I'm an experienced web developer, software engineer, and leader. Welcome to my blog. If you need to reach out you can continue the conversation with a tweet to @geedew. I hope you find what you are looking for here. You can also find me on Github and StackOverflow.

The HTML5 Input Event

In the DOM a special event occurs on an <input> or <textarea> element known as the change event [1] [2]. The change event gives a developer the ability to catch input changes. However, it falls short when instant feedback is needed because it will only trigger once the input has lost focus. Immediate feedback could be handled using the keydown or keyup events. Those events are costly (happening often and requires the code to keep state to know of changes actually occurring) and are potentially buggy due to extra logic needed.

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Mustache as a Second Language

The mustache template language is ubiquitous with speed and efficiency. While many different templating engines and languages exist in web development, mustache crosses support for many different languages including PHP and JavaScript. Many times on a project, a point arrives when the project grows larger than the initial thought or intention. Walls are run into and hurdles to slow down work get in the way. Embedding the language, simple strings of communication, into your code is something many projects succeed well at, unfortunately. Once languages lives in the code, the difficulties to altering to a new language increase exponentially. In fact, adding a language becomes such a large project, that it stymies growth and becomes a large feature if not entirely scrapped; whereas it should just be part of the initial design. A unique solution to this that I found though is using the mustache templating language to make the localization process much easier.

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jQuery UI Dialog Accessibility

jQuery UI is an amazing product. It’s not because it offers the best features, or that it offers the best solution, it’s that it offers a large degree of support for years to come. Which is saying a lot for something that is nothing more than JavaScript. It’s certainly something that many enterprises have begun to look at and look for in the development world. At my job at Coventry Healthcare, I’m responsible for the User Interfaces and generally the User Experience across some very highly visible web applications. One of the most recent developments in our line of business is the risk of not having an accessible site (we fall under Section 508 guidelines because of our Medicare/Medicaid users). jQuery UI has literally allowed me to very easily create and maintain large amounts of code so that I can spend more time making sure that it follows WCAG 2.0 and WARIA (which should cover us for S508).

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