About a year and a half ago, I had some ideas about using 3D CSS to create nonstandard 3D shapes, but never got around to writing a post about it. However, inspired by the incredibly impressive Acko.net redesign, I decided to finally clean it up and share it with you. Here it is.
By stacking and rotating elements in 3D space, you can create some new shapes out of pure CSS. It's not practical or useful in the least, but it is interesting. These examples work best in Safari, but they will mostly work in Chrome. Check it out: Pure CSS 3D Shapes (remember to click and drag to rotate. Thanks to Dirk Weber's traqball.js for that little bit of magic).
I've recently starting developing using LESS CSS (lesscss.org), and quickly decided that I would benefit from a toolkit containing mixins that I would use over and over, such as border-radius or box-shadow.
We all have various tools in our box to deal with the constant headache that is Internet Explorer. Browser hacks, conditional comments, filters, pounding our heads against the wall, etc (wait, is it possible that's where the headaches come from? I'll look into it and get back to you).
This situation gets even worse when one wants to use some of the fantastic techniques available to us in CSS3, like border radius, drop shadows, and gradients. In the past, we had to use images for all of these design elements, but now it's possible to have a fancy, shiny button that uses only a <button> element and some css. Well, possible except in IE. Enter CSS3 PIE.
A little Friday-fun experiment I built: a word clock using CSS3 transforms and a little Javascript to run the actual clock. Useful? Maybe not. Fun? Definitely.
It's been quiet around here for a few months. Part of that, of course, is the holidays and all the craziness that comes with them. But the main reason is that I've spent most of my free computer time on this: my new site.
There's a great collection of IE6 fixes up on Virtuosi Media that is worth a bookmark. If you've ever stepped into IE6 (and, chances are, you have) you know that it can be a mess. This cheatsheet is a very nice roundup of IE6 bugs in HTML/CSS/Javascript, plus a few more goodies.
Client-side validation (checking for things like required fields, valid email address, etc) is always one of those sort of pain in the butt, last minute, only because i have to sort of things. It's not usually fun or flashy, it's just one of those things you have to do. Enter VanadiumJS, a new library just released by Daniel Kwiecinski.
Speaking of HTML5 and canvas, Carsonified has a nice little tutorial to get started with canvas. This article includes a good overview of where you can use canvas (anywhere), which browsers support it (most of them, at least with a little help (even IE6!)), and how to get going with some easy stuff.