I dig really small, specialized web tools that do one job well. Degreees, a new temperature app, nails that pretty much perfectly. Nice job by the Finely production team here. Just head over and allow the site to scan your location. You’ll get the forecast for your area rendered with lovely CSS3.
What are the future elements or tags that best support responsive images? A List Apart tackles the debate between the Responsive Images Community Group (RICG) and a browser manufacturer proposed alternative. Essential reading for web developers.
Jeffrey Zeldman, talking about the (semi-controversial) redesign of his own personal site:
Even our best clients can sometimes push back, and even our most thrilling projects typically contain some element of compromise. A personal site is where you don’t have to compromise. Even if you lose some readers. Even if some people hate what you’ve done. Even if others wonder why you aren’t doing what everyone else who knows what’s what is doing.
Great points here. A lot of the work I did here on nickschaden.com was based on experimentation that I could only toy with on other paid jobs. Doing something for only yourself – a personal site, side project, something else fun on Github – is sometimes our best opportunity for growth.
Another A List Apart, another strong article on CSS. Author Alan Stearns dives into “faux” font styles and why they should be avoided.
Ars Technica’s design refresh is great. I especially dig the Noticia headline font; it gives a soft, approachable look when compared against other tech websites.
So Paydirt, a time tracking and invoicing web app, just ditched support for IE completely and landed on the front page of Hacker News. Cool, but read the fine print: 1.63% of their traffic is from IE. Repeat, less than 2%. For Paydirt’s browser distribution, this is a no-brainer. But ditching IE is impossible for most, if not nearly all web sites out there.
This slide from a tech talk by Instagram’s Mike Kriger says it all. You can have fast tech, but sometimes clever design allows you to pounce on that tech earlier in the user experience.
A List Apart’s Eric Meyer interviews Mozilla lead Tantek Çelik on his plan for Firefox to support webkit prefixed CSS properties. After reading, I’m even more puzzled on what Mozilla’s plan is long term here. So, Mozilla is targetting Webkit CSS prefixes in Firefox, but only “specific ones”? Then they may utilize Webkit prefixes on just mobile Firefox, but not necessarily the desktop?
Meyer hits on a huge point later in the interview:
The promise of vendor prefixes was that implementations could be tested in the wild and problems corrected before behavior was formalized. That paid off handsomely with gradient syntax, for example, where totally incompatible syntaxes were tried out, and eventually a unified syntax was found. This plan seems like it imperils that ability—that, once vendors start supporting each others’ prefixes, we may as well drop prefixes altogether.
Perhaps you’re reading this post, don’t know much about HTML and CSS, but want to start. Many if not most would recommend some sort of online tutorial. Based on the sample chapter I’ve read and reviews elsewhere, check out this book first. Gorgeous work and $15 on Amazon.
Granted it’s true 99% of technical books out there are outdated within seemingly a day after their publication. Yet the raw basics of HTML and CSS – markup, attributes, layout – are fairly timeless. I expect this book, for this reason and with its shallow learning curve, will last on shelves a lot longer.
Excellent primer on floating elements from the Design Shack team. Floats can be a hard concept to visualize, yet author Joshua Jonson does a good job of laying the basic rules out. The experienced should file this as reference material; it’s an article best suited for CSS newbies.