Blogs

At the time of writing this, CSS3's transition module does not support gradient background. However, there are many tricks that can achieve the same visual effect. I've seen many of them around the web so far, but most of them end up using JavaScript for this, and this is not what we want...

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Today's lesson, or should I've said tonight's lesson since it's 10:12 pm, it's on how to create a 3D carousel using CSS3 and a tiny bit of JavaScript. First, let's start by adding a basic HTML list onto the page. The HTML consists of a list of ten images that we want to showcase.

• Read more about CSS3 3D Carousel with jQuery
• Teddy's blog
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Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla? Which open-source platform will best fit your needs. Here is a nice infographic published by DeviousMedia that may help.

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Today's CSS blog entry is about the multiple uses of the ":before" and ":after" pseudo-elements. The most common use of those elements on the web is for creating image-free speech bubble graphics via css only, but I've found many other ways where these guys can come in handy.

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The IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader filter aims to fix a problem with semi-transparent true color PNGs in IE versions < 7. The problem with this filter is that it blocks rendering and freezes the browser while the image is being downloaded. It also increases memory consumption and is applied per element, not per image, so the problem is multiplied.

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 7
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Some sites have helpful 404s "Did you mean X?", which is great for the user experience but also wastes server resources (like database, etc). Particularly bad is when the link to an external JavaScript is wrong and the result is a 404. First, this download will block parallel downloads. Next the browser may try to parse the 404 response body as if it were JavaScript code, trying to find something usable in it.

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 6
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One of the cited benefits of Ajax is that it provides instantaneous feedback to the user because it requests information asynchronously from the backend web server. However, using Ajax is no guarantee that the user won't be twiddling his thumbs waiting for those asynchronous JavaScript and XML responses to return. In many applications, whether or not the user is kept waiting depends on how Ajax is used.

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 5
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Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism that web servers and browsers use to determine whether the component in the browser's cache matches the one on the origin server. (An "entity" is another word a "component": images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) ETags were added to provide a mechanism for validating entities that is more flexible than the last-modified date. An ETag is a string that uniquely identifies a specific version of a component...

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 4
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The Domain Name System (DNS) maps hostnames to IP addresses, just as phonebooks map people's names to their phone numbers. When you type www.yahoo.com into your browser, a DNS resolver contacted by the browser returns that server's IP address. DNS has a cost. It typically takes 20-120 milliseconds for DNS to lookup the IP address for a given hostname. The browser can't download anything from this hostname until the DNS lookup is completed.

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 3
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The time it takes to transfer an HTTP request and response across the network can be significantly reduced by decisions made by front-end engineers. It's true that the end-user's bandwidth speed, Internet service provider, proximity to peering exchange points, etc. are beyond the control of the development team. But there are other variables that affect response times. Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response.

• Read more about Best Practices For Speeding Up Your Web Site - Part 2
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