Ratio, principles and Confucianism.
The Designer’s Guide to the OSX Command Prompt
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.
Nice Web Type – MyFonts on CSS line-height and web font spacing
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.
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.
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!
An Introduction to HTML5 web messaging - Dev.Opera
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.
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.
* { 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.
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.
Chinese web design patterns: how and why they’re different
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.
New in accessibility in Firefox 10 | Marco’s accessibility blog
A few weeks ago Firefox was updated to version 10. Here's a list of accessibility things that were fixed.