A look at web components
Although web components have been around for several years in the web development world, it hasn’t been something that I’ve heard mentioned a lot. On the surface, web components look like an easy way to create and…
Category: Development and code
Posts about development activities, code articles, etc.
Website performance and the hidden environmental impact of the internet
It could be easy to assume, given its intangible nature, that the internet’s environmental impact would be trivial. Unfortunately, the ever-growing volumes of traffic and the data centres and servers required to handle…
Why we have code standards and style guides
Code standards and code style guides are like two sides of the same coin. They essentially tell programmers in a team, or across a larger organisation, how to best write their code. Code standards are the rules and…
Unicode is complicated
Why there are four different ways to show the pound sterling symbol in Unicode. With added explosions. Confusion surrounding the pound goes beyond the Scottish independence referendum. This article from Us vs Th3m…
Moving the University website to HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS
When we redesigned the University website in 2008 we adopted the Blueprint CSS framework which greatly cut down our CSS development time. It offered us a solid, cross-browser compatible foundation on which to build our…
New framework for responsive HTML emails
Ink is a fairly new framework from Zurb, who brought us the Foundation CSS framework, for creating responsive HTML emails. It’s been a while since I’ve been asked to help put together an HTML email but as news of this…
jQuery cycle plugin
Where would we be without jQuery, the JavaScript library that speeds up development no end? I’ve recently been using the Bootstrap 2.3.2 CSS framework within our content management system, TerminalFour Site Manager and…
A scalable and modular approach to writing CSS
Something that I’ve been keen to introduce to the web team for quite a while is a coding standard: a style guide, a consistent way for the whole team to write and format their code (whether HTML, CSS, JavaScript or…
Check accessibility with HTML_CodeSniffer from Squiz
Last month we had a visit from web content management system company Squiz. The primary reason for their visit was to demo their CMS Matrix but one of the really cool and practical things they left us with was simply…
Which browsers do you support?
I’m currently working on a document of guidelines for our web team and web developers. Something that I’ve been asked to include is to indicate which browsers we support. Digging around, for example, Yahoo! have their…