20Jan 2019 by Amine G No Comments
Animating URLs with Javascript and Emojis

Animating URLs with Javascript and Emojis

Blog
You can use emoji (and other graphical unicode characters) in URLs. And wow is it great. But no one seems to do it. Why? Perhaps emoji are too exotic for normie web platforms to handle? Or maybe they are avoided for fear of angering the SEO gods? Whatever the reason, the overlapping portion on the Venn diagram of "It's Possible v.s. No One Is Doing It" is where my excitement usually lies. Graphically animating URLs is a new thing. So I decided to put a little time into the possibilities of graphical characters in URLs. Specifically, with the possibility for animating these characters by way of some Javascript. Loopin' First off, make sure your page's Javascript code is being labelled as UTF-8 or you're gonna have a bad time putting…
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18Nov 2018 by Amine G 1 Comment
The Power of Web Components

The Power of Web Components

Blog
Background Ever since the first animated DHTML cursor trails and “Site of the Week” badges graced the web, re-usable code has been a temptation for web developers. And ever since those heady days, integrating third-party UI into your site has been, well, a semi-brittle headache. Using other people’s clever code has required buckets of boilerplate JavaScript or CSS conflicts involving the dreaded !important. Things are a bit better in the world of React and other modern frameworks, but it’s a bit of a tall order to require the overhead of a full framework just to re-use a widget. HTML5 introduced a few new elements like <video> and <input type="date">, which added some much-needed common UI widgets to the web platform. But adding new standard elements for every sufficiently common web…
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