January 2012
77 posts
Michael Wolfe's answer to Engineering Management:... →
Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I’ll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast:
Use Your Hand to Estimate Your Portions →
When you’re staring down the barrel of a new diet, your portions are one of the most difficult things to measure and keep track of. Your kitchen scale may be great in the comfort of your home, but it’s not practical to carry with you all day. Instead, just get to know the rough estimates with your hand.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : The best of s →
Avid HTML5 watchers will know that the element was dropped from HTML, then re-instated, with more New! Improved! semantics.
A better Photoshop grid for responsive web design... →
In making the move to responsive web design, one of the potential hurdles is the rather awkward maths for calculating the percentage-based widths necessary for fluid layouts. If, for example, you’re designing with a 960px grid in Photoshop and you have six columns, each 140px wide, you divide 140 by 960 to get your percentage-based width: 14.583333%. Now, I don’t know about you, but numbers like...
The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog) →
As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of ‘cloudiness’. People who aren’t interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here.
Pictos →
This article is to serve as a guide for best practices when using icon fonts on the web. Because icon fonts are still in their infancy, browser support and new technologies are constantly being developed. Be sure to check back often for updated information. If you have any knowledge or experience to contribute, please tweet to @pictos or email drew@pictos.cc to have it included in this article.
Be Less Annoying: Reduce Bounce Rates through... →
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...
Animate to an Inline Style | CSS-Tricks →
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....
Gridiron League →
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.
How Positive Thinking Can Improve Your Focus and... →
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.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Nesting ARIA roles →
A couple of people have asked me recently if it’s possible to nest ARIA roles. The answer: yes.
Naming Convention in CSS - Snook.ca →
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.)
Mac OS X Lion with CSS3 | Blog of Alessio Atzeni |... →
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.
iOS Inspired CSS3 Popups | CSSDeck →
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.
How to spice up your menu with CSS3 | Codrops →
Quick tip on how to spice up your menu with CSS3: add an image to every menu item and slide it out on hover.
The rise and rise of JavaScript « DanNorth.net →
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...
Coding Guidelines - ACM Queue →
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.
Handling CSS Transitions with prepareTransition -... →
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).
The Principles of Web API Usage | Nettuts →
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.
Why Apple's products are 'Designed in California'... →
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...
A List Apart: Articles: A Pixel Identity Crisis →
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...
WebKit Scrollbars →
umbrUI - CSS3 Shadow DOM styling →
What the Heck is Shadow DOM? « Dimitri Glazkov →
Shadow DOM refers to the ability of the browser to include a subtree of DOM elements into the rendering of a document, but not into the main document DOM tree.
Use CSS transitions to link Media Queries and... →
A common problem in responsive design is the linking of CSS3’s media queries and JavaScript. For instance on a larger screen we can restyle, but it might be useful to use JavaScript and pull in different content at the same time, e.g. higher quality images. With CSS transitions, specifically their transitionEnd events, we can marry up our media queries and JavaScript perfectly,...
The new (and hopefully final) linear gradient... →
The latest Working Draft of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content module was released last month, and contains some changes to the gradient syntaxes — for what you’d hope would be the last time. The updated syntaxes are a little more logical, but offer the same flexibility.
Let TweetNest Accept JSON · Avalonstar, by Bryan... →
It’s a sad reality that we’ve been living with for years now. I hit my 5 year anniversary with Twitter two days ago, yet I can only go back two weeks if I wanted to search for anything, which is obviously a limitation of the current API.
Anonymous Goes on Megaupload Revenge Spree: DoJ,... →
Anonymous has sure been quiet lately, but today’s federal bust of Megaupload riled ‘em up good: a retaliatory strike against DoJ.gov (and plenty of other foes) leaving them completely dead.
Resolution Independence With SVG - Smashing Coding... →
Before diving into an example, let’s consider the state of the Web at present and where it is going. Website design has found new vigor in recent years, with the evolving technique of responsive design. And for good reason: essentially, responsive website design moves us away from the fixed-width pages we’ve grown accustomed to, replacing them with shape-shifting layouts and intelligent reflowing...
