian Heilmann gets back to the basics of events and gets you in the mood to start playing with them.
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A few days ago, a tutorial on how to Create A Christmas Wish List With PHP was published on Smashing Magazine’s Coding section that frustrated me. It frustrated me as it was incredibly easy to predict the comment reactions it caused. It also frustrated me as it was a classic example of a tutorial resulting in very happy readers who will go out and cause a lot of terrible things on the Web unless they understand that this was meant as a “beginner tutorial”. A lot of the bad feedback was about security — something we shouldn’t take lightly.
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Christian Heilmann brings us a quick introduction to using exponentials and sine waves and to plotting things on a circle. Have a go with the code, and play with the numbers!
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One of the main changes from HTML4 to HTML5 is that the new specification breaks a few of the boundaries that browsers have been confined to. Instead of restricting user interaction to text, links, images and forms, HTML5 promotes multimedia, from a generic <object> element to a highly specified <video> and <audio> element, and with a rich API to access in pure JavaScript.
Native multimedia capability has a few benefits. For instance, end users have full control over the multimedia. The native controls of browsers allow users to save videos locally or email them to friends. Also, HTML5 video and audio are keyboard-enabled by default, which is a great accessibility benefit.
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Delivering great presentations is an art, and preparing the slides for them very much so, too. But we’re not going to talk about that. We’re also not going to get into the debate about whether to use open or closed technologies to create slide decks — this is something you need to hash out yourself, and there are some interesting discussions going on.
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Building a beautiful design is a great experience. Seeing the design break apart when people start putting in real content, though, is painful. That’s why testing it as soon as possible with real information to see how it fares is so important. To this end, Web services provide us with a lot of information with which to fill our products. In recent years, this has been a specialist’s job, but the sheer amount of information available and the number of systems to consume it makes it easier and easier to use Web services, even for people with not much development experience.
The problem with APIs is that access to them varies in simplicity, from just having to load data from a URL all the way up to having to authenticate with the server and give all kinds of information about the application you want to build before getting your first chunk of information.
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Storing information locally on a user’s computer is a powerful strategy for a developer who is creating something for the Web. In this article, we’ll look at how easy it is to store information on a computer to read later and explain what you can use that for.
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We who work on the Web live in wonderful times. In the past, we did of lot of trial-and-error learning, and the biggest hurdle was getting people to understand what we were on about. Over time, companies like Google, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook and Twitter managed to get the geeky Web into the living rooms of regular people and into the headlines of the mainstream press.
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Do you feel like you’re wasting time learning the ins and outs of all of the browsers and working around their issues? Well Chris did, too. Doing this back then secured his career and ensured that he had a great job. But we shouldn’t have to go through this trial by fire any longer.
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In this article, I’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of PHP. We’ll focus on using PHP to access Web services and on turning static HTML pages into dynamic ones by retrieving data from the Web and by showing different content depending on what the user has entered in a form or requested in the URL.
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Lately I have been getting bored and annoyed with people getting up in arms against Web standards and the ideas of progressive enhancement, claiming that they hold us back from creating a rich, beautiful Web. There are also claims that these tools limit us from pushing the boundaries of what is possible with today’s technologies.
The problem with claims such as these is that they are based on a misunderstanding of standards and progressive enhancement and ― at least to me ― on arrogance and ignorance about what our job on the Web is. The Web is out there for everybody and is a product and a medium like any other.
For example, I am a big film buff and love good movies. I also understand, though, that in order to fund great movies we have to make money from terrible ones that appeal to the lowest common denominator or rehash ideas that were successful in the past.
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I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBS and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don’t quite get, I thought I was safe in this area.
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Using JavaScript has become increasingly easy over the last few years. Whereas back in the day we needed to know the quirks of every browser, now many libraries such as jQuery, YUI, Dojo and MooTools allow someone who doesn’t even know JavaScript to spruce up boring HTML documents with impressive and shiny effects. By piggy-backing on the CSS selector engine, we have moved away from the complexity and inconsistencies of the DOM and made things much easier.
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Almost every movie has a scene in which a character pull the protagonist aside and says, “There’s something you should know about [insert another character’s name here].” Most of the time, we find out some dark secret about a supposed friend of the protagonist or that the main ally is actually an evil overlord.
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In this article, Christian Heilmann explains how you can find out more about the right JavaScript solution. First of all, though, understanding what it means to develop for the Web is important.
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The purpose of this article is to raise awareness and perhaps make some of that website security mumbo-jumbo a bit more understandable to you.
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Website performance is a hugely important topic, for big companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, slow websites mean fewer users, less happy users, and thus lost revenue and reputation.
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