Category: Original

Posts that hold POTENTIALLY original content, partially or totally. Content that I came up and haven’t read about somewhere else. It might not be actually original, as people often have the same ideas, it’s just original as far as my knowledge goes, which isn’t infinite :P. IF it its actually original, then it’s licensed through the MIT license.

Categories
Original Releases

CSS.coloratum: Convert and share CSS colors

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Whenever I wanted to convert a CSS named color to RGB, I used to open the CSS3 colors spec in a new tab, search in the page and copied the values. Every time it felt even more tedious. I didn’t want to search in long tables, I wanted to type the color somewhere and get the values back, in an easy to copy format. So, after yet another color lookup earlier today, I decided to scratch my own itch and do it myself.

Of course, I didn’t plan to include a whole database of CSS colors in the website. My idea was much simpler: Use the named color to draw a rectangle in a <canvas> and then read the R,G,B values through ctx.getImageData().

I got the core functionality done in under 10 minutes, so I started adding stuff. I added a hex and HSL representation, I used canvas.toDataURL() to get a data URI of the rectangle and use it as a dynamic favicon*, I made the colors sharable and bookmarkable by using an old-fashioned hash. Also, I realized it actually supports any CSS supported color represenation by design, not just named colors.

Regarding the color conversions themselves, I took extra care to avoid redundancy. So values < 1 don’t have leading zeroes (.5 instead of 0.5) and when the hex color is in the format #xxyyzz it gets converted to #xyz. When it’s an RGBA color, it still converts it to hex, since those values will be supported in CSS4.

Since it’s for developers, I didn’t bother at all with fallbacks.

Cool stuff used:

  • HTML5: canvas, autofocus, output, oninput event, hashchange event
  • CSS3: gradients, media queries, box-sizing, background-clip, border-radius, shadows, RGBA
  • ES5: Array#map()
  • Selectors API

The reason the input’s border appears weird on Webkit is this long standing Webkit bug. Also, for some reason my nice dynamic favicons don’t display on Firefox, although they display fine in Webkit and Opera.

Enjoy: CSS.coloratum
Happy color sharing! Let me know of any problems or suggestions you may have.
PS: In case you’re wondering about the domain, I’ve had it for ages for another project and I thought it was quite fitting.

*Thanks to @milo for giving me the idea of using a dynamic favicon

Categories
Original

Accessible star rating widget with pure CSS

Reading Time: 2 minutes

For ages, we couldn’t utilize the sibling combinators (~ and +) to ease the pain of creating star rating widgets, because of this stupid Webkit bug. Nowadays, not only it’s fixed, but the fix has already propagated to Chrome and Safari 5.1. So, we can at least use the sibling combinator to make coloring the stars easier.

But can we use no JavaScript for a rating widget and make it just with CSS?

Actually, we can. By adapting Ryan Seddon’s technique for custom radio buttons with CSS, we can turn a series of radio buttons into stars that change colors (for the purposes of this demo they’re just unicode characters that change colors, but in your case they may as well be images) and use the sibling combinator to color the previous stars. A series of radio buttons is what many people use as a star rating widget fallback anyway, so the markup required is not necessarily more than usual. The only thing that needs to be done differently is their reverse ordering: The highest ratings need to go first, due to the way CSS3 selectors work (this limitation might be removed in CSS4, but that’s a long way ahead).

Of course, you’d still need JS to attach an event handler if you want the votes to be registered through AJAX, but that’s not part of the rating widget per se (it could still work as part of a regular form).

What’s best is that it’s fully keyboard accessible (focus and then use keyboard arrows) and screen reader accessible (although VoiceOver will also pronounce the generated stars, but that won’t happen if you use images instead of unicode stars). I’m guessing it could become even more accessible with proper ARIA, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the commenter 😀

In browsers that don’t support :checked (essentially only IE < 9), it degrades to a series of radio buttons (haven’t verified that it does, but it should do).

So, here it is:

Legal note, for those who need it: This code is MIT licensed.

Categories
Original Personal Releases

twee+: Longer tweets, no strings attached

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As some people that have been following me for a while know, the 140 character limit on twitter bugs me a lot sometimes, and I’ve tried to find a way to overcome it previously as well. The most common ways these days seems to be either cutting down the long tweet into multiple pieces (yuck) or using a service to host the longer tweet and post a summary with a link to it.

