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| 242 | 242 | Creating My First Chrome Extension | Writing a Chrome Extension isn’t as scary at it seems! Not too long ago, I used a Chrome extension called 20 Cubed. I’m far-sighted, and being a software engineer makes it difficult to maintain distance vision. So I used 20 Cubed to remind myself to look away from my screen and rest my eyes. I loved its simple interface and design. I loved it so much, I often forgot to turn it off in the middle of presentations, where it would take over my entire screen. Oops. Unfortunately, the developer stopped updating the extension and removed it from Chrome’s extension library. I was so sad. None of the other eye rest extensions out there matched my design aesthetic, so I decided to create my own! Want to do the same? Fortunately, Google has some respectable documentation on how to create an extension. And remember, Chrome extensions are just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can add libraries and frameworks, or you can just code the “old-fashioned” way. Sky’s the limit! Setup But first, some things you’ll need to know about before getting started: Callbacks Timeouts Chrome Dev Tools Developing with Chrome extension methods requires a lot of callbacks. If you’ve never experienced the joy of callback hell, creating a Chrome extension will introduce you to this concept. However, things can get confusing pretty quickly. I’d highly recommend brushing up on that subject before getting started. Hyperbole and a Half Timeouts and Intervals are another thing you might want to brush up on. While creating this extension, I didn’t consider the fact that I’d be juggling three timers. And I probably would’ve saved time organizing those and reading up on the Chrome extension Alarms documentation beforehand. But more on that in a bit. On the note of organization, abstraction is important! You might have any combination of the following: The Chrome extension options page The popup from the Chrome Menu The windows or tabs you create The background scripts And that can get unwieldy. You might also edit the existing tabs or windows in the brow… | 2018 | Jennifer Wong | jenniferwong | 2018-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/my-first-chrome-extension/ | code |
| 243 | 243 | Researching a Property in the CSS Specifications | I frequently joke that I’m “reading the specs so you don’t have to”, as I unpack some detail of a CSS spec in a post on my blog, some documentation for MDN, or an article on Smashing Magazine. However waiting for someone like me to write an article about something is a pretty slow way to get the information you need. Sometimes people like me get things wrong, or specifications change after we write a tutorial. What if you could just look it up yourself? That’s what you get when you learn to read the CSS specifications, and in this article my aim is to give you the basic details you need to grab quick information about any CSS property detailed in the CSS specs. Where are the CSS Specifications? The easiest way to see all of the CSS specs is to take a look at the Current Work page in the CSS section of the W3C Website. Here you can see all of the specifications listed, the level they are at and their status. There is also a link to the specification from this page. I explained CSS Levels in my article Why there is no CSS 4. Who are the specifications for? CSS specifications are for everyone who uses CSS. You might be a browser engineer - referred to as an implementor - needing to know how to implement a feature, or a web developer - referred to as an author - wanting to know how to use the feature. The fact that both parties are looking at the same document hopefully means that what the browser displays is what the web developer expected. Which version of a spec should I look at? There are a couple of places you might want to look. Each published spec will have the latest published version, which will have TR in the URL and can be accessed without a date (which is always the newest version) or at a date, which will be the date of that publication. If I’m referring to a particular Working Draft in an article I’ll typically link to the dated version. That way if the information changes it is possible for someone to see where I got the information from at the time of writing. If you want the very latest additions an… | 2018 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2018-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/researching-a-property-in-the-css-specifications/ | code |
| 244 | 244 | It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like XSSmas | I dread the office Secret Santa. I have a knack for choosing well-meaning but inappropriate presents, like a bottle of port for a teetotaller, a cheese-tasting experience for a vegan, or heaven forbid, Spurs socks for an Arsenal supporter. Ok, the last one was intentional. It’s the same with gifting code. Once, I made a pattern library for A List Apart which I open sourced, and a few weeks later, a glaring security vulnerability was found in it. My gift was so generous that it enabled unrestricted access to any file on any public-facing server that hosted it. With platforms like GitHub and npm, giving the gift of code is so easy it’s practically a no-brainer. This giant, open source yankee swap helps us do our jobs without starting from scratch with every project. But like any gift-giving, it’s also risky. Vulnerabilities and Open Source Open source code is not inherently more or less vulnerable than closed-source code. What makes it higher risk is that the same piece of code gets reused in lots of places, meaning a hacker can use the same exploit mechanism on the same vulnerable code in different apps. Graph showing the number of open source vulnerabilities published per year, from the State of Open Source Security 2017 In the first 24 ways article this year, Katie referenced a few different types of vulnerability: Cross-site Request Forgery (also known as CSRF) SQL Injection Cross-site Scripting (also known as XSS) There are many more types of vulnerability, and those that live under the same category share similarities. For example, my favourite – is it weird to have a favourite vulnerability? – is Cross Site Scripting (XSS), which allows for the injection of scripts into web pages. This is a really common vulnerability often unwittingly added by developers. OWASP (the Open Web Application Security Project) wrote a great article about how to prevent opening the door to XSS attacks – share it generously with your colleagues. Most vulnerabilities like this are not added intentionally – they’re doors left ajar… | 2018 | Anna Debenham | annadebenham | 2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-xssmas/ | code |
| 246 | 246 | Designing Your Site Like It’s 1998 | It’s 20 years to the day since my wife and I started Stuff & Nonsense, our little studio and my outlet for creative ideas on the web. To celebrate this anniversary—and my fourteenth contribution to 24 ways— I’d like to explain how I would’ve developed a design for Planes, Trains and Automobiles, one of my favourite Christmas films. My design for Planes, Trains and Automobiles is fixed at 800px wide. Developing a <frameset> framework I’ll start by using frames to set up the framework for this new website. Frames are individual pages—one for navigation, the other for my content—pulled together to form a frameset. Space is limited on lower-resolution screens, so by using frames I can ensure my navigation always remains visible. I can include any number of frames inside a <frameset> element. I add two rows to my <frameset>; the first is for my navigation and is 50px tall, the second is for my content and will resize to fill any available space. As I don’t want frame borders or any space between my frames, I set frameborder and framespacing attributes to 0: <frameset frameborder="0" framespacing="0" rows="50,*"> […] </frameset> Next I add the source of my two frame documents. I don’t want people to be able to resize or scroll my navigation, so I add the noresize attribute to that frame: <frameset frameborder="0" framespacing="0" rows="50,*"> <frame noresize scrolling="no" src="nav.html"> <frame src="content.html"> </frameset> I do want links from my navigation to open in the content frame, so I give each <frame> a name so I can specify where I want links to open: <frameset frameborder="0" framespacing="0" rows="50,*"> <frame name="navigation" noresize scrolling="no" src="nav.html"> <frame name="content" src="content.html"> </frameset> The framework for this website is simple as it contains only two horizontal rows. Should I need a more complex layout, I can nest as many framesets—and as many individual documents—as I need: <frameset rows="50,*"> <frame name="navigation"> <frameset cols="25%,*"> <frame name="sideba… | 2018 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2018-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/designing-your-site-like-its-1998/ | code |
| 247 | 247 | Managing Flow and Rhythm with CSS Custom Properties | An important part of designing user interfaces is creating consistent vertical rhythm between elements. Creating consistent, predictable space doesn’t just make your web pages and views look better, but it can also improve the scan-ability. Browsers ship with default CSS and these styles often create consistent rhythm for flow elements out of the box. The problem is though that we often reset these styles with a reset. Elements such as <div> and <section> also have no default margin or padding associated with them. I’ve tried all sorts of weird and wonderful techniques to find a balance between using inherited CSS while also levelling the playing field for component driven front-ends with very little success. This experimentation is how I landed on the flow utility, though and I’m going to show you how it works. Let’s dive in! The Flow utility With the ever-growing number of folks working with component libraries and design systems, we could benefit from a utility that creates space for us, only when it’s appropriate to do so. The problem with my previous attempts at fixing this is that the spacing values were very rigid. That’s fine for 90% of contexts, but sometimes, it’s handy to be able to tweak the values based on the exact context of your component. This is where CSS Custom Properties come in handy. The code .flow { --flow-space: 1em; } .flow > * + * { margin-top: var(--flow-space); } What this code does is enable you to add a class of flow to an element which will then add margin-top to sibling elements within that element. We use the lobotomised owl selector to select these siblings. This approach enables an almost anonymous and automatic system which is ideal for component library based front-ends where components probably don’t have any idea what surrounds them. The other important part of this utility is the usage of the --flow-space custom property. We define it in the .flow component and each element within it will be spaced by --flow-space, by default. The beauty about setting this as a … | 2018 | Andy Bell | andybell | 2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/managing-flow-and-rhythm-with-css-custom-properties/ | code |
| 249 | 249 | Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website | Every website deserves a great search engine - but building a search engine can be a lot of work, and hosting it can quickly get expensive. I’m going to build a search engine for 24 ways that’s fast enough to support autocomplete (a.k.a. typeahead) search queries and can be hosted for free. I’ll be using wget, Python, SQLite, Jupyter, sqlite-utils and my open source Datasette tool to build the API backend, and a few dozen lines of modern vanilla JavaScript to build the interface. Try it out here, then read on to see how I built it. First step: crawling the data The first step in building a search engine is to grab a copy of the data that you plan to make searchable. There are plenty of potential ways to do this: you might be able to pull it directly from a database, or extract it using an API. If you don’t have access to the raw data, you can imitate Google and write a crawler to extract the data that you need. I’m going to do exactly that against 24 ways: I’ll build a simple crawler using wget, a command-line tool that features a powerful “recursive” mode that’s ideal for scraping websites. We’ll start at the https://24ways.org/archives/ page, which links to an archived index for every year that 24 ways has been running. Then we’ll tell wget to recursively crawl the website, using the --recursive flag. We don’t want to fetch every single page on the site - we’re only interested in the actual articles. Luckily, 24 ways has nicely designed URLs, so we can tell wget that we only care about pages that start with one of the years it has been running, using the -I argument like this: -I /2005,/2006,/2007,/2008,/2009,/2010,/2011,/2012,/2013,/2014,/2015,/2016,/2017 We want to be polite, so let’s wait for 2 seconds between each request rather than hammering the site as fast as we can: --wait 2 The first time I ran this, I accidentally downloaded the comments pages as well. We don’t want those, so let’s exclude them from the crawl using -X "/*/*/comments". Finally, it’s useful to be able to run the command multiple times… | 2018 | Simon Willison | simonwillison | 2018-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/fast-autocomplete-search-for-your-website/ | code |
| 253 | 253 | Clip Paths Know No Bounds | CSS Shapes are getting a lot of attention as browser support has increased for properties like shape-outside and clip-path. There are a few ways that we can use CSS Shapes, in particular with the clip-path property, that are not necessarily evident at first glance. The basics of a clip path Before we dig into specific techniques to expand on clip paths, we should first take a look at a basic shape and clip-path. Clip paths can apply a CSS Shape such as a circle(), ellipse(), inset(), or the flexible polygon() to any element. Everywhere in the element that is not within the bounds of our shape will be visually removed. Using the polygon shape function, for example, we can create triangles, stars, or other straight-edged shapes as on Bennett Feely’s Clippy. While fixed units like pixels can be used when defining vertices/points (where the sides meet), percentages will give more flexibility to adapt to the element’s dimensions. See the Pen Clip Path Box by Dan Wilson (@danwilson) on CodePen. So for an octagon, we can set eight x, y pairs of percentages to define those points. In this case we start 30% into the width of the box for the first x and at the top of the box for the y and go clockwise. The visible area becomes the interior of the shape made by connecting these points with straight lines. clip-path: polygon( 30% 0%, 70% 0%, 100% 30%, 100% 70%, 70% 100%, 30% 100%, 0% 70%, 0% 30% ); A shape with less vertices than the eye can see It’s reasonable to look at the polygon() function and assume that we need to have one pair of x, y coordinates for every point in our shape. However, we gain some flexibility by thinking outside the box — or more specifically when we think outside the range of 0% - 100%. Our element’s box model will be the ultimate boundary for a clip-path, but we can still define points that exist beyond that natural box for an element. See the Pen CSS Shapes Know No Bounds by Dan Wilson (@danwilson) on CodePen. By going beyond the 0% - 100% range we can turn a polygon with three p… | 2018 | Dan Wilson | danwilson | 2018-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/clip-paths-know-no-bounds/ | code |
| 255 | 255 | Inclusive Considerations When Restyling Form Controls | I would like to begin by saying 2018 was the year that we, as developers, visual designers, browser implementers, and inclusive design and experience specialists rallied together and achieved a long-sought goal: We now have the ability to fully style form controls, across all modern browsers, while retaining their ease of declaration, native functionality and accessibility. I would like to begin by saying all these things. However, they’re not true. I think we spent the year debating about what file extension CSS should be written in, or something. Or was that last year? Maybe I’m thinking of next year. Returning to reality, styling form controls is more tricky and time consuming these days rather than flat out “hard”. In fact, depending on the length of the styling-leash a particular browser provides, there are controls you can style quite a bit. As for browsers with shorter leashes, there are other options to force their controls closer to the visual design you’re tasked to match. However, when striving for custom styled controls, one must be careful not to forget about the inherent functionality and accessibility that many provide. People expect and deserve the products and services they use and pay for to work for them. If these services are visually pleasing, but only function for those who fit the handful of personas they’ve been designed for, then we’ve potentially deprived many people the experiences they deserve. Quick level setting Getting down to brass tacks, when creating custom styled form controls that should retain their expected semantics and functionality, we have to consider the following: Many form elements can be styled directly through standard and browser specific selectors, as well as through some clever styling of markup patterns. We should leverage these native options before reinventing any wheels. It is important to preserve the underlying semantics of interactive controls. We must not unintentionally exclude people who use assistive technologies (ATs) that rely on these semantics. Ma… | 2018 | Scott O'Hara | scottohara | 2018-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/inclusive-considerations-when-restyling-form-controls/ | code |
| 256 | 256 | Develop Your Naturalist Superpowers with Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist | We’re going to level up your knowledge of what animals you might see in an area at a particular time of year - a skill every naturalist* strives for - using technology! Using iNaturalist and Observable Notebooks we’re going to prototype seasonality graphs for particular species in an area, and automatically create a guide to what animals you might see in each month. *(a Naturalist is someone who likes learning about nature, not someone who’s a fan of being naked, that’s a ‘Naturist’… different thing!) Looking for critters in rocky intertidal habitats One of my favourite things to do is going rockpooling, or as we call it over here in California, ‘tidepooling’. Amounting to the same thing, it’s going to a beach that has rocks where the tide covers then uncovers little pools of water at different times of the day. All sorts of fun creatures and life can be found in this ‘rocky intertidal habitat’ A particularly exciting creature that lives here is the Nudibranch, a type of super colourful ‘sea slug’. There are over 3000 species of Nudibranch worldwide. (The word “nudibranch” comes from the Latin nudus, naked, and the Greek βρανχια / brankhia, gills.) They are however quite tricky to find! Even though they are often brightly coloured and interestingly shaped, some of them are very small, and in our part of the world in the Bay Area in California their appearance in our rockpools is seasonal. We see them more often in Summer months, despite the not-as-low tides as in our Winter and Spring seasons. My favourite place to go tidepooling here is Pillar Point in Half Moon bay (at other times of the year more famously known for the surf competition ‘Mavericks’). The rockpools there are rich in species diversity, of varied types and water-coverage habitat zones as well as being relatively accessible. I was rockpooling at Pillar Point recently with my parents and we talked to a lady who remarked that she hadn’t seen any Nudibranchs on her visit this time. I realised that having an idea of what species to find where, a… | 2018 | Natalie Downe | nataliedowne | 2018-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/observable-notebooks-and-inaturalist/ | code |
| 257 | 257 | The (Switch)-Case for State Machines in User Interfaces | You’re tasked with creating a login form. Email, password, submit button, done. “This will be easy,” you think to yourself. Login form by Selecto You’ve made similar forms many times in the past; it’s essentially muscle memory at this point. You’re working closely with a designer, who gives you a beautiful, detailed mockup of a login form. Sure, you’ll have to translate the pixels to meaningful, responsive CSS values, but that’s the least of your problems. As you’re writing up the HTML structure and CSS layout and styles for this form, you realize that you don’t know what the successful “logged in” page looks like. You remind the designer, who readily gives it to you. But then you start thinking more and more about how the login form is supposed to work. What if login fails? Where do those errors show up? Should we show errors differently if the user forgot to enter their email, or password, or both? Or should the submit button be disabled? Should we validate the email field? When should we show validation errors – as they’re typing their email, or when they move to the password field, or when they click submit? (Note: many, many login forms are guilty of this.) When should the errors disappear? What do we show during the login process? Some loading spinner? What if loading takes too long, or a server error occurs? Many more questions come up, and you (and your designer) are understandably frustrated. The lack of upfront specification opens the door to scope creep, which readily finds itself at home in all the unexplored edge cases. Modeling Behavior Describing all the possible user flows and business logic of an application can become tricky. Ironically, user stories might not tell the whole story – they often leave out potential edge-cases or small yet important bits of information. However, one important (and very old) mathematical model of computation can be used for describing the behavior and all possible states of a user interface: the finite state machine. The general idea, as it applies to user interfa… | 2018 | David Khourshid | davidkhourshid | 2018-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/state-machines-in-user-interfaces/ | code |
