Welcome to stillbreathing.co.uk, web designers, developers and consultants

This is me, what a handsome chapThis is the online home of Chris Taylor, web developer and designer from Yorkshire, U.K.. Please take a look around using the menu below, click here if you have any questions or would like to contact me.

Being married to a geek

Thu May 22

Which my wife is, of course. Thanks to Jonathan I have a great joke that I would find hilarious if I ever had the guts it say it. She wouldn’t get it, though, which may be good or bad.

Anyway, the joke:

Geek: Get me a sandwich
Significant other: Aren’t you missing the inportant word?
Geek: Oh yes. sudo get me a sandwich

As you may have guessed this is just a quick update to let you know I’m still alive as I’m still up to my neck in myJournal, which will soon have some little preview screenshots.

Unobtrusive JavaScript password strength checker

Fri Apr 25

I’ve added a couple of new functions to Performer - my easy to use JavaScript library. The two new functions allow you to check the strength of a password as it’s typed into a text box, and also check if a password and its confirmation match. Both update a notification element with a suitable message.

But that’s not all. Some of the older functions, such as the AJAX loader and tabbing functions, have got a little love as well. They now add extra classes to the elements they affect so you can style them easily. This stuff isn’t documented yet, but in a nutshell:

  • When loading some data from a remote page using the Loader function the element which is being updated will have the class ‘loaderloading’ while the loading is happening. Phew, a few too many ‘loader’s there.
  • When using the Tabber function to switch the visibility between different elements in a tag group, the link to the selected tab will have an additional class of ‘tabbercurrent’.
  • UPDATE: the Toggler function adds the class ‘toggleropen’ when the toggled element is being shown. That means you can easily do ‘open’ and ‘close’ CSS styles.

I’ve got lots more ideas for Performer, but time is short at the moment. However this little library - and the fantastic prototype library it’s built on - continue to make my life better.

HTML is still where it’s at

Mon Apr 21

I just read a ridiculous thing at NetworkWorld about the “demise” of HTML skills. It’s in the conext of an article discussing “5 IT skills that won’t boost your salary”. I’ll quote the passage and highlight the relevent parts to save your eyeballs from being assailed by their ad-heavy pages:

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday’s craft in favor of tomorrow’s must-have talent …

As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5% in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don’t see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. “I’m not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills — HTML programming skills,” says Debbie Joy, lead solution architect for CSC in Phoenix.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find that ridicuous? AJAX requires HTML, just like cars need roads, or boats need water. Without HTML skills all the flashy new AJAX development wouldn’t work.

Tell your managers, we need to keep the plain old semantic HTML skills. Without them the web is dead.

HTML, PHP and JavaScript Experiments

Sun Apr 20

I was browsing through some stats for my website tonight and noticed a few people were visiting for my Automatic Image Replacement Engine (AIRE) which I did a long while ago. So I thought I’d do a quick post about some of the other experiments I’ve worked on which are all free for any use (just credit me as the original author).

3hive player - playing the sharing!

A If nifty Greasemonkey script for Firefox which adds a little player for every track found on the excellent 3hive music sharing website. Keep up the good work, boys.

CSS Gantt chart

Show a Gannt chart with just HTML and CSS, no need for images. There’s even fixed-width and fluid-width versions.

Datatable class

A simple datatable class for PHP which will allow you to pass an array of values which will then be displayed as a table. Format cells almost anyhow you like, add optional alternating CSS classes, and lots more options. There’s also a simple explanation of object-oriented programming on that page in case you’ve found it as difficult as me to understand the concept.

Refresher function

Update a part of your webpage with JavaScript the easy way, so now anyone can do that clever AJAX stuff.

Clean URL Capability Checker

If you want to know if your server supports mod_rewrite, the fantastic way to rewrite URLs, then use this little tool.

Zoom Boxes

An experiment with multiple boxes that zoom in and out when clicked. Not much more I can say about that, really.

AIRE - automatic image replacement engine

Fonts are limited on the web, so I wrote this little PHP function that will render single-line text using any font you want as an image. Before you say “but images aren’t accessible!” it writes the images in as backgrouns, leaving accessible text in the HTML. Hoorah.

Confessions of a compulsive view-sourcer

Wed Apr 16

Hi, my name’s Chris and I’m a compulsive view-sourcer. I’ve been a compulsive view-sourcer for several years, but most of the time I keep it to myself and try not to let it affect my family and friends. Sometimes I have a bad episode and then I feel guilty afterwards. Those bad episodes are happening more frequently.

You see, other people might favour crack or LSD, I prefer HTML. It gives me a real high to get some quality semantic HTML - I’m happy for hours. But there’s a lot of bad stuff out there that will just give you a headache; dirty HTML with all sorts of other crud added to it. I try to stay away from dirty code but it’s so much easier to find than the clean stuff.

Take last week. A website I used to be a regular visitor to relaunched with a new design. I went to have a look, but before I knew what I was doing I had right-clicked and viewed the source. Bad mistake. It was HTML, but only barely. Full of tables for layout, spacer GIFs, all the worst additives. I know I shouldn’t have done it, I just couldn’t stop myself.

I felt so dirty and guilty, not to mention ashamed. I had to do something about it, so I cleaned up the HTML. You can see the original version here, and my cleaned up version here.

This is where my compulsion to view sourcing gets hard to handle. I mean, it’s not enough that I see bad code, I just have to do something about it. The website I rewrote is now over 60% lighter when you count code and images, and has a clean and semantic HTML structure. If they get 250,000 visitors a month (but I think they get a lot more than that) with their old dirty homepage HTML that would be 59.6 gigabytes of data transferred. With the new clean HTML it’s cut down to 22.9 gigabytes.

But that doesn’t matter, because I’m never satisfied. I’ll always need another hit of HTML, and while the clean stuff is great, it’s the dirty stuff that’s much easier to find. Still, I suppose the first step is realising I have a problem.

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If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised by Chris’ confession there is help available. Visit one of the excellent online support groups and get involved. Together we can stop the supply of dirty HTML to our screens.