Category Archives: Behind the Websites

Everything to do with website coding that we can think of. Front-end, back-end, upside and down, you’ll find it here. It also contains our thoughts about Content Management Systems (CMS) and all the other little and technical things.

Behind the Websites: HTML5: I couldn’t (quite) do it

I found it difficult to use pure and semantic HTML5 when dealing with current versions of Internet Explorer. I really tried to adopt the commonly advocated view that it’s okay to require website visitors have JavaScript enabled but settled on a different option I could actually live with.

Behind the Websites: Forms are forms, not lists

I have often seen HTML forms coded as part of a lists, including from some publications and people I highly respect. I believe this to be incorrect.

Behind the Websites: Selectivizr with CSS on a sub-domain

Updating the Soupgiant base WordPress theme recently (among other things we were porting it to HTML5), we needed to decide which shims and/or polyfills to use. We starterd with Remy Sharp’s HTML5 enabling script but another to consider was Selectivizr to improve IE‘s support of CSS3 selectors.

Behind the Websites: A half-baked (CSS) idea

Spritebaker has done the rounds a fair bit in web development circles over the past few weeks. It’s a great idea, done well. The only problem is it has the strange effect of making it seem like the page is actually taking longer to load. I take a look at a possible solution.

Behind the Websites: jQuery 1.5 as jQuery 1.5.0

When jQuery 1.4 was released, the Google URL being publicised by the jQuery team was http://…/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js – while Google had set it up as http://…/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js. I had problems with this seemingly minor difference.

Behind the Websites: HTML5 for Web Designers

The first release from publisher A Book Apart does exactly what I would hope for from the people who brought us the excellent A List Apart online magazine. It simplifies a topic and gets me excited about using new web technologies.

Behind the Websites: JavaScript Localisation in WordPress

I was asked on Twitter recently if it’s possible to pass WordPress data to JavaScript, wp_localize_script() is the tool to do it with.

Behind the Websites: Delay Print Stylesheets Plugin

A few weeks ago I wrote a post in which I adapted an idea from a zOompf article to delay the loading of print stylesheets until after a web page has fully rendered. I’ve decided to convert the code from the original post into a plugin and add it to the WordPress plugin directory.

Behind the Websites: Delay loading of print CSS

Recently I stumbled across an article detailing browser performance with the CSS print media type. In most recent browsers the print stylesheet held up rendering.

The article suggested a solution, which I decided to automate for WordPress.

Behind the Websites: Thesis V WordPress, Pearson V Mullenweg

Mullenweg believes that, because WordPress is released under the GPLv2 license, all themes and plugins developed for WordPress must also be released under the same license. Pearson disagrees. I believe that Mullenweg is wrong. WordPress themes can operate on other blogging platforms with minimal changes.