The latter isn’t an entirely horrible option. However, I see 3 big downsides:

  1. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of some external service hosting my content which could close down any time due to failure to monetize their website. In that case, I’d be left with some dead links that are of no value and my content would be lost forever. Yes, they usually warn you in advance in such cases, but such news could be missed for a number of reasons.
  2. People (including yours truly) don’t plan those things in advance. They just seek services like that at the exact moment when they want to post a long tweet. Being greeted with a prompt to use Twitter Connect is NOT nice. For starters, it slows me down. Also, I don’t want to give permission to every website on the effing interwebs to post on my twitter timeline. I owe it to my followers to be responsible and not risk filling their timelines with crap.
  3. Most of these websites look like someone puked and what came out happened to be HTML and CSS. The only exception I’ve found is twtmore, but it still suffers from #1 and #2.
So, like every developer with a healthy amount of NIH syndrome, I decided to write my own 😀
My goals were:
  1. It had to be entirely client-side (except initially getting downloaded from the server of course). This way, whoever is concerned can download the full website and decode their tweets with it if it ever goes down. Also, being entirely client side allows it to scale very easily, as serving files is not a very resource intensive job (compared to databases and the like).
  2. No Twitter Connect, the tweets would get posted through Twitter Web Intents.
  3. It had to look good. I’m not primarily a designer, so I can’t make something that looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I can at least make it look very decent.
  4. If I was gonna go through all the hassle of making this, I may as well try to keep it under 10K, so that I could take part in the 10K apart contest. (I haven’t submitted it yet, I’ll submit a few days before the deadline, as it seems you can’t make changes to your submission and I want to polish the code a bit, especially the JS — I’m not too proud about it)
I managed to succeed in all my goals and I really liked the result. I ended up using it for stuff I never imagined, like checking if a twitter username corresponds to the account I think (as it shows the avatars). So I went ahead and came up with a name, bought a domain for it, and tweeplus.com was born 🙂

twee+? Seriously?

Yes, I like it. The plus means “more”, which is fitting and + kinda looks like a t, so it could be read as “tweet” as well. Yes, I know that the word “twee” has some negative connotations, but oh well, I still like the name. Whoever doesn’t can just not use it, I won’t get depressed, I promise. 😛

Geeky stuff

How it works

  • A relatively new feature, Twitter automatically wraps URLs in t.co links, making them only 20 characters long.
  • All the text of the tweet is stored in the URL hash (query string will also work, although the output uses a hash). Some research revealed that actually browsers can handle surprisingly long URLs. Essentially, the only limit (2083 characters) is enforced by Internet Explorer. I decided to limit tweets to 2000 characters (encoded length), not only because of the IE limit, but also because I wouldn’t like people to post whole books in t.co links. We don’t want Twitter to start taking measures against this, do we? 🙂
  • A hard part was deciding which encoding to use (twitter is quite limited in the characters it parses as part of a URL).
    • My first thought was base64, but I quickly realized this was not a very good idea:
      • The encoding & decoding functions (btoa() and atob() respectively) are relatively new and therefore not supported by older browsers. I’m fine with the app hardly working in old browsers, but existing links must as a minimum be readable.
      • It uses approximately 1.34 characters per ASCII character. Unicode characters need to be URL-encoded first, otherwise an Exception is thrown. URL-encoding them uses 6 characters, which would result in 8 characters when they’re base64 encoded.
    • Then I thought of using URL-encoding for the whole thing. The good thing with it is that for latin alphanumeric characters (which are the most) it doesn’t increase the string length at all. For non-alphanumeric characters it takes up 3 characters and 6 characters for Unicode ones. Also, it’s much more readable.
    • Still, implementing it was tricky. It doesn’t encode some characters (like the dot), even though twitter doesn’t accept them as part of a URL. Also, escape() and encodeURI() behave differently and the Unicode encoding returned by the former isn’t accepted by Twitter. So I had to combine the two and do some substitutions manually.
  • When the textarea changes, the hash does too. The whole thing is a form with action=”http://twitter.com/intent/tweet”, so submitting it does the right thing naturally. I keep a hidden input with the tweet and the textarea has no name, so it doesn’t get submitted.
  • Usernames, hashtags and URLs get extracted and linkified. Usernames also get an avatar (it’s dead easy: Just use twitter.com/api/users/profile_image?screen_name={username} where {username} is the user’s username)
  • Internal “pages” (like “About” or “Browser support”) are essentially long “tweets” too.
  • A little easter egg is that if the browser supports radial gradients, the gradient follows the mouse, creating a spotlight effect. This looks nice on Chrome and Firefox, and really shitty on IE10, probably due to bugs in the gradient implementation (which I have to reduce & report sometime).

