parent selector in Chrome as of today

parent selector in CSS is said to be included in new CSS draft as has() class. A stack overflow comment mentions about it.

Also, on this blog, the author says a reverse selector or parent selector is available with IE and WebKit-based browsers. Chrome was a WebKit-based until Google exited from the WebKit herd. However, in many document, Chrome is mentioned as WebKit-based and there are still lots of WebKit-ness there.
However, as of today, on my Chrome browser on Windows, this parent selector, <, is not available.The version of Chrome browser on my machine is Version 47.0.2526.106 m.

 

 

Google and their web initiatives

What I don’t like about Google is that they try to kill or diminish interest in platform native development.

At first, they weren’t. They introduced picasa program and picture-sharing chatting/SNS program. I was amazed by their insight for GUI and elegant/cute GUI design. However, they shortly decided to kill the picture sharing chatting program ( the rationale was that the program was not quite popular, as far as I remember.)
Then they reduced expose of Picasa program and promoted Picasa web service. Then they started to encourage web development and delayed their SDK development for C/C++.

I don’t like such direction. I know how current generation of developers think about native programming. However, C/C++ programming is fun and you can learn about computers and how it works more. Script language is easy to use, but also they are resource hogs and slow. Well, nowadays CPU is very fast and cost of memory goes down. Also, Google enhanced JavaScript engine and hs tried to fine tune TCP protocol for Web for better efficiency.
So, people can say web programming is the way to go.
However, I still feel limitation in web programming paradigm.
Also, although many web frameworks hides the ugly face of HTTP, but HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not really created for interactivity. Well, AJAX solves it. But still it’s like to find a way to introduce native-app like interation on top of a layer which was not designed for that.

I was a long time web developer. When one tried to become everything, it usually failed in the history of computer.

Currently, AJAX based trend looks to be better than that of PL/1 and Java, but basically I see lots of inefficiency with web based development.

Moreover, when tried to integrate Google services to a native app, it’s cumbersome, and Google don’t provide good document or sufficiently good behavior of API.
Some people would shout what I’m talking about.
Yes. Google’s documentation looks pretty and looks thourough until you actually start to work on them. You see lots of missing information and missing link, or not-so-clear explanation.
It’s better than MS documentation, but it lacks in other area.

I wish Google introduce more C/C++ based platform independent SDKs for integrating their service into native apps.

Customizing a scrollbar in HTML/CSS/JavaScript

This single post contains lots of links for customizing a scrollbar.

StackOverFlow : CSS customized scroll bar in div

HTML parser for Mac and iPhone/iPod touch

While Apple Inc. provides XML parsers based on open source XML parsers, but they don’t for HTML.

One of a good parser I found is Element Parser and its source codes is host at GitHub. However there is no good explanation about how to use it.
So, I took a look at its sample source codes, and its FAQ page. My impression was that it would use CSS selectors.

So, if there are HTML tags like this :

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.1" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://icodeblog.com/wp-content/themes/bluez/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/rss/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/atom/" />
<link rel="pingback" href="http://icodeblog.com/xmlrpc.php" />

To retrieve information for CSS links, search pattern should be :

link[rel="alternate"]

There is a good explanation about CSS selectors at Selectutorial:CSS selectors

JavaScript – Cocoa bridging

If you write web app instead of desktop app, it is wider accessibility. But how to enable desktop features on a web app targeted for Mac or iPhone? You may want to write Objective-C / Cocoa code which calls JavaScript or vice versa.

I found some good articles on JavaScript-Cocoa.

• Scripting with JavaScript in Cocoa explains how to call JavaScript code from Objective-C/Cocoa
• Javascript does Cocoa too
• JSCocoa is a framework with which you can call Cocoa methods from JavaScript. Don’t forget Objective-J, SproutCore and Cappuccino also!

Bespin – In-Browser IDE

Thanks to AJAX, web development became more like desktop application development. Nowadays it is not possible to think computing environment without networking, and network speed is getting faster for non-intranet networking.

Eventually IDEs for developing web application is based on the web browser.
The Mozilla announced such an IDE called Bespin.

I don’t know how it will handle network disconnection case, but if they utilize a cache file of a web browser, there will be no problem.

Here are two screenshots of the Bespin.

Bespin 0.1 running in a web browser

Dashboard, i.e.Project Browser

CSS Animation : very easy and good explanation

CSS Animation is sometimes said to be Flash-replacement for certain areas. I doubt how flexible its animation can be : presentation flexibility, performance, resource usage, and so on.

The WebKit blog article introduces the CSS animation in very easy-reading style. Probably most of advertisement flash can be replaced with this CSS animation, and it would get rid of lots of burden from web browsers. Especially Korean web sites use flash-advertisement very heavily. They are even obstructive. I want them not to use that many advertisement in such obstructive way. But if they once do it, I want it not to degrade web browser responsiveness.

Web developers! Study the CSS animation!!!!!