Browsers, maps and books.
inspiring toilets
People obviously find it inspiring to look at the offices of famous web people. What strikes me is that most of these offices are rather small. Bruce Lawson realized there are more small rooms that might inspire you and launched this next successful tumblrblog.
TypeStacks: Instant font stacks based on your font
Here's a nice tool that suggests a font stack based on your font. It knows fonts served by Typekit, it doesn't seem to know too many Google Fonts though. Still, a very handy tool.
Browser Support
If you, for whatever reason, don't like any of the other tools and sites out there that tell you what browsers support what CSS feature then this tool might be the one you were looking for. I still prefer When Can I Use… though.
IE in Chnina
One of the only reasons to keep supporting IE6 is when you work for a company that does a lot of business in China, marketshare of IE6 was always very high over there. This graph shows us that something significant happened a few weeks ago. On the positive side: IE6 usage has suddenly dropped below 20%. On the negative side: IE8 usage is close to 50% now. A long, long way to go.
BIK BITV-Test | Articles | How effective is WCAG? - Methodological flaws put question mark on study of the impact of WCAG on user problems
A while ago a study was presented about the impact of WCAG on user problems which caused a bit of a roar in the accessibility world. According to the study the accessibility guidelines had no significant effect for blind users. Now, before you all start builing your sites with tables again, please first read this article in which Detlev Fischer debunks the study.
maps.stamen.com
Your app needs a map but you want something else than good old boring Google Maps? You could try OpenStreetMap with one of these beautiful map tiles.
Roundup of HTML-Based Slide Deck Toolkits | Impressive Webs
Wondering which toolkit to use for your HTML based presentation? Louis Lazaris collects them right here. Do you know another one? Let him know in the comments.
Browser Support? Forget It! – David Bushell – Web Design & Front-end Development
What does browser support mean exactly? Some think it means pixel perfection for a predefined set of browsers. According to David Bushell it means something else. A good read for people (or clients) struggling with the ever expanding browser landscape.
The id attribute got more classy in HTML5 · Mathias Bynens
One of the easy ways to get a somewhat unique ID is by using the UNIX epoch time. The problem with an ID like that is that in HTML an ID had to start with a letter. Mathias Bynens tells us if this is still the case in HTML5.
Autofill City & State from Zip Code with Ziptastic | CSS-Tricks
Filling out forms is a pain in the ass and especially on devices without a classic keyborad you should ask your users to fill in as little information as possible. So if there's a way to make things easier you should probably use it. For instance, parts of an address can be prefilled if the user enters her zip code. Chris Coyier shows us what a flow like that could look like.
the origin of the <blink> tag - www
Here's the true story behind the -tag by the guy who came up with the idea, Louis J. Montulli II. A nice anecdote in early browser history.
CSS layout gets smarter with calc() - HTML5Rocks Updates
A thing we needed desperately before we could use box-sizing: border-box; was the ability to mix different CSS units. There are still some use cases though and luckily more and more browsers start supporting the calc() property. Here's how it works.
Shady Characters » Miscellany № 7
Here's a small post by Keith Houston with news and thoughts about unusual characters. Always a pleasure to read, like everything on his blog.
Web Font Performance: Weighing @font-face Options and Alternatives
An important part of design and UX is performance so when you decide to use a webfont you should definitely understand what the negative impact of that choice might be for your users. Here's an excellent in depth article about font performance. Yes, you should definitely read it (and read the comments too, they're actually quite good).
Guest Post: Allen Tan on highlighting and focus… | Readmill Blog
My father always scribbles annotations in the margins of his paper books. He's probably been doing this for more than 50 years now and if somehow we could collect these annotations it would be an incredibly intersting and useful database. But as it is, it's pretty useless. Allen Tan writes about this and more in this article about modern, digital reading.
Let's Get Physical (Units) | Boris Smus
There are a few use cases where's we'd love to use physical units (like cm and in) but unfortunately these units don't work as expected in CSS. Boris Smus wrote an extensive article about these units, how they should work, why we want them and why they work the way they work.
Adactio: Journal—Your local mobile device lab
Jeremy Keith started an open, local mobile device lab in Brighton and he urges you to do the same in your home town.
Responsive News - Cutting the mustard
The BBC is working on a responsive news site and they share everything they find out, which is extremely useful. In this article Tom Maslen explains how they manage browser support. An absolute must read for everybody who is struggling with the growing complexity of browser support. This solution (or something similar) should be implemented everywhere.
H5BP ♥ Open Source
Here's an overview of projects related to the HTML5 Boilerplate. There's some excellent stuff in there but before you start using everything in there, remember the excellent advice by Rachel Andrew: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.
html5shiv and Serving Content From Code Repositories | Zoompf
You should never just link to scripts hosted on other domains, the possible advantages – caching, gzip – are not always enabled. This gets explained in detail in this excellent article. Yes, you should definitely read it.
A Holistic Customer Experience is the Future of Mobile Payments | Idea Engineers
Holistic means something like complete. So Perry Chan argues that a complete user experience is the future of mobile payments. I actually think that right now, on the short run, whatever is the future: the things we have right now are just terrible, anything is less painful (at least here in the Netherlands). (I also think the future of UX on the web is bigger fonts, much bigger).
Thinking Async | CSS-Tricks
Loading an external JavaScript file can block loading of the rest of the page which, of course, can be a major performance and usability issue. The solution to this issue is to load the scripts asynchronically and Chris Coyier shows the ways to do that, extensively as always.
Learn CSS Selectors interactively
CSS selectors can be pretty hard to understand, especially the difference between nth-child and nth-of-type can be confusing. There are many tools to visualize the difference, here's another one by Ben Howdle.