kashit - Ehsan Quddusi

Google Chrome has been impressive till date with its light weight, quick startup & performance. Since its introduction, the most sought feature has been the availability of an extension system, the feature currently dominated by Firefox. Finally the extension system is there in beta with impressive 1000+ extensions already in the store after its launch in December 2009.

The main attraction of firefox is its customizable environment for the users to meet their tastes and requirements in terms of themes and plugins. As themes were already available with the chrome, the introduction of extension system brings it closer to firefox in terms of customization.

Here I am listing some of the chrome extensions available for web designers & developers.

CSS Sprites is a technique by which we can combine multiple images in a single big image and position the various parts of this big image with our elements using pure CSS attributes. The primary objective behind using CSS Sprites is to decrease the number of HTTP requests and thus decreasing the request stress on server. The idea behind CSS Sprites is to consolidate multiple images into one sprite and then selectively display portions of this sprite with positioning. It starts by creating a larger CSS Sprite by grouping more than one images (usually icons) together and aligning them in proper grid style to aid the positioning. Then it is aligning used a proper positioning values on the webpages to show their respective images. This way it decreases the number of HTTP requests and thus increases the overall speed of webpages.

HTML 5 is planned to be the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features are introduced to help web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. It is an incremental step forward rather than a bold step as compared with XHTML 2.0 that is coming and which is intended to create an architecture that will become the host language to many other W3C technologies. The ideas behind HTML 5 were pioneered in 2004 by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). HTML 5 was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the W3C in 2007. The HTML working group has published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22nd January 2008. HTML 5 should be flexible to handle incorrect syntax in contract to XHTML where the browser must refuse to render the page at all even if there is just one illegal character or missing close tag. HTML 5 is designed such that the old HTML 4 browsers will escape the new HTML 5 tags or constructs.

.htaccess stands for hypertext access. It is the default name of Apache directory-level configuration file. .htaccess file provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. .htaccess file is placed in a particular directory and the directives in the .htaccess file apply to that directory and all subdirectories thereof.The filename starts with a dot because dot files are by convention hidden files on Unix-like operating systems.

The meta “description” tag gives information about a web page. The first and the foremost reason is, that the content of meta “description” tag, usually called snippet, is the thing which most search engine extracts and shows up in search results. This is the place where chances of people visitng the page can be improved vastly. One has to be very creative and carefull to make sure that the descriptions are truly descriptive and not redundant. Redundant, in the sense, that the title of a page contains some lead text for the page, which usually comes as a link to the content in search results. The content of meta “description” tag should not be same as the text in the title. A potential visitor might be lost by not providing more and relevant information. This also means we are not using the meta information to its full potential.