PewPew 2.0 - Blogs about webdesign

jQuery - Core Table Functionality.

Check out this table. If you've got JavaScript enabled, you'll see alternating row colors and a highlight on the "hover row" - these are courtesy of jQuery.

This functionality is included in the core jQuery library. Check out my article for a detailed discussion.

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jQuery - A Library.

I've been experimenting with jQuery, a JavaScript library, lately. And, with one exception, I've been quite impressed by it's elegance and simplicity.

It took me a while to come to terms with the concept that using any JavaScript library might be acceptable. Libraries and frameworks do have costs - there's the user downloaded file size, and your ability to grok the new system to consider. Writing the code from scratch so that I completely grokked it allowed me to polish, support and extend it. But certain web pages absolutely had to have that special bling-a-ding-ding. Coding many of those special effects (fading, animations, shrinking) is way beyond my skill level. Why not leverage existing technology that's been developed, vetted and browser tested by experts?

I investigated a couple of different JavaScript libraries before selecting jQuery as the one to learn. But jQuery provided a wealth of documentation, a variety of features, and suitable browser support. When I started working with jQuery, it was dead simple to learn. And I'm most impressed that jQuery can access any elements I can identify with CSS - this allows me to add JavaScript functionality in a non-obtrusive manner; generally without changing my markup at all.

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My Evening at Refresh.

I went to last night's Refresh Seattle talk. The presenter was the head designer of a new document sharing / extra-net service, and he talked about the problems encountered with designing the behaviors of the service. I was particularly impressed by how they simplified the sign-up process. Users hate to sign up.

I was quite shy as I felt rather out of place. The mini-conference of Refresh was mostly attended by designers - who do both take a project from concept to X/HTML. With Widemile, I get the designs from our creative department, code it up, and plop it into our testing platform. With my narrower skill set, I felt as if I wouldn't have anything much to contribute. (Until someone needs to know some advanced page optimization techniques, anyway.) I'll go back a few more times, at least.

I did go have a drink with some of the other attendees afterwards. I talked to a few people about stuff. We talked about the ways in which Vista sucks and Leopard rules, the curse of designer-itis, and how many people at the table had iPhones.

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Experiments with IE6 and Alpha .PNG Solutions.

One of the things that I've been busy doing is working a new article. IE6 (and lower) .PNG Experiments is a series of tests of various solutions for the grey background that appears on .PNGs with alpha transparencies in Internet Explorer 6 (or lower).

The really important part of this article is the major drawbacks to any solution that is based on using the AlphaImageLoader filter. In short, doing so caused hard lockups of IE6 that some serious Microsoft ninjas were unable to resolve. My very strong recommendations is that you use a graphic-based solution such as using Fireworks to add an alternate color palette to the image, or simply re-matting the image against the desired background color.

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Custom Dreamweaver Snippets Folder

I finally figured out how to have MY own snippets folder in the root of the snippets in Dreamweaver. (I'm using DW CS3, but this would probably work fine in Dreamweaver 8.) For the life of me, I couldn't create a new snippets folder. Instead, I hijacked an existing snippets folder (I used Comments) and renamed it. Since the new name begins with an underscore, it shows up at the top of all the snippets folders. Blammo - instant custom snippets folder.

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