Prefixes, ads and drama.
Using CSS Selectors as Fragment Identifiers
Regular readers of this blog might have noticed an unusual URL pattern every now and then. I use it sometimes to link to a section in a document which has no ID. It only works if you use this browser plugin. It seems like work is being done to make it an oficial specification.
What’s Your CSS Style? - Web Standards Sherpa
Somehow the selectors we still use most (almost exclusively when I look at CSS files) are the ID-selector and the class-selector. Emily Lewis explains how to use some other selectors.
Nerve Damage, Comprehension, and Content | Contents Magazine
Is content strategy a purely analytical profession or is there an emotional side to it too? If you like brains and nerves you might like this article too.
Vendor Prefixes
There are more vendor prefixes than -o-, -ms-, -moz-, and -webkit-. They're listed here.
“Chrome connects to three random domains at startup.” — Mike West
The so called awesome bar (the address bar in your browser that also works as a search engine) is a rather complex thing and the one in Chrome uses some tricks to be as awesome as it is.
The Piracy Threshold - Matt Gemmell
Matt Gemmell is angry with the movie industry and explains why. If you replace movie industry with font foundries you get my exact feelings about most of those. I especially like this paragraph where he explains that the entyre adult world is willing to pay for the services they want.
JS GooDies
If you think there are not enough articles about JavaScript in the Daily Nerd – you're right about that, but I only write about things that I understand – then you should definitely follow JS Goodies by the incredible Peter van der Zee.
How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked
Here's some excellent and very clever advice about security and your self-hosted blog. I might actually start using that for some of my sites (although I would hate setting up all those virtual hosts again on every new computer. Yes, I switch computers more often than hosts)
Responsive Ads in the Real World: Ad Server Implementation - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
There's one big problem with responsive web design and that's ads. Ads are responsive in many ways (they respond to your browsing behaviour, for instance) but they do not respond to your screen size. Here's an article by Rob Flaherty about a possible solution for this issue. (He mentions briefly that normal people never resize their browser. Eric Eggert rightly reacts to that statement by pointing to orientation change on desknot devices. The proposed solution in the next comment, the same set of ads in both orientations
is probably impossible to implement (480x800, 768x1024 and 600*1280 are a common desknot resolutions, and there are many more overlaps). But good to see some research being done in this field.
Appnostic : Time to Pioneer Human Centered Mobile Design - Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen
Here's a very good article by Jenifer Hanen about how silly the native vs. web debate is: instead we should focus on good mobile experiences, however they are consumed.
Bricss - Forget loading spinners, use a wait cursor
Instead of a loading spinner you might want to use a waiting cursor, in certain situations on devices with a mouse. Lennart Schoors explains how it works.
Are graphic designers ruining the web? | News | .net magazine
Here's an interesting discussion – sparked by an article by John Naughton – about whether or not designers are ruining the web. I agree with the point made by Aaron Gustafson. It's not a design problem per se, it's an issue with a lack of professionalism. Unfortunately I see lack of professionalism more often with visual designers than with other disciplines. This is certainly a fact in The Netherlands where somehow the majority of visual designers still believe being an expert photoshopper makes you a good web designer. And yes, I am definitely looking for ways to change that, I see it as one of the biggest problems we have in our profession. How do we get these people to finally learn real web skills? Or should we just give up, consider them a failed generation, fire them, and put our energy into the next generation? Or am I being overly dramatic now? Ghehehe.