| 258 | 258 | Mistletoe Offline | It’s that time of year, when we gather together as families to celebrate the life of the greatest person in history. This man walked the Earth long before us, but he left behind words of wisdom. Those words can guide us every single day, but they are at the forefront of our minds during this special season. I am, of course, talking about Murphy, and the golden rule he gave unto us: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So true! I mean, that’s why we make sure we’ve got nice 404 pages. It’s not that we want people to ever get served a File Not Found message, but we acknowledge that, despite our best efforts, it’s bound to happen sometime. Murphy’s Law, innit? But there are some Murphyesque situations where even your lovingly crafted 404 page won’t help. What if your web server is down? What if someone is trying to reach your site but they lose their internet connection? These are all things than can—and will—go wrong. I guess there’s nothing we can do about those particular situations, right? Wrong! A service worker is a Murphy-battling technology that you can inject into a visitor’s device from your website. Once it’s installed, it can intercept any requests made to your domain. If anything goes wrong with a request—as is inevitable—you can provide instructions for the browser. That’s your opportunity to turn those server outage frowns upside down. Take those network connection lemons and make network connection lemonade. If you’ve got a custom 404 page, why not make a custom offline page too? Get your server in order Step one is to make …actually, wait. There’s a step before that. Step zero. Get your site running on HTTPS, if it isn’t already. You won’t be able to use a service worker unless everything’s being served over HTTPS, which makes sense when you consider the awesome power that a service worker wields. If you’re developing locally, service workers will work fine for localhost, even without HTTPS. But for a live site, HTTPS is a must. Make an offline page Alright, assuming your site is being served… | 2018 | Jeremy Keith | jeremykeith | 2018-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/mistletoe-offline/ | code |
| 260 | 260 | The Art of Mathematics: A Mandala Maker Tutorial | In front-end development, there’s often a great deal of focus on tools that aim to make our work more efficient. But what if you’re new to web development? When you’re just starting out, the amount of new material can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have a solid background in Computer Science. But the truth is, once you’ve learned a little bit of JavaScript, you can already make some pretty impressive things. A couple of years back, when I was learning to code, I started working on a side project. I wanted to make something colorful and fun to share with my friends. This is what my app looks like these days: Mandala Maker user interface The coolest part about it is the fact that it’s a tool: anyone can use it to create something original and brand new. In this tutorial, we’ll build a smaller version of this app – a symmetrical drawing tool in ES5, JavaScript and HTML5. The tutorial app will have eight reflections, a color picker and a Clear button. Once we’re done, you’re on your own and can tweak it as you please. Be creative! Preparations: a blank canvas The first thing you’ll need for this project is a designated drawing space. We’ll use the HTML5 canvas element and give it a width and a height of 600px (you can set the dimensions to anything else if you like). Files Create 3 files: index.html, styles.css, main.js. Don’t forget to include your JS and CSS files in your HTML. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"> <script src="main.js"></script> </head> <body onload="init()"> <canvas width="600" height="600"> <p>Your browser doesn't support canvas.</p> </canvas> </body> </html> I’ll ask you to update your HTML file at a later point, but the CSS file we’ll start with will stay the same throughout the project. This is the full CSS we are going to use: body { background-color: #ccc; text-align: center; } canvas { touch-action: none; background-color: #fff; } button { font-size: 110%;… | 2018 | Hagar Shilo | hagarshilo | 2018-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/the-art-of-mathematics/ | code |
| 263 | 263 | Securing Your Site like It’s 1999 | Running a website in the early years of the web was a scary business. The web was an evolving medium, and people were finding new uses for it almost every day. From book stores to online auctions, the web was an expanding universe of new possibilities. As the web evolved, so too did the knowledge of its inherent security vulnerabilities. Clever tricks that were played on one site could be copied on literally hundreds of other sites. It was a normal sight to log in to a website to find nothing working because someone had breached its defences and deleted its database. Lessons in web security in those days were hard-earned. What follows are examples of critical mistakes that brought down several early websites, and how you can help protect yourself and your team from the same fate. Bad input validation: Trusting anything the user sends you Our story begins in the most unlikely place: Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing was a 2001 video game set in a quaint town, filled with happy-go-lucky inhabitants that co-exist peacefully. Like most video games, Animal Crossing was the subject of many fan communities on the early web. One such unofficial web forum was dedicated to players discussing their adventures in Animal Crossing. Players could trade secrets, ask for help, and share pictures of their virtual homes. This might sound like a model community to you, but you would be wrong. One day, a player discovered a hidden field in the forum’s user profile form. Normally, this page allows users to change their name, their password, or their profile photo. This person discovered that the hidden field contained their unique user ID, which identifies them when the forum’s backend saves profile changes to its database. They discovered that by modifying the form to change the user ID, they could make changes to any other player’s profile. Needless to say, this idyllic online community descended into chaos. Users changed each other’s passwords, deleted each other’s messages, and attacked each-other under the cover of complete anonym… | 2018 | Katie Fenn | katiefenn | 2018-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/securing-your-site-like-its-1999/ | code |
| 264 | 264 | Dynamic Social Sharing Images | Way back when social media was new, you could be pretty sure that whatever you posted would be read by those who follow you. If you’d written a blog post and you wanted to share it with those who follow you, you could post a link and your followers would see it in their streams. Oh heady days! With so many social channels and a proliferation of content and promotions flying past in everyone’s streams, it’s no longer enough to share content on social media, you have to actively sell it if you want it to be seen. You really need to make the most of every opportunity to catch a reader’s attention if you’re trying to get as many eyes as possible on that sweet, sweet social content. One of the best ways to grab attention with your posts or tweets is to include an image. There’s heaps of research that says that having images in your posts helps them stand out to followers. Reports I found showed figures from anything from 35% to 150% improvement from just having image in a post. Unfortunately, the details were surrounded with gross words like engagement and visual marketing assets and so I had to close the page before I started to hate myself too much. So without hard stats to quote, we’ll call it a rule of thumb. The rule of thumb is that posts with images will grab more attention than those without, so it makes sense that when adding pages to a website, you should make sure that they have social media sharing images associated with them. Adding sharing images The process for declaring an image to be used in places like Facebook and Twitter is very simple, and at this point is familiar to many of us. You add a meta tag to the head of the page to point to the location of the image to use. When a link to the page is added to a post, the social network will fetch the page, look for the meta tag and then use the image you specified. <meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/my_image.jpg"> There’s a good post on this over at CSS-Tricks if you need to bone up on the details of this and other similar meta tags … | 2018 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2018-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/dynamic-social-sharing-images/ | code |
| 271 | 271 | Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range | Any web designer or front-end developer worth their salt will be familiar with the CSS @font-face rule used for embedding fonts in a web page. We’ve all used it — either directly in our code ourselves, or via one of the web font services like Fontdeck, Typekit or Google Fonts. If you’re like me, however, you’ll be used to just copying and pasting in a specific incantation of lines designed to get different formats of fonts working in different browsers, and may not have really explored all the capabilities of @font-face properties as defined by the spec. One such property — the unicode-range descriptor — sounds pretty dull and is easily overlooked. It does, however, have some fairly interesting possibilities when put to use in creative ways. Unicode-range The unicode-range descriptor is designed to help when using fonts that don’t have full coverage of the characters used in a page. By adding a unicode-range property to a @font-face rule it is possible to specify the range of characters the font covers. @font-face { font-family: BBCBengali; src: url(fonts/BBCBengali.ttf) format("opentype"); unicode-range: U+00-FF; } In this example, the font is to be used for characters in the range of U+00 to U+FF which runs from the unexciting control characters at the start of the Unicode table (symbols like the exclamation mark start at U+21) right through to ÿ at U+FF – the extent of the Basic Latin character range. By adding multiple @font-face rules for the same family but with different ranges, you can build up complete coverage of the characters your page uses by using different fonts. When I say that it’s possible to specify the range of characters the font covers, that’s true, but what you’re really doing with the unicode-range property is declaring which characters the font should be used for. This becomes interesting, because instead of merely working with the technical constraints of available characters in a given font, we can start picking and choosing characters to use and selectively mix fon… | 2011 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/creating-custom-font-stacks-with-unicode-range/ | code |
| 276 | 276 | Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck | Fun fact: more websites are now using jQuery than Flash. jQuery is an amazing tool that’s made JavaScript accessible to developers and designers of all levels of experience. However, as Spiderman taught us, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The unfortunate downside to jQuery is that while it makes it easy to write JavaScript, it makes it easy to write really really f*&#ing bad JavaScript. Scripts that slow down page load, unresponsive user interfaces, and spaghetti code knotted so deep that it should come with a bottle of whiskey for the next sucker developer that has to work on it. This becomes more important for those of us who have yet to move into the magical fairy wonderland where none of our clients or users view our pages in Internet Explorer. The IE JavaScript engine moves at the speed of an advancing glacier compared to more modern browsers, so optimizing our code for performance takes on an even higher level of urgency. Thankfully, there are a few very simple things anyone can add into their jQuery workflow that can clear up a lot of basic problems. When undertaking code reviews, three of the areas where I consistently see the biggest problems are: inefficient selectors; poor event delegation; and clunky DOM manipulation. We’ll tackle all three of these and hopefully you’ll walk away with some new jQuery batarangs to toss around in your next project. Selector optimization Selector speed: fast or slow? Saying that the power behind jQuery comes from its ability to select DOM elements and act on them is like saying that Photoshop is a really good tool for selecting pixels on screen and making them change color – it’s a bit of a gross oversimplification, but the fact remains that jQuery gives us a ton of ways to choose which element or elements in a page we want to work with. However, a surprising number of web developers are unaware that all selectors are not created equal; in fact, it’s incredible just how drastic the performance difference can be between two selectors that, at first g… | 2011 | Scott Kosman | scottkosman | 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/your-jquery-now-with-less-suck/ | code |
| 283 | 283 | CSS3 Patterns, Explained | Many of you have probably seen my CSS3 patterns gallery. It became very popular throughout the year and it showed many web developers how powerful CSS3 gradients really are. But how many really understand how these patterns are created? The biggest benefit of CSS-generated backgrounds is that they can be modified directly within the style sheet. This benefit is void if we are just copying and pasting CSS code we don’t understand. We may as well use a data URI instead. Important note In all the examples that follow, I’ll be using gradients without a vendor prefix, for readability and brevity. However, you should keep in mind that in reality you need to use all the vendor prefixes (-moz-, -ms-, -o-, -webkit-) as no browser currently implements them without a prefix. Alternatively, you could use -prefix-free and have the current vendor prefix prepended at runtime, only when needed. The syntax described here is the one that browsers currently implement. The specification has since changed, but no browser implements the changes yet. If you are interested in what is coming, I suggest you take a look at the dev version of the spec. If you are not yet familiar with CSS gradients, you can read these excellent tutorials by John Allsopp and return here later, as in the rest of the article I assume you already know the CSS gradient basics: CSS3 Linear Gradients CSS3 Radial Gradients The main idea I’m sure most of you can imagine the background this code generates: background: linear-gradient(left, white 20%, #8b0 80%); It’s a simple gradient from one color to another that looks like this: See this example live As you probably know, in this case the first 20% of the container’s width is solid white and the last 20% is solid green. The other 60% is a smooth gradient between these colors. Let’s try moving these color stops closer to each other: background: linear-gradient(left, white 30%, #8b0 70%); See this example live background: linear-gradient(left, white 40%, #8b0 60%); See this example live backgro… | 2011 | Lea Verou | leaverou | 2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/css3-patterns-explained/ | code |
| 288 | 288 | Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes | Traditionally, bitmap formats such as PNG have been the standard way of delivering iconography on websites. They’re quick and easy, and it also ensures they’re as pixel crisp as possible. Bitmaps have two drawbacks, however: multiple HTTP requests, affecting the page’s loading performance; and a lack of scalability, noticeable when the page is zoomed or viewed on a screen with a high pixel density, such as the iPhone 4 and 4S. The requests problem is normally solved by using CSS sprites, combining the icon set into one (physically) large image file and showing the relevant portion via background-position. While this works well, it can get a bit fiddly to specify all the positions. In particular, scalability is still an issue. A vector-based format such as SVG sounds ideal to solve this, but browser support is still patchy. The rise and adoption of web fonts have given us another alternative. By their very nature, they’re not only scalable, but resolution-independent too. No need to specify higher resolution graphics for high resolution screens! That’s not all though: Browser support: Unlike a lot of new shiny techniques, they have been supported by Internet Explorer since version 4, and, of course, by all modern browsers. We do need several different formats, however! Design on the fly: The font contains the basic graphic, which can then be coloured easily with CSS – changing colours for themes or :hover and :focus styles is done with one line of CSS, rather than requiring a new graphic. You can also use CSS3 properties such as text-shadow to add further effects. Using -webkit-background-clip: text;, it’s possible to use gradient and inset shadow effects, although this creates a bitmap mask which spoils the scalability. Small file size: specially designed icon fonts, such as Drew Wilson’s Pictos font, can be as little as 12Kb for the .woff font. This is because they contain fewer characters than a fully fledged font. You can see Pictos being used in the wild on sites like Garrett Murray’s Maniacal Rage… | 2011 | Jon Hicks | jonhicks | 2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/displaying-icons-with-fonts-and-data-attributes/ | code |
| 289 | 289 | Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too | The theme of this year’s World IA Day was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”. This article isn’t about what you may consider an information architect to be: someone in the user-experience field, who maybe studied library science, and who talks about taxonomies. This is about a realisation I had a couple of years ago when I started to run an increasing amount of usability-testing sessions with people who have disabilities: that the structure, labelling, and connections that can be made in front-end code is information architecture. People’s ability to be successful online is unequivocally connected to the quality of the code that is written. Places made of information In information architecture we talk about creating places made of information. These places are made of ones and zeros, but we talk about them as physical structures. We talk about going onto a social media platform, posting in blogs, getting locked out of an environment, and building applications. In 2002, Andrew Hinton stated: People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds. 25 Theses We’re creating structures which people rely on for significant parts of their lives, so it’s critical that we carry out our work responsibly. This means we must use our construction materials correctly. Luckily, our most important material, HTML, has a well-documented specification which tells us how to build robust and accessible places. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the semantics of HTML. Semantics The word “semantic” has its origin in Greek words meaning “significant”, “signify”, and “sign”. In the physical world, a structure can have semantic qualities that tell us something about it. For example, the stunning Westminster Abbey inspires awe and signifies much about the intent and purpose of the structure. The building’s size; the quality of the stone work; the massive, detailed stained glass: these … | 2016 | Francis Storr | francisstorr | 2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/ | code |
| 292 | 292 | Watch Your Language! | I’m bilingual. My first language is French. I learned English in my early 20s. Learning a new language later in life meant that I was able to observe my thought processes changing over time. It made me realize that some concepts can’t be expressed in some languages, while other languages express these concepts with ease. It also helped me understand the way we label languages. English: business. French: romance. Here’s an example of how words, or the absence thereof, can affect the way we think: In French we love everything. There’s no straightforward way to say we like something, so we just end up loving everything. I love my sisters, I love broccoli, I love programming, I love my partner, I love doing laundry (this is a lie), I love my mom (this is not a lie). I love, I love, I love. It’s no wonder French is considered romantic. When I first learned English I used the word love rather than like because I hadn’t grasped the difference. Needless to say, I’ve scared away plenty of first dates! Learning another language made me realize the limitations of my native language and revealed concepts I didn’t know existed. Without the nuances a given language provides, we fail to express what we really think. The absence of words in our vocabulary gets in the way of effectively communicating and considering ideas. When I lived in Montréal, most people in my circle spoke both French and English. I could switch between them when I could more easily express an idea in one language or the other. I liked (or should I say loved?) those conversations. They were meaningful. They were efficient. I’m quadrilingual. I code in Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python. In the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to write code in these languages at a massive scale. In learning Ruby, much like learning English, I discovered the strengths and limitations of not only the languages I knew but the language I was learning. It taught me to choose the right tool for the job. When I started working at Shopify, making a change to a view inv… | 2016 | Annie-Claude Côté | annieclaudecote | 2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/watch-your-language/ | code |