Burst Title | CSS-Tricks →
During the previews for a movie I saw recently, there was an advertisement for an Oprah-related something or another. I wasn’t paying attention because I was trying to get out my phone so I could snap a picture of it. Which I failed to do. There was these neat title screens that I thought would be fun to recreate with CSS. They looked like… well they looked like this:
javascript - Can you explain why [[]][ []] [ []]... →
How To Work From Home Like You Mean It | Fast... →
Despite all the stories you’ve heard, the hardest part of working from home isn’t putting on pants every day.
Software Developer Productivity | All about your... →
Everyone knows the routine, get to work by 9 AM, sit in front of the computer, code all day, and head home at 5. Now, thanks to guys like Tim Ferris I have started to re-think how I work and what makes me productive as a software developer.
Get Value of CSS Rotation through JavaScript |... →
Is there a way to get the angle [through JavaScript] by which the element is rotated?
Stuff you can do with the →
The “Checkbox Hack” is where you use a connected label and checkbox input and usually some other element you are trying to control, like this:
Adobe-like Arrow Headers | CSS-Tricks →
Adobe has some pretty cool header bars for modules on their site:
Multiple Attribute Values | CSS-Tricks →
This element just has a data-type attribute with a value of “module accordion expand”, not three unique values “module”, “accordion” and “expand”. But let’s say we wanted to be able to select elements based on individual values like we can with class names.
Responsive Data Table Roundup | CSS-Tricks →
The idea of the original was to abandon the grid layout of the table and make each cell it’s own line. Each of those lines is labeled with a pseudo element. This creates a much taller table, requiring more vertical scrolling, but does not require horizontal scrolling. It’s easier to browse the data without losing context of what’s what. The downside is that you might lose the...
MPAA Calls Anti-SOPA Blackouts A →
The Motion Picture Association of America cares about you. It doesn’t want children to see boobs or hear curse words (though rampant bloodshed is cool) and it doesn’t want you to turn into a pawn of the big corporations that it says are really behind today’s blackouts at sites like Craiglist and Wikipedia, which everyone knows are both monstrous examples of corporate greed.
What It’s Really Like to Work at Google ~... →
Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those...
Rendering: repaint, reflow/relayout, restyle /... →
Different browsers work differently, but the following diagram gives a general idea of what happens, more or less consistently across browsers, once they’ve downloaded the code for your page.
W3Fools – A W3Schools Intervention →
We are passionate about the web, learning, and craftsmanship. We want you, as web designers and developers, to be successful in your careers. We feel, though, that W3Schools is harming the community with inaccurate information. Like any other authoritative educational resource, W3Schools should both hold itself to, and be held to, the highest standards.
mir.aculo.us JavaScript with Thomas Fuchs » Blog... →
Want to know which parts of your web page are hardware accelerated on Safari or Mobile Safari? It’s easy to find out.
Performance Calendar » The new game show: →
Intrigued by Luke Smith‘s comment and also Alois Reitbauer‘s comment on the previous post about rendering I did some more testing with dynaTrace and SpeedTracer. Also prompted by this tweet, I wanted to provide an example of avoiding reflows by using document fragments as well as hiding elements with display: none. (btw, sorry that I’m slow to respond to tweets and blog comments, just too much...
Fastersite: How (not) to trigger a layout in... →
As most web developers are aware, a significant amount of a script’s running time may be spent performing DOM operations triggered by the script rather than executing the JS byte code itself. One such potentially costly operation is layout (aka reflow) — the process of constructing a render tree from a DOM tree. The larger and more complex the DOM, the more expensive this operation may...
CSS PERFORMANCE →
parislemon • Why I Hate Android →
Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.
Why tabs are clearly superior | Lea Verou →
If you follow me on twitter or have heard one of my talks you’ll probably know I despise spaces for indentation with a passion. However, I’ve never gone into the details of my opinion on stage, and twitter isn’t really the right medium for advocacy. I always wanted to write a blog post about my take on this old debate, so here it is.
The New Web Typography →
OpenType has arrived on the web. Once-inaccessible design features such as small caps, swashes and fractions are now accessible through CSS, allowing for heightened control and extra typographic muscle.
Adactio: Journal—Months and years →
While I was in San Francisco for the last Event Apart of the year in December, Luke pulled me aside while he was preparing for his A Day Apart workshop on mobile web design. As befits the man who literally wrote the book on web forms and also wrote the the book on mobile-first design, Luke was planning to spend plenty of time covering input on mobile devices and he wanted my opinion on one of the...