Code

Poetry? Not likely (though Dan Cederholm wrote some doggerel back in 2006). Here are articles on hypertext markup language, its attributes and other minutiae; crafty hacks tips for your cascading style sheets; JavaScript legerdemain; and tinkering with application programming interfaces.

2013

Scourge of browser vendors everywhere, WaSP buzzed its last in March. Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden celebrated its tenth anniversary in May, and Google Glass was released. Ever broad in its interests, 24 ways tamed Grunt, URLs and GitHub Pages, encouraged readers to write and publish books, and leavened all that with goodies on project management, web typography and SVG.

About the author

Drew McLellan is lead developer on your favourite content management systems, Perch and Perch Runway. He is Director and Senior Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Bristol, England, and is formerly Group Lead at the Web Standards Project. When not publishing 24 ways, Drew keeps a personal site covering web development issues and themes, takes photos, tweets a lot and tries to stay upright on his bicycle.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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2 Comments

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Jeremy Keith

This is great stuff! I’m terrible at regular expressions—my brain just doesn’t seem to want to remember any of it—but this article contains the clearest description of regular expressions I’ve come across.

I thought I’d share a useful little rewrite rule that I use for cache-busting JavaScript and CSS files. You know the story: you make a change in your JavaScript or CSS and you want to let the browser know that it should grab the new version instead of using what it’s got in its cache.

Now, I could potentially just use a query string when I point to my JS and CSS files ( e.g. /js/myscript.js?20131201 ) …but that can cause issues with proxy servers.

Instead what I what I do is point to files like this: /js/myscript.20131201.js

Then I need to tell the server to look for the actual file in /js/myscript.js

Here’s the rewrite rule I’m using:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.).(d).(js|css)$ $1.$3 [L]

It’s basically telling the server that, if the JS or CSS file doesn’t actually exist and it matches the pattern of having two dots before the file extension (with only numbers after the first dot), to look at the bit before the first dot, and look at the bit after the second dot, but to ignore the bit in between (the numbers).

The server serves up the right file, but browsers fetch the new version because, as far as they’re concerned, this looks like a brand new file that they haven’t got in their cache.

That was a terrible explanation, wasn’t it? I now have even more appreciation for how clearly and concise this article is.

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