| 293 | 293 | A Favor for Your Future Self | We tend to think about the future when we build things. What might we want to be able to add later? How can we refactor this down the road? Will this be easy to maintain in six months, a year, two years? As best we can, we try to think about the what-ifs, and build our websites, systems, and applications with this lens. We comment our code to explain what we knew at the time and how that impacted how we built something. We add to-dos to the things we want to change. These are all great things! Whether or not we come back to those to-dos, refactor that one thing, or add new features, we put in a bit of effort up front just in case to give us a bit of safety later. I want to talk about a situation that Past Alicia and Team couldn’t even foresee or plan for. Recently, the startup I was a part of had to remove large sections of our website. Not just content, but entire pages and functionality. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, not only for the reason why we had to remove so much of what we had built, but also because it’s the ultimate “I really hope this doesn’t break something else” situation. It was a stressful and tedious effort of triple checking that the things we were removing weren’t dependencies elsewhere. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any amount of success or confidence without our test suite. Writing tests for code is one of those things that developers really, really don’t want to do. It’s one of the easiest things to cut in the development process, and there’s often a struggle to have developers start writing tests in the first place. One of the best lessons the web has taught us is that we can’t, in good faith, trust the happy path. We must make sure ourselves, and our users, aren’t in a tough spot later on because we only thought of the best case scenarios. JavaScript Regardless of your opinion on whether or not everything needs to be built primarily with JavaScript, if you’re choosing to build a JavaScript heavy app, you absolutely should be writing some combination of u… | 2016 | Alicia Sedlock | aliciasedlock | 2016-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/a-favor-for-your-future-self/ | code |
| 294 | 294 | New Tricks for an Old Dog | Much of my year has been spent helping new team members find their way around the expansive and complex codebase that is the TweetDeck front-end, trying to build a happy and productive group of people around a substantial codebase with many layers of legacy. I’ve loved doing this. Everything from writing new documentation, drawing diagrams, and holding technical architecture sessions teaches you something you didn’t know or exposes an area of uncertainty that you can go work on. In this article, I hope to share some experiences and techniques that will prove useful in your own situation and that you can impress your friends in some new and exciting ways! How do you do, fellow kids? To start with I’d like to introduce you to our JavaScript framework, Flight. Right now it’s used by twitter.com and TweetDeck although, as a company, Twitter is largely moving to React. Over time, as we used Flight for more complex interfaces, we found it wasn’t scaling with us. Composing components into trees was fiddly and often only applied for a specific parent-child pairing. It seems like an obvious feature with hindsight, but it didn’t come built-in to Flight, and it made reusing components a real challenge. There was no standard way to manage the state of a component; they all did it slightly differently, and the technique often varied by who was writing the code. This cost us in maintainability as you just couldn’t predict how a component would be built until you opened it. Making matters worse, Flight relied on events to move data around the application. Unfortunately, events aren’t good for giving structure to complex logic. They jump around in a way that’s hard to understand and debug, and force you to search your code for a specific string — the event name‚ to figure out what’s going on. To find fixes for these problems, we looked around at other frameworks. We like React for it’s simple, predictable state management and reactive re-render flow, and Elm for bringing strict functional programming to everyone. But when you ha… | 2016 | Tom Ashworth | tomashworth | 2016-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/new-tricks-for-an-old-dog/ | code |
| 295 | 295 | Internet of Stranger Things | This year I’ve been running a workshop about using JavaScript and Node.js to work with all different kinds of electronics on the Raspberry Pi. So especially for 24 ways I’m going to show you how I made a very special Raspberry Pi based internet connected project! And nothing says Christmas quite like a set of fairy lights connected to another dimension1. What you’ll see You can rig up the fairy lights in your home, with the scrawly letters written under each one. The people from the other side (i.e. the internet) will be able to write messages to you from their browser in real time. In fact why not try it now; check this web page. When you click the lights in your browser, my lights (and yours) will turn on and off in real life! (There may be a queue if there are lots of people accessing it, hit the “Send a message” button and wait your turn.) It’s all done with JavaScript, using Node.js running on both the Raspberry Pi and on the server. I’m using WebSockets to communicate in real time between the browser, server and Raspberry Pi. What you’ll need Raspberry Pi any of the following models: Zero (will need straight male header pins soldered2 and Micro USB OTG adaptor), A+, B+, 2, or 3 Micro SD card at least 4Gb Class 10 speed3 Micro USB power supply at least 2A USB Wifi dongle (unless you have a Pi 3 - that has wifi built in). Addressable fairy lights Logic level shifter (with pins soldered unless you want to do it!) Breadboard Jumper wires (3x male to male and 4x female to male) Optional but recommended Base board to hold the Pi and Breadboard (often comes with a breadboard!) Find links for where to buy all of these items that goes along with this tutorial. The total price should be around $1004. Setting up the Raspberry Pi You’ll need to install the SD card for the Raspberry Pi. You’ll find a link to download a disk image on the support document, ready-made with the Raspbian version of Linux, along with Node.js and all the files you need. Download it and write it to the SD card using the fantastic free … | 2016 | Seb Lee-Delisle | sebleedelisle | 2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/internet-of-stranger-things/ | code |
| 296 | 296 | Animation in Design Systems | Our modern front-end workflow has matured over time to include design systems and component libraries that help us stay organized, improve workflows, and simplify maintenance. These systems, when executed well, ensure proper documentation of the code available and enable our systems to scale with reduced communication conflicts. But while most of these systems take a critical stance on fonts, colors, and general building blocks, their treatment of animation remains disorganized and ad-hoc. Let’s leverage existing structures and workflows to reduce friction when it comes to animation and create cohesive and performant user experiences. Understand the importance of animation Part of the reason we treat animation like a second-class citizen is that we don’t really consider its power. When users are scanning a website (or any environment or photo), they are attempting to build a spatial map of their surroundings. During this process, nothing quite commands attention like something in motion. We are biologically trained to notice motion: evolutionarily speaking, our survival depends on it. For this reason, animation when done well can guide your users. It can aid and reinforce these maps, and give us a sense that we understand the UX more deeply. We retrieve information and put it back where it came from instead of something popping in and out of place. “Where did that menu go? Oh it’s in there.” For a deeper dive into how animation can connect disparate states, I wrote about the Importance of Context-Shifting in UX Patterns for CSS-Tricks. An animation flow on mobile. Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped. 14 second generic loading screen.22 second custom loadin… | 2016 | Sarah Drasner | sarahdrasner | 2016-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/animation-in-design-systems/ | code |
| 298 | 298 | First Steps in VR | The web is all around us. As web folk, it is our responsibility to consider the impact our work can have. Part of this includes thinking about the future; the web changes lives and if we are building the web then we are the ones making decisions that affect people in every corner of the world. I find myself often torn between wanting to make the right decisions, and just wanting to have fun. To fiddle and play. We all know how important it is to sometimes just try ideas, whether they will amount to much or not. I think of these two mindsets as production and prototyping, though of course there are lots of overlap and phases in between. I mention this because virtual reality is currently seen as a toy for rich people, and in some ways at the moment it is. But with WebVR we are able to create interesting experiences with a relatively low entry point. I want us to have open minds, play around with things, and then see how we can use the tools we have at our disposal to make things that will help people. Every year we see articles saying it will be the “year of virtual reality”, that was especially prevalent this year. 2016 has been a year of progress, VR isn’t quite mainstream but with efforts like Playstation VR and Google Cardboard, we are definitely seeing much more of it. This year also saw the consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So it does seem to be a good time for an overview of how to get involved with creating virtual reality on the web. WebVR is an API for connecting to devices and retrieving continuous data such as the position and orientation. Unlike the Web Audio API and some other APIs, WebVR does not feel like a framework. You use it however you want, taking the data and using it as you wish. To make it easier, there are plenty of resources such as Three.js, A-Frame and ReactVR that help to make the heavy lifting a bit easier. Getting Started with A-Frame I like taking the opportunity to learn new things whenever I can. So while planning this article I thought that instead of trying to… | 2016 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/ | code |
| 300 | 300 | Taking Device Orientation for a Spin | When The Police sang “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” they weren’t talking about using a smartphone to view a panoramic image on Facebook, but they could have been. For years, technology has driven relentlessly towards devices we can carry around in our pockets, and now that we’re there, we’re expected to take the thing out of our pocket and wave it around in front of our faces like a psychotic donkey in search of its own dangly carrot. But if you can’t beat them, join them. A brave new world A couple of years back all sorts of specs for new HTML5 APIs sprang up much to our collective glee. Emboldened, we ran a few tests and found they basically didn’t work in anything and went off disheartened into the corner for a bit of a sob. Turns out, while we were all busy boohooing, those browser boffins have actually being doing some work, and lo and behold, some of these APIs are even half usable. Mostly literally half usable—we’re still talking about browsers, after all. Now, of course they’re all a bit JavaScripty and are going to involve complex methods and maths and science and probably about a thousand dependancies from Github that will fall out of fashion while we’re still trying to locate the documentation, right? Well, no! So what if we actually wanted to use one of these APIs, say to impress our friends with our ability to make them wave their phones in front of their faces (because no one enjoys looking hapless more than the easily-technologically-impressed), how could we do something like that? Let’s find out. The Device Orientation API The phone-wavy API is more formally known as the DeviceOrientation Event Specification. It does a bunch of stuff that basically doesn’t work, but also gives us three values that represent orientation of a device (a phone, a tablet, probably not a desktop computer) around its x, y and z axes. You might think of it as pitch, roll and yaw if you like to spend your weekends wearing goggles and a leather hat. The main way we access these values is through an event listener, which can … | 2016 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/ | code |
| 303 | 303 | We Need to Talk About Technical Debt | In my work with clients, a lot of time is spent assessing old, legacy, sprawling systems and identifying good code, bad code, and technical debt. One thing that constantly strikes me is the frequency with which bad code and technical debt are conflated, so let me start by saying this: Not all technical debt is bad code, and not all bad code is technical debt. Sometimes your bad code is just that: bad code. Calling it technical debt often feels like a more forgiving and friendly way of referring to what may have just been a poor implementation or a substandard piece of work. It is an oft-misunderstood phrase, and when mistaken for meaning ‘anything legacy or old hacky or nasty or bad’, technical debt is swept under the carpet along with all of the other parts of the codebase we’d rather not talk about, and therein lies the problem. We need to talk about technical debt. What We Talk About When We Talk About Technical Debt The thing that separates technical debt from the rest of the hacky code in our project is the fact that technical debt, by definition, is something that we knowingly and strategically entered into. Debt doesn’t happen by accident: debt happens when we choose to gain something otherwise-unattainable immediately in return for paying it back (with interest) later on. An Example You’re a front-end developer working on a SaaS product, and your sales team is courting a large customer – a customer so large that you can’t really afford to lose them. The customer tells you that as long as you can allow them to theme your SaaS application according to their branding, they are willing to sign on the dotted line… the problem being that your CSS architecture was never designed to incorporate theming at all, and there isn’t currently a nice, clean way to incorporate a theme into the codebase. You and the business make the decision that you will hack a theme into the product in two days. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to be ugly, but you can’t afford to lose a huge customer just because your CSS isn’t quite … | 2016 | Harry Roberts | harryroberts | 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/we-need-to-talk-about-technical-debt/ | code |
| 305 | 305 | CSS Writing Modes | Since you may not have a lot of time, I’m going to start at the end, with the dessert. You can use a little-known, yet important and powerful CSS property to make text run vertically. Like this. Or instead of running text vertically, you can layout a set of icons or interface buttons in this way. Or, of course, with anything on your page. The CSS I’ve applied makes the browser rethink the orientation of the world, and flow the layout of this element at a 90° angle to “normal”. Check out the live demo, highlight the headline, and see how the cursor is now sideways. See the Pen Writing Mode Demo — Headline by Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) on CodePen. The code for accomplishing this is pretty simple. h1 { writing-mode: vertical-rl; } That’s all it takes to switch the writing mode from the web’s default horizontal top-to-bottom mode to a vertical right-to-left mode. If you apply such code to the html element, the entire page is switched, affecting the scroll direction, too. In my example above, I’m telling the browser that only the h1 will be in this vertical-rl mode, while the rest of my page stays in the default of horizontal-tb. So now the dessert course is over. Let me serve up this whole meal, and explain the the CSS Writing Mode Specification. Why learn about writing modes? There are three reasons I’m teaching writing modes to everyone—including western audiences—and explaining the whole system, instead of quickly showing you a simple trick. We live in a big, diverse world, and learning about other languages is fascinating. Many of you lay out pages in languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Or you might be inspired to in the future. Using writing-mode to turn bits sideways is cool. This CSS can be used in all kinds of creative ways, even if you are working only in English. Most importantly, I’ve found understanding Writing Modes incredibly helpful when understanding Flexbox and CSS Grid. Before I learned Writing Mode, I felt like there was still a big hole in my knowledge, something I just didn’… | 2016 | Jen Simmons | jensimmons | 2016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/css-writing-modes/ | code |
| 306 | 306 | What next for CSS Grid Layout? | In 2012 I wrote an article for 24 ways detailing a new CSS Specification that had caught my eye, at the time with an implementation only in Internet Explorer. What I didn’t realise at the time was that CSS Grid Layout was to become a theme on which I would base the next four years of research, experimentation, writing and speaking. As I write this article in December 2016, we are looking forward to CSS Grid Layout being shipped in Chrome and Firefox. What will ship early next year in those browsers is expanded and improved from the early implementation I explored in 2012. Over the last four years the spec has been developed as part of the CSS Working Group process, and has had input from browser engineers, specification writers and web developers. Use cases have been discussed, and features added. The CSS Grid Layout specification is now a Candidate Recommendation. This status means the spec is to all intents and purposes, finished. The discussions now happening are on fine implementation details, and not new feature ideas. It makes sense to draw a line under a specification in order that browser vendors can ship complete, interoperable implementations. That approach is good for all of us, it makes development far easier if we know that a browser supports all of the features of a specification, rather than working out which bits are supported. However it doesn’t mean that works stops here, and that new use cases and features can’t be proposed for future levels of Grid Layout. Therefore, in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the things I think grid layout could do in the future. I would love for these thoughts to prompt you to think about how Grid - or any CSS specification - could better suit the use cases you have. Subgrid - the missing feature of Level 1 The implementation of CSS Grid Layout in Chrome, Firefox and Webkit is comparable and very feature complete. There is however one standout feature that has not been implemented in any browser as yet - subgrid. Once you set the value of the displa… | 2016 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2016-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/what-next-for-css-grid-layout/ | code |
| 307 | 307 | Get the Balance Right: Responsive Display Text | Last year in 24 ways I urged you to Get Expressive with Your Typography. I made the case for grabbing your readers’ attention by setting text at display sizes, that is to say big. You should consider very large text in the same way you might a hero image: a picture that creates an atmosphere and anchors your layout. When setting text to be read, it is best practice to choose body and subheading sizes from a pre-defined scale appropriate to the viewport dimensions. We set those sizes using rems, locking the text sizes together so they all scale according to the page default and your reader’s preferences. You can take the same approach with display text by choosing larger sizes from the same scale. However, display text, as defined by its purpose and relative size, is text to be seen first, and read second. In other words a picture of text. When it comes to pictures, you are likely to scale all scene-setting imagery - cover photos, hero images, and so on - relative to the viewport. Take the same approach with display text: lock the size and shape of the text to the screen or browser window. Introducing viewport units With CSS3 came a new set of units which are locked to the viewport. You can use these viewport units wherever you might otherwise use any other unit of length such as pixels, ems or percentage. There are four viewport units, and in each case a value of 1 is equal to 1% of either the viewport width or height as reported in reference1 pixels: vw - viewport width, vh - viewport height, vmin - viewport height or width, whichever is smaller vmax - viewport height or width, whichever is larger In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries. The following makes the heading font size 13% of the viewport width: h1 { font-size: 13 vw; } So for a selection of widths, the rendered font size would be: Rendered font size (px) Viewport width 13 vw 320 42 768 100 1024 133 1280 166 1920 … | 2016 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2016-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/responsive-display-text/ | code |
