The upcoming IE10 will continue to have strong support for a number of CSS3 features and HTML5 APIs.
But if you haven’t yet heard, many of these features will be supported in IE10 unprefixed. These include gradients, animations, transitions, and more.
There’s been a lot of talk about IE10, and what it supports, and the great improvements it’s made.
Taking all the latest news into consideration, I summarize my thoughts on this subject in this post.
When I look at new modules in the CSS spec, it makes me feel like singing the chorus from a popular Radiohead song from the ’90s: “But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. I don’t belong here.”
If web standards could talk, I think a lot of them would be humming that regularly.
When you code a button or other clickable element, you need to also define a comfortable click area. Depending on the context and the design, this can sometimes be a challenge. Let’s look at a few examples in a short case study, so we can see the various ways this can be done.
Some navigation bars that I’ve seen are quite paradoxical in the click area they define. Look at the screen shot below showing the main nav bar for WebProNews.
I think for most freelancers, the rate we end up charging for any design or development project generally depends on, and is focused on, the work we do (i.e. we have an hourly rate, or a fixed price for a certain type of job).
True, we might change our prices in certain cases. For example, if we know we’re dealing with a high maintenance client, or we’re developing something for a non-profit.
I don’t know how many times I’ve redesigned this site over the past 4 years, but here’s another one, just launched this morning.
Layout-wise, there’s nothing really all that different. It’s more of a different skin than anything, and (out of sheer laziness) the comments and footer area have pretty much remained the same. Basically, I got tired of the dull looking header/sidebar in the previous design and wanted something cleaner and with a little more color.
Recently, a friend who used to do some web design years ago approached me with some questions about getting back into front-end coding. She doesn’t have a programming background and, from what I understand, her experience in coding is limited to old-style HTML using tables and very little CSS.
She says she finds all the stuff associated with front-end development to be quite overwhelming. Well, she’s not the only one. I think we all feel frustrated at the amount of reading and research that’s needed to keep up with things in the industry.
I don’t know who started it, but at some point in the web’s relatively short history, we decided that paragraphs displayed on web pages should be “typeset” in a manner similar to what we see by default in a Microsoft Word document: an empty line after a paragraph, and no indent for each paragraph.
Somehow it was unanimously settled upon that the traditional manner of typesetting paragraphs — with indents and no spaces between paragraphs — is not as readable on a computer screen. In fact, the default styles applied by a browser on paragraph elements encourages the no-indent method. If you throw together an HTML document that doesn’t have any author styles defined, you’ll see the following when you inspect your paragraph elements in Chrome’s developer tools:
If you keep up on print magazine reading in the industry, you probably know that .net magazine and Web Designer Magazine are basically the only two print magazines specifically targeted at web designers (at least, the only two that I know of).
So recently, Web Designer contacted me to do a feature piece covering CSS3 techniques. The focus of the piece is CSS effects that, prior to CSS3, required the use of images or scripts. The feature (called “Master CSS Effects) was planned to have 30 CSS techniques, and I was responsible for covering 20 of them. I don’t know what the final count includes, as I haven’t yet seen the issue, but the magazines’s staff were responsible for any remaining tips. They also wrote the intro and conclusion.
For a while now I’ve been wanting to set aside some time to do some sort of web development parody. I’ve done this sort of thing before and it’s fun to see people’s reactions.
I knew it had to be something centered around the ‘framework’ movement, mainly poking fun at the well-known HTML5 Boilerplate project. So on Tuesday night this week, I took the idea of HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS from concept to creation. I finished it that night, including registering the domain, setting up the site, and gritclonemerging its own bogus repo.
