Originally I wasn’t looking forward to the launch of Google Chrome for one reason - it’s *another* browser which us web developers have to cater for. But since I heard it is based on the not-so-bad WebKit rendering engine I started getting excited. What does this mean for Firefox though - can they compete with Apple and Google (both WebKit)!? The new Google browser is not just another duck in the pond either; they have completely rethought the typical browser interface and have added a bunch of features making the browser experience better for users and the developing experience better for us developers.

A tutorial that I wrote explaining how to develop a degradable style switcher in jQuery and PHP has just been published on NETTUTS.

I thought it would be a good idea to expand on the tutorial for the benefit of those who want to integarete the style-switcher into their own website.

Okay… We all know about the ‘javascript’ pseudo protocol and how wrong it is to use it within links to initiate functions. What I’m talking about here is doing some like this: (please don’t!)

<a href="javascript:func(this)">Linky</a>

There is one valid way to use it though… You’ve probably seen quite a few sites that have bookmark links intended for you to drag the link to your bookmarks panel within your browser. These links are not limited to plain old URLs! - You can actually put javascript within them (with the ‘javascript’ protocol) so when you click on one it can carry out something on the page you’re currently on. These are known as "bookmarklets" and can be really useful!

Lots of "blogs" nowadays have one of those "top links from this month" kind of post every so often. To be honest, I rarely find these posts very useful; most of them seem rushed and contain pretty average links to pretty average content.

So, in rebellion of the above status quo I have put together an awesome list of all the articles which I feel will be useful to the great majority of people who read this. I won’t be doing this regularely - that’s why there are so many. Some of them are very techie, some of them are inspirational, some of them are preaching usability, some of them are just for beginners and some of them are quite old (but still relevant)… Regardless of what type of web developer/designer you are I think there is a mixed enough blend of content linked to, to keep you satisfied.

There are a certain number of stock JavaScript functions which I tend to use on most projects. Normally I’ll create a function if a task needs to be carried out quite a few times. So, here we have a newElement function, a style function and a toggleVisibility function. It’s pretty obvious what each of them do…

This has been around for a while (Probably since the days when WEB 2.0 was still in fashion), but I’ve only seen it utilised on various forums and a few informational sites in the past. Even though most browsers’ "find" function is only a couple of keystrokes away (ctrl+F) I think this search-term highlighting thing is really great and makes it even easier for the user to read and navigate the content of your site!

One of the reasons I think jQuery is the best JavaScript library is because of all the plugins available. There are thousands! So, in this article I’ll be demonstrating the ease with which you can develop your own jQuery plugin!

This is my first jQuery plugin and to be honest I am quite proud of it. It’s nothing complicated - a simple image gallery/viewer. When calling the plugin you specify which images you want to use like this:

$('div.some-images img').gallery();

The script would take all images within "div.some-images" (or whatever you specified) and put them within the gallery.

You can see a DEMO of it here.

There is no doubt amongst web professionals that some browsers are simply better than others. Although we, as web developers are obligated to make our websites totally cross-browser compatible and completely functional on all platforms there is the question of whether it’s okay to selectively enhance the user’s experience (dependent on which browser they’re running).

In my opinion the most misunderstood HTML element is probably the DIV. It’s perfectly okay to use it; I’ve never created a website without using it at least once, but some people use it incorrectly. I’m normally not annoyed about this at all but it recently got to the point when I thought, "hmmm, maybe I should write a blog post about the DIV to show people how sad and frustrated I am about it’s misuse…"