| 308 | 308 | How to Make a Chrome Extension to Delight (or Troll) Your Friends | If you’re like me, you grew up drawing mustaches on celebrities. Every photograph was subject to your doodling wrath, and your brilliance was taken to a whole new level with computer programs like Microsoft Paint. The advent of digital cameras meant that no one was safe from your handiwork, especially not your friends. And when you finally got your hands on Photoshop, you spent hours maniacally giggling at your artistic genius. But today is different. You’re a serious adult with important things to do and a reputation to uphold. You keep up with modern web techniques and trends, and have little time for fun other than a random Giphy on Slack… right? Nope. If there’s one thing 2016 has taught me, it’s that we—the self-serious, world-changing tech movers and shakers of the universe—haven’t changed one bit from our younger, more delightable selves. How do I know? This year I created a Chrome extension called Tabby Cat and watched hundreds of thousands of people ditch productivity for randomly generated cats. Tabby Cat replaces your new tab page with an SVG cat featuring a silly name like “Stinky Dinosaur” or “Tiny Potato”. Over time, the cats collect goodies that vary in absurdity from fishbones to lawn flamingos to Raybans. Kids and adults alike use this extension, and analytics show the majority of use happens Monday through Friday from 9-5. The popularity of Tabby Cat has convinced me there’s still plenty of room in our big, grown-up hearts for fun. Today, we’re going to combine the formula behind Tabby Cat with your intrinsic desire to delight (or troll) your friends, and create a web app that generates your friends with random objects and environments of your choosing. You can publish it as a Chrome extension to replace your new tab, or simply host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension. Here’s a sneak peek at my final result featuring my partner, my cat, and I in cheerfully weird accessories. Your result will look however you want it to. Along the way, we’ll cover how to bui… | 2016 | Leslie Zacharkow | lesliezacharkow | 2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension/ | code |
| 309 | 309 | HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers: The Perfect Partnership | Being a web developer today is exciting! The web has come a long way since its early days and there are so many great technologies that enable us to build faster, better experiences for our users. One of these technologies is HTTP/2 which has a killer feature known as HTTP/2 Server Push. During this year’s Chrome Developer Summit, I watched a really informative talk by Sam Saccone, a Software Engineer on the Google Chrome team. He gave a talk entitled Planning for Performance, and one of the topics that he covered immediately piqued my interest; the idea that HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers were the perfect web performance combination. If you’ve never heard of HTTP/2 Server Push before, fear not - it’s not as scary as it sounds. HTTP/2 Server Push simply allows the server to send data to the browser without having to wait for the browser to explicitly request it first. In this article, I am going to run through the basics of HTTP/2 Server Push and show you how, when combined with Service Workers, you can deliver the ultimate in web performance to your users. What is HTTP/2 Server Push? When a user navigates to a URL, a browser will make an HTTP request for the underlying web page. The browser will then scan the contents of the HTML document for any assets that it may need to retrieve such as CSS, JavaScript or images. Once it finds any assets that it needs, it will then make multiple HTTP requests for each resource that it needs and begin downloading one by one. While this approach works well, the problem is that each HTTP request means more round trips to the server before any data arrives at the browser. These extra round trips take time and can make your web pages load slower. Before we go any further, let’s see what this might look like when your browser makes a request for a web page. If you were to view this in the developer tools of your browser, it might look a little something like this: As you can see from the image above, once the HTML file has been downloaded and parsed, the browser then mak… | 2016 | Dean Hume | deanhume | 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/http2-server-push-and-service-workers/ | code |
| 310 | 310 | Fairytale of new Promise | There are only four good Christmas songs. I know, yeah, JavaScript or whatever. We’ll get to that in a minute, I promise. First—and I cannot stress this enough— there are four good Christmas songs. You’re free to disagree with me here, of course, but please try to understand that you will be wrong. They don’t all have the most safe-for-work titles; I can’t list all of them here, but if you choose to let your fingers do the walkin’ to your nearest search engine, I will say that one was released by the band FEAR way back in 1982 and one was on Run the Jewels’ self-titled debut album. The lyrics are a hell of a lot worse than the titles, so maybe wait until you get home from work before you queue them up. Wear headphones, if you’ve got thin walls. For my money, though, the two I can reference by name are the top of that small heap: Tom Waits’ Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, and The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. The former once held the honor of being the only good Christmas song—about which which I was also unequivocally correct, right up until I changed my mind. It’s not the song up for discussion today, but feel free to familiarize yourself just the same—I’ll wait. Fairytale of New York—the top of the list—starts out by hinting at some pretty standard holiday fare; dreams and cheer and whatnot. Typical seasonal stuff, so long as you ignore that the story seems to be recounted as a drunken flashback in a jail cell. You can probably make a few guesses at the underlying spirit of the song based on that framing: following a lucky break, our bright-eyed protagonists move to New York in search of fame and fortune, only to quickly descend into bad decisions, name-calling, and vaguely festive chaos. This song speaks to me on a couple of levels, not the least of which is as a retelling of my day-to-day interactions with JavaScript. Each day’s melody might vary a little bit, granted, but the lyrics almost always follow a pretty clear arc toward “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT.” You might have heard a simi… | 2016 | Mat Marquis | matmarquis | 2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/fairytale-of-new-promise/ | code |
| 313 | 313 | Centered Tabs with CSS | Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors is pretty much the de facto way to build tabbed navigation with CSS, and rightfully so – it is, as they say, rockin’ like Dokken. But since it relies heavily on floats for the positioning of its tabs, we’re constrained to either left- or right-hand navigation. But what if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center? Styling the li as a floated block does give us a great deal of control over margin, padding, and other presentational styles. However, we should learn to love the inline box – with it, we can create a flexible, centered alternative to floated navigation lists. Humble Beginnings Do an extra shot of ‘nog, because you know what’s coming next. That’s right, a simple unordered list: <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> If we were wedded to using floats to style our list, we could easily fix the width of our ul, and trick it out with some margin: 0 auto; love to center it accordingly. But this wouldn’t net us much flexibility: if we ever changed the number of navigation items, or if the user increased her browser’s font size, our design could easily break. Instead of worrying about floats, let’s take the most basic approach possible: let’s turn our list items into inline elements, and simply use text-align to center them within the ul: #navigation ul, #navigation ul li { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #navigation ul { text-align: center; } #navigation ul li { display: inline; margin-right: .75em; } #navigation ul li.last { margin-right: 0; } Our first step is sexy, no? Well, okay, not really – but it gives us a good starting point. We’ve tamed our list by removing its default style… | 2005 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2005-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/centered-tabs-with-css/ | code |
| 314 | 314 | Easy Ajax with Prototype | There’s little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity. But it’s really hard, right? It involves all the nasty JavaScript that no one ever does often enough to get really good at, and the browser support is patchy, and urgh it’s just so much damn effort. Well, the good news is that – ta-da – it doesn’t have to be a headache. But man does it still look impressive. Here’s how to amaze your friends. Introducing prototype.js Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff. There’s loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it’s good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is – friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp. First step is to download the latest Prototype and put it somewhere safe. I suggest underneath the Christmas tree. Cutting to the chase Before I go on and set up an example of how to use this, let’s just get to the crux. Here’s how Prototype enables you to make a simple Ajax call and dump the results back to the page: var url = 'myscript.php'; var pars = 'foo=bar'; var target = 'output-div'; var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars}); This snippet of JavaScript does a GET to myscript.php, with the parameter foo=bar, and when a result is returned, it places it inside the element with the ID output-div on your page. Knocking up a basic example So to get this show on the road, there are three files we need to set up in our site alongside prototype.js. Obviously we need a basic HTML page with prototype.js linked in. This is the page the user interacts with. Secondl… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/easy-ajax-with-prototype/ | code |
| 315 | 315 | Edit-in-Place with Ajax | Back on day one we looked at using the Prototype library to take all the hard work out of making a simple Ajax call. While that was fun and all, it didn’t go that far towards implementing something really practical. We dipped our toes in, but haven’t learned to swim yet. So here is swimming lesson number one. Anyone who’s used Flickr to publish their photos will be familiar with the edit-in-place system used for quickly amending titles and descriptions on photographs. Hovering over an item turns its background yellow to indicate it is editable. A simple click loads the text into an edit box, right there on the page. Prototype includes all sorts of useful methods to help reproduce something like this for our own projects. As well as the simple Ajax GETs we learned how to do last time, we can also do POSTs (which we’ll need here) and a whole bunch of manipulations to the user interface – all through simple library calls. Here’s what we’re building, so let’s do it. Getting Started There are two major components to this process; the user interface manipulation and the Ajax call itself. Our set-up is much the same as last time (you may wish to read the first article if you’ve not already done so). We have a basic HTML page which links in the prototype.js file and our own editinplace.js. Here’s what Santa dropped down my chimney: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <title>Edit-in-Place with Ajax</title> <link href="editinplace.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="editinplace.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Edit-in-place</h1> <p id="desc">Dashing through the snow on a one horse open sleigh.</p> </body> </html> So that’s our page. The editable item is … | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/edit-in-place-with-ajax/ | code |
| 316 | 316 | Have Your DOM and Script It Too | When working with the XMLHttpRequest object it appears you can only go one of three ways: You can stay true to the colorful moniker du jour and stick strictly to the responseXML property You can play with proprietary – yet widely supported – fire and inject the value of responseText property into the innerHTML of an element of your choosing Or you can be eval() and parse JSON or arbitrary JavaScript delivered via responseText But did you know that there’s a fourth option giving you the best of the latter two worlds? Mint uses this unmentioned approach to grab fresh HTML and run arbitrary JavaScript simultaneously. Without relying on eval(). “But wait-”, you might say, “when would I need to do this?” Besides the example below this technique is handy for things like tab groups that need initialization onload but miss the main onload event handler by a mile thanks to asynchronous scripting. Consider the problem Originally Mint used option 2 to refresh or load new tabs into individual Pepper panes without requiring a full roundtrip to the server. This was all well and good until I introduced the new Client Mode which when enabled allows anyone to view a Mint installation without being logged in. If voyeurs are afoot as Client Mode is disabled, the next time they refresh a pane the entire login page is inserted into the current document. That’s not very helpful so I needed a way to redirect the current document to the login page. Enter the solution Wouldn’t it be cool if browsers interpreted the contents of script tags crammed into innerHTML? Sure, but unfortunately, that just wasn’t meant to be. However like the body element, image elements have an onload event handler. When the image has fully loaded the handler runs the code applied to it. See where I’m going with this? By tacking a tiny image (think single pixel, transparent spacer gif – shudder) onto the end of the HTML returned by our Ajax call, we can smuggle our arbitrary JavaScript into the existing document. The image is added to the DOM, and … | 2005 | Shaun Inman | shauninman | 2005-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/have-your-dom-and-script-it-too/ | code |
| 318 | 318 | Auto-Selecting Navigation | In the article Centered Tabs with CSS Ethan laid out a tabbed navigation system which can be centred on the page. A frequent requirement for any tab-based navigation is to be able to visually represent the currently selected tab in some way. If you’re using a server-side language such as PHP, it’s quite easy to write something like class="selected" into your markup, but it can be even simpler than that. Let’s take the navigation div from Ethan’s article as an example. <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> As you can see we have a standard unordered list which is then styled with CSS to look like tabs. By giving each tab a class which describes it’s logical section of the site, if we were to then apply a class to the body tag of each page showing the same, we could write a clever CSS selector to highlight the correct tab on any given page. Sound complicated? Well, it’s not a trivial concept, but actually applying it is dead simple. Modifying the markup First thing is to place a class name on each li in the list: <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li class="home"><a href="#"><span>Home</span></a></li> <li class="about"><a href="#"><span>About</span></a></li> <li class="work"><a href="#"><span>Our Work</span></a></li> <li class="products"><a href="#"><span>Products</span></a></li> <li class="last contact"><a href="#"><span>Contact Us</span></a></li> </ul> </div> Then, on each page of your site, apply the a matching class to the body tag to indicate which section of the site that page is in. For example, on your About page: <body class="about">...</body> Writing the CSS selector You can now write a single CSS rule to match the selected tab on any give… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/auto-selecting-navigation/ | code |
| 319 | 319 | Avoiding CSS Hacks for Internet Explorer | Back in October, IEBlog issued a call to action, asking developers to clean up their CSS hacks for IE7 testing. Needless to say, a lot of hubbub ensued… both on IEBlog and elsewhere. My contribution to all of the noise was to suggest that developers review their code and use good CSS hacks. But what makes a good hack? Tantek Çelik, the Godfather of CSS hacks, gave us the answer by explaining how CSS hacks should be designed. In short, they should (1) be valid, (2) target only old/frozen/abandoned user-agents/browsers, and (3) be ugly. Tantek also went on to explain that using a feature of CSS is not a hack. Now, I’m not a frequent user of CSS hacks, but Tantek’s post made sense to me. In particular, I felt it gave developers direction on how we should be coding to accommodate that sometimes troublesome browser, Internet Explorer. But what I’ve found, through my work with other developers, is that there is still much confusion over the use of CSS hacks and IE. Using examples from the code I’ve seen recently, allow me to demonstrate how to clean up some IE-specific CSS hacks. The two hacks that I’ve found most often in the code I’ve seen and worked with are the star html bug and the underscore hack. We know these are both IE-specific by checking Kevin Smith’s CSS Filters chart. Let’s look at each of these hacks and see how we can replace them with the same CSS feature-based solution. The star html bug This hack violates Tantek’s second rule as it targets current (and future) UAs. I’ve seen this both as a stand alone rule, as well as an override to some other rule in a style sheet. Here are some code samples: * html div#header {margin-top:-3px;} .promo h3 {min-height:21px;} * html .promo h3 {height:21px;} The underscore hack This hack violates Tantek’s first two rules: it’s invalid (according to the W3C CSS Validator) and it targets current UAs. Here’s an example: ol {padding:0; _padding-left:5px;} Using child selectors We can use the child selector to replace both the star html bug and underscore hack. H… | 2005 | Kimberly Blessing | kimberlyblessing | 2005-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/avoiding-css-hacks-for-internet-explorer/ | code |
| 320 | 320 | DOM Scripting Your Way to Better Blockquotes | Block quotes are great. I don’t mean they’re great for indenting content – that would be an abuse of the browser’s default styling. I mean they’re great for semantically marking up a chunk of text that is being quoted verbatim. They’re especially useful in blog posts. <blockquote> <p>Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.</p> </blockquote> Notice that you can’t just put the quoted text directly between the <blockquote> tags. In order for your markup to be valid, block quotes may only contain block-level elements such as paragraphs. There is an optional cite attribute that you can place in the opening <blockquote> tag. This should contain a URL containing the original text you are quoting: <blockquote cite="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement"> <p>Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.</p> </blockquote> Great! Except… the default behavior in most browsers is to completely ignore the cite attribute. Even though it contains important and useful information, the URL in the cite attribute is hidden. You could simply duplicate the information with a hyperlink at the end of the quoted text: <blockquote cite="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement"> <p>Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.</p> <p class="attribution"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement">source</a> </p> </blockquote> But somehow it feels wrong to have to write out the same URL twice every time you want to quote something. It could also get very tedious if you have a lot of… | 2005 | Jeremy Keith | jeremykeith | 2005-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/dom-scripting-your-way-to-better-blockquotes/ | code |
| 321 | 321 | Tables with Style | It might not seem like it but styling tabular data can be a lot of fun. From a semantic point of view, there are plenty of elements to tie some style into. You have cells, rows, row groups and, of course, the table element itself. Adding CSS to a paragraph just isn’t as exciting. Where do I start? First, if you have some tabular data (you know, like a spreadsheet with rows and columns) that you’d like to spiffy up, pop it into a table — it’s rightful place! To add more semantics to your table — and coincidentally to add more hooks for CSS — break up your table into row groups. There are three types of row groups: the header (thead), the body (tbody) and the footer (tfoot). You can only have one header and one footer but you can have as many table bodies as is appropriate. Sample table example Inspiration Table Striping To improve scanning information within a table, a common technique is to style alternating rows. Also known as zebra tables. Whether you apply it using a class on every other row or turn to JavaScript to accomplish the task, a handy-dandy trick is to use a semi-transparent PNG as your background image. This is especially useful over patterned backgrounds. tbody tr.odd td { background:transparent url(background.png) repeat top left; } * html tbody tr.odd td { background:#C00; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader( src='background.png', sizingMethod='scale'); } We turn off the default background and apply our PNG hack to have this work in Internet Explorer. Styling Columns Did you know you could style a column? That’s right. You can add special column (col) or column group (colgroup) elements. With that you can add border or background styles to the column. <table> <col id="ingredients"> <col id="serve12"> <col id="serve24"> ... Check out the example. Fun with Backgrounds Pop in a tiled background to give your table some character! Internet Explorer’s PNG hack unfortunately only works well when applied to a cell. To f… | 2005 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2005-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/tables-with-style/ | code |
