Best of JavaScript, HTML & CSS – Week of November 25, 2013

The US holiday last week may have delayed my post, but it didn’t lead to any shortage of great content. Some highlights this week include a look at how the Polygon pages for the Xbox One and PS4 were created (they were very well done), a look at how you can use Grunt to automate the process of verifying coding standards and an update to PhoneGap.

Tutorials

Great overview by Vox Product on how they created line drawings for Polygon’s console reviews using SVG animations.
Polygon feature design: SVG animations for fun and profit

Sara Soueidan explores several techniques for creating textured text or applying a background to text.
Techniques for Creating Textured Text

Landon Schropp shares a list of 8 HTML elements you ought to be using but probably are not.
8 HTML Elements You’re Not Using (and Should Be)

Ariya Hidayat continues his series on building a JavaScript kinetic scrolling example.
JavaScript Kinetic Scrolling: Part 2

The HTML5 meter element is designed to be used to represent a scalar measurement within a known range and Pankaj Parashar shows how to use it.
The HTML5 meter Element

Oleg Solomka explores the possibilities of SVG icons for the web.
SVG Icons FTW

CSS on Sails is a set of development standards for converting PSDs to HTML, WordPress and Email.
CSS on Sails: A secret compass for PSD to HTML conversion

David Walsh created a system based on media queries and the z-index communicate to JavaScript which CSS media query the user is viewing in at any given time.
Device State Detection with CSS Media Queries and JavaScript

Libraries and Frameworks

Walk through building a 2D Asteroids-like browser game using JavaScript and the PhysicsJS library from Jasper Palfree.
Building a 2D Browser Game with PhysicsJS

Gavin Lazar Suntop explains how to establish JavaScript coding standards for your team and then verify them automatically using Grunt.
Eliminating Code Smell with Grunt

Victor Savkin compares and contrasts the approaches of Backbone and Angular.
Contrasting Backbone and Angular

Maciej Sopyło shows how to get started using Three.js to create an animated 3D cube, particles and smoke.
WebGL With Three.js: Textures & Particles

Mobile

PhoneGap is now a key feature in the Sencha Touch mobile workflow and Ross Gerbasi shows how it works.
Leveraging PhoneGap within Sencha Touch

Andy Trice shows how to implement the card UI in HTML and CSS for a mobile application.
Implementing the “Card” UI Pattern in PhoneGap/HTML5 Applications

Addy Osmani examines some tools that provide cross-device testing capabilities.
Synchronized Cross-device Mobile Testing

New and Updated Libraries and Frameworks

PhoneGap 3.2.0 is focused on stability and includes various bug fixes and enhancements for all platforms.
PhoneGap 3.2.0 Released

Responsive Comments is a client side solution to conditional loading for responsive web design using comments.
ResponsiveComments

List.js is a JavaScript library that makes HTML lists or tables flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable.
List.js

connect-cache-manifest is an Express/connect middleware to generate an HTML5 cache manifest file.
connect-cache-manifest

Etc.

A full post-mortem on a recent nom failure examining how it works, what went wrong, and changes to the previous architecture to fix it.
Keeping The npm Registry Awesome

Colorpeek is an app to help you quickly see and share colors in whatever CSS notation you wish.
Colorpeek: A Simple Way to See and Share CSS Colors

James Holmes walks through the WebGL boilerplate project that recreates the classic Hover 3D game.
Behind the Scenes with Hover and WebGL

Brian Rinaldi

Brian Rinaldi is the founder of Flippin’ Awesome. Brian works as the Developer Content Manager at Telerik (though this site is not affiliated with his employer) focused on ensuring that the Developer Relations team creates top notch content for the web development community. Previously, Brian focused on publishing HTML, CSS and JavaScript developer content for the Adobe Developer Connection at Adobe.

Brian has published in a variety of technical publications over the years, has presented at numerous conferences and events and has served as a technical editor on a number of books.

You can read Brian’s blog archive with 9+ years of content at remotesynthesis.com (he still posts, infrequently). You can find a full list of Brian’s past publications and presentations. Follow Brian on Twitter @remotesynth.