Sometimes it is hard to determine which element to focus. This post provides you with a specific tool to make your choice of candidates wider than just the body or “whatever the browser does”. | Continue reading
There is a new kid on the block with CSS colors. OKLCH is all the rave. We can use it together with CSS custom properties to add easy color themes to our CSS styles. | Continue reading
I worked at importing Unicode data into Codepoints.net’s database, when I encountered a peculiar MySQL error that I haven’t seen before yet: ERROR 1153 (08S01): Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes | Continue reading
A little helper script allows for more comfort when working with make in projects with sub-folders. | Continue reading
A wonderfully elegant way to use Makefiles together with bundlers, that emit several files, are intermediate files. This post explains, how you can use them for easy cross-platform little-setup builds. | Continue reading
The Mozilla Developer Network recently switched its infrastructure. Now, the MDN content is stored in a Github repository in the form of HTML files with YAML front matter. You can think of it, what you want, given their … | Continue reading
Docker as a tool to spin up complex setups quickly also allows for phenomenally fast deployment of packaged applications, that would otherwise be daunting to install. Here are some very useful commands, that make heavy use of this feature for a plethora of different problems. | Continue reading
In this post we will open doors solely with the magic of modern CSS. Using the well-supported 3D transforming properties, we achieve this without a single line of Javascript. | Continue reading
The venerable aspell spell checking utility has gained some respectable powers over the last year. In this post we explore them to add easy spell checking to our Markdown pipeline. | Continue reading
Music sheets typeset with Lilypond have a hardcoded height. This post explains, how to reduce the height to what is actually shown using Inkscape’s command-line interface. | Continue reading
In unit tests you might run in problems, when your code uses PHP built-in functions, that emit certain hard-coded values like session_start(). When you use PHP namespaces, however, you can solve this problem in an elegant way. | Continue reading
What does a minimal usable .git folder look like? Let’s try it out! | Continue reading
This rule takes an SVG file as input and returns two PNGs. One is rendered with 72 dpi, which maps 1 SVG pixel to one output pixel. The other, target@2.png, is rendered with twice the solution to fit for Retina displays. | Continue reading
This small experiment allows to try out interactively the so-called Gutenberg canon for page layout on different page sizes. | Continue reading
If you use RequireJS and jQuery in a project, you might find yourself in a situation, where you embed jQuery before RequireJS, but still need to have the “jquery” dependency respected. This article describes, how to achieve this. | Continue reading
In January 2011 a user at StackOverflow asked, if he should start learning HTML5 / CSS 3 or begin with the older versions. In quite a length I answered the question by explaining my way to web development over the years. I think, that the answer might serve others well, too, who … | Continue reading
The other minute I’ve read an interesting article on the new HTML5 reversed attribute on ordered lists, that, who would have thought, reverses the counting. The article proposed a JavaScript polyfill. However, I thought,… | Continue reading
In 2009 Tantek Çelik published a draft of a new calendar with 5-day-weeks solving issues with the Gregorian one. I am not convinced, that this is a useful way to re-structure the calendar. Back in the days we set up a calendar for our RPG world together with Sebastian Gerstl and … | Continue reading
The Mozilla developers have received some critics for their decision to remove the version number from future Firefox releases. Many other open source projects, like GIMP, are speeding up their release cycles as well, al… | Continue reading
The question came up quite regularly in the past, what would be an appropriate way to attribute me when using one of the CC-released works. Unfortunately the Creative Commons License itself proves to be no real help here. The license text (as of version 3.0) says: | Continue reading
I’m a sucker for the monokai color scheme, especially in its Vim theme incarnation molokai. It is easy to imagine, how surprised I was, that this scheme wasn’t ported to a ChatZilla motif yet. After all it exists no… | Continue reading
The Mozilla Doc Sprint in Cincinnati was an extremely interesting event to be. This article sketches the deepest impressions I took home with me. | Continue reading
There are several techniques to replace native checkboxes with images. This approach will need no extra markup, degrades gracefully and doesn’t harm a single image. | Continue reading
PHP has been thrashed a lot over the last years. While many critics are doubtlessly true, it is still the most used server-side language to create the web we use today and it is an easy to learn language to get started w… | Continue reading
For one of my recent projects I looked for simple icons, that are free to use. Well, to put it in a nutshell, I didn’t find, what I was looking for. So I fired up Inkscape and created a set that fits my need. Here it is, simple, plain, monochrome and free to use (a.k.a. in public … | Continue reading
The HTML5 specification lists default CSS rules. The article describes how to revert these. | Continue reading
The article describes a way to mark up syntax highlighted source code with a simple pre element while retaining the advantages of other solutions. | Continue reading
The EPUB standard is based on several other, well-established technologies. This makes it easy to generate simple ebooks in this format with the standard libraries of many modern languages. I’ll show here a way to do it … | Continue reading
Many web services allow access to their APIs via JSONP nowadays. This allows client-side JavaScript to access ressources via domain boundaries. However, for several reasons caching ressources locally (on the same server … | Continue reading