| 322 | 322 | Introduction to Scriptaculous Effects | Gather around kids, because this year, much like in that James Bond movie with Denise Richards, Christmas is coming early… in the shape of scrumptuous smooth javascript driven effects at your every whim. Now what I’m going to do, is take things down a notch. Which is to say, you don’t need to know much beyond how to open a text file and edit it to follow this article. Personally, I for instance can’t code to save my life. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true. If my life was on the line, and the code needed was really simple and I wasn’t under any time constraints, then yeah maybe I could hack my way out of it But my point is this: I’m not a programmer in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, what I do best, is scrounge code off of other people, take it apart and then put it back together with duct tape, chewing gum and dumb blind luck. No, don’t run! That happens to be a good thing in this case. You see, we’re going to be implementing some really snazzy effects (which are considerably more relevant than most people are willing to admit) on your site, and we’re going to do it with the aid of Thomas Fuchs’ amazing Script.aculo.us library. And it will be like stealing candy from a child. What Are We Doing? I’m going to show you the very basics of implementing the Script.aculo.us javascript library’s Combination Effects. These allow you to fade elements on your site in or out, slide them up and down and so on. Why Use Effects at All? Before get started though, let me just take a moment to explain how I came to see smooth transitions as something more than smoke and mirror-like effects included for with little more motive than to dazzle and make parents go ‘uuh, snazzy’. Earlier this year, I had the good fortune of meeting the kind, gentle and quite knowledgable Matt Webb at a conference here in Copenhagen where we were both speaking (though I will be the first to admit my little talk on Open Source Design was vastly inferior to Matt’s talk). Matt held a talk called Fixing Broken Windows (b… | 2005 | Michael Heilemann | michaelheilemann | 2005-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/introduction-to-scriptaculous-effects/ | code |
| 323 | 323 | Introducing UDASSS! | Okay. What’s that mean? Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher! Boy are you in for treat today ‘cause we’re gonna have a whole lotta Ajaxifida Unobtrucitosity CSS swappin’ Fun! Okay are you really kidding? Nope. I’ve even impressed myself on this one. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to tell you the ins and outs of what I actually did to get this to work. We’re talking JavaScript, CSS, PHP…Ajax. But don’t worry about that. I’ve always believed that a good A.P.I. is an invisible A.P.I… and this I felt I achieved. The only thing you need to know is how it works and what to do. A Quick Introduction Anyway… First of all, the idea is very simple. I wanted something just like what Paul Sowden put together in Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets from Alistapart Magazine EXCEPT a few minor (not-so-minor actually) differences which I’ve listed briefly below: Allow users to switch styles without JavaScript enabled (degradable) Preventing the F.O.U.C. before the window ‘load’ when getting preferred styles Keep the JavaScript entirely off our markup (no onclick’s or onload’s) Make it very very easy to implement (ok, Paul did that too) What I did to achieve this was used server-side cookies instead of JavaScript cookies. Hence, PHP. However this isn’t a “PHP style switcher” – which is where Ajax comes in. For the extreme technical folks, no, there is no xml involved here, or even a callback response. I only say Ajax because everyone knows what ‘it’ means. With that said, it’s the Ajax that sets the cookies ‘on the fly’. Got it? Awesome! What you need Luckily, I’ve done the work for you. It’s all packaged up in a nice zip file (at the end…keep reading for now) – so from here on out, just follow these instructions As I’ve mentioned, one of the things we’ll be working with is PHP. So, first things first, open up a file called index and save it with a ‘.php’ extension. Next, place the following text at the top of your document (even above your DOCTYPE) <?php require_once('uti… | 2005 | Dustin Diaz | dustindiaz | 2005-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/introducing-udasss/ | code |
| 326 | 326 | Don't be eval() | JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design. Common mistakes Here’s the classic misuse of eval(). You have a JavaScript object, foo, and you want to access a property on it – but you don’t know the name of the property until runtime. Here’s how NOT to do it: var property = 'bar'; var value = eval('foo.' + property); Yes it will work, but every time that piece of code runs JavaScript will have to kick back in to interpreter mode, slowing down your app. It’s also dirt ugly. Here’s the right way of doing the above: var property = 'bar'; var value = foo[property]; In JavaScript, square brackets act as an alternative to lookups using a dot. The only difference is that square bracket syntax expects a string. Security issues In any programming language you should be extremely cautious of executing code from an untrusted source. The same is true for JavaScript – you should be extremely cautious of running eval() against any code that may have been tampered with – for example, strings taken from the page query string. Executing untrusted code can leave you vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. What’s it good for? Some programmers say that eval() is B.A.D. – Broken As Designed – and should be removed from the language. However, there are some places in which it can dramatically simplify your code. A great example is for use with XMLHttpRequest, a component of the set of tools more popularly known as Ajax. XMLHttpRequest lets you make a call back to the server from JavaScript without refreshing the whole page. A simple way of using this is to have the server return JavaScript code which is then passed to eval(). Here is a simple function for doing exactly that … | 2005 | Simon Willison | simonwillison | 2005-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/dont-be-eval/ | code |
| 327 | 327 | Improving Form Accessibility with DOM Scripting | The form label element is an incredibly useful little element – it lets you link the form field unquestionably with the descriptive label text that sits alongside or above it. This is a very useful feature for people using screen readers, but there are some problems with this element. What happens if you have one piece of data that, for various reasons (validation, the way your data is collected/stored etc), needs to be collected using several form elements? The classic example is date of birth – ideally, you’ll ask for the date of birth once but you may have three inputs, one each for day, month and year, that you also need to provide hints about the format required. The problem is that to be truly accessible you need to label each field. So you end up needing something to say “this is a date of birth”, “this is the day field”, “this is the month field” and “this is the day field”. Seems like overkill, doesn’t it? And it can uglify a form no end. There are various ways that you can approach it (and I think I’ve seen them all). Some people omit the label and rely on the title attribute to help the user through; others put text in a label but make the text 1 pixel high and merging in to the background so that screen readers can still get that information. The most common method, though, is simply to set the label to not display at all using the CSS display:none property/value pairing (a technique which, for the time being, seems to work on most screen readers). But perhaps we can do more with this? The technique I am suggesting as another alternative is as follows (here comes the pseudo-code): Start with a totally valid and accessible form Ensure that each form input has a label that is linked to its related form control Apply a class to any label that you don’t want to be visible (for example superfluous) Then, through the magic of unobtrusive JavaScript/the DOM, manipulate the page as follows once the page has loaded: Find all the label elements that are marked as superfluous and hide them Find ou… | 2005 | Ian Lloyd | ianlloyd | 2005-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/improving-form-accessibility-with-dom-scripting/ | code |
| 331 | 331 | Splintered Striper | Back in March 2004, David F. Miller demonstrated a little bit of DOM scripting magic in his A List Apart article Zebra Tables. His script programmatically adds two alternating CSS background colours to table rows, making them more readable and visually pleasing, while saving the document author the tedious task of manually assigning the styling to large static data tables. Although David’s original script performs its duty well, it is nonetheless very specific and limited in its application. It only: works on a single table, identified by its id, with at least a single tbody section assigns a background colour allows two colours for odd and even rows acts on data cells, rather than rows, and then only if they have no class or background colour already defined Taking it further In a recent project I found myself needing to apply a striped effect to a medium sized unordered list. Instead of simply modifying the Zebra Tables code for this particular case, I decided to completely recode the script to make it more generic. Being more general purpose, the function in my splintered striper experiment is necessarily more complex. Where the original script only expected a single parameter (the id of the target table), the new function is called as follows: striper('[parent element tag]','[parent element class or null]','[child element tag]','[comma separated list of classes]') This new, fairly self-explanatory function: targets any type of parent element (and, if specified, only those with a certain class) assigns two or more classes (rather than just two background colours) to the child elements inside the parent preserves any existing classes already assigned to the child elements See it in action View the demonstration page for three usage examples. For simplicity’s sake, we’re making the calls to the striper function from the body’s onload attribute. In a real deployment situation, we would look at attaching a behaviour to the onload programmatically — just remember that, as we need to pass varia… | 2005 | Patrick Lauke | patricklauke | 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/splintered-striper/ | code |
| 332 | 332 | CSS Layout Starting Points | I build a lot of CSS layouts, some incredibly simple, others that cause sleepless nights and remind me of the torturous puzzle books that were given to me at Christmas by aunties concerned for my education. However, most of the time these layouts fit quite comfortably into one of a very few standard formats. For example: Liquid, multiple column with no footer Liquid, multiple column with footer Fixed width, centred Rather than starting out with blank CSS and (X)HTML documents every time you need to build a layout, you can fairly quickly create a bunch of layout starting points, that will give you a solid basis for creating the rest of the design and mean that you don’t have to remember how a three column layout with a footer is best achieved every time you come across one! These starting points can be really basic, in fact that’s exactly what you want as the final design, the fonts, the colours and so on will be different every time. It’s just the main sections we want to be able to quickly get into place. For example, here is a basic starting point CSS and XHTML document for a fixed width, centred layout with a footer. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Fixed Width and Centred starting point document</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="fixed-width-centred.css" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> </head> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="side"> <div class="inner"> <p>Sidebar content here</p> </div> </div> <div id="content"> <div class="inner"> <p>Your main content goes here.</p> </div> </div> <div id="footer"> <div class="inner"> <p>Ho Ho Ho!</p> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> body { text-align: center; min-width: 740px; padding: 0; margi… | 2005 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2005-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/css-layout-starting-points/ | code |
| 333 | 333 | The Attribute Selector for Fun and (no ad) Profit | If I had a favourite CSS selector, it would undoubtedly be the attribute selector (Ed: You really need to get out more). For those of you not familiar with the attribute selector, it allows you to style an element based on the existence, value or partial value of a specific attribute. At it’s very basic level you could use this selector to style an element with particular attribute, such as a title attribute. <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> In this example I’m going to make all <abbr> elements with a title attribute grey. I am also going to give them a dotted bottom border that changes to a solid border on hover. Finally, for that extra bit of feedback, I will change the cursor to a question mark on hover as well. abbr[title] { color: #666; border-bottom: 1px dotted #666; } abbr[title]:hover { border-bottom-style: solid; cursor: help; } This provides a nice way to show your site users that <abbr> elements with title tags are special, as they contain extra, hidden information. Most modern browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Opera support the attribute selector. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and below does not support the attribute selector, but that shouldn’t stop you from adding nice usability embellishments to more modern browsers. Internet Explorer 7 looks set to implement this CSS2.1 selector, so expect to see it become more common over the next few years. Styling an element based on the existence of an attribute is all well and good, but it is still pretty limited. Where attribute selectors come into their own is their ability to target the value of an attribute. You can use this for a variety of interesting effects such as styling VoteLinks. VoteWhats? If you haven’t heard of VoteLinks, it is a microformat that allows people to show their approval or disapproval of a links destination by adding a pre-defined keyword to the rev attribute. For instance, if you had a particularly bad meal at a restaurant, you could signify your dissaproval by adding a rev… | 2005 | Andy Budd | andybudd | 2005-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/the-attribute-selector-for-fun-and-no-ad-profit/ | code |
| 334 | 334 | Transitional vs. Strict Markup | When promoting web standards, standardistas often talk about XHTML as being more strict than HTML. In a sense it is, since it requires that all elements are properly closed and that attribute values are quoted. But there are two flavours of XHTML 1.0 (three if you count the Frameset DOCTYPE, which is outside the scope of this article), defined by the Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs. And HTML 4.01 also comes in those flavours. The names reveal what they are about: Transitional DOCTYPEs are meant for those making the transition from older markup to modern ways. Strict DOCTYPEs are actually the default – the way HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 were constructed to be used. A Transitional DOCTYPE may be used when you have a lot of legacy markup that cannot easily be converted to comply with a Strict DOCTYPE. But Strict is what you should be aiming for. It encourages, and in some cases enforces, the separation of structure and presentation, moving the presentational aspects from markup to CSS. From the HTML 4 Document Type Definition: This is HTML 4.01 Strict DTD, which excludes the presentation attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as support for style sheets matures. Authors should use the Strict DTD when possible, but may use the Transitional DTD when support for presentation attribute and elements is required. An additional benefit of using a Strict DOCTYPE is that doing so will ensure that browsers use their strictest, most standards compliant rendering modes. Tommy Olsson provides a good summary of the benefits of using Strict over Transitional in Ten questions for Tommy Olsson at Web Standards Group: In my opinion, using a Strict DTD, either HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict, is far more important for the quality of the future web than whether or not there is an X in front of the name. The Strict DTD promotes a separation of structure and presentation, which makes a site so much easier to maintain. For those looking to start using web standards and valid, semantic markup, it is important… | 2005 | Roger Johansson | rogerjohansson | 2005-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/transitional-vs-strict-markup/ | code |
| 335 | 335 | Naughty or Nice? CSS Background Images | Web Standards based development involves many things – using semantically sound HTML to provide structure to our documents or web applications, using CSS for presentation and layout, using JavaScript responsibly, and of course, ensuring that all that we do is accessible and interoperable to as many people and user agents as we can. This we understand to be good. And it is good. Except when we don’t clearly think through the full implications of using those techniques. Which often happens when time is short and we need to get things done. Here are some naughty examples of CSS background images with their nicer, more accessible counterparts. Transaction related messages I’m as guilty of this as others (or, perhaps, I’m the only one that has done this, in which case this can serve as my holiday season confessional) We use lovely little icons to show status messages for a transaction to indicate if the action was successful, or was there a warning or error? For example: “Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.” Notice that we place a nice little icon there, and use background colours and borders to convey a specific message: there was a problem that needs to be fixed. Notice that all of this visual information is now contained in the CSS rules for that div: <div class="error"> <p>Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.</p> </div> div.error { background: #ffcccc url(../images/error_small.png) no-repeat 5px 4px; color: #900; border-top: 1px solid #c00; border-bottom: 1px solid #c00; padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 2.5em; font-weight: bold; } Using this approach also makes it very easy to create a div.success and div.warning CSS rules meaning we have less to change in our HTML. Nice, right? No. Naughty. Visual design communicates The CSS is being used to convey very specific information. The choice of icon, the choice of background colour and borders tell us visually that there is something wrong. With the icon as a background image – there… | 2005 | Derek Featherstone | derekfeatherstone | 2005-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/naughty-or-nice-css-background-images/ | code |
| 336 | 336 | Practical Microformats with hCard | You’ve probably heard about microformats over the last few months. You may have even read the easily digestible introduction at Digital Web Magazine, but perhaps you’ve not found time to actually implement much yet. That’s understandable, as it can sometimes be difficult to see exactly what you’re adding by applying a microformat to a page. Sure, you’re semantically enhancing the information you’re marking up, and the Semantic Web is a great idea and all, but what benefit is it right now, today? Well, the answer to that question is simple: you’re adding lots of information that can be and is being used on the web here and now. The big ongoing battle amongst the big web companies if one of territory over information. Everyone’s grasping for as much data as possible. Some of that information many of us are cautious to give away, but a lot of is happy to be freely available. Of the data you’re giving away, it makes sense to give it as much meaning as possible, thus enabling anyone from your friends and family to the giant search company down the road to make the most of it. Ok, enough of the waffle, let’s get working. Introducing hCard You may have come across hCard. It’s a microformat for describing contact information (or really address book information) from within your HTML. It’s based on the vCard format, which is the format the contacts/address book program on your computer uses. All the usual fields are available – name, address, town, website, email, you name it. If you’re running Firefox and Greasemonkey (or if you can, just to try this out), install this user script. What it does is look for instances of the hCard microformat in a page, and then add in a link to pass any hCards it finds to a web service which will convert it to a vCard. Take a look at the About the author box at the bottom of this article. It’s a hCard, so you should be able to click the icon the user script inserts and add me to your Outlook contacts or OS X Address Book with just a click. So microformats are useful after all. Free… | 2005 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2005-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/practical-microformats-with-hcard/ | code |
