CSS3PIE

Web programmers are a diverse group of people, meaning that the way one thinks is entirely different from another. We all have our styles, our practices, our points of view, so no two programmers are the same. However, go talk to any programmer, even 100 of them, and they will all agree on one thing: IE needs to die. With all the new technologies being discovered and created, all of the new browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) have been really good about keeping the fire under their feet and keeping up with the game, but IE is the world's worst about trending. For instance, say you wanted to add a border radius, gradient color, and a box-shadow to a box:

If you are currently in any of the newer browsers, you can see that the right box is rendering perfectly. Sadly, for those using IE, these boxes look exactly the same. This is because IE is waaaay behind when it comes to CSS3, especially for those still running anything below IE9, which is over half the market. Well for us programmers, who tend to want it to be equal all the way across the board, I give you this: CSS3PIE. CSS3PIE is a script file that is saved as an htc, that gives the ability for IE8 and older to understand CSS3.

http://css3pie.com/

JSLint

Nothing makes a page more user friendly and visually appealing than the addition of javascript to your website. This includes anything from dropdown menus, to gallery slideshows, to pulsing colors, you name it, javascript probably has something for that. Now lets say you wanted to take the reigns this time and write your own custom javascript to do something that these pre-built files are just lacking. Kudos to you, first off, cause you are on the right track to being the best programmer you could be. I would like to offer you a tool that will help you on your way to building this file, called JSLint. As we all know, when it comes to debugging code, you can easily program yourself into a corner, which has the potential to make you quit your project and give up! Well JsLint extends a helping hand to assist you along the way. JSLint is an online system that allows you to take the code that you are working on, paste it in a text box, and it will run tests on it to make sure it is going in the right direction, and keeping your coding techniques in check at the same time. You have many different options to choose from to customize the way the program combs through your provided code, and in turn it will output any errors that it sees in your scripting. Anything from syntax errors to logic errors, it certainly is a helpful tool to let you test function by function so you dont end up building a huge file with an equally huge amount of errors imbedded in it. But it doesnt just stop there! Say you only have a small bit of javascript code that you just pasted in a HTML page, because it was too small to have its own file, or you only wanted it on one page. JSLint will scan that too! Not only will it look through all the js inside <script> tags, it will also scan your html as well for any issues that would interfere with your script and give coding advice on your HTML coding style as well. As far as CSS goes, it is still in the beta stage, but feel free to try it out, you never know what kind of help it might give to you, but i would suggest another tool that i will describe in my next post

http://www.jslint.com/