Nothing Insightful

Aristo 1.0 Milestone Release

Great news! The Aristo theme for jQuery UI has hit a cleaner and more concise version 1.0 release! I was able to close some issues that were raised on the GitHub repo and do a few little house-keeping things I’ve been putting off. A list of changes made in this release include:

Converted the theme to use CSS3 gradients and effects where possible, greatly reducing the number of images used. Image fall-backs are still provided for Internet Explorer, which are not called by other browsers.
Three issues raised on GitHub have been closed, and another will be fixed in a future bug fix commit.
Updated the theme to work with jQuery UI 1.8.7 by re-basing the theme from the latest Theme Roller version.
Created a demo page hosted using GitHub static pages (a very handy little feature).

In regards to the new CSS3 gradients and effects: I have deliberately chosen a stance of graceful degradation. The Wijmo library (based upon my and others’ work with Aristo) takes a more troublesome stance of “aggressive degradation”. Tough to replicate effects (such as the slider handle) are achieved with CSS3 effects that do not degrade well between browsers. The use of CSS3 overall comes at the cost of the pixel perfect precision that made the work of 280 North so great. Hopefully this is being worked on as we speak, but demo versions I have played with do need polish.