7 new techniques every web developer should know
TRANSCRIPT
7 new techniques every web developer should know
Web developers always have to update their knowledge and learn new technologies if they want
to stay tuned with today’s coding. Today, I’m going to show you 7 recent web development
techniques that you should definitely learn, or improve if you already know them.
1. CSS3 media queries
With the rise of mobile devices, and on the other hand, of very wide displays, creating a website
that looks great in both big and small devices is definitely a challenge for web designers and
developers. Happily, the CSS3 specification have a new feature which allow web developers to
define styles for a specific display size only.
2. Font resizing with REMs
CSS3 introduces a few new units, including the rem unit, which stands for “root em”. If this
hasn’t put you to sleep yet, then let’s look at how rem works.
The em unit is relative to the font-size of the parent, which causes the compounding issue. The
rem unit is relative to the root—or the html—element. That means that we can define a single
font size on the html element and define all rem units to be a percentage of that.
html { font-size: 62.5%; }
body { font-size: 1.4rem; } /* =14px */
h1 { font-size: 2.4rem; } /* =24px */
3. Cache pages for offline usage
HTML5 introduces a great feature, offline caching. Basically, this feature allows you to tell the
client browser to cache some pages so your visitor will be able to view it again, even if he’s not
connected to the Internet.
Caching pages is pretty easy. The first thing to do is to add the following to your site .htaccess
file:
AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest
Once done, you can create a file named, for example, offline.manifest, with the following
directives:
CACHE MANIFEST
CACHE
index.html
style.css
image.jpg
And finally, link your .manifest file to your html document:
<html manifest="/offline.manifest">
That’s all, and your page will now be cached if the client browser supports this technology.
4. Server-side JavaScript
Since the mid-90’s, JavaScript has been a very popular client-side language for web developers.
But nowadays, JavaScript is becoming more and more used on the server side. Why? Because
now we have powerful server-side JavaScript environments such as Jaxer, Node.js and Narwhal.
The code belows demonstrate how to create a simple Hello World using Node.js.
var sys = require("sys");
sys.puts("Hello World!");
5. HTML5 drag & drop
Thanks to new technologies such as HTML5, the web is becoming more and more user-friendly.
Now, it is possible to easily implement drag and drop on your web pages. This is very useful, for
example for a shopping basket.
In order to make an element draggable, you simply have to add it the draggable="true"
attribute, as shown in the example below:
6. Forms, the HTML5 way
The HTML5 specification introduces lots of new features regarding one of the most important
element of a website: forms. For example, it is now possible to add date pickers, numeric
spinners, as well as validating emails using regular expressions patterns.
The following code is pretty self-explanatory and shows most of the new forms-specific features
introduced in the HTML5 specification.
7. CSS animations
Most modern browsers are now supporting CSS animations. Yes, CSS are now allowing you to
create some simple animations, without the help of a client-side programming language such as
JavaScript.
The following example shows how to make a background color change. As you can see, we have
(for now) to use some proprietary properties such as -moz-keyframes.
