HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

Three months into using the Magento e-commerce platform, we take a look at where it can improve and the issues we’ve had with it.

In this article, we discuss changes—some simple and some more complex—to the structure of your code that will make your it cleaner, easier to read, and easier to maintain.

Edgar takes an excruciatingly detailed look at code reuse and recycling. He examines when to just say no and how to best build for reuse, along with the pitfalls and successes you’ll stumble upon along the way.

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.

John Resig posts a great piece on how Firebug is powering the web revolution by letting developers tap into the core of JavaScript and the DOM in general. He goes on to talk about what’s next for Firebug and the wonderful things we can do with it.

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.

There is considerable confusion on the internet about the proper placement of complex business logic when using the MVC pattern. In this post, we look at another pattern we can use to solve this problem in an elegant way.

We show you how to make use of the undocumented dynamic keyword feature for building Google AdWords ads.

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.