Web Building Tools

April 29, 2009 11:43 AM

Fyrdility has been busy with useful web building tools. First, he has a jQuery plug-in to provide support for the CSS Template Layout Module. Template layout demos using the plug-in here. Then, there's the When can I use... browser compatibility tables that let you know when you can start using the latest web technologies, like CSS3, HTML5, SVG, etc.
posted by netbros (13 comments total)

Well, using JS for layout is Teh Evils of course, but this is fucking awesome.

I love me some JQuery.
posted by Artw at 11:49 AM on April 29, 2009

I don't know what most of this stuff even is (there's an HTML 5 now?) but it looks like a great resource. (And lol, IE still doesn't handle application/xhtml or SVG yet? Who is using that piece of crap?)
posted by DU at 11:53 AM on April 29, 2009

Unfortunately the reason why I probably won;t be using this anytime soon is that 17% of users are still on IE6.
posted by Artw at 11:57 AM on April 29, 2009

> the When can I use... browser compatibility tables that let you know when you can start using the latest web technologies, like CSS3, HTML5, SVG, etc.

So when can I start using VRML? This isn't helping me.
posted by ardgedee at 12:28 PM on April 29, 2009 [2 favorites]

I <3 jQuery. DIE IE6.

That about sums it up.

I spent 30 minutes yesterday reading up on the datagrid element in HTML5 (forums, blog). HTML5 looks to be ridiculously awesome and I'm seeing a lot of semantic stuff built in (header, footer, section tags are useful). I've already experimented with client side DB storage in Safari, the idea that I can have a local DB and run SQL against it and stuff, it'll be sweet. I can think of so many web apps for my company that I could develop if I had persistent client side storage that survives flaky internet connections.
posted by SirOmega at 12:29 PM on April 29, 2009

Another extensive compatibility table.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:41 PM on April 29, 2009

In my opinion this is a big fail. Looking at the source code for even the simplest example reveals the same old div blocking required of plain ol' CSS.

The "benefit" of this system is that now you have a hideous layer of javascript obscuring an already unclear system.

Can someone explain in plain (read reasonably complex) Engilsh what the benefits of doing CSS in JavaScript are especially in light of the fact that these demos only target browsers that have moderately acceptable CSS rendering?

I mean what's the point of a disgusting JavaScript hack if it doesn't address IE 6?
posted by mistersquid at 1:17 PM on April 29, 2009

javascript is like cocaine, discuss
posted by johnny novak at 2:44 PM on April 29, 2009

Re:ie6 - I still say that waiting for NS4 or IE5(mac) to finally die off was worse.
posted by Artw at 2:56 PM on April 29, 2009

i read the google code project page and looked at the source of 4 demos before i saw anything that actually explained how you might use this, which is generally not a good sign, but once i came to demo 5 i was actually somewhat impressed. i would advise against using this for a public site, but there are scenarios where using something like this might sense. that said, this is essentially a novelty, and the notion that it may be some sort of future proofing is laughable. if you introduced this to a project of mine and it caused problems, i'd probably be pissed. i'd let you try, though.
posted by feloniousmonk at 6:29 PM on April 29, 2009

I thought it was funny when the guy was explaining how CSS tables are way cool even though HTML tables are still bad.
posted by CCBC at 1:29 AM on April 30, 2009

Wow. I thought no-one outside MS was using that.
posted by Artw at 9:29 AM on April 30, 2009

I thought it was funny when the guy was explaining how CSS tables are way cool even though HTML tables are still bad.

I dunno, I'm in favour of removing tables for layout as much as possible and it does generallly result in much cleaner lighter code, but sometimes, especially when doing anything involving vertical layouts or anything gridlike, you get table-free solutions a that actually have more tags than the equivalent table would. CSS3 is going to cut down on that a little, but we're still going to effectively have class="tr" and class="td" a lot of the time...

I think some tag phobias are just dumb, TBH. If TABLE can be replaced with sensible code then fine, but if not let it be a table. But I;m one of those guys that has never been convinced that B is evils and that theres something inherently better about STRONG or class="b".
posted by Artw at 9:34 AM on April 30, 2009