In the last year, there’s been a wave of helpful placeholder services. What’s a placeholder? Well, when you’re working on a new website, isn’t it a waste of time to use stock images, cropped to the right dimensions? A placeholder service allows you to automatically use a random image at the desired dimensions with minimal effort.
Jeffrey Way covers up nice Image Placeholder Services such as Place Kitten for Webdesigners.
The one thing while creating .css-Files, which really bothers me is that there is no variability at all. Let’s say you want to change a color value that you have applied to like 20 Style-sets in your css, you’ll need to replace them all by hand. Maybe there are colors slightly different to the color you want to change (i.e. a hover-color) you’ll need to search them all and change them. A painstaking strain.
Sometimes you’ll need to calculate values (e.g. with-values) from another value. CSS has no solution for this, but calculating it by yourself looking for the values you need (There is no DOM in css).
Also in CSS there is that nice “approach” to have some sort of object-oriented style language. Well css has of course inheritance, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a more dynamic structure that allows variables, conditionals and own-functions.
Read on →A common first time project of every PHP-Developer is to write his own Templating System. Templating in pseudo languages with weird syntaxes used to be very trendy and served the matter to draw a line between presentation logic and business logic.
It was also believed Templating-languages would be a suitable replacement for plain-php or your favorite backend language, so designers (who -so the common developer belief- are obviously are some zombie creatures without brains) did not need to learn php. This turned out to be a huge error in reasoning, because usually Designers can code at all. (And if they claim they “can”, they usually suck at it.) Another common problem with Template-Systems is performance: other files are parsed by php in the runtime using slow regex or maybe even reparsed with output buffering.
Being a performance enthusiast it always bothered me that something is parsed and compiled by a language such as php, which is parsed itself, just for the sake of code-clearness. Usually they are not cached, and the set of functions is very limited (output this, loop that). If they’re cached (e.g. Smarty) there are other Problems (just take a look at the “Cache-File”). Futhermore you as a developer need to learn a simpler templating language, which usually sucks. Debugging Template can be a pain, depending on which template System you use.
Read on →