Updated on May 23, 2016 in Learn
The Beginner’s Guide to Ratchet: a Mobile Web App Framework
Ratchet is a front-end framework for building mobile web apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ratchet 2.0 was recently released, so it’s a good time to start learning how to build Ratchet apps. If you just want to see Ratchet in…
Updated on May 23, 2016 in Learn
How to Create Smoother Animations and Transitions in the Browser
In order to achieve smooth transitions and animations, a browser needs to avoid doing extra work on its main thread, the part that’s in charge of handling tasks like JavaScript, style calculations, layout, painting and compositing (more on these later)….
Updated on May 23, 2016 in Learn
How I Rapidly Prototype Websites
(Photo by Andrés Nieto Porras/Flickr) Treehouse students will often ask me which mockup tool I use to prototype websites, and my response is almost always the same: pencil and paper. I feel like when I give this answer, there’s a small…
Updated on May 21, 2015 in Learn
How to Evaluate Front-End Code for Inefficiencies
There’s more to writing good front-end code than knowing every HTML tag, CSS selector, or the latest front-end features and techniques. And as I mentioned in a recent blog post, writing good code takes a lot of patience and practice….
Updated on August 13, 2021 in Learn
How Data URIs Speed Improve Website Speed
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…
Updated on May 23, 2016 in Learn
Building HTML5 Context Menus
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…
Updated on September 23, 2022 in Learn
An Introduction to HTML Imports
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,…
Updated on September 11, 2023 in Learn
Exploring the JavaScript Device APIs
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…
Updated on May 21, 2015 in Learn
Gamepad Controls for HTML5 Games
HTML5 games still have a lot of promises to fulfill, but the W3C gamepad specification is a great example of something that’s going well. The spec is still a working draft, but the prospect of reading game controller data in…
Updated on May 21, 2015 in Learn
HTML5 Games: A Land of Broken Hopes and Dreams
A long time ago on a web far far away there was the promise of HTML5 games. Unfortunately, this future still hasn’t come to fruition. In this rumination, I will explore why that is and what hope HTML5 games have…
Updated on May 21, 2015 in Learn
Using localForage for Offline Data Storage
(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…
Updated on November 16, 2022 in Learn
Should I Use WordPress to Create a Website?
(Photo by William Hook/Flickr) You can create powerful, polished sites with WordPress without learning a lot of coding. Once you’re comfortable with WordPress, you can do in a week or a weekend what could take you a month or more…