| 9 | 9 | How to Write a Book | Were you recently inspired to write a book after reading Owen Gregory’s compendium of author insights? Maybe so inspired to strike out on your own and self-publish? Based on personal experience, writing a book is hard. It requires a great deal of research, experience, and patience. To be able to consolidate your thoughts and what you’ve learned into a sensible and readable tome is an admirable feat. To decide to self-publish and take on yourself all of the design, printing, distribution, and so much more is tantamount to insanity. Again, based on personal experience. So, why might you want to self-publish? If you’ve spent many a late night doing cross-browser testing just to know that your site works flawlessly in twenty-four different browsers — including Mosaic, of course — then maybe you’ll understand the fun that comes from doing it all. Working with a publisher, you’re left to focus on one core thing: writing. That’s a good thing. A good publisher has the right resources to help you get your idea polished and the distribution network to get your book on store shelves around the world. It’s a very proud moment to be able to walk into a book store and see your book sitting there on the shelf. Self-publishing can also be a wonderful process as you get to own it from beginning to end. Every decision is yours and if you’re a control freak like me, this can be a very rewarding experience. While there are many aspects to self-publishing, I’m going to speak to just one of them: creating an ebook. Formats In creating an ebook, you first need to decide what formats you wish to support. There are three main formats, each with their own pros and cons: PDF EPUB MOBI PDFs are supported on almost every device (Windows, Mac, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc.) and can even be a stepping stone to creating a print version of your book. PDFs allow for full typographic and design control, but at the cost of needing to fit things into a predefined page layout. Is it US Letter or A4? Or is it a format that isn’t easily… | 2013 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2013-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/how-to-write-a-book/ | content |
| 19 | 19 | In Their Own Write: Web Books and their Authors | The currency of written communication — words on the page, words on the screen — comprises many denominations. To further our ends in web design and development, we freely spend and receive several: tweets aphoristic and trenchant, banal and perfunctory; blog posts and articles that call us to action or reflection; anecdotes, asides, comments, essays, guides, how-tos, manuals, musings, notes, opinions, stories, thoughts, tips pro and not-so-pro. So many, many words. Our industry (so much more than this, but what on earth are we, collectively?), our community thrives on writing and sharing knowledge and experience. 24 ways is a case in point. Everyone can learn and contribute through reading and writing — it’s what we’ve always done. To web authors and readers seeking greater returns, though, broader culture has vouchsafed an enduring and singular artefact: the book. Last month I asked a small sample of web book authors if they would be prepared to answer a few questions; most of them kindly agreed. In spirit, the survey was informal: I had neither hypothesis nor unground axe. I work closely with writers — and yes, I’ve edited or copy-edited books by several of the authors I surveyed — and wanted to share their thoughts about what it was like to write a book (“…it was challenging to find a coherent narrative”), why they did it (“Who wouldn’t want to?”) and what they learned from the experience (“That I could!”). Reasons for writing a book In web development the connection between authors and readers is unusually close and immediate. Working in our medium precipitates a unity that’s rare elsewhere. Yet writing and publishing a book, even during the current books revolution, is something only a few of us attempt and it remains daunting and a little remote. What spurs an author to try it? For some, it’s a deeply held resistance to prevailing trends: I felt that designers and developers needed to be shaken out of what seemed to me had been years of stagnation. —Andrew Clarke Or even a desire to protect us from… | 2013 | Owen Gregory | owengregory | 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/web-books/ | content |
| 24 | 24 | Kill It With Fire! What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs | In the mid-1640s, a man named Matthew Hopkins attempted to rid England of the devil’s influence, primarily by demanding payment for the service of tying women to chairs and tossing them into lakes. Unsurprisingly, his methods garnered criticism. Hopkins defended himself in The Discovery of Witches in 1647, subtitled “Certaine Queries answered, which have been and are likely to be objected against MATTHEW HOPKINS, in his way of finding out Witches.” Each “querie” was written in the voice of an imagined detractor, and answered in the voice of an imagined defender (always referring to himself as “the discoverer,” or “him”): Quer. 14. All that the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money, and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him. Ans. You doe him a great deale of wrong in every of these particulars. Hopkins’ self-defense was an early modern English FAQ. Digital beginnings Question and answer formatting certainly isn’t new, and stretches back much further than witch-hunt days. But its most modern, most notorious, most reviled incarnation is the internet’s frequently asked questions page. FAQs began showing up on pre-internet mailing lists as a way for list members to answer and pre-empt newcomers’ repetitive questions: The presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through ftp. In practice, this rarely happened and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the “right” answers becomes tedious… When all the users of a system can hear all the other users, FAQs make a lot of sense: the conversation needs to be managed and manageable. FAQs were a stopgap for the technological limitations of the time. But the internet moved past mailing lists. Online information can be stored, searched,… | 2013 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/what-to-do-with-faqs/ | content |
| 43 | 43 | Content Production Planning | While everyone agrees that getting the content of a website right is vital to its success, unless you’re lucky enough to have an experienced editor or content strategist on board, planning content production often seems to fall through the cracks. One reason is that, for most of the team, it feels like someone else’s problem. Not necessarily a specific person’s problem. Just someone else’s. It’s only when everyone starts urgently asking when the content is going to be ready, that it becomes clear the answer is, “Not as soon as we’d like it”. The good news is that there are some quick and simple things you can do, even if you’re not the official content person on a project, to get everyone on the same content planning page. Content production planning boils down to answering three deceptively simple questions: What content do you need? How much of it do you need? Who’s going to make it? Even if it’s not your job to come up with the answers, by asking these questions early enough and agreeing who is going to come up with the answers, you’ll be a long way towards avoiding the last-minute content problems which so often plague projects. How much content do we need? People tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long that content takes to produce. When I ask someone how big their website is – how many pages it contains – I usually double or triple the answer I get. That’s because almost everyone’s mental model of their website greatly underestimates its true size. You can see the problem for yourself if you look at a site map. Site maps are great at representing a mental model of a website. But because they’re a deliberate simplification they naturally lead us to underestimate how much content is involved in populating them. Several years ago I was asked to help a client create a new microsite (their word) which they wanted ready in two weeks for a conference they were attending. Here’s the site map they had in mind. At first glance it looks like a pret… | 2014 | Sophie Dennis | sophiedennis | 2014-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/content-production-planning/ | content |
| 57 | 57 | Cooking Up Effective Technical Writing | Merry Christmas! May your preparations for this festive season of gluttony be shaping up beautifully. By the time you read this I hope you will have ordered your turkey, eaten twice your weight in Roses/Quality Street (let’s not get into that argument), and your Christmas cake has been baked and is now quietly absorbing regular doses of alcohol. Some of you may be reading this and scoffing Of course! I’ve also made three batches of mince pies, a seasonal chutney and enough gingerbread men to feed the whole street! while others may be laughing Bake? Oh no, I can’t cook to save my life. For beginners, recipes are the step-by-step instructions that hand-hold us through the cooking process, but even as a seasoned expert you’re likely to refer to a recipe at some point. Recipes tell us what we need, what to do with it, in what order, and what the outcome will be. It’s the documentation behind our ideas, and allows us to take the blueprint for a tasty morsel and to share it with others so they can recreate it. In fact, this is a little like the open source documentation and tutorials that we put out there, similarly aiming to guide other developers through our creations. The ‘just’ification of documentation Lately it feels like we’re starting to consider the importance of our words, and the impact they can have on others. Brad Frost warned us of the dangers of “Just” when it comes to offering up solutions to queries: “Just use this software/platform/toolkit/methodology…” “Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word. “Just” by Brad Frost I can really empathise with these sentiments. My relationship with code started out as many good web tales do, with good old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. University years involved some time with Perl, PHP, Java and C. In my first job I worked primarily with ColdFusion, a bit of ActionScri… | 2015 | Sally Jenkinson | sallyjenkinson | 2015-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/cooking-up-effective-technical-writing/ | content |
| 87 | 87 | Content Planning Demystified | The first thing you learn as a junior editor is that you can’t do everything yourself. You must rely on someone else to do at least part of what must be done: the long-range planning, the initial drafting or shooting or recording, the editing, the production, the final polish. All of those pieces of work that belong to someone else take quite a lot of time — days, weeks, sometimes months. If you’re the sort of person who wrote college term papers the night before they were due, this can come as a bit of a shock. To my twenty-two-year-old self, it certainly did. It turns out that the only real way to avoid a trainwreck with editorial work is to get ahead of the trouble, line everything up carefully, and leave oodles of room for all the pieces to connect on time. The same is true of content strategy, content planning, and just about everything to do with content on the web, except for the writing itself — and that, too, usually takes far longer than anyone expects. If you’re not a professional editor and you suddenly find yourself dealing with content creation, you’re almost certainly going to underestimate the time and effort involved, or to skip something important in the planning process that pops up to bite you later. Without good content, it doesn’t matter how well designed or coded your web project is, because it won’t be doing the thing it’s meant to do. And even if content is far from your specialty, you may well end up being the only one willing to coordinate it far enough in advance to avoid a chaotic ending. Whether you’re hiring writers and editors for a big project, working with a small client, or coaxing some editorial help out of a co-worker, getting the planning work done correctly — and ahead of time — will allow you to orchestrate a glorious ballet of togetherness, instead of feverishly scraping together something to put on your site when the deadline looms. So get out the graph paper and the pocket protector, because we’re going to go Full Nerd on this problem. Know your poison Anyone who’s… | 2012 | Erin Kissane | erinkissane | 2012-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/content-planning-demystified/ | content |
| 172 | 172 | The Construction of Instruction | If the world were made to my specifications, all your clients would be happy to pay for a web writer to craft every sentence into something as elegant as it was functional, and the client would have planned the content so that you had it just when you asked, but we both know that won’t happen every time. Sometimes you just know they are going to write the About page, two company blog pages and a Facebook fan page before resigning their position as chief content writer and you are going to end up filling in all the details that will otherwise just be Lorem Ipsum. Welcome to the big world of microcopy: A man walks into a bar. The bartender nods a greeting and watches as the man scans the bottles behind the bar. “Er, you have a lot of gin here. Is there one you would recommend?” “Yes sir.” Long pause. “… Never mind, I’ll have the one in the green bottle.” “Certainly, sir. But you can’t buy it from this part of the bar. You need to go through the double doors there.” “But they look like they lead into the kitchen.” “Really, sir? Well, no, that’s where we allow customers to purchase gin.” The man walks through the doors. On the other side he is greeted by the same bartender. “Y-you!” he stammers but the reticent bartender is now all but silent. Unnerved, the man points to a green bottle, “Er, I’d like to buy a shot of that please. With ice and tonic water.” The bartender mixes the drink and puts it on the bar just out of the reach of the man and looks up. “Um, do you take cards?” the man asks, ready to present his credit card. The bartender goes to take the card to put it through the machine. “Wait! How much was it – with sales tax and everything? Do you take a gratuity?” The bartender simply shrugs. The man eyes him for a moment and decides to try his luck at the bar next door. In the Choose Your Own Adventure version of this story there are plenty of ways to stop the man giving up. You could let him buy the gin right where he was; you could make the price more obvious; you could signpost the pla… | 2009 | Relly Annett-Baker | rellyannettbaker | 2009-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/the-construction-of-instruction/ | content |
| 198 | 198 | Is Your Website Accidentally Sexist? | Women make up 51% of the world’s population. More importantly, women make 85% of all purchasing decisions about consumer goods, 75% of the decisions about buying new homes, and 81% of decisions about groceries. The chances are, you want your website to be as attractive to women as it is to men. But we are all steeped in a male-dominated culture that subtly influences the design and content decisions we make, and some of those decisions can result in a website that isn’t as welcoming to women as it could be. Typography tells a story Studies show that we make consistent judgements about whether a typeface is masculine or feminine: Masculine typography has a square or geometric form with hard corners and edges, and is emphatically either blunt or spiky. Serif fonts are also considered masculine, as is bold type and capitals. Feminine typography favours slim lines, curling or flowing shapes with a lot of ornamentation and embellishment, and slanted letters. Sans-serif, cursive and script fonts are seen as feminine, as are lower case letters. The effect can be so subtle that even choosing between bold and regular styles within a single font family can be enough to indicate masculinity or femininity. If you want to appeal to both men and women, search for fonts that are gender neutral, or at least not too masculine. When you’re choosing groups of fonts that need to work harmoniously together, consider which fonts you are prioritising in your design. Is the biggest word on the page in a masculine or feminine font? What about the smallest words? Is there an imbalance between the prominence of masculine and feminine fonts, and what does this imply? Typography is a language in and of itself, so be careful what you say with it. Colour me unsurprised Colour also has an obvious gender bias. We associate pinks and purples, especially in combination, with girls and women, and a soft pink has become especially strongly related to breast cancer awareness campaigns. On the other hand, pale blue is strongly associated with boy… | 2017 | Suw Charman-Anderson | suwcharmananderson | 2017-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/is-your-website-accidentally-sexist/ | content |
| 227 | 227 | A Contentmas Epiphany | The twelve days of Christmas fall between 25 December, Christmas Day, and 6 January, the Epiphany of the Kings. Traditionally, these have been holidays and a lot of us still take a good proportion of these days off. Equally, a lot of us have a got a personal site kicking around somewhere that we sigh over and think, “One day I’ll sort you out!” Why not take this downtime to give it a big ol’ refresh? I know, good idea, huh? HEY WAIT! WOAH! NO-ONE’S TOUCHING PHOTOSHOP OR DOING ANY CSS FANCYWORK UNTIL I’M DONE WITH YOU! Be honest, did you immediately think of a sketch or mockup you have tucked away? Or some clever little piece of code you want to fiddle with? Now ask yourself, why would you start designing the container if you haven’t worked out what you need to put inside? Anyway, forget the content strategy lecture; I haven’t given you your gifts yet. I present The Twelve Days of Contentmas! This is a simple little plan to make sure that your personal site, blog or portfolio is not just looking good at the end of these twelve days, but is also a really useful repository of really useful content. WARNING KLAXON: There are twelve parts, one for each day of Christmas, so this is a lengthy article. I’m not expecting anyone to absorb this in one go. Add to Instapaper. There is no TL;DR for this because it’s a multipart process, m’kay? Even so, this plan of mine cuts corners on a proper applied strategy for content. You might find some aspects take longer than the arbitrary day I’ve assigned. And if you apply this to your company-wide intranet, I won’t be held responsible for the mess. That said, I encourage you to play along and sample some of the practical aspects of organising existing content and planning new content because it is, honestly, an inspiring and liberating process. For one thing, you get to review all the stuff you have put out for the world to look at and see what you could do next. This always leaves me full of ideas on how to plug the gaps I’ve found, so I hope you are similarly motivated come… | 2010 | Relly Annett-Baker | rellyannettbaker | 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/a-contentmas-epiphany/ | content |
| 251 | 251 | The System, the Search, and the Food Bank | Imagine a warehouse, half the length of a football field, with a looped conveyer belt down the center. On the belt are plastic bins filled with assortments of shelf-stable food—one may have two bags of potato chips, seventeen pudding cups, and a box of tissues; the next, a dozen cans of beets. The conveyer belt is ringed with large, empty cardboard boxes, each labeled with categories like “Bottled Water” or “Cereal” or “Candy.” Such was the scene at my local food bank a few Saturdays ago, when some friends and I volunteered for a shift sorting donated food items. Our job was to fill the labeled cardboard boxes with the correct items nabbed from the swiftly moving, randomly stocked plastic bins. I could scarcely believe my good fortune of assignments. You want me to sort things? Into categories? For several hours? And you say there’s an element of time pressure? Listen, is there some sort of permanent position I could be conscripted into. Look, I can’t quite explain it: I just know that I love sorting, organizing, and classifying things—groceries at a food bank, but also my bookshelves, my kitchen cabinets, my craft supplies, my dishwasher arrangement, yes I am a delight to live with, why do you ask? The opportunity to create meaning from nothing is at the core of my excitement, which is why I’ve tried to build a career out of organizing digital content, and why I brought a frankly frightening level of enthusiasm to the food bank. “I can’t believe they’re letting me do this,” I whispered in awe to my conveyer belt neighbor as I snapped up a bag of popcorn for the Snacks box with the kind of ferocity usually associated with birds of prey. The jumble of donated items coming into the center need to be sorted in order for the food bank to be able to quantify, package, and distribute the food to those who need it (I sense a metaphor coming on). It’s not just a nice-to-have that we spent our morning separating cookies from carrots—it’s a crucial step in the process. Organization makes the difference between chaos and … | 2018 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2018-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/the-system-the-search-and-the-food-bank/ | content |
