The Daily Nerd

Unicode-bidi, grids and testing.

Star Ratings With Very Little CSS | CSS-Tricks

The most clever way to write a star-rating system is by using unicode-bidi: bidi-override. There is a fair chance that you don't even know what it does, but the ever brilliant Chris Coyier doesn't just know what it does, he know how to make use of it. As always with his articles: clear, smart, complete and super clever.

css, brilliant

» Of Grids, Class Names, Responsiveness, and Lifecycles Bits Pushed Around

When you choose class names you try to choose them in a way that describes what they're for. So when you choose class names for a grid layout system you would probably choose a class name that describes the size of the grid, something like .grid-half; you probably understand what that does. The problem with these grid-names is that the don't work in responsive designs. Here's a very nice article by Alex Duloz about this very problem and a possible solution (I used the names of the Greek letters a while ago, but more abstract things are definitely possible).

grid, css, responsive design

Ratio, principles and Confucianism.

Nice Web Type – Responsive Typography

Responsive web design is hard. I see front-end developers and interaction designers jumping with joy about this concept, but at the same time I see visual designers struggling: it's not easy to understand the relationship between web design’s fundamental fluid nature and the typographic standards of construction that have served us heretofore. Tim Brown collected some links to sources about responsive typography, commented them but – most importantly – in the last paragraph he explicitly asks for your help.

typography, responsive design

Our First Principles | Contents Magazine

The second edition of Contents Magazine is about First Principles. In this article Karen McGrane, Randall Snare, Henrik Berggren, Elizabeth McGuane, Ian Alexander, Dorian Taylor, and Kat Meyer answer a few questions about their own first principles. Very inspiring!

content, design, principles

Interview: Opera on the Web of Devices - W3C Blog

Here's an interesting interview with Andreas Bovens and Divya Manian about the web of devices, about the different platforms on which you can use Opera, about the (lack of (complete)) support for new HTML5 features, about the luring browser monoculture, about the new TV-Store, about the future and more. You should definitely read it if you want to know where we're heading.

opera, html5, tv, future

* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW « Paul Irish

With the width property in CSS you set the width of the content, not the width of the container. Everybody – except for some philosophers – hates this. Paul Irish explains how we can finally get rid of this feature.

css, width

Dealing with iBooks Caching

Cache can be hard on the web – I remember a conversation on my first job as a web developer a long time ago where a colleague of mine told a client that a certain fix was not visible because of a cash problem, which resulted in much faster payments – but cache with ebooks is even harder. Here's something you can do about it when you are testing your ebook on an iOs device.

cache, ebook, epub

Time, images and a random post.

Did we lose track of the big picture?

The best practices we use seem to be changing and that is not a good thing, according to Thierry Koblentz. He explains why good old accessibility and progressive enhancement are good (Does anybody have any idea when this article was published? I can find no date on that page and I think a date is very important, especially on tech articles like this).

best practices, progressive enhancement

HTTP — an application-level protocol - Dev.Opera

We should know a thing or two about HTTP – the protocol we use on the web to get our documents from the server to the browser – because it will help you to define better user interactions, achieve better site performance and create effective tools for managing information on the Web, according to Karl Dubost. You should read it, it really isn't as hard as it sounds.

http

Mozilla Hacks Weekly, February 16th 2012 ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

Yes, I know, this week's been a lousy Daily Nerd with less links than normal and even a whole day off. I expect the next few weeks to be as bad since I'm pretty busy at the moment with other cool things. The Mozilla Developer Engagement Team posted this weekly link list, filled with up to date links. If you really have nothing to do this weekend and want more to read, here's a link to a random post on the Daily Nerd (many are in Dutch, most links lead to English content though). Enjoy!

links, linkdump, random

Wireframing, hosting and not knowing.

The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog)

There are many types of hosting. Maciej Cegłowski looks at five different forms and explains the good and bad about them. As always with his articles, a very interesting and entertaining read.

hosting

What We Don't Know | CSS-Tricks

The web is weird. Designers never had to deal with things we don't know, ever: the context and content was always predefined. On the web not so. Chris Coyier looks at some of the things we don't know and explains them. A must read for all designers.

design, uncertainty

Money, agreements and punctuation.

Aankomende uitschrijving niet-betalende leden · Fronteers

Fronteers is an organization run by volunteers, volunteers who try to make our profession better. They do this by organizing workshops, conferences, meetings, contacting schools, writing articles, and much, much more. What these people should not be doing is sending reminders about late payments, that's a waste of everybody's time. So, are you a Fronteers member and you forgot to pay? Please do so this week or your membership will expire (which means no more incredible discounts).

fronteers

We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA | Electronic Frontier Foundation

A while ago there was this thing with SOPA and PIPA (remember?) but now there is a probably even bigger threat to people: ACTA. One of the biggest problems with this agreement is that fact that the exact content is a secret, which makes it easier to lie about it for people who want this agreement to pass (for whatever real reason). You can expect more links about ACTA because I believe it's of great importance to people who work with the web.

law, lies, copyright

Ubuntu Brand Guidelines

Did you finish reading the Android design guidelines I linked to a while ago? Yes? Good. Here's the next set of design guidelines you can study: the Ubuntu Brand Guidelines. Very interesting material for designers (for example read the parts about rounded corners and drop shadows where a fallback is not even mentioned!).

design, guidelines

BenjaminKeen.com

Here's a very clever tool you can use to generate a responsive design bookmarklet with. This bookmarklet is not just handy for testing on small screens, it's is especially handy if you want to test a design on a bigger screen than your own.

responsive design, design

Designing For TV - Google TV — Google Developers

Opera has published some articles about designing websites for TV in the recent past, and here's an article by Google about designing websites for the upcoming Google TV, I guess something's happening in TV land. For the people amongst you who think that the amount of different resolutions on desknots are too hard to handle, be sure to read the part about resolutions, autozoom and manual zoom on TV's. You'll switch to paper in no time.

tv, design, responsive design

Responsive Web Design Business Challenges « Cloud Four

Here's an interesting post by Jason Grigsby about business challenges of responsive web design. Advertising and CDN's are a real challenge but are SEO and Analytics really that big of an issue? I doubt it but I find it pretty disturbing to think about experts and consultants in the near future who start saying that we shouldn't be building responsive web sites because Matt Cutts says so. Besides that, responsive design isn't about mobile, it's about much more. Remember that.

seo, responsive design

A Recovering Physicist: Hanging Punctuation in CSS3

Hanging punctuation is specified in CSS3 and this article by Keith Dawson explains what it's supposed to do. There was an interesting twitter discussion a while ago between some übernerds and me about this feature and the nerds said it looks ugly. I agreed that it does look ugly in the given example but that it might look good in a good design. I can't remember I ever saw an example of this particular kind of hanging punctuation though.

punctuation, typography, css3