Prevent Widows with PHP and JavaScript
One of the small touches you can add to your website is preventing "widows" in your H1-H6 tags. For those who aren't aware, a widow (in terms of text and headings) means only one word of a title wraps to the next line -- a bit of an ugly sight if you ask me. The way to prevent widows with just text is by adding a between the last two words of the text instead of a regular space character. Here are two snippets for preventing widows in your website: one using JavaScript and another using PHP!
// With JavaScript
var text = text.replace(/\s(?=[^\s]*$)/g, ' ');
// With PHP
$text = preg_replace( '|([^\s])\s+([^\s]+)\s*$|', '$1 $2', $text);
As I mentioned originally, widows are not necessarily a bug, but a small visual quirk that just doesn't look great. Keep these regex usages handy so you can prevent such a smudge!
![Write Better JavaScript with Promises]()
You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Input Incrementer and Decrementer with MooTools]()
Chris Coyier's CSS-Tricks blog is everything mine isn't. Chris' blog is rock star popular, mine is not. Chris prefers jQuery, I prefer MooTools. Chris does posts with practical solutions, I do posts about stupid video-game like effects. If I...
![pointer Media Query]()
As more devices emerge and differences in device interaction are implemented, the more important good CSS code will become. In order to write good CSS, we need some indicator about device capabilities. We've used CSS media queries thus far, with checks for max-width and pixel ratios.
Great idea to take care of all headings at once!
Only concern I would have would be search engines. Are there repercussions to adding this markup? Would it confuse/deter proper search engine indexing?
I’m sure Google, etc take javascript into account in some way, but I would do this via javascript instead of PHP to lessen the chances of hurting search rankings (if that’s important to you).
I’ve never seen the ?= operator in regular expression. And I don’t find such in my regex cheat sheet. Can you please explain how this particular reg ex is working? Thanks.
The
?=is a look-ahead operator. It allows you to specify an expression that matches what comes next. In the example abovethe expression is stating that the character after the space must be zero-or-more non-whtie-space characters followed by the end of the string. In other words, it makes sure that it only replaces the last space in the heading with a non-breaking space.
PHP not cancer of the Web