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!
![5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...
![9 More Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
With Firefox OS, asm.js, and the push for browser performance improvements, canvas and WebGL technologies are opening a world of possibilities. I featured 9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos and then took it up a level with 9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos, but I want to outdo...
![MooTools onLoad SmoothScrolling]()
SmoothScroll is a fantastic MooTools plugin but smooth scrolling only occurs when the anchor is on the same page. Making SmoothScroll work across pages is as easy as a few extra line of MooTools and a querystring variable.
The MooTools / PHP
Of course, this is a...
![Save Web Form Content Using Control + S]()
We've all used word processing applications like Microsoft Word and if there's one thing they've taught you it's that you need to save every few seconds in anticipation of the inevitable crash. WordPress has mimicked this functionality within their WYSIWYG editor and I use it...
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