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
Here's a write-up by Harry Roberts about how sites should be designed and built: layered, based on content, considering small screens as well as big screens. Yes, I know, many projects are more complex than a simple portfolio site but even on huge sites this approach will pay off. Must read for designers struggling with the workflow.
design, responsive design, workflow
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
Karl Groves suggests that we should do automatic testing first when we do web accessibility testing (did you see what I did in the previous sentence? I shuffled the words of the title a bit, added seven words (five if we don't count the duplicates) and presented it as news).
accessibility, testing
Me and my colleague Peet Sneekes drove my old Mercedes through the Car Wash, again, and talked about content, again. If you think fourty seven minutes is too long, here a six minute version. And if you don't care at all about us talking (or you don't understand Dutch), here's a stop motion film of our route.
content, car-wash
Many non-programmers find the command prompt (or terminal in OSX) intimidating. It is a very handy tool though that gives you super powers. Here's a good introduction by John W. Long. Yes, you should read it.
terminal
An important part of layout design is the ratio between the font relative to its space. Once you get that right the design already looks good. This sounds easy but, alas, we're talking about fonts so nothing is easy. Here's an interesting article by Tim Brown which explains some core concepts about this ratio.
fonts, ratio, 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
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
It used to be hard and unsafe to communicate between two windows. Not anymore, we now have a thing called web messaging. Tiffany Brown explains what it is and how it works.
html5, messaging
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
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
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
Here's a very interesting presentation by Chui Chui Tan which looks at the differences between Chinese web design and the web design of the west. Many assumptions we make are simply not true and others are explained with a basic lesson in Confucianism. A must click for everybody who works on international web sites.
design, culture, international
A few weeks ago Firefox was updated to version 10. Here's a list of accessibility things that were fixed.
accessibility, browsers
The time element was removed from the spec for a day or so and then re-included with more features. Bruce Lawson explains.
html5, semantics, time
You don't want to send unnecessary bytes to the people who visit your site, that's why you optimize your images. There is an issue with images on responsive sites. Mat Marquis explains the problem and the possible solution.
responsive, responsive design, images
Here's a nice article about the incredible mobile Lanyrd site/app. Yes, there's a lot that can be done with HTML.
html5, apps
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
Looking for nice examples of Google Webfont usage? Here you are.
typography
There are some common arguments against the use of meta languages like Sass and Compass. Tom Genoni gives some counterarguments and uses an old drug pusher trick to seduce into using these languages.
meta-languages
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
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
Many interaction designers and architects I know are looking for good wireframing tools. Johan Ronsse – it's his birthday today, did you congratulate him yet? – wrote this useful comparison of different tools and techniques he uses (and the ones he never uses). Handy.
A nice small article by Jeremy Keith about how remarkable the web is.
web
Here's a good reminder by Michael Woloszynowicz that people do not read everything. He shows some possible solutions for some situations.
usability, content, ux
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
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
This looks like a very nice swipe slider.
swipe, slide
Ha, I always thought you needed jQuery to target a specific className but Christian Heilmann point us into the direction of classList. And yes, there is a polyfill!
javascript, classes
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
I've been linking to the articles about the Accessibility Business Case by Karl Groves a lot. Good, thorough and honest articles about the question if you can make more money if your site is accessible. Here's the conclusion of this excellent series.
accessibility, business
A while ago a nice animation by the name of One Hour Per Second circled the internet. I saw tweets like "OMG HTML5!" and "OMG CSS3 animations!" Here's a little article that gives us a little more insight into the techniques used in this amazing mash-up of web technologies.
javascript, animation, svg, css, graceful degradation, flash
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
Web Intents are pretty interesting, in the words of Glenn Jones: Web Intents is the name of a framework for web-based inter-application communication and service discovery
. The rest of this interview is written in understandable English and is rather interesting too.
intents, social
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
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
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
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
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