Some people may have noticed that the frequency of my articles has died down a bit over the past month or so. I’ve been adding posts at a new location now for work.

Many of the topics are the same, if your interested in checking it out head on over to Fresh Tilled Soil: Web Resources and take a look.

I’ll continue to post on kevinleary.net as well, but not as often. I’d say that I plan to average 2-3 new posts per month.

Thanks again for reading!

Here’s a common web development scenario: How do we highlight the current page in a navigation seamlessly and dynamically? The answer is jQuery.

See a Live Demo

My recipe for this common scenario involves a mixture of CSS and JavaScript with a dash of jQuery.

XHTML

<ul id="navigation">
	<li><a href="about-us.html">about us</a></li>
	<li><a href="our-products.html">our products</a></li>
	<li><a href="blog.html">blog</a></li>
	<li><a class="active" href="login.html">login</a></li>
	<li><a class="active" href="contact.html">contact</a></li>
</ul>

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Web standards books praise the idea of separating presentation from content. Unfortunately doing so is harder said than done in the professional world. When I begin working on a re-design I usually find myself spending countless hours re-formatting content, so what’s the point? If a client wants specific information laid out as an unordered list (or outline) one day and tabular data the next you’ll find yourself rebuilding the pages structure.

The best solution to this ongoing probably is to utilize XML to describe the content as best as possible. The one problem with this approach is that parsing that XML into usable code is usually a big pain in the ass. With PHP5′s implementation of the SimpleXML object parsing XML is finally as simple as it should be.

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