Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You “hear” it every time you read a book, newspaper, magazine, or web site—every place ...

PHP 5.4.0 will arrive soon. The PHP team is working to bring to some very nice presents to PHP developers. In the previous release of 5.3.0 they had added a few language changes. This version is no different. Some of the other changes include the ability to use DTrace for watching PHP apps in BSD variants (there is a loadable kernel module for Linux folks). This release features many speed and security improvements along with some phasing out of older language features (Y2K compliance is no longer optional). The mysql extensions for ext/mysql, mysqli, and pdo now use the MySql n...

Recently, I published an article on one of the new features in HTML 5 called Offline Browsing  in HTML5 with ApplicationCache.The response to that article was good, and I was asked to expand on some further points including:how to decide on what files to cachethe implications of caching those filesdebugging the ApplicationCacheSo, that’s where this article will start: where the last one finished.  If you haven’t, you should probably read the previous article before this one.Let’s dive into what resources you and should not add to the ApplicationCache.What Should ...

Skip my post and read this one instead.  It says the same thing, but less offensively.  (Or, rather, more offensively to Facebook and Google employees, less offensive to .NET developers, though the underlying message is the same.)Tuesday midnight edit: After >500 comments, >1000 tweets, and >1000 Facebook likes, I’m closing comments on this thread so we can all get back to work.  The very last comment takes the cake, however, and is a fitting close.  Thanks ez, whoever you are!As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. &nb...

There’s no denying it. I’m just to damn lazy to be an HTML developer. This really sunk in when I looked at a tutorial for doing a jQuery Lightbox – for a client project. The tutorial was titled “Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery” but after reading it over I thought a better title would be “A really freaking hard tutorial on the inane intricacies of doing something that looks simple but in reality is a skein of HTML, Javascript and CSS that no one except an HTML Jedi Master could every come up with “.I must say that I have a totally refreshed...

PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better.In the Beginning, There Was Apache and CGIAnd there was much rejoicing.In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf created the “Personal Home Page Tools,” a set of CGI binaries written in C. These tools looked little-to-nothing like the PHP we know today. Embedded in HTML comments, and using ...

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage.In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage:<?php$startMemory = memory_get_usage();$array = range(1, 100000);echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes';How much would you expect it to be? Simple, one integer is 8 bytes (on a 64 bit unix machine and using the long type) and you got 100000 integers...

1. Use PHP only when it is necessary – Rasmus LerdorfThere is no better source than the creator of PHP, to learn what he can do. Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Since then, the language has spread like a wildfire rate in the developer community, incidentally changing the face of the Internet. However, Rasmus did not create PHP with these intentions. PHP was created for the needs of web development. As is the case with many other projects with open source, have become popular, philosophy or even narcissism has never been the driving force. It wa...