Quesb

World is in serious problem. The place which we once called home, we ourself are destroying it. Literally!!! I happen to see this video by James Nachtwey at TED. It win TED Prize 2007. And I felt so sad. We call ourself the most civilized creature on earth but the pictures tell another story. I do not know how I can help the situation improve, but what least I can do is to share this and hope that would help our next generation to live in a better world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war.html

Google recently launched a concept called instant search. So as you type your search Google will suggest the probable search query as well as show you the result at the same time.Pretty cool to look at.

People are actually writing lot of good things about it anyway J Typical when Google launches something. (we heard same about Google Wave J but well it’s trashed now !!!)

But that brings up in my mind an interesting question, this is technically cool, saves time, usable, makes me feel like a geek, blah blah blah … BUT will it be used at all.

I have noticed many people actually does not visit Google home page to search. All the modern browsers (IE 8, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari) all provide search in address bar. For me opening Google homepage and then typing the search is lot of work , and I get Google suggest in address bar as well.

I was very interested in creating a letter press effect in CSS3.

Problem is I could only fake it but not get the real one like below image.

Then I had a look at http://www.stunningcss3.com/ and found that the heading is having very nice Letter press effect and guess what it’s purely in CSS3.

When I inspected the style I found this

text-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.699219) 0 1px 0, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 0 -1px 0;

So the trick is putting two text-shadow which is cool (and am not aware of that )

I created a little demo in labs … have a look

I was trying explore different possibilities of CSS3 (next version of CSS) features targeted to beautification of presentation. I have build a little card sorting app(just basic stuffs) using jQuery and few CSS3 stuffs…

View App in Quesb Labs

NB: you have download the attached file, unzip it and open the file cards.html. Check in Firefox 3.6 or Chrome or Safari for CSS things.In IE there is actually nothing exciting.

Thank’s to my colleague Eirik Mikkelsen for updating the code for Opera.

Suman

1. Always put all you JavaScript code within the function which checks if the page is fully loaded or not.

   below is jQuery snippet…
   $(document).ready(function(){
   //Put your JavaScript here.
   });

   The reason for doing this is that JavaScript is client side language. And it makes no sense to run it unless the client code (HTML) is loaded completely.
   Also browser is an interpreter, hence the JavaScript engine of the browser will execute JavaScript  as and when it encounters it in the page. Hence delaying the actual page rendering.

2. Maximize use of CSS selectors to find element in HTML page.
3. Use console.log() instead of alert() to make development process faster (work in firebug). If you are in IE there is no easy solution … but you might try using following tools
   1. FauxConsole
   2. Firebug Lite
4. It will be sometimes good to use profile in both IE Developer toolbar and Firebug to see how your JavaScript is performing and if there is a way to  improve it.
5. Make an habit of using JSLint to test your code. It’s a nice tool which will make you write good JavaScript code.

In my recent interaction with my project’s developer friends I felt many of us really don’t buy the idea why the heck the UI team is jumping up and down and so against table based layout !!!

Of course table based layout is:

1. Easier to code
2. Easier to understand
3. User don’t really care it’s table or DIV… browsers anyway renders it
4. What the big deal in accessibility thing … data grids will be table, how about that??? Why UI team don’t object that !!!
5. UI team talks about grid … table is better grid option than DIV. Isn’t it logically ???

Ok the above quotation are not made up by me … I just overheard, heard, listened from the team.

I will try to explain our or the professional UI developers argument for using HTML+CSS than using table for lay-outing.

Not all are my words, I have picked quotes from different places around the web as well.

Argument 1:

Let’s look at the below code …

class car {
int wheels = 4;
string engine;
}

car mybike = new car();
mybike.wheels = 2;
mybike.engine = null;

I picked this example from an forum thread …

Is the code wrong ? Of course not … at least technically. But will you prefer this code … no because it is not meaningful.

It is not semantic.

HTML is all about semantics. Different HTML tags are there to define what kind of content it contains not how it should look.

e.g.:

• <P> for paragraph of text
• <table> should have meaningful data-grid type of content.
• <DIV> semantically acts as a container for different thing.

There is a long list but you get the point right!!!

Argument 2:

It is not very easy to linearize layout table.

Probably this w3c article will provide proper explanation to the curious.

Argument 3:

Table layout is more readable and easier to understand by most of the people – standard argument for table.
“Most people” don’t matter. Professionals matter. For professionals, table layouts create many more problems than HTML + CSS. This is like saying I shouldn’t use GVim or Emacs or Visual Studio because Notepad is simpler for most people. Or that I shouldn’t use LaTeX because MS Word is simpler for most people.

again I picked this answer from a forum thread and added my bit …

Argument 4:

Table rendering in browser is slow

This problem increase exponentially in case of nested table. Not because of more HTML tags but because:

1. Table is rendered only when the full table is downloaded
2. Rendering algorithm for table is much complex than DIV which increase the rendering time further.

Argument 5:

Separating content from layout and presentation.

Simply speaking when a developer develops page using table she must understand the layout of the whole page to make it render effectively.

Whereas when frontend engineer develops HTML page the focus is to put only the content in the HTML page and put all the layout and design login in CSS.

Result ….much cleaner HTML and lesser burden on developers to understand the structure.

Am back from my wedding with my beautiful wife.

I introduced a new section i my website … quesb labs

I will be putting all my experiments in this section. Currently I have not dedicated any page for it … just the directory listing.

The first experiment is a digital clock. I tried to experiment with :nth-child pseudo class of CSS3.

Digital Clock

So at last I am getting married with my beautiful fiancé Sreyashi on 2nd December, 2009.

I will write back after I come back on 12th December , 2009

Till then amen…

I tried to consolidate a list of design conferences in India. Below is the what I found.

First an email application .. then document management … then a browser and now a full blown OS.

Looks like folks at Google had setup a big plan long back.

Although the official release of Google Chrome OS is still an year to go, Google has released few very nice videos describing their approach towards operating system. It’s also interesting to note that Google is planning a custom made hardware to give a whole new experience to it’s user such as lightning fast boot experience.The approach Google has taken has a big assumption at it’s root. users most used application is internet. Which is kind of true anyway.

It will interesting to note how Google will handle other stuffs that users would like to do in their computer let’s say gaming.

But let’s leave that to the creative folks at Google to decide. For now enjoy few interesting and innovative videos by Google describing Google Chrome and it’s feature.

Cheers