I’m not really sure who officially started it, but it seems that Pinterest made it famous. I’m talking about the current trendy grid/masonry layout that everyone seems to love.
Well, I’m officially declaring it an anti-usability pattern that has fewer advantages than we think. The websites that quickly come to mind that are using this design pattern include:
Sometime over the past week, my Windows 7 machine did some updates that, amazingly, included an auto-update of IE10 to IE11. This is great news. This is the first time I’ve heard of any version of IE being pushed out automatically as a “critical” update (which I assume is what it did, since I don’t ever do the optional updates and those don’t happen automatically).
Those who have checked out IE11 have probably noticed a visual overhaul to the developer tools. One particular thing I noticed is that the “document mode” and “browser mode” options that were present in IE10’s tools have now been integrated into something called “Emulation” (which you can open quickly by hitting F12 then CTRL-8).
Ever since HTML5 Boilerplate put the ::selection pseudo-element on the map, so to speak, most CSS developers nowadays have been including this selector as part of their universal styles.
To get cross-browser support, the ::selection pseudo-element (which is used to change styles on highlighted, or selected, text) is declared like this:
It should be a coder’s goal to make sure that every character in every line of code serves some purpose.
The quality of code is not dependent on good form, prettiness, or theoretical benefits. Code should solve problems.
HTML5 lets you omit closing paragraph tags and closing tags for list items. Some cringe at the thought of this, but it’s perfectly valid code. So if omitting extra tags helps your code become leaner and faster, then you’re solving a problem and that makes it good code.
I’m reading an old article on A List Apart by Andy Rutledge called Contrast and Meaning, which, before getting into the meat of the content of the article, lays the foundation by defining communication fundamentals.
I honestly can’t stand the thought of creating a new design from scratch. It’s bad enough that I’m not a formally educated designer (last I checked, buying design books on Amazon does not constitute a formal design education), but on top of that, I just don’t have the ability to innovate. Almost everything I’ve created […]
A colleague today mentioned the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays — a much improved team compared to what was fielded in 2012. It’s owned and operated by Rogers Blue Jays baseball Partnership, a division of Rogers Communications
I opened up their website and scanned through it, quite excited by the upcoming season and the game schedule. It was only when I clicked through to their team roster that I saw this:
Never forget that usability lessons can be learned from virtually anything you use. This concept has been discussed extensively in Don Norman’s famous book, and I thought I’d discuss something specific in this area in this post.
Last week I sent out a tweet regarding an annoyance with USB plugs.
Before I get into the meat of this post, I’ll just provide some context. Last week, Harry Roberts posted a fantastic article discussing his view of bad CSS. In that article, as he’s done before, he disourages the use of IDs as selectors.
In response, Jeffrey Zeldman tried to defend the use of ID selectors. I posted a few comments in response to Jeffrey and another commenter, explaining why their views were wrong.
In most cases, when you place an element on the page in your markup, if you don’t specify any special styles, it will occupy exactly the same space that it appears to occupy visually.
In other words, if you place a box sized at 200px by 200px on your page, anything you place after it in the source order, with no further styles added, will occupy the space below or beside the green box, outside of those set boundaries.
But not everything on an HTML page occupies space that is honored by other elements. I thought it would be interesting to list and describe all the things in CSS that don’t occupy this kind of physical space in an HTML document.