Buzzword compliance

This little app demonstrates quite a lot new open web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc), such as:

  • textarea maxlength
  • placeholder
  • autofocus (edit: I had to remove it cause it triggered a Webkit bug in Safari)
  • required inputs
  • New input types (url)
  • History API
  • oninput event (with keyup fallback)
  • hashchange event
  • SVG
  • Common CSS3 (border-radius, shadows, transitions, rgba, media queries)
  • CSS3 gradients
  • CSS3 animations
  • CSS3 resize
  • :empty
Let me know if I forgot something.
Oh yeah, I did forget something. There it is: twee+
Categories
News Original Personal

Detecting CSS selectors support + my JSConf EU talk

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ll start with a little backstory, if you want to jump straight to the meat, skip the next 4 paragraphs.

In the past few months, my CSS research has been getting some attention and I’ve been starting to become somewhat well-known in the CSS industry. A little known fact about me is that JavaScript has always been one of my loves, almost as much as CSS (even more than it in the past). Ironically, the first time I was asked to speak in a big conference, it was about JavaScript, even though I ended up choosing to speak about CSS3 instead.

Lately, I’ve started wanting to get more into the JavaScript industry as well. I’m quite reluctant to submit speaking proposals myself (every conference or meetup I’ve given a talk so far has asked me to speak, not the other way around) and most JavaScript conferences expect you to submit a proposal yourself. I also couldn’t think of a good topic, something I was passionate about and hasn’t already been extensively covered.

This changed a few weeks ago. While I was writing my <progress> polyfill, it dawned on me: Polyfills is something that’s JS-related and I’m passionate about! I love studying them, writing them, talking about them. I quickly searched if there were any talks about polyfill writing already and I couldn’t find any. So, I decided to submit a proposal to JSConf EU, even though the call for speakers had passed 10 days ago. When I read @cramforce’s tweet that they had decided on most of the speakers, I spent a few days stressed as hell, checking my inbox every few minutes and hoping that my gut feeling that I would get accepted was right.

And it was! 3 days ago I received an email from JSConf EU that my proposal was accepted!! I can’t even begin to describe how happy and excited I am about it. And nervous too: What if they know everything I’m going to say? What if they hate my talk? What if the JavaScript industry is really as sexist as some people claim and they dismiss me because of my gender? I decided to put my fears aside and start working on my slides, as I couldn’t wait until later (even though I have multiple deadlines creeping up on me right now…).

A big part of writing polyfills is feature detection. Before trying to implement a feature with JavaScript, you first have to check if it’s already supported. So, a substantial portion of my talk will be about that. How to detect if APIs, HTML elements, CSS properties/values/selectors etc are supported. There are already established solutions and techniques about most of these, except CSS selectors. Modernizr doesn’t detect any, and judging from my Google search nobody has written about any techniques for doing so in a generic fashion.

A really simple way to detect CSS selectors support is using document.querySelector() in a try...catch statement. If the selector is not supported, an error will be thrown. However, that’s not really reliable, as the Selectors API is not supported in IE < 8. So, I thought of another idea: What if I turn the hassle of reading out a stylesheet via the DOM methods (browsers drop stuff they don’t understand) into a feature detection method?

The basic idea is creating a new <style> element with an empty rule and the selector we want to test support for, and then read out the stylesheet through the DOM methods to see if a rule actually exists. I’ve so far tested it in Firefox, Opera and Chrome and it seems to work. I haven’t tested it in IE yet, as I currently have too many apps running to turn on the vm, so it might need a few fixes to work there (or I might be unlucky and the idea might not work at all).

You can test it out yourself in this fiddle, just check the console: http://fiddle.jshell.net/leaverou/Pmn8m/show/light/

Apologies if this has already been documented elsewhere, I really couldn’t find anything.

Edit: James Long worked on fixing my example’s issues with IE

Categories
Original Releases

A polyfill for HTML5 progress element, the obsessive perfectionist way

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Yesterday, for some reason I don’t remember, I was looking once more at Paul Irish’s excellent list of polyfills on Github. I was really surprised to see that there are none for the <progress> element. It seemed really simple: Easy to fake with CSS and only 4 IDL attributes (value, max, position and labels). “Hey, it sounds fun and easy, I’ll do it!”, I thought. I have no idea how in only 1 day this turned into “OMG, my brain is going to explode”. I’ve documented below all the pitfalls I faced. And don’t worry, it has a happy ending: I did finish it. And published it. So, if you’re not interested in long geeky stories, just jump straight to its page.

Continue reading “A polyfill for HTML5 progress element, the obsessive perfectionist way”
Categories
Original

CSS reflections for Firefox, with -moz-element() and SVG masks

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We all know about the proprietary (and imho, horrible) -webkit-box-reflect. However, you can create just as flexible reflections in Firefox as well, by utilizing -moz-element(), some CSS3 and Firefox’s capability to apply SVG effects to HTML elements. And all these are actually standards, so eventually, this will work in all browsers, unlike -webkit-box-reflect, which was never accepted by the CSS WG.

