Before You Use Captcha: Form Protection Tips
23 Jan 2012
I ran into a great post on the PHP devnetwork forums here talking about some tactics to protect your forms without using Captcha.
First is the Honeypot method. The idea is to add a field to the form that bots would likely fill out but that is a hidden element on the form that should remain blank. twindev explains:
JavaScript Selector Library Supports CSS4!
13 Jan 2012
Long Text Lines in Webkit
10 Jan 2012
Firefox Extensions: Add Button to Nav Bar
2 Nov 2011
The new Add-On SDK for Firefox rocks! It is so easy to create and test using the cfx command line utility.
One thing that is conspicuously absent is the ability to add a button to the navigation toolbar. You know, the toolbar that holds the URL bar and bookmarks button. It took a fair amount of research and trial and error, but it turns out to be a small bit of code.
CSS Conditional Rules: Exciting and Scary
8 Sep 2011
This month the W3C came out with a brand new working draft for CSS Conditional Rules (W3C Draft).
Conditional rules are basically @-rules that apply CSS only when certain conditions are met. The most powerful is the @supports condition. You might be able to guess how it works by looking at the example below.
Why Emails Suck
7 Sep 2011
jsPerf.com Introduces Graphs
31 Aug 2011
If you haven't seen jsPerf.com, you've been missing out. You can benchmark pieces of JavaScript against each other. The site was created by Mathias Bynens (blog) and the benchmarking engine, Benchmark.js, was created by John-David Dalton (blog).
JavaScript is by nature only acurate to 1 millisecond, and some browsers are acurate to only 15 milliseconds in practice. Benchmark.js uses higher resolution timers where available. For browsers it utilizes a Java Applet to access a high-precision timer. When Chrome or NodeJS are run with a --enable-benchmarking flag, it makes use of a native microsecond timer.
A JavaScript Phone: Microsoft's Night Terrors
24 Aug 2011
Today Mozilla announced their proposal for providing phone-like functionality to the browser in this hacks.mozilla.org article. Their goal is to provide "basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months."
Specifically, they want to provide JavaScript APIs for accessing the phone dialer, address book, SMS, and more. We already have support on Android and iOS for getting geolocation data from GPS. There is also some support for taking photos using only JavaScript. And don't forget the FileReader and FileWriter APIs.
JSON++: The Structured Clone Algorithm
17 Aug 2011
I was using window.postMessage yesterday and ran into this nugget on hacks.firefox.org:
The window.postMessage() method now uses the structured clone algorithm to let you pass JavaScript objects instead of just strings from one window to another.
The Structured Clone Algorithm is an HTML5 specification for serializing complex data structures. The following are data structures that the algorithm can store that JSON cannot.