A Permanent Wreck

You already know that inline styles are “bad practice.” Inline styles aren’t reusable like CSS in separate files is, and thus, inefficient bloat. Unless of course, when it isn’t. There are some instances where inline styles make perfect sense. Perhaps you have an application where user’s pick their favorite color, and then you set the background of the body to that. Using an inline style in that case is actually more efficient than external CSS, since it’s specific to one user and one element.

According to the almighty Google, bounce rate is defined as “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page“. Basically, those users who leave your site right after they hit it — without checking anything else out. Bounce rate is a true measure of your site’s engagement. There are a bunch of factors that are involved with a lowering bounce rate, the main one being having relevant content, but even relevant content doesn’t stand a chance with a very poor web design.

Gridiron League is a collection of idealized NFL insignias that pay tribute to each team’s history and geography in a period-specific aesthetic that glorifies the Vince Lombardi-era over the Cold-Activated-era. This is not an exercise in nostalgia but an interpretation of the league’s founding principles through the symbols that we, as football fans, identify with most.

Our brains are pretty easily distracted, especially with all the emails, texts, and other data flying at us constantly. The good news, Harvard Business Review says, is we can train our brain to be more focused and productive—by improving our emotional balance.

A couple of people have asked me recently if it’s possible to nest ARIA roles. The answer: yes.

My mind is on CSS quite a bit these days. At Shopify, I’m jumping into projects that already well under way. As a result, it’s been a great way to look at what I wrote in SMACSS and see how applicable it is to yet another project. (As if Yahoo! wasn’t already enough of a testing ground.)

Hello everyone and Happy New Year to all, lately i’ve been busy and so i haven’t time to write here, i hope that by this experiment to be pardoned :). I wanted to create with only use of CSS3 the boot, the login page and finally the desktop of the Mac OS X Lion.

Quick tip on how to spice up your menu with CSS3: add an image to every menu item and slide it out on hover.

All popups use a div with a class of popup and an unordered list. For a button list, just make the list items links. Additional classes add arrows, remove dividers and justify text.

I’ve been using JavaScript for a while now, but only really programming in anger with it during the last year. I’ve found it in turns frustrating and enlightening, ridiculous and brilliant. I have never felt so empowered by a language and its ecosystem, so I thought I’d take some time to write about why that is. I’m starting with a ramble through the history of JavaScript, or rather my undoubtedly inaccurate understanding of it, to provide some context for where and how I’ve been using it.

Computer science is both a science and an art. Its scientific aspects range from the theory of computation and algorithmic studies to code design and program architecture. Yet, when it comes time for implementation, there is a combination of artistic flare, nuanced style, and technical prowess that separates good code from great code.

Using CSS transitions can be quite fun. But what’s not fun is when you want to transition something that needs to use display:none or visibility:hidden (or really, any non-transitionable property).

Not too long ago, I wrote an article about “The Increasing Importance of APIs in Web Development.” As a follow-up, today, I’ll cover the basics of using Web APIs.

Look at the back of your iPhone, or your iPad, or on the bottom of your Mac. You’ll see the following words embossed somewhere: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” Many Americans, all the way up to the President himself, have wondered why Apple has outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas. At a dinner with several top US technology executives last year, President Obama asked Steve Jobs flat out what it would take to bring those jobs back to the US. According to Jobs, there’s simply no way for it to happen.

The pixel has always been the smallest unit in screen-based design. Because it’s been indivisible, it is the concrete unit of measurement among screen-based designers. The phrase “a pixel is a pixel is a pixel” has been adopted to help print designers not used to fixed-screen density understand the concept. Because of this consistency, web designers have adopted pixels over points and other units to build websites.