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Matt West is a designer at Wildbit, creators of Beanstalk, Postmark and DeployBot. He also wrote the book HTML5 Foundations. You can catch him on twitter as @MattAntWest.
February 8, 2023 in Learn
Something that comes up often when building front-end web applications is the need to change the classes applied to an element. For some time elements have had a className attribute which allows you to retrieve a string containing the class…
January 18, 2023 in Learn
The browser developer tools console is one of the most powerful tools available to you when it comes to debugging your front-end web applications. The console has an API that provides several methods that make debugging easier. It’s not uncommon…
November 25, 2022 in Learn
The <datalist> element is a new addition in the HTML5 specification. The <datalist> element allows developers to create native autocomplete dropdowns for their web applications. This type of user interface component is used on form fields and search boxes as…
November 25, 2022 in Learn
The LocalStorage API gives front-end web developers access to a simple key-value datastore that can be used to save data on a user’s computer. Saving data on the client side can help speed up the performance of your web applications…
September 28, 2022 in Learn
(Photo by Kenny Louie / Flickr) An exciting feature of the HTML specification is creating custom HTML elements. These allow you to create your own HTML elements along with their own JavaScript API. This can be useful when building interfaces with reused…
April 23, 2014 in Learn
(Illustration by Mat Helme, Treehouse) Perceived Performance Is a Measure of How Quick a User Thinks Your Site Is, and That’s Often More Important Than Its True Speed Performance is important. It can mean the difference between making a sale,…
March 27, 2014 in Learn
As our websites grow more complex, web performance is becoming an increasingly important topic. There are many different strategies that you can employ to improve the performance of your websites. These include optimising images, combining multiple CSS files, or setting…
March 25, 2014 in Learn
A lesser known feature of the HTML5 specification is context menus. These allow you to add custom items to the menu that appears when a user right-clicks on the page. Using JavaScript, you can then control the actions these items…
March 21, 2014 in Learn
HTML imports is an exciting technology that promises to change how we build websites. Imports allow you to include HTML documents within other HTML documents. This has a number of benefits, including the ability to create a bundle of HTML,…
March 19, 2014 in Learn
Photograph by Jeremy Keith (adactio) The mobile revolution has completely changed how people access the web. It’s only natural then that the web should evolve to better suit the plethora of devices on which it’s now accessed. When the web…
March 15, 2014 in Learn
(Photo by Erich Ferdinand/Flickr) An important step on the path toward robust, offline web applications is the ability to store data in the user’s browser. Technologies like IndexedDB and localStorage have provided this functionality to web developers, but they are not…
March 12, 2014 in Learn
Conversions don’t always equate to purchases or transactions, they can also appear in the form of newsletter sign-ups and contact forms. Contact forms are one of the most common features on a website. Standard contact forms work just fine, but…