Rob Gravelle

CSS Cross-browser Text Rotation CSS Cross-browser Text Rotation All of the major browsers support some kind of text rotation, in order to enable text layout for non-Latin languages like Japanese and Arabic. Having said that, the exact mechanism for accomplishing text rotation differs from vendor to vendor. All support one or more CSS properties that […]

 The Evolution of Event Handling Once upon a time, developers added event handlers directly to an element in the HTML code using an “on…” attribute: That was awful because you could only attach one handler to a given element at a time and added JavaScript code to the HTML source. In time, browsers implemented the […]

JavaScript’s support for nested functions allows developers to place a function within another so that it is only accessible by its parent. This makes nesting helper function the ideal way to keep a function tightly coupled with the method which it supports. The downside to this model is that it tends to result in many […]

Welcome to the conclusion of the Create a Win/Loss Chart with PlotKit article. In that tutorial, we differentiated our Win/Loss chart from one in which the value of each column is either 1 or -1, where 1 denotes a win and -1 a loss. Ours more closely resembled a positive & negative bar chart, whereby […]

With Halloween just around the corner, I’ve decided to tackle a particularly frightening topic: JavaScript arrays. You see, JavaScript arrays are not quite like those of more restrictive languages such as Java, in that they are sparse arrays. That means that they can contain gaps between elements, gaps where the unwary can fall through or […]

You’ve got a new visitor to impress with your web pages: the web bot. You’ve no doubt heard of them, those spider apps that follow links from one html document to another, collecting information for search engines, companies, and God only know who else. In the past, web bots were content to read your headings […]

I recently wrote about liquidx‘s PlotKit in an article entitled Easy HTML5 Charting with PlotKit. It’s a JavaScript charting library that includes support for both the HTML5 Canvas and SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer as well as an emulated canvas for Internet Explorer. I came a across it while looking for a tool to help […]

There are a lot of ways to create Objects in JavaScript, perhaps even more to integrate inheritance into them. Just when you thought that you’ve seen every possible way to create JS objects, I’m here to announce that there’s yet another: the new Object create() method. Wouldn’t you know it, there are some pretty good […]

I once worked with a development team that eschewed the use of JavaScript because it was difficult to test. Now this was a few years back, but maybe they didn’t look very hard for JS testing frameworks. If they had, maybe they would have come across Pivotal Labs‘ JsUnit Framework. Dating all the way back […]

In the Guide to the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript Library, I introduced Alex Gorbatchev’s popular SyntaxHighlighter library. As the name suggests, it’s purpose is to display source code or specially formatted text in color-coded schemes to highlight key syntactical elements. The code that determines which elements get assigned what color are called brushes. In this article, we’re […]

I think that it’s fair to say that most people would rather create JS objects using a wrapper of some type than from scratch. That’s why pretty much every JS library includes some object creation functionality. In fact, now there are even a few libraries that specialize in nothing but objects. Today, I’d like to […]

Easy HTML5 Charting with PlotKit With browser support for both the HTML5 Canvas and SVG on the rise, it should not come as a surprise that libraries have begun cropping up to help us turn our data into visually dazzling HTML charts. One such library that I recently gave a try is PlotKit by liquidx […]