My name’s Mathias Bynens, and I’m a freelance web developer from Belgium. I collaborate on open-source projects such as jsPerf and HTML5 Boilerplate. If that sounds like fun to you, you should follow me on Twitter.
Are you using MySQL’s utf8 charset in your databases? In this write-up I’ll explain why you should switch to utf8mb4 instead, and how to do it.
Continue reading “How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases”…
Are you a Dropbox user? By completing this year’s Dropquest, you can get 1 GB of extra Dropbox storage space, for free. Here’s how to do that as fast as possible.
Continue reading “How to speedrun Dropbox’s Dropquest 2012”…
Are the quotes in font-family: 'Comic Sans MS' required, or not? If you thought the answer was yes, you may want to read on.
Fun fact: var foo = { H̹̙̦̮͉̩̗̗ͧ̇̏̊̾Eͨ͆͒̆ͮ̃͏̷̮̣̫̤̣Cͯ̂͐͏̨̛͔̦̟͈̻O̜͎͍͙͚̬̝̣̽ͮ͐͗̀ͤ̍̀͢M̴̡̲̭͍͇̼̟̯̦̉̒͠Ḛ̛̙̞̪̗ͥͤͩ̾͑̔͐ͅṮ̴̷̷̗̼͍̿̿̓̽͐H̙̙̔̄͜: 42 }; is valid JavaScript. It may not be immediately obvious, but the real surprise here is that the Cthulhu-esque property name is not surrounded by quotes. Intrigued by this, and having written about the similar topic of JavaScript identifiers before, I decided to look into valid property names in JavaScript. When do they need to be quoted? When can the quotes be omitted? And in which cases can dot notation be used instead of bracket notation to get or set a property based on its name?
Continue reading “Unquoted property names / object keys in JavaScript”…
Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them.