HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

It’s surprising how effective a couple of great icons can be. They add polish to an application and really ties the room together, so to speak. And while some applications really need a consistent look-and-feel and thus, custom icons for every single course of action, a lot of the time, there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. Especially when there are royalty-free, attractive icons available in convenient, aesthetically-homogenous packs. Mmm, icon packs.

We take a look at Facebook’s redesign and what we think of their new news feed page: two steps backward and for no good reason.

Internet Explorer 6 presents developers with a challenge: Continue developing around its quirks and creating hacky, bloated code, or stop making things work for it and risk alienating over a quarter of your potential web audience. We look at who’s doing it and what we think about phasing out IE 6 support.

HTML 5 is coming, at some point. So we look far down the road and explore some of the features it will bring us. When it finally gets here. 10 or so years from now.

Recently, we needed to come up with a method of implementing a rating system for a client’s application. The decision came after the client agreed that the results would effectively be useless due to the potential for manipulation by users but the end goal of giving warm fuzzies to visitors is what was more important. This is through no fault of programming but due to the fact that transactions don’t occur on his site and therefore we had no easy way of confirming the review given was authentic.

Build a favicon for your website. Or just learn what a favicon is. (Hint: it’s the graphic that appears next to our site address.) It’s free and easy and you need to have one.

Maintaining state in multiple instances of a browser can cause unwanted side effects. The common solution is to rely on Ajax, but making use of Ajax requests in an environment with a flaky network creates further problems, all of which we address after the jump.

As the guys around the office are well aware, I tend to obsess over minor details in our code. Whether it be fixing code to be tabbed properly or renaming variables to better fit naming conventions of a project, the developers hate when I meddle into the codebase. Is it my fault that sometimes I miss a few when I go through and rename variables, functions, methods, etc? Clearly, no. The joys of being the boss.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to quickly and easily use single images and a bit of crafty CSS to create easy image rollovers. You can also use this technique to simplify browser caching of your images by storing multiple images in a single “meta image”, so to speak. (There are some reasons not to do this, though.)

There are plenty of resources for code snippets and quick-and-dirty ways to accomplish all sorts of things in JavaScript. Back before AJAX achieved any sort of prominence, they were all form validators, alert systems, calculators and the like. Now that AJAX has hit the “Web 2.0″ scene in a big way, (in large part typifying the “Web 2.0″ application interface) more and more users are clamoring for ways to add those cheeky interface elements that they see on Flickr and elsewhere to their own attempts at the web.