jQuery Mobile alpha has just been released. It certainly has borrowed from jqTouch (literally) which is not a bad thing, and there will be more confidence in adopting this given the momentum behind jQuery.
Documentation is slim at the moment so we're working off a single demo application for guidance. Looks good so far, although there needs to be support for live/delegate handlers to facilitate DOM manipulation: right now dynamic content injected will not be processed automatically by the parser (you can do it manually).
Nevertheless, loads of controls, transition and styling support. A remarkable achievement for the few months that they have been at it.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Refactoring CSS
SASS and LESS are CSS preprocessors which offer a fantastic way into more structural CSS.
They provide the ability to use variables, mixins, arithmetic and inheritance to create CSS rules, which are then parsed to produce valid CSS. The real benefit of this is that it allows refactoring of CSS, so you can take whatever you've written, and extract commonly-used values / repeated sections, and assign them to variables which can be referenced throughout the CSS. Variables can be given semantic names to make the CSS more readable. Additionally, with nested rules, you can see the cascading hierarchy directly in the code, making it easier to identify redundant rules and repeating patterns.
SASS is a little more advanced in terms of features, but LESS offers a javascript processor, for easier testing and integration. You choose, but either way this is a great step forward. This stuff should be in the CSS spec from the start.
They provide the ability to use variables, mixins, arithmetic and inheritance to create CSS rules, which are then parsed to produce valid CSS. The real benefit of this is that it allows refactoring of CSS, so you can take whatever you've written, and extract commonly-used values / repeated sections, and assign them to variables which can be referenced throughout the CSS. Variables can be given semantic names to make the CSS more readable. Additionally, with nested rules, you can see the cascading hierarchy directly in the code, making it easier to identify redundant rules and repeating patterns.
SASS is a little more advanced in terms of features, but LESS offers a javascript processor, for easier testing and integration. You choose, but either way this is a great step forward. This stuff should be in the CSS spec from the start.
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