The Department of Biological Sciences seeks to recruit two permanent, full-time lecturers.

General Biology: The successful candidate will teach introductory biology for majors, covering topics in basic cellular and molecular biology, genetics, physiology, ecology and evolution.  The candidate will also teach a core laboratory course for biology majors that provides skills needed for upper division laboratory courses.

Physiology: The successful candidate will teach an upper division course and its companion upper level laboratory course in Animal Physiology. The candidate will also teach a required introductory course in general biology for allied health majors.

Successful candidates will have a Ph. D. in a relevant area (or areas) of biological sciences and experience in college-level teaching that includes both regular and laboratory courses. In addition, both candidates must have experience with current methods for encouraging student engagement and for the assessment of student learning outcomes.

UMBC is a medium-sized research university in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area, whose combined excellence in research and outstanding educational programs have earned recognition by US News and World Report as the "#1 Up-and-Coming National University”.  The university has also been recognized for its strong commitment towards the inclusion of women and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. For information about the Department of Biological Sciences and its education programs, visit http://biology.umbc.edu.

Applicants should submit a cover letter indicating the position of interest, curriculum vitae, summary of current teaching philosophy and future teaching interests and at least three letters of reference.  All materials should be sent, preferably in PDF format, to biosearch@umbc.edu. Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2013 and continue until the position is filled, with an expected start date of Aug. 1, 2014. 

One of the lesser-known HTML attributes is contenteditable. This attribute allows you to turn a standard read-only HTML element into an interactive, rich-text editor.

When Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser in 1990, he created modes for both browsing and editing HTML documents. However as the web grew, browsers transitioned to a more read-only state. The contenteditable attribute and associated element properties bring native content editing back to the browser.

Tim Berners-Lee’s Original Web Browser (Source: http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html)

In this blog post you are going to learn how to use the contenteditable attribute to allow users to edit page content directly within their browser. You’ll also be taking a look at the properties that allow you to manipulate an element’s editable state using JavaScript.

The contenteditable Attribute

You can make an element editable by adding the contenteditable attribute in your markup. This attribute has three possible values: true, false, and inherit. Specifying inherit will make the element editable if it’s immediate parent is editable.

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">
      ...
    </div>
    

See the Demo View on CodePen

Note: Editable elements are included in the tab order and can therefore be focussed using the tab key. This makes them accessible to users that might not be able to use a mouse. The tabindex attribute can be used to specify where in the tab order the editable element should fall.

Making Elements Editable in JavaScript

As well as the contenteditable HTML attribute it is also possible to make an element editable using JavaScript. This involves two element properties:

• isContentEditable – This property will return true if the element is editable and false if it is not.
• contentEditable – This property can be used to set the editable status of an element. Supported values are the same as those used for the contenteditable attribute: true, false, and inherit.

var editor = document.getElementById('editor');
    editor.isContentEditable;
    editor.contentEditable = true;
    

Lets take a look at an example of how you could use a button to toggle an element’s editable state.

<button id="editorBtn" type="button">Enable Editing</button>
    <div id="editor">
      ...
    </div>
    

Here you’ve created simple <button> and <div> elements. Notice that the <div> doesn’t have a contenteditable attribute.

var editorBtn = document.getElementById('editorBtn');
    var element = document.getElementById('editor');
    
    editorBtn.addEventListener('click', function(e) {
      e.preventDefault();
    
      if (element.isContentEditable) {
        // Disable Editing
        element.contentEditable = 'false';
        editorBtn.innerHTML = 'Enable Editing';
    
        // You could save any changes here.
      } else {
        element.contentEditable = 'true';
        editorBtn.innerHTML = 'Disable Editing';
      }
    });
    

In this JavaScript code you start by creating two variables that represent the <button> and <div> elements on the page. You then attach an event listener to the editorBtn that will be fired when the user clicks the button. Inside the callback function of this event listener you examine the <div> element’s isContentEditable property to determine whether the element is currently editable. If it is, you disable editing by setting the element’s contentEditable property to false, and update the button text to Enable Editing. If the element is not editable you first enable editing and then change the button text to Disable Editing.

See the Demo View on CodePen

Making an Entire Page Editable

If you’d like to make an entire web page editable you can use the designMode property of the document object. Setting this property to 'on' will enable editing. This also works on documents within iframes.

document.designMode = 'on';
    

Try turning on designMode for this page using your browser’s dev tools. Once enabled you should be able to edit all of the page content.

If you’re not familiar with using your browser’s dev tools, here’s some steps to get you going.

