Ardamis » script.aculo.us http://www.ardamis.com Ardamis is a blog about web development and technology in general. Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:26:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Web development tools http://www.ardamis.com/2010/08/15/web-development-tools/ http://www.ardamis.com/2010/08/15/web-development-tools/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:39:17 +0000 ardamis http://www.ardamis.com/?p=842 A collection of web development tools for building better sites more easily.

Frameworks and scripts

HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass’s base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.

scriptsrc.net is a collection of script tags of the latest versions of a range of JavaScript libraries.

Modernizr adds classes to the <html> element which allow you to target specific browser functionality in your stylesheet. You don’t actually need to write any Javascript to use it.

Images

placehold.it is a quick and simple image placeholder service.

Text manipulation

TextFixer is a collection of online text tools. Remove line breaks from text, alphabetize text, capitalize the first letter of sentences, remove whitespaces, and uppercase text or lowercase text.

XHTML

HTML Minifier will minify HTML (or XHTML), and any CSS or JS included in your markup.

CSS

CSS3 Generator is an awesome code generator for CSS3 snippets, and shows the minimum browser versions required to display the effects.

proCSSor is an advanced CSS prettifier with tons of formatting options.

JavaScript

Online javascript beautifier will reformat and reindent bookmarklets, ugly javascript, unpack scripts packed by the popular Dean Edward’s packer, as well as deobfuscate scripts processed by javascriptobfuscator.com. The source code for the latest version is always available on github, and you can download the beautifier for local use (zip, tar.gz) as well.

Fonts and Typography

Fontshop.com has written A Field Guide to Typography to get you excited about fonts and typography.

Typetester is an online app for comparing different fonts for the screen, you can test up to three fonts at a time and choose the one you like. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.

A quick chart of the fonts common to all versions of Windows and the Mac equivalents, or a more extensive matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite.

<html>ipsum has Lorem ipsum already wrapped in HTML tags. Pre-made paragraphs, lists, etc…

More resources at: 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography and 21 Typography and Font Web Apps You Can’t Live Without.

Colors

Color Scheme Designer.

Markup

Google Webmaster Tools’ Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to check that Google can correctly parse your structured data markup and display it in search results.

]]> http://www.ardamis.com/2010/08/15/web-development-tools/feed/ 1 Interrupting a script.aculo.us event http://www.ardamis.com/2008/10/18/interrupting-a-scriptaculous-event/ http://www.ardamis.com/2008/10/18/interrupting-a-scriptaculous-event/#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:18:10 +0000 ardamis http://www.ardamis.com/?p=83 A client wanted me to implement a drop down contact form that was triggered when the cursor hovered over a button in the site’s navigation. This was no problem, and I delivered some code using script.aculo.us‘s blind effect. A few hours later, the client contacted me and said that as he moved his cursor around the screen, he kept accidently triggering the contact form as the cursor moved through the element, and couldn’t I find a way to make the action a little more deliberate.

As far as I can tell, there is a way to delay a blind effect in script.aculo.us, but no way to stop the effect once the delay’s countdown has begun.

I searched around and came upon a w3schools JavaScript tutorial about timing events and the setTimeout() and clearTimeout() methods. This was exactly what I needed. By calling a function that started a countdown to the event rather than the event itself, and later calling a function that cancelled the countdown, it is possible to abort the drop down action if the mouse was moved out of the element within a specified time interval.

The code snippet below assumes you have links to the script.aculo.us and prototype libraries in place already. As the cursor enters the link, the startForm() function is called and a 500 ms timer begins. If the cursor moves out of the link, the stopForm() function is called, and the timer is cancelled. If stopForm() is called before the timer finishes counting, the effect never happens.

The client’s happy and I learned something useful.

The Code

<script type="text/javascript"><!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--
var t
function startForm() {
	t=setTimeout("Effect.toggle('contactform','blind')",500);
}
function stopForm() {
	clearTimeout(t);
}
//--><!]]></script>

A simple demonstration of how to implement this using inline JavaScript (a no-no).

<ul id="nav">
	<li><a href="#">a link</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">a link</a></li>
	<li><a href="#" onmouseover="startForm()" onmouseout="stopForm()">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="contactform">
        <!-- the form goes here -->
</div>
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