First and foremost, have a look at the demo:

How it works

  • For every element, we generate an ::after pseudoelement with the same dimensions and a position of being right below our original element.
  • Then, we make it appear the same as our element, by giving it a background of ‑moz-element(#element-id) and no content.
  • Reflections are flipped, so we flip it vertically, by applying transform: scaleY(‑1);
  • If we want the reflection to have a little distance from the element (for example 10px like the demo), we also apply a transform of translateY(10px)
  • We want the reflection to not be as opaque as the real element, so we give it an opacity of around 0.3-0.4
  • At this point, we already have a decent reflection, and we didn’t even need SVG masks yet. It’s essentially the same result -webkit-box-reflect gives if you don’t specify a mask image. However, to really make it look like a reflection, we apply a mask through an SVG and the mask CSS property. In this demo, the SVG is external, but it could be a data URI, or even embedded in the HTML.

Caveats

  • Won’t work with replaced elements (form controls, images etc).
  • If you have borders, it gets a bit more complicated to size it properly
  • Doesn’t degrade gracefully, you still get the pseudoelement in other browsers, so you need to filter it out yourself
  • Bad browser support (currently only Firefox 4+)
  • You need to set the reflection’s background for every element and every element needs an id to use it (but this could be done automatically via script)

Further reading

Credits: Thanks to Christian Heilmann for helping me debug why SVG masks for HTML elements weren’t originally working for me.

Categories
Original

Pure CSS Tic Tac Toe

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s supposed to be used by 2 people taking turns (click twice for the other sign).

Basic idea:

  • It uses hidden checkboxes for the states (indeterminate means empty, checked means X, not checked means O) and labels for the visible part
  • When it starts, a little script (the only js in the demo) sets the states of all checkboxes to indeterminate.
  • It uses the :checked and :indeterminate pseudo-classes and sibling combinators to change the states and show who won.
  • Once somebody clicks on a checkbox (or in this case, its label) they change it’s state from indeterminate to either checked or not checked, depending on how many times they click on it.
Continue reading “Pure CSS Tic Tac Toe”
Categories
Original Tips

Change URL hash without page jump

Reading Time: < 1 minute

In modern complex layouts, sometimes the point where a hash will transport you to will be entirely different than the one you actually wanted. If you prevent the default event, you will save yourself from the page jump, but the hash won’t change either. You can accept the regular behavior and change scrollTop after the jump, but the user will still see a distracting flicker.
Chris Coyier found a great workaround last year but it’s not meant for every case.

A different solution

Turns out we can take advantage of the History API to do that quite easily. It’s just one line of code:

history.pushState(null, null, '#myhash');

and we can combine it with the old method of setting location.hash to cater for older browsers as well:

if(history.pushState) {
    history.pushState(null, null, '#myhash');
}
else {
    location.hash = '#myhash';
}

Browser support?

The History API is supported by:

  • Firefox 4+
  • Safari 5+
  • Chrome 8+
  • Coming soon in Opera

Enjoy 🙂

Categories
Original Releases

StronglyTyped: A library for strongly typed properties & constants in JavaScript

Reading Time: 3 minutes

StronglyTypedI’ll start by saying I love the loosely typed nature of JavaScript. When I had to work with strongly typed languages like Java, it always seemed like an unnecessary hassle. On the contrary, my boyfriend even though very proficient with HTML, CSS and SVG, comes from a strong Java background and hates loosely typed scripting languages. So, to tempt him into JS and keep him away from heavy abstractions like Objective-J, I wrote a little library that allows you to specify strongly typed properties (and since global variables are also properties of the window object, those as well) of various types (real JS types like Boolean, Number, String etc or even made up ones like Integer) and constants (final properties in Java). It uses ES5 getters and setters to do that and falls back to regular, loosely typed properties in non-supporting browsers.

Continue reading “StronglyTyped: A library for strongly typed properties & constants in JavaScript”
Categories
Original Releases

CSS3 patterns gallery and a new pattern

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I finally got around to doing what I wanted to do for quite a few months: Create a gallery with all the basic patterns I was able to create with CSS3 gradients. Here it is: 
CSS3 Pattern Gallery

Also, it includes a brand new pattern, which is the hardest one I have ever made so far: Japanese cubes. Thanks to David Storey for challenging me about it.

Supported browsers:

  • Firefox 4 (the patterns themselves work on 3.6 too but the gallery doesn’t due to a JS limitation)
  • Opera 11.10
  • IE10
  • Google Chrome
  • Webkit nightlies

However bear in mind that every implementation has its limitations so a few of them won’t work in all the aforementioned browsers (for example Opera doesn’t support radial gradients and Firefox doesn’t support explicitly sized ones).