Tag Archives: web development

Experimenting with LESS

I’ve been exploring LESS this weekend as a way to make writing CSS a much more efficient affair. So far, so very good! I’m using LESS.app for Mac OS X to compile my .less files down to CSS with each save. There are Ruby scripts and JavaScript available for interpreting LESS on the fly, but I far prefer to serve up already-baked CSS with the app, which gets bonus points for spitting out minified files. Be careful with the minifier, though, if you’re writing CSS with LESS for WordPress (try saying that three times fast) — it will strip the comment block WordPress needs to identify your theme from the CSS file. There are a couple workarounds for this; the easiest way is probably just to use a minifying WordPress plugin (I use W3 Total Cache’s minifying facility myself), or if you want your server to have one less thing to do, you can spit the minified files out to a different location, reference that location in your HTML, and just use style.css as a way to identify the theme and for nothing else. (WordPress doesn’t require you to store your styles there, but it is generally more consistent to do so.)

Using the app has another great side benefit as its compiler flags errors it finds in the code and tosses up a Growl notification with a brief explanation of the problem — so not only am I writing CSS more efficiently, I’m also writing much more error-free CSS as a result. Win-win.

Who else is using LESS (or its contemporary SASS) to write and simplify CSS?

Is HTML 5 ready for public consumption?

Blue Ion‘s recent launch of a site for Tryon Plaza in Charlotte is very notable in one aspect their blog post doesn’t cover — it uses HTML5 (and not just the doctype — there are actual HTML5 tags at work here). I’d been debating on how much I’d want to use HTML5 in future projects both for ReadWriteWeb (where I have been using the doctype on new projects) and for future revisions of this very blog. If HTML5 (with IE support via the HTML5 shiv JavaScript) is good enough for a quality shop like Blue Ion, it’s good enough for me. ;) Developers, how are you using HTML5 in production projects (if at all)?

Don’t Forget Opera

Rather than wallow in the misery that’s become the Cubs game tonight, I decided to play with my recently-acquired Wii (formerly owned by Duke) a bit, and I realized just how cool it is to have a functioning web browser on my television. I pulled up Twitter Election ’08 and caught reaction to the Senate version of the bailout (which passed) as it scrolled by in real-time. The Election site is already cool, but having that on my television was even cooler.

The Wii fascinates me. It can’t play DVDs without a hack, but yet it can run — and run quite well, I say — rich websites. (I also like the Forecast Channel for obvious reasons. :)) The Wii is quite a powerful little box and I’m looking to experimenting with it more.

I think devices like the Wii stress the importance of embracing Web standards and a strong commitment to testing sites on multiple platforms, including Opera. Opera’s a nifty little browser; few people use it on their PC, but it’s literally everywhere else, whether it be in the Wii or on portable devices (many BlackBerry users, including myself, use Opera for the Web instead of the built-in RIM browser). Its share on traditional desktop machines may be low, but anything outside of it and you’ll run into Opera. It’s increasingly in any developer’s best interest to ensure that a site they create is accessible not just by computer but by mobile devices and other specialty devices like the Wii; anytime those devices fail to work, that’s lost audience. It’s easy to do this, too! Coding to standards usually will do the trick, as properly-written, semantic HTML with style sheets for layout will gracefully degrade if the need arises, making your content — the most important thing on your site — as accessible as it would be as if it were on a computer.