| 252 | 252 | Turn Jekyll up to Eleventy | Sometimes it pays not to over complicate things. While many of the sites we use on a daily basis require relational databases to manage their content and dynamic pages to respond to user input, for smaller, simpler sites, serving pre-rendered static HTML is usually a much cheaper — and more secure — option. The JAMstack (JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup) is a popular marketing term for this way of building websites, but in some ways it’s a return to how things were in the early days of the web, before developers started tinkering with CGI scripts or Personal HomePage. Indeed, my website has always served pre-rendered HTML; first with the aid of Movable Type and more recently using Jekyll, which Anna wrote about in 2013. By combining three approachable languages — Markdown for content, YAML for data and Liquid for templating — the ergonomics of Jekyll found broad appeal, influencing the design of the many static site generators that followed. But Jekyll is not without its faults. Aside from notoriously slow build times, it’s also built using Ruby. While this is an elegant programming language, it is yet another ecosystem to understand and manage, and often alongside one we already use: JavaScript. For all my time using Jekyll, I would think to myself “this, but in Node”. Thankfully, one of Santa’s elves (Zach Leatherman) granted my Atwoodian wish and placed such a static site generator under my tree. Introducing Eleventy Eleventy is a more flexible alternative Jekyll. Besides being written in Node, it’s less strict about how to organise files and, in addition to Liquid, supports other templating languages like EJS, Pug, Handlebars and Nunjucks. Best of all, its build times are significantly faster (with future optimisations promising further gains). As content is saved using the familiar combination of YAML front matter and Markdown, transitioning from Jekyll to Eleventy may seem like a reasonable idea. Yet as I’ve discovered, there are a few gotchas. If you’ve been considering making the switch, he… | 2018 | Paul Lloyd | paulrobertlloyd | 2018-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/turn-jekyll-up-to-eleventy/ | content |
| 275 | 275 | Context First: Web Strategy in Four Handy Ws | Many, many years ago, before web design became my proper job, I trained and worked as a journalist. I studied publishing in London and spent three fun years learning how to take a few little nuggets of information and turn them into a story. I learned a bunch of stuff that has all been a huge help to my design career. Flatplanning, layout, typographic theory. All of these disciplines have since translated really well to web design, but without doubt the most useful thing I learned was how to ask difficult questions. Pretty much from day one of journalism school they hammer into you the importance of the Five Ws. Five disarmingly simple lines of enquiry that eloquently manage to provide the meat of any decent story. And with alliteration thrown in too. For a young journo, it’s almost too good to be true. Who? What? Where? When? Why? It seems so obvious to almost be trite but, fundamentally, any story that manages to answer those questions for the reader is doing a pretty good job. You’ll probably have noticed feeling underwhelmed by certain news pieces in the past – disappointed, like something was missing. Some irritating oversight that really lets the story down. No doubt it was one of the Ws – those innocuous little suckers are generally only noticeable by their absence, but they sure get missed when they’re not there. Question everything I’ve always been curious. An inveterate tinkerer with things and asker of dopey questions, often to the point of abject annoyance for anyone unfortunate enough to have ended up in my line of fire. So, naturally, the Five Ws started drifting into other areas of my life. I’d scrutinize everything, trying to justify or explain my rationale using these Ws, but I’d also find myself ripping apart the stuff that clearly couldn’t justify itself against the same criteria. So when I started working as a designer I applied the same logic and, sure enough, the Ws pretty much mapped to the exact same needs we had for gathering requirements at the start of a project. It seemed so obvi… | 2011 | Alex Morris | alexmorris | 2011-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/context-first/ | content |
| 287 | 287 | Extracting the Content | As we throw away our canvas in approaches and yearn for a content-out process, there remains a pain point: the Content. It is spoken of in the hushed tones usually reserved for Lord Voldemort. The-thing-that-someone-else-is-responsible-for-that-must-not-be-named. Designers and developers have been burned before by not knowing what the Content is, how long it is, what style it is and when the hell it’s actually going to be delivered, in internet eons past. Warily, they ask clients for it. But clients don’t know what to make, or what is good, because no one taught them this in business school. Designers struggle to describe what they need and when, so the conversation gets put off until it’s almost too late, and then everyone is relieved that they can take the cop-out of putting up a blog and maybe some product descriptions from the brochure. The Content in content out. I’m guessing, as a smart, sophisticated, and, may I say, nicely-scented reader of the honourable and venerable tradition of 24 ways, that you sense something better is out there. Bunches of boxes to fill in just don’t cut it any more in a responsive web design world. The first question is, how are you going to design something to ensure users have the easiest access to the best Content, if you haven’t defined at the beginning what that Content is? Of course, it’s more than possible that your clients have done lots of user research before approaching you to start this project, and have a plethora of finely tuned Content for you to design with. Have you finished laughing yet? Alright then. Let’s just assume that, for whatever reason of gross oversight, this hasn’t happened. What next? Bringing up Content for the first time with a client is like discussing contraception when you’re in a new relationship. It might be awkward and either party would probably rather be doing something else, but it needs to be broached before any action happens (that, and it’s disastrous to assume the other party has the matter in hand). If we can’t talk about it, how … | 2011 | Relly Annett-Baker | rellyannettbaker | 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/extracting-the-content/ | content |
| 291 | 291 | Information Literacy Is a Design Problem | Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of information” have only grown wilder, thornier, and more constant. We call the internet a firehose, yet we’re loathe to turn it off (or even down). The amount of information we consume daily is staggering—and yet our ability to fully understand it all remains frustratingly insufficient. This should hit a very particular chord for those of us working on the web. We may be developers, designers, or strategists—we may not always be responsible for the words themselves—but we all know that communication is much more than just words. From fonts to form fields, every design decision that we make changes the way information is perceived—for better or for worse. What’s more, the design decisions that we make feed into larger patterns. They don’t just affect the perception of a single piece of information on a single site; they start to shape reader expectations of information anywhere. Users develop cumulative mental models of how websites should be: where to find a search bar, where to look at contact information, how to filter a product list. And yet: our models fail us. Fundamentally, we’re not good at parsing information, and that’s troubling. Our experience of an “information society” may have evolved, but the skills Dr. Kuhlthau spoke of are even more critical now: our lives depend on information literacy. Patterns from words Let’s start at the beginning: with the words. Our choice of words can drastically alter a message, from its emotional resonance to its context to its literal meaning. Sometimes we can use word choice for good, to reinvigorate old, forgotten, or unfairly besmirched ideas. One time at a wedding bbq we labeled the coleslaw BRASSICA MIXTA so… | 2016 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/information-literacy-is-a-design-problem/ | content |
| 1 | 1 | Why Bother with Accessibility? | Web accessibility (known in other fields as inclusive design or universal design) is the degree to which a website is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility is most often used to describe how people with disabilities can access the web. How we approach accessibility In the web community, there’s a surprisingly inconsistent approach to accessibility. There are some who are endlessly dedicated to accessible web design, and there are some who believe it so intrinsic to the web that it shouldn’t be considered a separate topic. Still, of those who are familiar with accessibility, there’s an overwhelming number of designers, developers, clients and bosses who just aren’t that bothered. Over the last few months I’ve spoken to a lot of people about accessibility, and I’ve heard the same reasons to ignore it over and over again. Let’s take a look at the most common excuses. Excuse 1: “People with disabilities don’t really use the web” Accessibility will make your site available to more people — the inclusion case In the same way that the accessibility of a building isn’t just about access for wheelchair users, web accessibility isn’t just about blind users and screen readers. We can affect positively the lives of many people by making their access to the web easier. There are four main types of disability that affect use of the web: Visual Blindness, low vision and colour-blindness Auditory Profoundly deaf and hard of hearing Motor The inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control Cognitive Learning difficulties, distractibility, the inability to focus on large amounts of information None of these disabilities are completely black and white Examining deafness, it’s clear from the medical scale that there are many grey areas between full hearing and total deafness: mild moderate moderately severe severe profound totally deaf For eyesight, and brain conditions that affect what users see, there is a huge range of conditions and challenges: astigmatis… | 2013 | Laura Kalbag | laurakalbag | 2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/ | design |
| 6 | 6 | Run Ragged | You care about typography, right? Do you care about words and how they look, read, and are understood? If you pick up a book or magazine, you notice the moment something is out of place: an orphan, rivers within paragraphs of justified prose, or caps masquerading as small caps. So why, I ask you, is your stance any different on the web? We’re told time and time again that as a person who makes websites we have to get comfortable with our lack of control. On the web, this is a feature, not a bug. But that doesn’t mean we have to lower our standards, or not strive for the same amount of typographic craft of our print-based cousins. We shouldn’t leave good typesetting at the door because we can’t control the line length. When I typeset books, I’d spend hours manipulating the text to create a pleasurable flow from line to line. A key aspect of this is manicuring the right rag — the vertical line of words on ranged-left text. Maximising the space available, but ensuring there are no line breaks or orphaned words that disrupt the flow of reading. Setting a right rag relies on a bunch of guidelines — or as I was first taught to call them, violations! Violation 1. Never break a line immediately following a preposition Prepositions are important, frequently used words in English. They link nouns, pronouns and other words together in a sentence. And links should not be broken if you can help it. Ending a line on a preposition breaks the join from one word to another and forces the reader to work harder joining two words over two lines. For example: The container is for the butter The preposition here is for and shows the relationship between the butter and the container. If this were typeset on a line and the line break was after the word for, then the reader would have to carry that through to the next line. The sentence would not flow. There are lots of prepositions in English – about 150 – but only 70 or so in use. Violation 2. Never break a line immediately following a dash A dash — either an em-dash or … | 2013 | Mark Boulton | markboulton | 2013-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/run-ragged/ | design |
| 12 | 12 | Untangling Web Typography | When I was a carpenter, I noticed how homeowners often had this deer-in-the-headlights look when the contractor I worked for would ask them to make tons of decisions, seemingly all at once. Square or subway tile? Glass or ceramic? Traditional or modern trim details? Flat face or picture frame cabinets? Real wood or laminate flooring? Every day the decisions piled up and were usually made in the context of that room, or that part of that room. Rarely did the homeowner have the benefit of taking that particular decision in full view of the larger context of the project. And architectural plans? Sure, they lay out the broad strokes, but there is still so much to decide. Typography is similar. Designers try to make sites that are easy to use and understand visually. They labour over the details of line height, font size, line length, and font weights. They consider the relative merits of different typographical scales for applications versus content-driven sites. Frequently, designers consider all of this in the context of one page, feature, or view of an application. They are asked to make a million tiny decisions. Sometimes designers just bump up the font size until it looks right. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Instincts are important. Designing in context is easier. It’s OK to leave the big picture until later. Design a bunch of things, and then look for the patterns. You can’t always know everything up front. How does the current feature relate to all the other features on the site? For a large site, just like for a substantial remodel, the number of decisions you would need to internalize to make that knowable would be prohibitively large. When typography goes awry I should be honest. I know very little about typography. I struggle to understand vertical rhythm and the math in Tim Ahrens’s talks about the interaction between type design and rendering technology kind of melted my brain. I have an unusual perspective because I’m not the one making the design decisions, but I am the one implementing t… | 2013 | Nicole Sullivan | nicolesullivan | 2013-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/untangling-web-typography/ | design |
| 13 | 13 | Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey | Too often, we base designs on assumptions that don’t match customer perspectives. Why? Because the data we need to make informed decisions isn’t available. Imagine starting off the year with a treasure trove of user data that can be filtered, sliced, and diced to inform new UI designs, help you discover where users struggle the most, and expose emerging trends in your customers’ needs that could lead to new features. Why, that would be useful indeed. And it’s easy to obtain by conducting an annual survey. Annual surveys may seem as exciting as receiving socks and undies for Christmas, but they’re the gift that keeps on giving all year long (just like fresh socks and undies). I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love surveys! Each time my design research team runs a survey, we learn so much about customer motivations, interests, and behaviors. Surveys provide an aggregate snapshot of your users that can’t easily be obtained by other research methods, and they can be conducted quickly too. You can build a survey in a few hours, run a pilot test in a day, and have real results streaming in the following day. Speed is essential if design research is going to keep pace with a busy product release schedule. Surveys are also an invaluable springboard for customer interviews, which provide deep perspectives on user behavior. If you play your cards right as you construct your survey, you can capture a user ID and an email address for each respondent, making it easy to get in touch with customers whose feedback is particularly intriguing. No more recruiting customers for your research via Twitter or through a recruiting company charging a small fortune. You can filter survey responses and isolate the exact customers to talk with in moments, not months. I love this connected process of sending targeted surveys, filtering the results, and then — with surgical precision — selecting just the right customers to interview. Not only is it fast and cheap, but it lets design researchers do quantitative and qualitative research in … | 2013 | Aarron Walter | aarronwalter | 2013-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/data-driven-design-with-an-annual-survey/ | design |
| 26 | 26 | Integrating Contrast Checks in Your Web Workflow | It’s nearly Christmas, which means you’ll be sure to find an overload of festive red and green decorating everything in sight—often in the ugliest ways possible. While I’m not here to battle holiday tackiness in today’s 24 ways, it might just be the perfect reminder to step back and consider how we can implement colour schemes in our websites and apps that are not only attractive, but also legible and accessible for folks with various types of visual disabilities. This simulated photo demonstrates how red and green Christmas baubles could appear to a person affected by protanopia-type colour blindness—not as festive as you might think. Source: Derek Bruff I’ve been fortunate to work with Simply Accessible to redesign not just their website, but their entire brand. Although the new site won’t be launching until the new year, we’re excited to let you peek under the tree and share a few treats as a case study into how we tackled colour accessibility in our project workflow. Don’t worry—we won’t tell Santa! Create a colour game plan A common misconception about accessibility is that meeting compliance requirements hinders creativity and beautiful design—but we beg to differ. Unfortunately, like many company websites and internal projects, Simply Accessible has spent so much time helping others that they had not spent enough time helping themselves to show the world who they really are. This was the perfect opportunity for them to practise what they preached. After plenty of research and brainstorming, we decided to evolve the existing Simply Accessible brand. Or, rather, salvage what we could. There was no established logo to carry into the new design (it was a stretch to even call it a wordmark), and the Helvetica typography across the site lacked any character. The only recognizable feature left to work with was colour. It was a challenge, for sure: the oranges looked murky and brown, and the blues looked way too corporate for a company like Simply Accessible. We knew we needed to inject a lot of personalit… | 2014 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/ | design |
| 27 | 27 | Putting Design on the Map | The web can leave us feeling quite detached from the real world. Every site we make is really just a set of abstract concepts manifested as tools for communication and expression. At any minute, websites can disappear, overwritten by a newfangled version or simply gone. I think this is why so many of us have desires to create a product, write a book, or play with the internet of things. We need to keep in touch with the physical world and to prove (if only to ourselves) that we do make real things. I could go on and on about preserving the web, the challenges of writing a book, or thoughts about how we can deal with the need to make real things. Instead, I’m going to explore something that gives us a direct relationship between a website and the physical world – maps. A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet The simplest form of map on a website tends to be used for showing where a place is and often directions on how to get to it. That’s an incredibly powerful tool. So why is it, then, that so many sites just plonk in a default Google Map and leave it as that? You wouldn’t just use dark grey Helvetica on every site, would you? Where’s the personality? Where’s the tailored experience? Where is the design? Jumping into design Let’s keep this simple – we all want to be better web folk, not cartographers. We don’t need to go into the history, mathematics or technology of map making (although all of those areas are really interesting to research). For the sake of our sanity, I’m going to gloss over some of the technical areas and focus on the practical concepts. Tiles If you’ve ever noticed a map loading in sections, it’s because it uses tiles that are downloaded individually instead of requiring the user to download everything that they might need. These tiles come in many styles and can be used for anything that covers large ar… | 2014 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2014-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/putting-design-on-the-map/ | design |
| 28 | 28 | Why You Should Design for Open Source | Let’s be honest. Most designers don’t like working for nothing. We rally against spec work and make a stand for contracts and getting paid. That’s totally what you should do as a professional designer in the industry. It’s your job. It’s your hard-working skill. It’s your bread and butter. Get paid. However, I’m going to make a case for why you could also consider designing for open source. First, I should mention that not all open source work is free work. Some companies hire open source contributors to work on their projects full-time, usually because that project is used by said company. There are other companies that encourage open source contribution and even offer 20%-time for these projects (where you can spend one day a week contributing to open source). These are super rad situations to be in. However, whether you’re able to land a gig doing this type of work, or you’ve decided to volunteer your time and energy, designing for open source can be rewarding in many other ways. Portfolio building New designers often find themselves in a catch-22 situation: they don’t have enough work experience showcased in their portfolio, which leads to them not getting much work because their portfolio is bare. These new designers often turn to unsolicited redesigns to fill their portfolio. An unsolicited redesign is a proof of concept in which a designer attempts to redesign a popular website. You can see many of these concepts on sites like Dribbble and Behance and there are even websites dedicated to showcasing these designs, such as Uninvited Designs. There’s even a subreddit for them. There are quite a few negative opinions on unsolicited redesigns, though some people see things from both sides. If you feel like doing one or two of these to fill your portfolio, that’s of course up to you. But here’s a better suggestion. Why not contribute design for an open source project instead? You can easily find many projects in great need of design work, from branding to information design, documentation, and website or ap… | 2014 | Jina Anne | jina | 2014-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/why-you-should-design-for-open-source/ | design |
