This is our sixth article in a series that introduces the latest useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts. The fourth shared a free plugin called GuideGuide with us, and in the fifth we’ve announced Erskine’s responsive grid generator Gridpak.
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You’ve presented the new website and everyone loves it. The design is crisp, the code is bug-free, and you’re ready to release. Then someone asks, “Does it work in Japanese?”
You break out in a cold sweat: you have no idea. The website works in English, and you figured other languages would come later. Now you have to rework the whole app to support other languages. Your release date slips, and you spend the next two months fixing bugs, only to find that you’ve missed half of them.
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Here we are again! Smashing Magazine’s Q&A. Your question could be about a very specific problem you are having, or it could be a question about philosophical approach. Go wild and challenge us!
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It’s not actually old browsers that are holding back the web, it’s old ways of thinking about the Web that are holding back the Web. Nicholas C. Zakas explains why fixating on circumstances that you can’t change isn’t a recipe for success.
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Many people think of PHP, Ruby on Rails or Python and Django when choosing a language to create a new website or when choosing a language to learn to get that exciting new job. .NET, however, seems to occupy a space somewhat apart from this playground of cool kids. It’s always the last to be picked for team sports; it was shouting “Wassup!” at parties well after 2000; and it has been just plain left out in the cold.
I’m not one of these people. In fact, I’m quite a fan of .NET and have found it great to develop with since moving away from PHP in the early days of my career. With its great tools, large community and broad applicability (mobile, Xbox, desktop and Web) it’s both powerful and fun.
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You probably know that testing is good, but the first hurdle to overcome when trying to write unit tests for client-side code is the lack of any actual units; JavaScript code is written for each page of a website or each module of an application and is closely intermixed with back-end logic and related HTML. In the worst case, the code is completely mixed with HTML, as inline events handlers.
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Classes, classes, classes everywhere. What if we don’t need CSS classes at all? What if we stopped worrying about how many classes we’re using and what we should be calling them and just finished with them once and for all?
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Howdy, folks! Welcome to the new incarnation of Smashing Magazine’s Q&A. Your question could be about a very specific problem you are having, or it could be a question about philosophical approach.
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Your website works. Now let’s make it work faster. Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on it runs.
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This article relies heavily on numbers and aims to provide an understanding of character sets, Unicode, UTF-8 and the various problems that can arise.
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