When it comes to code for projects that I’m working on, nothing annoys me more than code bloat. All too often people will grab a plugin to complete a single task, which is in and of itself fine, until you realise that the codebase encompasses much more than the functionality that you need, and results in a bulky collection of files and code being tagged onto a site needlessly.
Increasingly I find myself writing my own plugins to accomplish goals, each being coded to achieve a single thing well, rather than trying to do many things at once. It’s easier to use multiple plugins than it is to rip code out of a single plugin. That is the reason that both my isEmpty and Select plugins exist. Today I am adding my Show of Slides Plugin to that list.
CSS gives us a lot of control over how things look and feel in our projects, but I find time and again, that there is a single element that seems to consistently cause issues. The beloved <select> element.
It’s such a useful element to have on a site, yet it seems to have default styling in many browsers that limits what we can do. Bizarrely, I’ve found Internet Explorer to have the best implementation in terms of styling. That’s just wrong.
HTML5 form validation is pretty cool. I’m a big fan, even if it needs to be supported with some client-side magic and server side validation. What I don’t like is when a form tells users that they are doing something wrong... before they have even had a chance to do anything. So I made something to fix that.
