Rob Gravelle

Drag Files Into the Browser From the Desktop using jQuery Event Binding A little while ago, I wrote how to use HTML5 Drag & Drop and JavaScript FileReader to accept image files from the Desktop and display them in the browser in an article entitled Drag Files Into the Browser From the Desktop with HTML5. […]

Shortly after my article on Working with Tables Using jQuery was posted, I received questions from readers about how to accomplish other operations on HTML tables. Rather than attempt to answer everyone individually, I incorporated the answers into a new library. In today’s article, I’ll go over some of the functions, including how to insert […]

Declare and Respond to a DOM Element Ready Event In my Respond to DOM Changes with Mutation Observers article, I introduced the W3C DOM4 specification’s mutation observers, which replace the deprecated mutation events. Mutation Observers inform your script of changes to the DOM structure using an asynchronous callback mechanism. Both the types of changes and […]

Create a Simple Automated Slideshow I was looking to present a simple looping slideshow on my website the other day, and it just seemed that all of the plugins I came across were too bulky for my trivial purpose, so I turned my attention to stand-alone solutions. In the end, I found that jQuery was […]

The terms “Web API” and “”API-first development” have been gaining a lot of traction in recent months. Yet, the term API – or Application Programming Interface – is quite vague and may apply to a variety of application development components. At its most general, it’s a set of function/routines, protocols, and tools for building software […]

In the world of front-end web development, testing is not espoused like it is with traditional programming languages such as C, Java, etc… There may be several reasons for this. Testing is often perceived as a time consuming and a difficult task. Moreover, a lot of developers are simply unsure on how to go about […]

Virtual Reality – or VR – has been presented to us in several movies, from 1992’s Lawnmower Man to the slightly more recent Matrix series. Back in the real world, delivering a true VR experience has been a challenge to say the least. That’s because our brains are a lot tougher to fool that we […]

Lazy Loading Images using the HTML5 “data-src” Attribute According to the HTTPArchive site, as of 2015, images accounted for 737 KB of 1180 KB of average page size – about 63 percent. Even if developers jump through hoops to optimize and minify JavaScript and CSS to make them as small as possible, those actions can […]

A recurring task I have as developer of the GoodFoodTalks.com site is importing restaurant chains into the database via CSV file. In trying to map their address formats into ours, I tried out several online address parsers. What I discovered was that you can’t expect any automated process to be able to handle improperly formatted […]

Front-end web development could once be described as a waking nightmare, what with the variety of browsers, use of proprietary syntaxes, lack of compliance, etc… Fast forward to 2016, in many ways, things have only gotten worse. Now we have a gazzilion screen resolutions to contend with, a lot of bleeding-edge technologies emerging, and an […]

A Guide to Using CSS Variables Web designers accustomed to using CSS preprocessors are no strangers to CSS variables, but for those of us who are not, CSS variables are now officially part of the CSS specification. CSS variables, or more accurately, as they are called in the spec, CSS custom properties, can be useful […]

Serving up Base64-encoded Custom Fonts There is some debate among web developers about the performance advantages of embedding images and fonts directly into the page using Base64 encoding. Some contend that it improves performance by keeping http requests to a minimum while others argue that the file bloat caused by base64 encoding offsets any gains […]