UI and frontend software design and consulting since 1991
Nicholas Zakas is talking about basic principles of scalable [Web] application architectures: While this talk was made in 2013 it is still 100% applicable to modern Web and Sciter (desktop) applications.
Practical investigation on effectiveness of Virtual DOM (React) updates versus direct DOM updates (Vue). Clearly React takes significantly more CPU time for the task of updating 100 items list. That proves once again that there is no silver bullet in Web Front End design. Each task has its own optimal framework/architecture. “Ideal framework” should allow…
I have found Maintainable CSS site exceptionally useful for designing maintainable CSS systems. Modular and encapsulated: Styles don’t bleed or cascade without your permission. Any design requirements: Completely flexible to your needs. No tooling required: But you can use tooling if you want to. Easy to learn: Read the guides and see. Any size project:…
Disclaimer: the game is quite dangerous and may lead to alcoholism of participants even after first game. Play responsibly! Idea of the game: Players, in their turn, name random English word. To this word they add “JS” or “.JS” suffix and go google for it. If google will give JS library or framework with that…
Please consider these tasks: Find all words in text on HTML page and highlight them Syntax highlighting: parse text of <pre> and mark all keywords by changing their color Find all misspelled words in <textarea> highlight them specifically. Currently you can do #1 and #2 by wrapping each text found into <span>s with specific classes…
Quite often in HTML/CSS based UIs we need to hide/show some elements in runtime. Probably the most widespread (and the worst) solution is to set display:none CSS property programmatically. That sounds quite easy at the first glance but solves only half of the problem – it hides – removes the element from rendering tree. But…
Last year it was a jubilee of my BlockNote editor – it is 10 years old now. Quite a serious age for software product I think. BlockNote, in particular its HTML WYSIWYG editing engine, was the very first version of H-SMILE core that works now inside the Sciter. H-SMILE core was used in other software…
We are using URLs these days quite a lot, but not all of us understand what they actually are. By this post I will try to explain their structure and how Sciter/HTMLayout deals with them. Please note that this is sort of informal explanation and I am using term “URL” here while “URI” is more…
Adding basic <video> support to Sciter. The <video> element (behavior:video in fact) is rendered windowlessly as normal DOM element so can participate in animations, transforms and to have other DOM element rendered on it. Here is a screenshot of Sciter made when it is playing video (standard 30 fps rate) under animation and transformation on…
While ago I’ve found article “Inline validation in web forms” on AListApart particularly deep and yet useful. Despite that it was published 5 years ago it is still actual.