http://themaingate.net/dev HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and other assorted code Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:04:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just realized that I will soon be learning a great deal about something I know next to nothing about, but am very interested in: mobile web development.  And that will be a large focus, albeit not the sole focus, of this blog in the foreseeable future. I know next to ... http://themaingate.net/dev/mobile/the-mobile-landscape-of-2009 Nicholas Zakas has a nice writeup on creating a binary search tree in JavaScript as part of his computer science series, where he's explaining basic CS principles such as bubble sorting and linked lists entirely in JavaScript.  This is a great idea in many ways, most of all because it ... http://themaingate.net/dev/javascript/a-dead-simple-javascript-binary-search-tree-bst I first ran into this error when I started using jQuery.  It turns out it's a somewhat common (beginner's) mistake of trying to run a script without first waiting for jQuery to finish loading, which results in a race condition.  The easiest fix for this is to make sure jQuery ... http://themaingate.net/dev/jquery/is-not-defined-error Lately I've been a bit addicted to answering questions on Yahoo! Answers.  I think it's because of the excitement I feel when I can finally find a question I can answer!  :) Anyhow, one of the recent questions was regarding global variables in JavaScript.  One person responded incorrectly that writing "var" ... http://themaingate.net/dev/javascript/javascript-global-variables-and-you XML, JSON, YQL.  Is that enough acronyms for you? XML and JSON you've probably heard about, but maybe not YQL, which is Yahoo!'s SQL-esque query language which was released to the public late last year.  It's primarily advertised as a service to access data from Yahoo! properties such as Flickr and ... http://themaingate.net/dev/rss/converting-to-xml-or-json-with-yql I have never been involved in creating a web crawler, but as a website owner I'm well aware of the behavior of good crawlers versus bad crawlers.  For instance, a good crawler must not only follow the rules set by robots.txt, but it must also not impose an undue load ... http://themaingate.net/dev/uncategorized/calling-out-bad-crawlers-the-kintiskton-nuisance John Resig: "The DOM Is a Mess" @ Yahoo! Video John Resig, who will constantly be younger than me yet much smarter than I'll ever be, gave a talk at Yahoo last week regarding various issues relating to Javascript development and the DOM.  He had some interesting things to say ... http://themaingate.net/dev/javascript/video-john-resig-the-dom-is-a-mess I keep hearing about these off-the-wall classes such as the new "Game Theory in Starcraft" at UC Berkeley, but where are the really useful cutting edge classes that teach you about useful things such as frontend web development? Sure, there are tons of classes for hardcore C++, Java, and maybe even ... http://themaingate.net/dev/html/where-are-the-web-development-courses-at-colleges When you're just starting with CSS, one of the things you'll notice emphasized is the pattern of using divs instead of tables.  This is because historically, divs layout replaced table layouts.  But this has also lead to a misconception: that you should rely mostly on divs to present your content.  ... http://themaingate.net/dev/html/divitus-and-classitus I'm thinking of starting a section for "D'oh Moments" - aka moments where I made a simple mistake but it took me an unusually long time to solve the problem. In this case it's z-index, which I was trying to implement to fix a problem on IE (where most of the ... http://themaingate.net/dev/css/z-index-dont-expect-me-to-be-working-without-no-positioning