All the websites we build should be responsive; not just to browser speed, but to network condition. In this article I'll introduce the Network Information API, that helps us detect a device’s current bandwidth and allows us to modify our site if the speed is slower than we need. Browser support ... We usually can’t expect support for experimental APIs and in this case, the only two browsers that support it are Firefox and Chrome. In both cases, you need browser prefixes. How to use the Network Information...
Today we have mobile devices that come equipped with everything from cameras to geolocation, and we have little computers in our hands that can do pretty much anything we do with our desktop. One of the key APIs that functions with mobile devices is the Device Orientation API. The Device Orientation API helps us as developers detect the orientation of the user's screen and make the necessary changes to our layout. For example, on YouTube, if you are watching a video and you tilt your phone, the video goes...
One of the big obstacles in designing a game in HTML5 is that the popular gamepad hardware isn't available. Nobody wants to play a game with keyboard buttons, so the arrival of the Gamepad API brings us a lot closer to console-style gaming in the browser. Browser support ... At the time of writing, the only browsers that support the Gamepad API are Chrome and Firefox — the latest version of each working unprefixed. However, the more we use this API, the more browser manufacturers will support it, and as...
The more demanding our web apps become, the more power we draw from devices. On desktop, where we can be sure that the device is plugged into the mains, that's not a problem, but on a mobile device we need to know what the battery is doing and respond accordingly. Browser support ... At the time of writing the Battery API is only supported by Firefox (mobile and desktop). However, it doesn't require a vendor prefix to be supported. The reason I mention desktop is because this API can also be used with any laptop...
If you have done many animations using pure CSS you have probably noticed a small flicker that happens when an element is animated, you may even have used a hack to stop that from happening. Happily hacks are no longer needed, we a have a new CSS property to help us deal with heavy animations and transitions. Why does the flicker happen? ... When you execute an animation, the animation is performed using the browser's software rendering engine which is usually much slower than your computers GPU (Graphics...
CSS3 is evolving in such a way that we can translate pretty much everything we create in Photoshop into CSS code. However one thing we haven't had so far is a text stroke. We can add shadows to text, but until now there was no viable solution for text stroke. Now we have a webkit solution that introduces us to text stroke using only CSS. Browser support ... This property is still experimental and not safe in all browsers but you can also set some defaults that will only act up when the user is using a browser that...
Animating and transversing SVG files with Javascript is actually not such an easy task and plugins like Snap.svg make our lives much easier when it comes to animating our SVG files. This library is one that aims to help Web Developers easily bring advanced SVG features to the Web, with it we can load, animate and even create SVG graphics right in the browser. The creator of this plugin is also the creator or Raphael, also an SVG plugin. The main difference between these two resources is that Snap aims...
CSS is growing more sophisticated all the time, with new tools for us to use. In this article I'll talk about one new feature: clipping with clip-path and masking. clip-path and masking are two properties that push the boundaries of the box model a little further than we've seen before. Browser support ... Happily, browser support is pretty good for clip-path. For desktop browsers it's supported as far back as IE9 (although some older browsers need vendor prefixes, as we'll see). The only real issue...