Modern Web Design
Sunday 26th October, 2014 22:37
It's been many years since I've done much web design stuff. You can probably tell that from this basic looking website of mine. Recently I've been writing things using HTML5 with CSS and JavaScript and despite several improvements I can't help think that things haven't really progressed. I'd love to use animations, but using setInterval has slightly better browser support. There are issues around innerHTML, innerText and textContent. The new audio and video tags are great, but supported filetypes varies between browsers. A system font native in Windows and Internet Explorer didn't work in Chrome (using the family instead seemed to work). And I've stumbled onto some other quirks.
It seems that the best way to work around these implementation issues is to use a framework like jQuery. Issues with fonts can be solved using web fonts loaded from third party sites. But what if you want minimal code (that doesn't need to be updated every time they update the framework) or to host everything yourself (especially for internal systems without Internet access)? It gets tricky. Far trickier than I'd expected. I thought we'd learnt from the mistakes of the past.
I've managed to avoid using any browser specific hacks or third party frameworks (although I'm using setInterval instead of animations) and I've written something that seems to work in IE9+ and Chrome (and Firefox, last time I checked). I'm fairly happy with it, but viewing it over Remote Desktop caused some timing issues. I still haven't implemented vertical scrolling text yet either.
On a positive note the audio and video events are pretty useful.
Maybe in another 10 years things will be better.
It seems that the best way to work around these implementation issues is to use a framework like jQuery. Issues with fonts can be solved using web fonts loaded from third party sites. But what if you want minimal code (that doesn't need to be updated every time they update the framework) or to host everything yourself (especially for internal systems without Internet access)? It gets tricky. Far trickier than I'd expected. I thought we'd learnt from the mistakes of the past.
I've managed to avoid using any browser specific hacks or third party frameworks (although I'm using setInterval instead of animations) and I've written something that seems to work in IE9+ and Chrome (and Firefox, last time I checked). I'm fairly happy with it, but viewing it over Remote Desktop caused some timing issues. I still haven't implemented vertical scrolling text yet either.
On a positive note the audio and video events are pretty useful.
Maybe in another 10 years things will be better.