A fine example

13 May 2011 · by David DeSandro

Recently, some of my favorite people have taken the time to point out how Isotope is a fine example of developing for the best of what's available.

Trigger CSS3 Animations with jQuery by Thomas Reynolds

Thomas was awesome enough to properly explain one of the coolest features of Isotope -- how it handles CSS3 transforms within jQuery. Implementing transforms via JavaScript is a bit kludgy, as all the various functions -- translate(10px, 20px) and scale(0.5) -- get passed in as one string. This can be problematic when you only want to change one of those functional notations, and leave the other in tact. Isotope utilizes the CSS hooks introduced in jQuery 1.4.3 to keep track of the transforms. This article details how you can use this feature to your own advantage.

Bring your apps to life with CSS by Divya Manian

I'm a big fan of Divya's because she draws a clear line when it comes to best practices. So I was all the more delighted to find Isotope get a mention in a recent talk.

HTML5, CSS3, and DOM Performance by Paul Irish

Isotope portion starts at 9:53

Paul uses Isotope to talk about hardware acceleration. Getting the plugin to use hardware acceleration was no easy task, as I needed to develop all the stuff that Thomas talks about.

It's fantastic to see Isotope get this sort of recognition. I find it encouraging that each of the above mentions discuss not just Isotope's features, but how it has a series of fallbacks and intelligence built into it to enable its features in the best manner possible.