HTML5 and CSS 3 have been around for a good while now, and more and more of it can be used on client work, although we’re not yet at the stage where we can throw off the strict doctype completely and create extravagant sites using canvas and SVG and all the other css goodness around such as animations and transforms. We can use smatterings of this stuff, border-radius, box-shadow can easily be used now, although in general they’re used for the extra touches on websites and elements that won’t affect the main design or critical elements of the page.
There are a few ways to add in CSS support for unsupported browsers using JavaScript but nothing that really offers a one stop simple solution for achieving decent CSS 3 support cross browser, and one service which was recently announced was eCSStender, which promised that by downloading and including a couple of JavaScript files that a wide range of CSS 3 techniques could be implemented cross-browser, crucially without any vendor prefixes required.
Recently, I was working on a project which would have benefited from this library as development time would have been drastically reduced with the benefit of cross browser compatibility for techniques such as border-radius, box-shadow etc and I began coding with this in mind.
There was initial success with Firefox recognising the standard border-radius without the need for the -moz- prefix, and this appeared to work cross-browser. Except for Internet Explorer, any version. After many attempts at trying to get this to work, I gave up.I recently heard that border-radius was not supported in IE with eCSStender, and I’m wondering what all the hype was in the A List Apart article. It was billed as a simple solution to easily achieve CSS 3 compatibility, but if something as simple as border-radius doesn’t work in IE then what’s the point? There are other ways of achieving compatibility and eCSStender was not all it was made out to be in the article.
It was billed as the saviour to vendor prefixes and greater flexibility, whereas in reality it is none of these.
As my first year of university comes to an end, I was reading the latest issue of .net magazine and came across the article written by Jack Osborne about what to do after leaving university in order to gain employment within the industry. Although I’ve not yet reached that stage yet, there is a few tips that anyone at any stage of education can implement now in order to increase chances.
Portfolio:
Jack states that the portfolio of any work should be in the right order and as good as it can be as that is where potential employers will look first. Students are often encouraged to leave out university work from their portfolio but often that is all students have, and goes back to the old adage that they can’t get a job due to lack of experience but no-one’s willing to offer that experience. In my portfolio, two thirds of it is university based as that is all I have at the moment but another useful tip which I will implement over the summer is to “fake it”. By creating websites for imaginary clients it will give me a chance to improve both my design and coding skills as well as boosting my portfolio.
Welcome to the newly re-designed site (or version 3.0 if you prefer!)
The reason for changing the design was that I didn’t like the look of it after a while and also the code was riddled with errors which I was not happy with. This was mainly due to site being built in Summer 2008 when I had a lot less knowledge and skills in comparison to what I have now.
Through a combination of learning at University, reading blog posts and listening to podcasts I feel that my skills have improved considerably over the past few months and that a re-design was a natural progression of these new found skills. The aim of the blog was always to be a kind of personal playground if you like where I could put into practice skills and techniques that I pick up as my learning continues.
As with any new launch, the likelihood is that there will be a few bugs somewhere along the line so if you find any please either leave a comment here or drop me an email.
