innerText and textContent are properties that get or set the text of an element or all its children. Internet Explorer implemented innerText in version 4.0, and it’s a useful, if misunderstood feature. WebKit also has innerText, carefully copying from, and even improving upon IE; and additionally has the standards compliant textContent, which we shall see, is no where near as useful and is in fact quite different. Firefox has textContent but not innerText, and a common mistake is writing code that retrieves one or the other, assuming the result will be the same (it’s not). Opera has the property, but it is little more than an alias of textContent, which to me is analogous to false advertising.
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Plain Text vs innerText vs textContent
Internet Explorer 6 – Stop Enabling Yesterday’s Browser
Internet Explorer 6 in its heyday was a great browser. It raised the bar so high, it stood alone; the other browsers languished in its wake. It had the backing of Microsoft to the tune of $100 million a year in the late 1990′s. IE6 became the darling of enterprise website development using it as the standard to which they would develop. IE hit a peak usage share of around 95% during 2002, 2003. But that is yesterday’s technology, it is time to move on. Read the rest of this entry »
Webkit Unicode Bug
While working on the BetterVideo HTML5 player, I came across an odd bug in Safari; Unicode characters weren’t rendering correctly. What I was attempting to do was create a simple close button — a small box with an “x” in it. But I didn’t want to use the “x” character, I wanted something a little more specific. The Unicode character #&10005 is perfect, and there is a Webdings equivalent of it for Internet Explorer (small case “r”).
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Starting My Own Japanese Business
I’ve officially started my own business, and after months of research and thousands spent on focus groups, I’ve come up with the name “MichaelSoft”. I’m going to sell a product which is a container shaped like an old CRT monitor that holds all of your bow ties. Niche markets are where the money is! Catchy name, huh? I’m going to open my brick and mortar shop behind a Benihana’s. Like my logo? I got it off of Google Images! By the way, the website will actually sell cookies. I hope that’s not too confusing.
Presentation: SSJS, NoSQL, GAE, and AppEngineJS
Eugene’s presentation for SSJS is now available. And the video is here.
Video: SSJS, NoSQL, GAE, and AppEngineJS
Eugene talks about the next wave of web Server-Side JavaScript, NoSQL databases and how they fit into the Internet timeline. NoSQL is just a fad right? Ever hear of Big Table?
The video is posted here, and the presentation will be available soon.
Anatomy of Bad User Experience
It’s amazing that in this day of age, with all information, history, and expertise we have in building websites, that any company could churn out something so patently unusable. The following rant is a true story, experienced while reading one of my favorite bloggers on a major website…
Apple Rumored to Move to New Video Codec
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on HTML5 Video, and suggested that Apple may be the new evil empire for getting the world hooked on the H264 MPEG codec, and then collect massive royalties a few years later.
Why Your Company Needs A Front End Developer
Business often places most, if not all, of their development efforts on the server side. As companies start a development project, focus is usually given to the data that supports their idea, its security, and the business logic. The problem is, this strategy misses the holistic approach that a front end developer offers. The front end guy is often considered the guy who “makes things pretty”. While this description is based on a kernel of truth, it’s more of a stereotype. It’s about as accurate as describing the server-dev as the guy who just “serves data”.
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Video: HTML5 Video Explained
From the July Club AJAX meeting: What is HTML5 Video and how is it different from what we are used to? What problems does it solve, and what issues does it have? Since it doesn’t require a plugin does that mean it’s all open source? In this presentation, we will address these questions and provide some basic terminology for understanding how video works. We’ll show how to embed HTML5 Video API and explore the API, and discuss browser compatibility. Finally, we’ll go over video encoding possibilities.
