HTML/CSS

My friend Derek shared a link about Zen Coding a month ago which I finally made time to look at this morning. Zen Coding is a plugin designed to supercharge your HTML markup and CSS coding and it's available for several IDEs and text editors. I watched the available screencasts and gave it a try this morning. It's remarkable what you can do with it.

Gallery 3's core themes use the Superfish menu plugin for jQuery. Superfish provides very nice multi-level dropdown menus, but it does not include support for RTL languages.

I've been working with themes in Gallery for 6 years and it wasn't until recently that I started to give due consideration to a significant portion of Gallery's users, those whose native language is written from right to left. Shame on me, because it's really not that difficult to add proper RTL text and layout support to web applications. I hope the following helps out those who need to do the same.

It's common practice to skip the use of elements in simple forms. The most common example of this are site search forms. The following example uses a JavaScript event handler attribute to clear the input's value which also serves as the input's label.

If you know JavaScript but have yet to make the leap to unobtrusive JavaScript, read on. I'll demonstrate how to upgrade a traditional DHTML rollover to an unobtrusive script and then to a script that leverages the Yahoo! User Interface Library's (YUI).