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...
This project was designed to answer the question: Is it possible to create a grid control that remains as responsive as a desktop app even in the face of a large amount of data, without resorting to F...
This handy little JavaScript library determines whether a font is available in your browser, or whether an external font that your page has called really got loaded.
This is very simple to use:
...
This interactive Unicode character table lets you browse through the vast sea of exotic characters you probably never knew your PC could display. You can click on characters & find out what other, sim...
I'm a web developer, working in both frontend and backend using
PHP/JavaScript/MySQL. Before making things to stuff into the intertubes I had been primarily
a developer of Windows desktop software in C & C++ for over 15 years. Before that I worked in COBOL
for several years—all the while wondering, “What the heck am I doing working in COBOL???”
I'm originally from Detroit, but I've been a Seattleite long enough to have webbed feet.
And after all these years, I still can't afford a jetpack!