Web developers always have to update their knowledges and learn new technologies if they want to stay tuned with today’s coding. Today, I’m going to show you 7 recent web development techniques that you should definitely learn, or improve if you already know them.
CSS3 MEDIA QUERIES :
With the rise of mobile devices, and on the other hand, of very wide displays, creating a website that looks great in both big and small devices is definitely a challenge for web designers and developers. The CSS3 specification have a new feature which allow web developers to define styles for a specific display size only. For example, the code below show how to apply a specific style only if the client display is smaller than 767px.
@media screen and (max-width:767px){
#container{
width:320px;
}
header h1#logo a{
width:320px;
height:44px;
background:url(image-small.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;
}
FONT RESIZING WITH REMS:
CSS3 introduces a few new units, including the rem unit, which stands for “root em”. The em unit is relative to the font-size of the parent, which causes the compounding issue. The rem unit is relative to the root—or the html—element. That means that we can define a single font size on the html element and define all rem units to be a percentage of that.
html { font-size: 62.5%; }
body { font-size: 1.4rem; } /* =14px */
h1 { font-size: 2.4rem; } /* =24px */
CACHE PAGES FOR OFFLINE USAGE:
HTML5 introduces a great feature, offline caching. Basically, this feature allows you to tell the client browser to cache some pages so your visitor will be able to view it again, even if he’s not connected to the Internet.
Caching pages is pretty easy. The first thing to do is to add the following to your site .htaccess file:
AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest
Once done, you can create a file named, for example, offline.manifest, with the following directives:
CACHE MANIFEST
CACHE
index.html
style.css
image.jpg
And finally, link your .manifest file to your html document:
That’s all, and your page will now be cached if the client browser supports this technology.
SERVER-SIDE JAVASCRIPT:
Since the mid-90’s, JavaScript has been a very popular client-side language for web developers. But nowadays, JavaScript is becoming more and more used on the server side. Why? Because now we have powerful server-side JavaScript environments such as Jaxer, Node.js and Narwhal.
The code belows demonstrate how to create a simple Hello World using Node.js.
var sys = require("sys");
sys.puts("Hello World!");
HTML5 DRAG & DROP:
Because of HTML5, the web is becoming more and more user-friendly. Now, it is possible to easily implement drag and drop on your web pages. This is very useful, for example for a shopping basket. In order to make an element draggable, you simply have to add it the draggable="true" attribute, after you made an element draggable, you have to use some JavaScript to control what it should do. If you want to prevent the text contents of draggable elements from being selectable, simply apply the following CSS rules:
[draggable] {
-moz-user-select: none;
-khtml-user-select: none;
-webkit-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}
FORMS, THE HTML5 WAY:
The HTML5 specification introduces lots of new features regarding one of the most important element of a website: forms. For example, it is now possible to add date pickers, numeric spinners, as well as validating emails using regular expressions patterns.
CSS ANIMATIONS:
Most modern browsers are now supporting CSS animations. Yes, CSS are now allowing you to create some simple animations, without the help of a client-side programming language such as JavaScript.