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by George Paterson.
Being a new father i haven’t had much time to write articles and have spent most of my effort working within repositories on Github.
One thing i’ve been meaning to do with this site for some time now is change it to a responsive design. This is what i’m doing with the Aether theme and i’ve updated this site with the first incarnation of that theme.
by George Paterson.
This week marks the release of the new Tesco Direct UI. It’s been almost a year since work on the UI was completed by the team at LBi London with support from Spindrift in content management and Infosys providing system integration.
The team i was fortunate enough to lead included permanent members Ray Brooks, Lee Ryan, Aaron Faber with Sam Clohesy leading project management. The project wouldn’t have started without Will Howat’s development review which should a number of issues that LBi London were asked to resolve.
by George Paterson.
This week we at LBi London released the first phase of the new America’s Cup website. I had the opportunity to work with the hosts of the oldest active trophy in international sport as lead interface developer, with a team including Francesca Mancuso, Aaron Faber, Jamie Collins and Pia Gamon.
The site itself was built on EpiServer; which means .Net development and some of .Net’s more interesting aspects (web forms etc). What we produced is a HTML5 based site that is progressively enhanced using CSS and JavaScript. We couldn’t use all the elements HTML5 supports because we couldn’t be reliant on JavaScript for presentation in IE7 and 8. JavaScript development utilised jQuery and jQuery UI libraries.
This is only the first phase of ongoing development, with performance improvements including minification and new features for the site but an important first step in supporting one of the great yachting competitions.
by George Paterson.
I’ve recently been working on a jQuery plugin that uses a HTML5 video as the background for a page. An idea that perhaps owes far too much of it’s inception to splash pages, it was worth investigating; as a test for HTML5 video player development and because of it’s interesting use of the video element.
by George Paterson.
A number of web site designs require the page footer to stick to the bottom of a page, no matter the content. There are other solutions but after using a min-height solution for a number of years i have found it to be the most robust.
The increasing maturity of the browser market means the CSS has simplified to using min-height only. There are alternative solutions for min-height support using JavaScript, alternatively should the CSS fail it should not cause a significant issue to site usability.
by George Paterson.
In 1974 Richard Feynman gave the commencement address at Caltech and coined the phrase cargo cult science. Cargo cult can be used to describe any process using a flawed model of causation.
The term cargo cult is used in anthropology to define the religious cults that spring up in the wake of a technologically advanced society interacting with a technologically primitive society. Most recently this happened during World War II in the Pacific South West when Allied and Japanese forces created military bases on islands with limited previous contact with the modern world. The military base would commonly use air fields to import war materials.
The technical details of why and how the air field is set up would be beyond the basic understanding of the local populace but they would be able to see the process and witness the outcome which would be bountiful supplies of cargo brought in from the sky.
by George Paterson.
After writing about the cross browser display inline-block i was reminded of a requirement from “The Sceptre of Rajim” project. Each item in a row of items would have the same height but also a number of designated elements would have an equal vertical position in that row.
The code written for the project targeted a specific list of items and was limited in scope. Requirements change over time and this sort of positioning seems to be a common feature, so after the project i resolved to make good on the promise i always make, to create reusable code.
The jQuery Equaliser plugin is a simple plugin that iterates across an array of elements with a declared parent element.
by George Paterson.
HTML5 is the newest standard for HTML development, it has a range of additional features that will change the way we interact with the web. This is great for web development, there is a problem though, older browser versions specifically IE 6, 7 and 8 do not support the new HTML5 elements so that you cannot attach CSS to those elements.
Fortunately Sjoerd Visscher, Remy Sharp and John Resig amongst others have promoted a technique in mitigating this problem by using JavaScript to create a new DOM element of the same name as the required HTML 5 element, this then allows the browser to attach CSS to the element.
The fundamental problem of this though is that you are reliant on JavaScript for this to work and if the new elements have a structural role in the design then your design is going to fall apart.