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!
![CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?]()
How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps?
This article serves as a point-by-point...
![How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide]()
Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices. While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...
![HTML5’s placeholder Attribute]()
HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser; some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful. One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements. The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...
![Smooth Scrolling with MooTools Fx.SmoothScroll]()
I get quite a few support requests for my previous MooTools SmoothScroll article and the issue usually boils down to the fact that SmoothScroll has become Fx.SmoothScroll. Here's a simple usage of Fx.SmoothScroll.
The HTML
The only HTML requirement for Fx.SmoothScroll is that all named...
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