Eric Wendelin's Blog

This entry was authored by highly-respected blogger and friend David Walsh. Learn more about David

As you can see from my site’s lack of design (davidwalsh.name), I’m about 90% programmer and 10% designer. As someone that’s not a designer, I’m really grateful for websites like ColourLovers — websites that provide you palettes of colors that look good together. Let’s pretend for a moment that I do have a good design and I want others to know my palette. MooTools 1.2 has made that a reality.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I have posted a major update to my original post about Changing Text Size onClick with JavaScript at the David Walsh Blog.

It allows you to store your users’ text-size preferences in a cookie so that they don’t have to resize the text to their liking on every page. Check out the demo (remember to refresh the page to test the cookie!) and then check out how toSave Text Size Preference using MooTools and PHP!

Popularity: 2% [?]

For many of us designing fluid layouts, which are generally based in “em”s (pronounced like the letter M) you end up not really knowing how many pixels an “em” is while you are deep in the DOM tree. This is especially confusing if you increase/decrease text size with your browser.

For this reason, I have created a simple Javascript function that you can use to poll any element on your test page and figure out what size an “em” is.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Peter-Paul Koch explains how to create beautiful JavaScript and shows you how to combine it with proper HTML and CSS for the best web experience in ppk on JavaScript. Here is my review.

The structure of this book

ppk begins with a brief history of JavaScript and explains the “fat and thin” JavaScript cycle. I would agree with him on that we are in a fattening state right now, but I think the tides will turn soon (my guess is before 2010).

Then ppk gives a basic overview of accessibility (which he adds to later) before introducing us to the 8 real world scripts used as examples in this book:

• Textarea Maxlength
• Usable Forms
• Form Validation
• Dropdown Menu
• Edit Style Sheets
• Sandwich Picker
• XMLHTTP Speed Meter
• Site Survey

We then see chapters on browsers, how to prepare your markup for good JavaScript and a series of chapters that use his examples heavily giving light on several very diverse topics of JavaScript.

Popularity: 1% [?]