Let’s talk about mobile web development some more! The principle of progressive enhancement is a general principle of front-end web development with wide applicability. Because you have a wide range of capabilities in mobile browsers, the principle is very important in this space as well.
Category: CSS
A couple days ago I blogged about the viewport meta tag. It is a handy little meta tag for your mobile sites, for sure. For installment 3 of 7,867,543 on mobile web development, the next natural step is to talk about media queries.
Prolegomena to Mobile Web Development
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The mobile web is on my brain constantly these days. This is partly because I work as a development lead for Match.com in their mobile group, and I happen to be working on a big mobile web project for them (yet-to-be-launched). This is partly because I have...um...other projects around mobile web going on. This is also because Match gave me an iPhone. My first smartphone was a Windows Phone 7 device. Given that I have in the past much indulged myself in the Microsoft Kool-Aid, I bought that thing the day it came out. In general the phone was very good but the browsing experience was very bad (it got better with “Mango”, but it remains less than thrilling). So owning that deviced did not at all excite me about mobile web development. But then I switched to the mobile group at Match and they gave me an iPhone. Suddenly, I had a device that had a great browser. Perhaps you are surprised, but that makes a huge difference. And I’m a web developer by trade anyway, so the world of mobile web development offers an interesting new avenue.
This month I have two technical talks, and in this case they are back-to-back tomorrow and Thursday. I didn't need to relax anyway...
I have always been a "full stack" kind of guy. When I started teaching myself to program back in 2003, I had an app in mind that required a some knowledge of css, databases, and everything in between. At the time I didn't even really know what those were but eventually I figured it out. I'm doing Full Stack Day to help others get started with all the technologies you need to build websites.
As a developer who wants to be conscious of good client-side practices, I’m always looking for good ways to keep my Css separate from my Html. When there are page-specific css styles to apply, it is often tempting to add them to the page itself. It works, it's not evil but I wouldn’t recommend it. Here’s an easy trick I have used on several projects to make it easy to target page-specific design problems in a global css file without worrying about adversely affecting other pages.
I started using IE9 in the RC timeframe and liked it, though it is not likely to unseat Chrome as my primary browser. I downloaded IE 9 RTW this morning, installed and rebooted, and tried it on a site I am working on. Immediately found a bug. (Sign)
I my last post wrote about some of Html 5's improvements to the standard's semantic tags. That is all fine and dandy but if you have to support older browsers, can you really use them? As a matter of fact you can (easily). I will show you how to do that here.
Read More on "Using Html 5's Semantic Improvements Today" >>
The term “semantic” is frequently used in the literature of the web design world. I bet you noticed. If you have not, then you either are not a web developer or you don’t read well enough as one. I will have some recommendations on that in a later post. But in an effort to stay on topic, we should discuss what this term means and how it is important idea for you to keep in mind about your markup.
So last night David Penton and I spoke at the North Dallas .NET User Group on topics client-side in nature. We had a good turnout and good discussion. I think we both had a good time. Hopefully those who attended did so as well, and learned something along the way.
Tomorrow night I’ll be leading a discussion with David Penton called “Take a Walk on the Client-Side” at our monthly meeting of the North Dallas .NET User Group. And yes, the incredibly cheesy title was my idea. It’s going to be a little informal so all are welcome to come and join the discussion. If you do any web development at all, you should be able to get something out of the discussion. Also, we always have free pizza, so if you want some free dinner, join us.
So I ran across an interesting way of marking up Html forms. I thought it was nice, so I decided to bring that into the world of ASP.NET, because there is a (easy to overcome) roadblock in using the method in traditional ASP.NET (it is odd having to distinguish between traditional and MVC...).
Unfortunately, now that I'm home I can't remember where I found this link, so I can't give credit where credit is due. But, here it is nevertheless. 53 CSS Techniques You Couldn't Live Without. There's also some other interesting posts on the site. On another post they point out some nicely designed sites. I like looking at these nice sites, even though it reminds me that I'm still just a code monkey, not a fluffy shiny sparkly flashy CSS guru. Maybe one day I'll be cool like that...