Entries Tagged 'Web Development' ↓

Six Revisions has a post today enumerating seven analytics tools for web developers. Use of these tools will help you determine which parts of the site your users are going to and how they are getting there. Conversely, they can also tell you which parts of the site your users aren’t going to and what you need to work on.

Klaus Komenda has an excellent collection of in-browser tools for web developers on his blog. The obvious ones, Firebug and WebDeveloper, are there, but the article also lists tools for Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari too.

Spket IDE version 1.6.11 has been released. Looks like a bug-fix-mostly release with the addition of a new Theme Builder for Ext. Rey Bango, of Ext, has more information about this new feature on the Ext Blog. This should make integration of Ext-based widgets into your website much easier now that you can skin it easily to match your design.

via Ajaxian.

If you’ve ever been asked “but why is a CSS-based layout better?” and didn’t have a good answer ready, this is a post you have to read. Matt Jurmann on Chromatic Sites gives us Thirteen Reasons Why CSS is Superior to Tables in Website Design. Excellent post with thirteen concrete reasons why you should design your next site using CSS.

Dave Shea writes on Digital Web Magazine today about The Web Beyond the Desktop. This is a good article covering the rise in web-enabled devices and how web developers can prepare their sites to take advantage of these new interactions.

Eric Meyer posted a dose of cautious skepticism on his blog today in response to all of the Acid3 test passing news going around the last few days. He has some valid points - The Acid3 test isn’t exactly a realistic representation of what developers do in the real world. However, I tend to think that something is better than nothing and at least browser vendors have something to aim at. Hopefully some of these criticisms will be taken to heart for a more comprehensive, real-world, reference test for browsers in the future.

Both Opera and WebKit have passed the Acid3 browser test. What is Acid3? It is a test page you can run that scores the browsers ability to render, pixel for pixel, a reference page. Acid3 not only tests CSS positioning and features, but also tests a browsers ability to manipulate and script DOM elements. Now if we could just get Firefox and Internet Explorer to pass, web developers would have a huge toolkit that would be cross-browser compatible without needing special hacks for specific browsers.

The Yahoo! developer network blog has posted slides from a talk Stoyan Stefanov made at the PHP Quebec Conference. In the talk there are twenty tips for maximizing the performance of your web pages. These tips are in addition to the regular ones you can get from YSlow.

Google has launched a new visualization API for generating graphs, charts, and other types of visualization widgets. You can see some examples of what you can do at their gallery. Documentation for the API can be found here.

Joel Spolsky has decided to weigh in on the IE 8 Standards Mode debacle. His post describes the decision Microsoft has to make in great length, complete with Martian Headset analogy. A few reactions to Mr. Spolsky’s article can be found here and here.