This is the first in an occasional series on technical debt and ideas for avoiding it. What is technical debt? Technical debt is any code that's been written in an expedient manner that causes continuing problems of integration and maintenance down the road. These problems cost more and more as time goes on, as your codebase becomes more cluttered with band-aids, undocumented code written by developers who aren't here anymore, or even whole sections written using a different framework or codin...

Webfonts have transformed our webpages into much more individualistic products, but they have one drawback: There's no standard method to detect when a webfont has actually loaded. Even though we try to always specify a good font stack to fall back on in the font-family declaration, sometimes we really need to know if or when a webfont has successfully been loaded - usually so we can adjust some other part of the page to match it to pixel-perfection. The FontDetect.js libra...

If you use Chrome or Safari on Windows XP, you may have noticed that some webfonts show up grey & washed out on your pages, as if the browser is using some very aggressive antialiasing algorithm that's rubbing out real strokes in the glyphs and not just the jaggies. And often when this happens, not all the vertical strokes are washed out in the same way, so the text looks uneven to boot. This is especially noticeable in the smaller fonts with normal or lighter weights, in the range of 3...

We rely on an ever-increasing number of third-party widgets when we build our pages. Some make our pages more feature-rich or social, others generate revenue, and still others let us analyze our traffic or otherwise help us behind the scenes. We just can't live without our widgets! But they're a double-edged sword. The more widgets you load, the more they can delay your page loading - especially if your page requires JavaScript or AJAX to execute quickly on window.onload or $(document...