Three years ago, my colleagues and I in O’Reilly Media’s Production department made the decision to rearchitect our print-publishing software toolchain to support typesetting print books in HTML and CSS. Doing print layout with web technology was a fairly radical notion at the time (and still is today!), especially in traditional publishing-industry circles where commercial desktop-publishing software continues to hold sway. But we were convinced that aligning our publishing tech with the web stack would pay dividends. Short-term, we knew it would enable us to simultaneously produce print and digital media more efficiently. And long-term, we felt that placing our bets on HTML+CSS was the best way to future-proof our workflows as electronic publishing, both online and offline, continued to evolve.
Transitioning to HTML as our canonical content source format immediately allowed us to realize many benefits, including Web-based authoring and a digital-first approach to next-gen ebook development. Building print templates in CSS also proved to be surprisingly straightforward, once we got up to speed on Paged Media, and the particular dialect of it spoken by our PDF formatter software.

When I’m done staring with fear-induced catalepsy at the vast array of complex and overlapping app building, testing, integration and deployment tools that are quickly amassing around me, I like to take a little break and try to solve a simple problem. The “current page” link is just such a problem.

Despite web pages reaching 2MB performance remains a hot topic. The slicker your application, the better the user experience and the higher the conversion rate!

One question that came up more and more in recent months is how to create an accessible modal dialog with WAI-ARIA. So without further ado, here’s my take on the subject!

This polyfill makes it possible to use attr() like it is defined in the spec.

Animating elements in your mobile applications is easy. Animating elements in your mobile applications properly may be easy, too… if you follow our tips here.

Pure CSS; The content page won't skid to top with overlay on; Works on Mobile Safari

This is a patch for removing the default OS X behavior of always starting iTunes when the play button on the keyboard is pressed. This feature can be useful for a lot of users, but it can also be annoying if you are using VLC, Nightingale or other similar programs that support the media keys.

The application will patch the Remote Control Daemon to prevent it from starting iTunes whenever you press the play button on the keyboard or an external remote control. This will only prevent iTunes from starting, all other functions (like play/pause while iTunes is running) will continue to work as before. The original file is backed up in case you would like to restore the original functionality.

This is a patch for removing the default OS X behavior of always starting iTunes when the play button on the keyboard is pressed. This feature can be useful for a lot of users, but it can also be annoying if you are using VLC, Nightingale or other similar programs that support the media keys.

Using Wineskin technology, Porting Kit can install games and apps compiled for Microsoft Windows® in Mac OS X. It's free, it's simple, it's the Porting Kit.

SleepWatcher 2.2 (running with Mac OS X 10.5 to OS X 10.10, source code included) is a command line tool (daemon) for OS X that monitors sleep, wakeup and idleness of a Mac. It can be used to execute a Unix command when the Mac or the display of the Mac goes to sleep mode or wakes up, after a given time without user interaction or when the user resumes activity after a break or when the power supply of a Mac notebook is attached or detached. It also can send the Mac to sleep mode or retrieve the time since last user activity. A little bit knowledge of the Unix command line is required to benefit from this software. For Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4, use SleepWatcher 2.0.5 (and sources). For Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2, download SleepWatcher 1.0.1. Some years ago, it was a Pick of the Week at Mac OS X Hints.

The easiest-to-use graphical effects are the shorthand filter functions. You apply them with the CSS filter property. The browser manipulates the appearance of the corresponding element before painting it to the page. Filter functions are supported prefix-free in Firefox since version 35 (stable release in January 2015). They have been supported with the -webkit- prefix in Safari, Chrome, and Blink-based Opera for a few years now.

The redesign of my website finally gave me an opportunity to experiment with SVG filters and color manipulation. The duotone look, which was made sort of trendy again earlier this year by Spotify's new brand identity, is based around manipulating the image's color range by modifying the individual color channels.

But lately (several months) I’ve been thinking can we use SVG icons in Social Menu instead of icon fonts. Leland Fiegel picked up my question in Twitter and rolled his own idea. It’s not bad solution but what if we could do this without Javascript.

...And a crossbrowser sticky footer solution

Interestingly I found that there are two actions taken by the browser: firstly on the percentage itself - for example - Internet Explorer 7-11 will truncate any percentage to 2 decimal places, more modern browsers will round to a large number of decimal places.

Care must be taken when implementing icon fonts to ensure a great experience for all users. What happens when your font doesn’t load? What happens when @font-face isn’t supported in the browser? We’ll show you how to implement bulletproof font icons.