Blog | Kyan

Robin Whittleton
January 05, 2012

Behind our jukebox

If you take on Kyan as a client you’ll soon be aware that we love our music in the office.

We used to use a 3rd party music player, but decided a few years ago to build our own; this gives you a lot more flexibility in exactly how it works.

The interface to our jukebox, showing the controls, status and playlist.

Robin Whittleton
February 04, 2010

Kyan vs. HTML5, round 2

Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.

That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.

Print stylesheets

At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.

The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper <div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating.

Robin Whittleton
December 10, 2008

Easy image rollovers

Recently themeforest.net ran a quick tutorial on how to achieve an image slide effect similar to our homepage. I thought I’d go into some more detail about the design decisions we made.

Robin Whittleton
September 26, 2008

Unobtrusive scripting with jQuery

Here at Kyan we love unobtrusive scripting: scripting that adds on to the top of an existing web page and extends it to add functionality and interaction niceness.

We often use a Javascript library called jQuery to help us add scripting to our sites, and it’s got a nice extension mechanism. Let’s have a look at writing a small jQuery plugin to add a simple piece of functionality to our site: a print link after a news story.