Booleangate

Whether it’s an internal or external project, for coworkers or clients, the trap of being the boy who cried “wolf”, or in this case, the developer who cried “done,” is an easy one to fall into. The issue here, besides an elongated development time, is that this trap cuts at our credibility as programmers, even—and especially—when the circumstances are out of our hands. If you say it’s done, it’d damn well better be done. So, to avoid such an incredulous rap, try following these steps to make sure that projects actually get completed on time, the first time. (more…)

Author’s note: This article was originally posted at Frye / Wiles, and has been re-posted here for consolidation.

As a programming department, it is always our goal to code in such a manner that makes use of methods that provide, on average, the fastest execution times. In today’s discussion, we’ll be testing the many different ways to process and interact with arrays in PHP in the first of three main areas: reading, modifying, and reconstructing. (more…)

Author’s note: This article was originally posted at Frye / Wiles, and has been re-posted here for consolidation.

When we talk about topics such about CSS, JavaScript, and sometimes even certain image formats (png24, I’m looking at you), and how they render in a client’s browser, we always, or should always also consider cross-browser behavior. This behavior entails many things: CSS rendering, the availability of CSS specific attributes, whether or not the DOM interface will be the same, general JavaScript behavior — the list goes on and on. And, since most discussions about CSS and JavaScript (at least the ones that I am having) also concern this variable nature, I’m coining (maybe I’m the first) a new term to put all of this into a handy little phrase, “Cross-Browser Consistency,” or, in typical programmer fashion, simply, “XBC.”

Let’s take a brief moment to establish a more exact meaning for this phrase. As you may well be aware, the industry commonly talks about cross-browser support, so we’ll differentiate between support and consistency, as well as defining what cross-browser really means, and some other tidbits as to boot.

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Author’s note: This article was originally posted at Frye / Wiles, and has been re-posted here for consolidation.

Today, we’re talking about color, its use on the web and how it is (in)effectively rendered cross-browser and cross-platform. (more…)