• Open up your browser’s dev tools. (Right-click anywhere on the page and select ‘Inspect Element’)
• Switch to the Console tab.
• Type the following into the console and press enter: document.designMode = 'on';

Browser Support for contenteditable

Support for contenteditable is very good. Internet Explorer was the first browser to implement this technology, way back in IE 5.5 (circa 2000). Since then, contenteditable has been standardized by the WHATWG.

Source: http://caniuse.com/#feat=contenteditable

Final Thoughts

Enabling the ability to simply click an element and make an update enables a really enjoyable editing experience for the user. The contenteditable attribute makes implementing this interaction effortless.

You could enable this same behaviour by cleverly swapping in an <input> or <textarea> when an element is clicked. This is in fact the way that a number of websites still handle inline editing. The problem with this approach is that it involves writing a load of JavaScript to switch in the new <input> or <textarea>, and CSS to match it’s styling to the original element. Using contenteditable solves both of these issues.

How do you see yourself using contenteditable in your projects? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Useful Links

• WHATWG Standard
• Can I use… contenteditable
• WorldWideWeb, the first web client

The post Native Rich-Text Editing with the contenteditable Attribute appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

A movie released last month tells the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.  “Twelve Years a Slave” powerfully depicts that slavery was driven by violence and examines its moral and economic costs.

History Associate Professor and Chair Marjoleine Kars participated in a panel discussion about the movie Thursday on nationally-syndicated The Diane Rehm Show. During the discussion, Kars commented on the significance of the film and why it’s important in understanding slavery.

“This culture of terror that it produces almost makes it almost impossible for people to resist, and makes large slave rebellions like the one I’m studying in the Caribbean so rare, and it shows that terror in a way that I think audiences can really identify with,” Kars said.

Other panelists included David Blight, professor and director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, Richard America, adjunct professor, Georgetown University Business School, and Laurent Dubois, director, the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University.

Dr. Kars is currently working on a book about a massive slave rebellion in the 1760s in the Dutch colony of Berbice (now part of the Republic of Guyana).

You can listen to the full segment on The Diane Rehm Show here.

Recently at the CSS Dev Talk, I attended Clarissa Peterson's talk on responsive web typography. One part of it was about line length and readability. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and your mileage may vary, but the traditional thinking is that body copy (long text, multiple paragraphs, takes more than a glance to read...) should be between 45 and 75 characters per line to be comfortable. Shorter is awkward, longer makes it easy to lose your place and find the next line.

In a world of fixed width designs, getting that text to be between 45-75 characters per line is fairly easy. You pick a goody body copy font, you adjust the size of the font and width of the container to be about right.

But what do you do in a world of flexy widths?

Well, just because the container width might flex in width, it doesn't mean you have to sacrifice a comfortable reading line length. You can adjust the width of the container as well as the font-size at certain breakpoints (media queries) to get it as close as possible. Remember it doesn't need to be exact, this isn't a hard science.

But how do you test how many characters are on a particular line? Clarissa's had a clever idea to just count over 45 characters and put a span that you style to change the color of the text, and then close that span at 75 characters. That way you can visually see where those breaks are. Here's Clarissa's slides (embedded), on the slide with the span idea:

I thought that might be a neat thing to automate, so you could use it on any site. Bookmarklet's are great for that. So here we are:

See the Pen Bookmarklet to make the text between 45 and 75 characters turn red. by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

You drag that button up to your bookmarks bar, then click it on any site you want to use it on. First you click it to activate it, then you click it on a body copy element (like a paragraph). Then you can resize the window around to see where the line is breaking and try to get it close.

I didn't use any fancy algorithms here, but just by tweaking things around I got pretty close on a simple centered column of text:

Which comes from this CSS:

body {
      font-family: "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
      margin: 20px auto;
      width: 95%;
      font-size: 70%;
      line-height: 1.4;
    }
    @media (min-width: 400px) {
      body { width: 90%; font-size: 75%; }
    }
    @media (min-width: 700px) {
      body { width: 80%; font-size: 90%; }
    }
    @media (min-width: 850px) {
      body { width: 70%; font-size: 100%; }
    }
    @media (min-width: 1000px) {
      body { width: 60%; font-size: 110%; }
    }
    @media (min-width: 1100px) {
      body { width: 50%; font-size: 115%;}
    }
    @media (min-width: 1450px) {
      body { width: 40%; font-size: 125%; }
    }

Bookmarklet to Colorize Text Between 45 and 75 Characters (for line-length testing) is a post from CSS-Tricks