Generated Content by David Storey: A blog about HTML5, CSS3, SVG, ES5/JavaScript and other open web technologies. Also throws in thoughts about design and general geekery.
Visual Studio Code is the new kid on the block in text editor circles. It’s raison d’etre is to provide a keyboard focused lightweight editor that has less of the complexity of a full blown IDE, while trying to provide enough of the powerful features that developers love. While it looks to strike that balance between power and flexibility, it provides a robust extension ecosystem for anything that…
When I write here, I end up writing long winded articles that I fuss over and take a long time to write. Due to this I’ve not written for a year(!) or had a real meaty article in longer than that. I’ve had a bunch of excuses like…I hate the design; when I redesign I’ll post again, but I’ve decided to just get on with it, and write some sorter form posts until I get back into the swing of things.…
Today is Blue Beanie day . With that in mind, it is as good a time as any to let the cat out the bag. Very soon, I’ll be leaving my current company (Plain Concepts), and joining the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft as a full time employee. I think that might even be a first for a former-Opera Software employee. Now, I’m not exactly new to IE. For the past couple of years, first as a userAgent ,…
By the time you are reading this the all new IE Developer Channel will have been released into the wild. This is a new way for the Internet Explorer team to share with the developer community the progress being made in the browser. It is part of our commitment to increased openness, and joins the Status IE site as another method of getting developer feedback, and helping you plan for future IE…
Some exciting news just came out of Build , Microsoft’s developer conference, in San Francisco today. Have you ever wondered what the IE team are developing for the next version of IE, or what their position is on your pet feature? While Chrome has the Chrome Dashboard , IE has traditionally been a black hole. Just check out any feature on the aforementioned dashboard and look what it says for…
One of the great things about our industry is how passionate people are about helping each other learn. Be it articles about the latest and greatest techniques that they’ve discovered, or blog posts about new web platform features that have landed in modern browsers. All this content–often created by people in their spare time–has one downside: it is often unmaintained, and with the frequency that…
With the introduction of IE11, all major browsers now support the Fullscreen API. However, due to prefixes and differences between the specification and early implementations, you may need to update any code you have that makes use of this feature. When I looked through the top search results on Google, none of the results showed both the latest syntax for all features and the ms prefix. In this…
While most CSS features are defined by the CSS Working Group and either included in CSS Level 2.1, or individual CSS Modules, there are a surprising number squirrelled away in various other specifications. These may or may not have been worked on in conjunction with the CSS WG, but as many probably get overlooked, I thought I’d list them in a blog post so that I can find them later. How many did…
In this review of Internet Explorer 11, I’m going to attempt to ascertain if it can actually be considered a modern browser. There has been much written about IE since Microsoft allowed to to stagnate with IE6. There have been a number of jokes written about IE; you probably reconigse them, as they are hardly original and get repeated ad nauseam. There is the one about how slow IE is, then how…
One of the arguments in favour of native vs. Web is that of user experience; particularly when it comes to scrolling. A typical interaction on touch screens (especially tablets) is the sideways swipe to flip between items, such as the next/previous page or photo. Native apps handle this…well…natively. The platform deals with it, so the performance is good, and the behaviour is consistent between…
In a previous blog post, I covered vertical text using CSS writing modes . At that time, it was possible to use vertical text in both IE (and has been since version 5.5) and WebKit. Since Opera switched to Blink, it now also joins that list. However, at that time, the support for more advanced control of glyphs within a vertical layout was very limited. While the support does remain limited, the…
In my previous post, I introduced the Internationalization API . In this follow up I will show some tips and tricks for using the API and working around issues I found will writing that post. Setting the locale based on the document language In the previous blog post, I mostly set the locale by assigning it to a variable at the top of the JS file. Outside of small demos, it would be best not to…
If you have ever tried to write an application that supports multiple languages, I’m sure you will agree that it can be a complicated process. While there are obvious issues, such as translating the text, there are also differing conventions between countries on how things like dates and numbers are formatted, or how letters are sorted. Even just between the different versions of English, there…
There was a recent article on Softonic claiming “ Microsoft’s browser benchmark cheats, gives IE 11 speed crown ”. I attempted to comment on the article, but it seems that they are being eaten by the site’s comment system. Instead, I’m posting it here, as I think there are some important inaccuracies that need highlighting. After all, “cheating” is a serious allegation. The evidence doesn’t…
The humble var keyword has been with us since the very beginning of JavaScript. With ECMAScript 6, we’re gaining new ways to declare variables and even constants. Now that browser support is starting to improve, I’d like to take the opportunity to run through what we have now, what is coming up on the horizon. If you have any experience with JavaScript, you probably know at least something about…
The first preview of IE11 has just been released. Let’s see what is new so far. I’ll update this post as more information becomes available. The user-agent string The new user-agent string for IE11 is as follows: Desktop: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko Experience formerly known as Metro: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; Trident/7.0; Touch;…
A build of Windows–codenamed Windows Blue–was leaked onto the internet recently. What does this tell us about what is coming in IE11? First a disclaimer: the information in this post all comes from public sources. I have not run the leaked build myself, and although I am helping Microsoft with the userAgents community, I have no inside knowledge of current or future plans for IE11. This post is a…
Languages with latin-based writing systems such as English are typically written left to right, and from top to bottom. However, there is a whole different world of writing modes out there. CSS3 Writing Modes allows you to use these in your web sites. Read on to find out what you can, and can not use right now. Introduction to writing modes If you’re from anywhere outside of East Asia or the…
CSS3 Text provides the ability to apply hyphenation to text, via the hyphens property. While this is all well and good, it doesn’t provide the fine grain control you may require to get professional results. For this, let me introduce to you CSS4 Text . Applying bog standard hyphens Many of you are probably aware of the hyphens property, and what it is used for. It has long been considered a bad…
I have been spending quite a bit of time recently helping out with compatibility issues on sites such as StackOverflow and the MSDN forums . It is often difficult to give helpful advice, as the reporter doesn’t give sufficient details to debug the problem. Instead of repeatedly typing the same message in each thread, I’ve distilled some points here, that may guide you when reporting your web…