Why frameworks make me cranky

Violin

The past few years have been witness to an explosion of frameworks and libraries: CSS frameworks, WordPress theme frameworks, JavaScript frameworks, PHP frameworks…frameworks for just about any language you might want to write code in.

On one hand, this is great. As developers, we tend to solve the same problems over and over again. It makes sense to take advantage of code that’s already written that solves the problem we’re solving right now. On the other hand, it’s so easy to become over-reliant on frameworks. It’s so easy to solve every issue by looking for a a bit of code somebody else already wrote to solve our problem. Continue reading →

Animate text over images on hover without JavaScript

A couple of months ago, I published a tutorial showing how to show text over images on hover without using JavaScript. When I presented to an HTML5 Meetup Group a couple of weeks ago, I took that idea and ran with it, adding some extra special animations, and I’ll show you how to do it too. Here’s what we’ll be creating:

There are three animations happening simultaneously when you move your mouse over each image:

  1. A zoom effect on the image itself, created by scaling the image up 140%
  2. The text and its transparent black background fading in
  3. The text dropping in from the top

You’re free to use all of the animations or to remove 1 or 2 of them – it all depends on how you’d like your final product to look. Let’s take a look at how to accomplish this. Continue reading →

Radical Inclusion

At WordCamp Las Vegas 2011, I gave my first ever WordCamp talk. My topic was Progressively Enhancing Your WordPress Theme.

I chose that as my topic because I believed then, as I believe now, that progressive enhancement is nearly always the best way to build a website or web application. Focus on getting the content to someone, no matter what device they might be using, or what capabilities they might have. Then work on adding extras to that experience for devices and for people who have the capability to enjoy them.

As the web’s reach expands, the ways that people access it change, too. We take for granted that everyone else is having the same experience on our websites that we are – sitting at a desk with a nice, big monitor or maybe even balancing a laptop while sipping a coffee. But people access websites on gaming consoles, ebook readers, phones (only about half of which are smartphones),  tablets, televisions, etc. And all those different devices have different capabilities. Continue reading →