Posts about stuff that is related to me, and not to Web design & development.
I don’t usually post shameless plugs like that, but I’m so excited about this I decided to make an exception. A few minutes ago I found out that I’m shortlisted in the “Brilliant newcomer” category of The .net awards!!!
Thank you so much @ everyone that nominated me and/or plans to vote for me. I really appreciate it guys*! 🙂
* “guys” in that context is used in a gender neutral fashion, I’m not only thanking the men 😛
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:Â 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
Last week, I was in London to give 2 talks. The first one was last Thursday, in one of the conferences I wanted to go ever since I learned my first CSS properties: Web directions @media. The second one was 2 days later in a smaller event called Standards.next.
I decided to start writing a blog post after every talk I give, to be able to go back and remember what I thought about each event, what feedback my talk got etc. And I’m starting with Geek Meet May 2011.
I recently changed my Web Directions @media talk title & abstract to something more specialized. Instead of discussing under-hyped CSS3 features in general I will only focus on one CSS3 feature (more hyped than the ones I was planning to show, but all the hype is only about very basic use cases): CSS3 Gradients:
Mastering CSS3 Gradients
With most browsers adding increasing support, and the simplicity of providing fallbacks for those that don’t, CSS3 gradients are something we can start to use right now. They benefit our users with faster websites and ourselves with more time in our hands to spend in other things, since they are easy to create, edit and update. A very powerful feature that can also be utilized for a surprising number of design effects, even ones that don’t resemble gradients at all. In this talk, Lea will explore CSS3 gradients in great depth and it’s almost guaranteed that no matter your expertise level, you will walk out having learned new things.
I tested a draft of this talk with a meetup group in Oslo (Framsia) and it went very well. I got reviews like “I was amazed that you managed to speak almost an hour of CSS3 gradients and still keep the crowd interested” (thanks Legendre!). Even Bruce Lawson, who happened to be there, told me he didn’t know like 70% of the material presented! 🙂
I’m looking forward to it since it’s a topic I’m passionate about, and I hope to see you there! Don’t forget that you can use the coupon code WDVEROU when registering to take £50 off the current price.
PS: I don’t like the title very much, so if you have anything more witty to suggest, feel free. 😉
Just a quick note to let you know I’m speaking at this year’s @media Web Directions conference, which will take place during May 26–27 in London, UK. I’m very excited about this, since I always considered @media one of the top front-end conferences in the industry 🙂
The title and abstract of my talk is as follows:
CSS3 at the Outer Rim
By now most of you know how to use the core CSS3 features in your designs to embed custom fonts and easily create rounded corners, drop shadows, and scalable designs with media queries. But there is still a large area of CSS3 that remains unexplored by most web designers and developers. In this talk Lea will present many CSS3 features that are useful but underrated, as well as uncommon ways of utilising the CSS3 features you already know about, in order to do much more with even fewer images and less code.
Although it’s on the design track, I expect it to appeal to both developers and designers.
You can use the coupon code WDVEROU to take £50 off the current price. 😉
Hope to see you there! 😀
I had grown sick of my previous blog style and its various bugs (since it was put together in just a few hours), so I decided to make a new, more minimalistic one. Best viewed in browsers that support CSS gradients, like Firefox, Safari and Chrome. I also finally got around to making a logo for myself, although I’m not sure I’ll keep it. I also switched to HTML5, using Toolbox as a base.
I want to make a few more changes, but I have to go to sleep sometime :p
I also started using DISQUS for the blog comments. I like it when a blog I read has it (since it offers a few features I find convenient, like comment editing for instance), so I wanted to offer it to my readers too. It’s a shame that in some of their buttons they haven’t added the standard CSS3 border-radius declarations, but only the prefixed proprietary ones, so they’re square in Opera (and probably IE9). I’m fed up with seeing this in websites, TOPSY‘s widget also does it. However, their carelessness will backfire soon, when browsers stop supporting the prefixed versions *evil grin*
About a week ago, I was in Warsaw, Poland to give my first talk at a big conference, Front Trends 2010. As every first-time speaker, I was extremely nervous and worried that everything would go bad. That my talk would be boring or too basic or that I would just freeze at stage, unable to say a word. It was a 2-hour talk with a break in between, so I was also terrified that nobody would show up the second hour.
Contrary to my fears and insecurities, it went better than I could have ever hoped. The feedback on twitter and in general was enthusiastic! There wasn’t a single negative comment. Even people I look up to, like Tantek Çelik, PPK, Jake Archibald or Robert Nyman had something good to say! And instead of nobody showing up the second hour, the audience almost doubled!
At this point, I would like to thank Christian Heilmann for helping me become less nervous before my talk by going through all my slides with me and offering his invaluable advice for every part (I forgot to follow most of it, but it really helped in my attitude). I can’t thank you enough Christian!
Just a quick note to let you know that I’m speaking in this year’s Front-Trends conference, which will take place in Warsaw, Poland on October 21-22. Front-Trends is a new conference (starting this year) but the organizers have managed to put together an impressive line-up (Crockford, PPK, Paul Bakaus, Dmitry Baranovskiy, Tantek Çelik, Robert Nyman and more).
My talk will introduce many aspects of CSS3, some of them in good depth (eg. selectors). Here is the official abstract:
With browsers constantly adding support for CSS3, especially now that even IE jumped in the game, it’s quickly becoming a necessary tool of the trade. CSS3 offers exciting possibilities and changes the way that we design and develop websites.
In this 2-hour practical session, full of real world use cases, you will learn:
Tickets are very cheap (Just €198) but they’re selling quite fast, so if you want to come, hurry up!
About a year ago, prof. Vasilis Vassalos of Athens University of Economics and Business approached me and asked for my help in a new course they were preparing for their Computer Science department, which would introduce 4th year undergrads to various web development aspects. Since I was always complaining about how outdated higher education is when it comes to web development, I saw it as my chance to help things change for the better, so I agreed without a second thought.
This is one of the main reasons I didn’t have time to write many blog posts for the past months: This activity took up all my spare time. However, it proved to be an interesting and enlightening experience, in more than one ways. In this blog post I’ll describe the dilemmas we faced, the decisions we made and the insights I gained throughout these 6 months, with the hope that they’ll prove to be useful for anyone involved in something similar.