Frank Villa-Abrille » Development

Front End Coding Standards

Frank — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:52:21 +0000

You might be wondering… “Why do I need to follow standards if I’m the only front-end (or UI) developer working on this project?” That may be true at the moment, but you have to consider the long-term perspective. During time-crunch, the project may bring in additional developers to help with the work. After go-live, the [...]

Making IE, jQuery fade effect, and transparent PNGs play nicely

Frank — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:11:43 +0000

I recently worked on a B2C project which had a quick-view “shopping bag”. Fading it in and out slowly caused a big black blob to display just before the fade effect is applied by jQuery in IE7, IE8 and possibly IE6. This was not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc.

As designed, the shopping [...]

Google Labs: Browser Size

Frank — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:41:40 +0000

“Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible by [...]

Resolving Initial TCPDF Error

Frank — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:39:16 +0000

I’m currently working on a PHP project focused on PDF report generation. To develop locally, I’m using MAMP Pro 1.9 and TCPDF 4.9.018. Upon installation of TCPDF, I encountered the following error:

MAMP 403
TCPDF ERROR: Could not include font definition file: helvetica

To fix these issue:

Check your log files; they will most [...]

jQuery + IE6 = Could not set the selected property. Unspecified error.

Frank — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:51:48 +0000

Recently, I ran across an IE6 issue relating to jQuery and select options. The error message from IE6 was “Could not set the selected property. Unspecified error.“, which appears to be related to a timing issue with the DOM.

Here’s the original code, which worked for IE7 and IE8:

raw highlighted

jQuery 1.4 Released

Frank — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:50:58 +0000

The jQuery team recently released version 1.4 of their widely popular JavaScript library. This release includes significant performance improvements.

Many of the most popular and commonly used jQuery methods have seen a significant rewrite in jQuery 1.4. When analyzing the code base we found that we were able to make some significant performance gains [...]

HTML 5 vs. XHTML 2

Frank — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:44:39 +0000

Jeremy Keith and Brad Colbow explain the difference between the two markup languages in simple terms.

XHTML 2

Contrary to some beliefs, XHTML 2 does not have anything to do with XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1. XHTML 1.0 is simply a reformulation of HTML 4 with XML syntax.

lowercase tags and attribute names [...]