Tag: HTML5

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Original Releases

Introducing Multirange: A tiny polyfill for HTML5.1 two-handle sliders

Reading Time: 2 minutes

multirangeAs part of my preparation for my talk at CSSDay HTML Special, I was perusing the most recent HTML specs (WHATWG Living Standard, W3C HTML 5.1) to see what undiscovered gems lay there. It turns out that HTML sliders have a lot of cool features specced that aren’t very well implemented:

  • Ticks that snap via the list attribute and the <datalist> element. This is fairly decently implemented, except labelled ticks, which is not supported anywhere.
  • Vertical sliders when height > width, implemented nowhere (instead, browsers employ proprietary ways for making sliders vertical: An orient=vertical attribute in Gecko, -webkit-appearance: slider-vertical; in WebKit/Blink and writing-mode: bt-lr; in IE/Edge). Good ol’ rotate transforms work too, but have the usual problems, such as layout not being affected by the transform.
  • Two-handle sliders for ranges, via the multiple attribute.

I made a quick testcase for all three, and to my disappointment (but not to my surprise), support was extremely poor. I was most excited about the last one, since I’ve been wanting range sliders in HTML for a long time. Sadly, there are no implementations. But hey, what if I could create a polyfill by cleverly overlaying two sliders? Would it be possible? I started experimenting in JSBin last night, just for the lolz, then soon realized this could actually work and started a GitHub repo. Since CSS variables are now supported almost everywhere, I’ve had a lot of fun using them. Sure, I could get broader support without them, but the code is much simpler, more elegant and customizable now. I also originally started with a Bliss dependency, but realized it wasn’t worth it for such a tiny script.

So, enjoy, and contribute!

Multirange

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Original Releases

A better tool for cubic-bezier() easing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A few days ago, I had a talk at a conference in Zurich (I’m going to write more about it in another post). The talk was about “10 things you might not know about CSS3”. The first of those things was how you can do bouncing transitions with cubic-bezier() instead of an easing keyword. As usual, my slides included a few live demos of the functionality, in which I edited the cubic-bezier() parameters and the audience could see the transition produced.

However, in the case of cubic-bezier() that’s not enough. No matter how much you see someone changing the parameters, if you don’t picture it in a 2D plane, it’s very hard to understand how it works. So, the night before, I searched for a tool I could use to show them how bezier curves are formed. I found plenty, but all of them restricted the the coordinates to the 0-1 range. I’m not sure if the cause is ignorance about the spec changes or that Webkit hasn’t caught up with those changes yet (but it will, soon). The only one that supported values out of range was this one from the Opera Dragonfly developers, but I found it kinda impossible to adapt.

For my talk, I tried to adapt one of them but it was late so I gave up after a while and ended up just showing them a screenshot. And the day after the talk, I started adapting this to my needs (ever tried coding at a conference? It’s awesome, you get to ask questions from very knowledgeable people and ger replies straight away). And then I started cleaning up the code, changing how it worked, adding features. At this point, I think the only thing that’s left from that tool is …the HTML5 doctype. After 3-4 days, I finished it, and got it its own domain, cubic-bezier.com (I was surprised it was still free).

So, in a nutshell, what makes this better?

Lots of things:

  • It supports y values out of range, as per the latest version of the spec (and shows a warning for Webkit)
  • It’s fully accessible from the keyboard
  • You can move the handles not only by dragging but also by clicking on the plane or using the keyboard arrow keys
  • You can mouse over the plane and see the progression and time percentages that correspond to every point
  • You can save curves you like in your “Library” (uses localStorage to persist them)
  • You can import and export curves to/from your library to share them with others
  • You can share a permalink to every curve. For example, here’s a bouncing transition (FF & Opera only)
  • You can compare the current curve with any in your library, setting the duration yourself
  • Custom favicon that reflects the current curve

Cool stuff used

Given that this tool is not only for developers, but for badass developers that care about stuff like cubic-bezier(), I think I can safely assume they’re using a top notch browser. So, I went crazy with using cool modern stuff:

  • HTML5: Canvas, localStorage, History API, range inputs, oninput event, output, classList, data- attributes
  • ES5: Accessors, Array#map, Array#forEach
  • Selectors API
  • JSON
  • CSS3: Transitions, gradients, media queries, border-radius, shadows, :in-range pseudoclass, box-sizing, transforms, text-overflow
I also used my tiny chaining framework, Chainvas throughout this project.

Browser support

So far, I’ve tested it in modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and it seems to work. I haven’t tested it in IE10 (too lazy to open vm), although I want it to work there too, so if it doesn’t let me know. 🙂

Enjoy! cubic-bezier.com

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Original

Chainvas: Make APIs chainable, enhance the canvas API

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s definitely not the first time someone writes a script to make the canvas API chainable, as a quick Google search will confirm.

However, I think my attempt has merit, because it’s not really focused in chaining canvas methods, but just about every API you use it on and because it’s super small, only 1KB!

You can find it here: chainvas
Enjoy!
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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

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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”
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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 🙂

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Articles Original Personal

Organizing a university course on modern Web development

Reading Time: 10 minutes

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.

Table of contents

  1. Content
  2. Homework
  3. Labs
  4. Personal aftermath

Continue reading “Organizing a university course on modern Web development”