| 50 | 50 | Make a Comic | For something slightly different over Christmas, why not step away from your computer and make a comic? Definitely not the author working on a comic in the studio, with the desk displaying some of the things you need to make a comic on paper. Why make a comic? First of all, it’s truly fun and it’s not that difficult. If you’re a designer, you can use skills you already have, so why not take some time to indulge your aesthetic whims and make something for yourself, rather than for a client or your company. And you can use a computer – or not. If you’re an interaction designer, it’s likely you’ve already made a storyboard or flow, or designed some characters for personas. This is a wee jump away from that, to the realm of storytelling and navigating human emotions through characters who may or may not be human. Similar medium and skills, different content. It’s not a client deliverable but something that stands by itself, and you’ve nobody’s criteria to meet except those that exist in your imagination! Thanks to your brain and the alchemy of comics, you can put nearly anything in a sequence and your brain will find a way to make sense of it. Scott McCloud wrote about the non sequitur in comics: “There is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations.” Here’s an example of a non sequitur from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics – the images bear no relation to one another, but since they’re in a sequence our brains do their best to understand it: Once you know this it takes the pressure off somewhat. It’s a fun thing to keep in mind and experiment with in your comics! Materials needed A4 copy/printing paper HB pencil for light drawing Dip pen and waterproof Indian ink Bristol board (or any good quality card with a smooth, durable surface) Step 1: Get ideas You’d be surprised where you can take a small grain of an idea and develop it into an interesting comic. Think about a funny conversation you had, or any i… | 2015 | Rebecca Cottrell | rebeccacottrell | 2015-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/make-a-comic/ | design |
| 53 | 53 | Get Expressive with Your Typography | In 1955 Beatrice Warde, an American communicator on typography, published a series of essays entitled The Crystal Goblet in which she wrote, “People who love ideas must have a love of words. They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear.” And with that proposition Warde introduced the idea that just as we judge someone based on the clothes they are wearing, so we make judgements about text based on the typefaces in which it is set. Beatrice Warde. ©1970 Monotype Imaging Inc. Choosing the same typeface as everyone else, especially if you’re trying to make a statement, is like turning up to a party in the same dress; to a meeting in the same suit, shirt and tie; or to a craft ale dispensary in the same plaid shirt and turned-up skinny jeans. But there’s more to your choice of typeface than simply making an impression. In 2012 Jon Tan wrote on 24 ways about a scientific study called “The Aesthetics of Reading” which concluded that “good quality typography is responsible for greater engagement during reading and thus induces a good mood.” Furthermore, at this year’s Ampersand conference Sarah Hyndman, an expert in multisensory typography, discussed how typefaces can communicate with our subconscious. Sarah showed that different fonts could have an effect on how food tasted. A rounded font placed near a bowl of jellybeans would make them taste sweeter, and a jagged angular font would make them taste more sour. The quality of your typography can therefore affect the mood of your reader, and your font choice directly affect the senses. This means you can manipulate the way people feel. You can change their emotional state through type alone. Now that’s a real superpower! The effects of your body text design choices are measurable but subtle. If you really want to have an impact you need to think big. Literally. Display text and headings are your attention grabbers. They are your chance to interrupt, introduce and seduce. Display text and headings set the scene and draw people in. Text set large creates… | 2015 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2015-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/get-expressive-with-your-typography/ | design |
| 58 | 58 | Beyond the Style Guide | Much like baking a Christmas cake, designing for the web involves creating an experience in layers. Starting with a solid base that provides the core experience (the fruit cake), we can add further layers, each adding refinement (the marzipan) and delight (the icing). Don’t worry, this isn’t a misplaced cake recipe, but an evaluation of modular design and the role style guides can play in acknowledging these different concerns, be they presentational or programmatic. The auteur’s style guide Although trained as a graphic designer, it was only when I encountered the immediacy of the web that I felt truly empowered as a designer. Given a desire to control every aspect of the resulting experience, I slowly adopted the role of an auteur, exploring every part of the web stack: front-end to back-end, and everything in between. A few years ago, I dreaded using the command line. Today, the terminal is a permanent feature in my Dock. In straddling the realms of graphic design and programming, it’s the point at which they meet that I find most fascinating, with each dicipline valuing the creation of effective systems, be they for communication or code efficiency. Front-end style guides live at this intersection, demonstrating both the modularity of code and the application of visual design. Painting by numbers In our rush to build modular systems, design frameworks have grown in popularity. While enabling quick assembly, these come at the cost of originality and creative expression – perhaps one reason why we’re seeing the homogenisation of web design. In editorial design, layouts should accentuate content and present it in an engaging manner. Yet on the web we see a practice that seeks templated predictability. In ‘Design Machines’ Travis Gertz argued that (emphasis added): Design systems still feel like a novelty in screen-based design. We nerd out over grid systems and modular scales and obsess over style guides and pattern libraries. We’re pretty good at using them to build repeatable components and site-wide standard… | 2015 | Paul Lloyd | paulrobertlloyd | 2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/beyond-the-style-guide/ | design |
| 59 | 59 | Animating Your Brand | Let’s talk about how we add animation to our designs, in a way that’s consistent with other aspects of our brand, such as fonts, colours, layouts and everything else. Animating is fun. Adding animation to our designs can bring them to life and make our designs stand out. Animations can show how the pieces of our designs fit together. They provide context and help people use our products. All too often animation is something we tack on at the end. We put a transition on a modal window or sliding menu and we often don’t think about whether that animation is consistent with our overall design. Style guides to the rescue A style guide is a document that establishes and enforces style to improve communication. It can cover anything from typography and writing style to ethics and other, broader goals. It might be a static visual document showing every kind of UI, like in the Codecademy.com redesign shown below. UI toolkit from “Reimagining Codecademy.com” by @mslima It might be a technical reference with code examples. CodePen’s new design patterns and style guide is a great example of this, showing all the components used throughout the website as live code. CodePen’s design patterns and style guide A style guide gives a wide view of your project, it maintains consistency when adding new content, and we can use our style guide to present animations. Living documents Style guides don’t need to be static. We can use them to show movement. We can share CSS keyframe animations or transitions that can then go into production. We can also explain why animation is there in the first place. Just as a style guide might explain why we chose a certain font or layout, we can use style guides to explain the intent behind animation. This means that if someone else wants to create a new component, they will know why animation applies. If you haven’t yet set up a style guide, you might want to take a look at Pattern Lab. It’s a great tool for setting up your own style guide and includes loads of design patterns to get started. There … | 2015 | Donovan Hutchinson | donovanhutchinson | 2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animating-your-brand/ | design |
| 61 | 61 | Animation in Responsive Design | Animation and responsive design can sometimes feel like they’re at odds with each other. Animation often needs space to do its thing, but RWD tells us that the amount of space we’ll have available is going to change a lot. Balancing that can lead to some tricky animation situations. Embracing the squishiness of responsive design doesn’t have to mean giving up on your creative animation ideas. There are three general techniques that can help you balance your web animation creativity with your responsive design needs. One or all of these approaches might help you sneak in something just a little extra into your next project. Focused art direction Smaller viewports mean a smaller stage for your motion to play out on, and this tends to amplify any motion in your animation. Suddenly 100 pixels is really far and multiple moving parts can start looking like they’re battling for space. An effect that looked great on big viewports can become muddled and confusing when it’s reframed in a smaller space. Making animated movements smaller will do the trick for simple motion like a basic move across the screen. But for more complex animation on smaller viewports, you’ll need to simplify and reduce the number of moving parts. The key to this is determining what the vital parts of the animation are, to zone in on the parts that are most important to its message. Then remove the less necessary bits to distill the motion’s message down to the essentials. For example, Rally Interactive’s navigation folds down into place with two triangle shapes unfolding each corner on larger viewports. If this exact motion was just scaled down for narrower spaces the two corners would overlap as they unfolded. It would look unnatural and wouldn’t make much sense. Open video The main purpose of this animation is to show an unfolding action. To simplify the animation, Rally unfolds only one side for narrower viewports, with a slightly different animation. The action is still easily interpreted as unfolding and it’s done in a way that is a better… | 2015 | Val Head | valhead | 2015-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animation-in-responsive-design/ | design |
| 67 | 67 | What I Learned about Product Design This Year | 2015 was a humbling year for me. In September of 2014, I joined a tiny but established startup called SproutVideo as their third employee and first designer. The role interests me because it affords the opportunity to see how design can grow a solid product with a loyal user-base into something even better. The work I do now could also have a real impact on the brand and user experience of our product for years to come, which is a thrilling prospect in an industry where much of what I do feels small and temporary. I got in on the ground floor of something special: a small, dedicated, useful company that cares deeply about making video hosting effortless and rewarding for our users. I had (and still have) grand ideas for what thoughtful design can do for a product, and the smaller-scale product design work I’ve done or helped manage over the past few years gave me enough eager confidence to dive in head first. Readers who have experience redesigning complex existing products probably have a knowing smirk on their face right now. As I said, it’s been humbling. A year of focused product design, especially on the scale we are trying to achieve with our small team at SproutVideo, has taught me more than any projects in recent memory. I’d like to share a few of those lessons. Product design is very different from marketing design The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love. Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures… | 2015 | Meagan Fisher | meaganfisher | 2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/ | design |
| 72 | 72 | Designing with Contrast | When an appetite for aesthetics over usability becomes the bellwether of user interface design, it’s time to reconsider who we’re designing for. Over the last few years, we have questioned the signifiers that gave obvious meaning to the function of interface elements. Strong textures, deep shadows, gradients — imitations of physical objects — were discarded. And many, rightfully so. Our audiences are now more comfortable with an experience that feels native to the technology, so we should respond in kind. Yet not all of the changes have benefitted users. Our efforts to simplify brought with them a trend of ultra-minimalism where aesthetics have taken priority over legibility, accessibility and discoverability. The trend shows no sign of losing popularity — and it is harming our experience of digital content. A thin veneer We are in a race to create the most subdued, understated interface. Visual contrast is out. In its place: the thinnest weights of a typeface and white text on bright color backgrounds. Headlines, text, borders, backgrounds, icons, form controls and inputs: all grey. While we can look back over the last decade and see minimalist trends emerging on the web, I think we can place a fair share of the responsibility for the recent shift in priorities on Apple. The release of iOS 7 ushered in a radical change to its user interface. It paired mobile interaction design to the simplicity and eloquence of Apple’s marketing and product design. It was a catalyst. We took what we saw, copied and consumed the aesthetics like pick-and-mix. New technology compounds this trend. Computer monitors and mobile devices are available with screens of unprecedented resolutions. Ultra-light type and subtle hues, difficult to view on older screens, are more legible on these devices. It would be disingenuous to say that designers have always worked on machines representative of their audience’s circumstances, but the gap has never been as large as it is now. We are running the risk of designing VIP lounges where the cost o… | 2015 | Mark Mitchell | markmitchell | 2015-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/designing-with-contrast/ | design |
| 73 | 73 | How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour | Programmers like me are often intimidated by design – but a little effort can give a huge return on investment. Here are one coder’s tips for making any site quickly look more professional. I am a programmer. I am not a designer. I have a degree in computer science, and I don’t mind Comic Sans. (It looks cheerful. Move on.) But although I am a programmer, I want to make my sites look attractive. This is partly out of vanity, and partly realism. Vanity because I want people to think my work is good, and realism because the research shows that people won’t think a site is credible unless it also looks attractive. For a very long time after I became a programmer, I was scared of design. Design seemed to consist of complicated rules that weren’t written down anywhere, plus an unlearnable sense of taste, possessed only by a black-clad elite. But a little while ago, I decided to do my best to hack what it took to make my own projects look vaguely attractive. And although this doesn’t come close to the effect a professional designer could achieve, gathering these resources for improving a site’s look and feel has been really helpful. If I hadn’t figured out some basic design shortcuts, it’s unlikely that a weekend hack of mine would have ended up on page three of the Daily Mail. And too often now, I see excellent programming projects that don’t reach the audience they deserve, simply because their design doesn’t match their execution. So, if you are a developer, my Christmas present to you is this: my own collection of hacks that, used rightly, can make your personal programming projects look professional, quickly. None are hard to learn, most are free, and they let you focus on writing code. One thing to note about these tips, though. They are a personal, pragmatic compilation. They are suggestions, not a definitive guide. You will definitely get better results by working with a professional designer, and by studying design more deeply. If you are a designer, I would love to hear your suggestions for the b… | 2012 | Anna Powell-Smith | annapowellsmith | 2012-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/how-to-make-your-site-look-half-decent/ | design |
| 74 | 74 | Should We Be Reactive? | Evolution Looking at the evolution of the web and the devices we use should help remind us that the times we’re adjusting to are just another step on a journey. These times seem to be telling us that we need to embrace flexibility. Imagine an HTML file containing nothing but text. It’s viewable on any web-capable device and reasonably readable: the notion of the universality of the web was very much a founding principle. Right from the beginning, browser vendors understood that we’d want text to reflow (why wouldn’t we?), so I consider the first websites to have been fluid. As we attempted to exert more control through our designs in the early days of the web, debates about whether we should produce fixed or fluid sites raged. We could create fluid designs using tables, but what we didn’t have then was a wide range of web capable devices or the ability to control this fluidity. The biggest changes occurred when stats showed enough people using a different screen resolution we could cater for. To me, the techniques of responsive web design provide the control we were missing. Combining new approaches to layout and images with media queries empowered us to learn how to embrace the inherent flexibility of the web in ways to suit our work and the devices used by our audience. Perhaps another kind of flexibility might be found in how we use context to affect how we present our content; to consider how we might use the information we can access from people, browsers and devices to provide web experiences – effectively creating sites that react to initial or changing circumstances in the relationship between people and our content. Embracing flexibility So what is context? Put simply, you could think of it as a secondary piece of information that helps clarify the meaning of the first. It helps set a scene or describe circumstances. I think that Cennydd Bowles has summed it up really well through talks he’s given recently, in which he’s arrived at the acronym DETAILS (Device, Environment, Time, Activity, Individ… | 2012 | Dan Donald | dandonald | 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/should-we-be-reactive/ | design |
| 77 | 77 | Colour Accessibility | Here’s a quote from Josef Albers: In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is[…] This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art.Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963 Albers was a German abstract painter and teacher, and published a very famous course on colour theory in 1963. Colour is very relative — not just in the way that it appears differently across different devices due to screen quality and colour management, but it can also be seen differently by different people — something we really need to be more mindful of when designing. What is colour blindness? Colour blindness very rarely means that you can’t see any colour at all, or that people see things in greyscale. It’s actually a decreased ability to see colour, or a decreased ability to tell colours apart from one another. How does it happen? Inside the typical human retina, there are two types of receptor cells — rods and cones. Rods are the cells that allow us to see dark and light, and shape and movement. Cones are the cells that allow us to perceive colour. There are three types of cones, each responsible for absorbing blue, red, and green wavelengths in the spectrum. Problems with colour vision occur when one or more of these types of cones are defective or absent entirely, and these problems can either be inherited through genetics, or acquired through trauma, exposure to ultraviolet light, degeneration with age, an effect of diabetes, or other factors. Colour blindness is a sex-linked trait and it’s much more common in men than in women. The most common type of colour blindness is called deuteranomaly which occurs in 7% of males, but only 0.5% of females. That’s a pretty significant portion of the population if you really stop and think about it — we can’t ignore this demographic. What does it look like? People with the most common types of colour blindness, like protanopia and deuteranopia, have difficulty discriminating between red and green hues. There are also forms of colour blindness like tritanop… | 2012 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/colour-accessibility/ | design |
| 81 | 81 | Science! | Sometimes we want to capture people’s attention at a glance to communicate something fast. At other times we want to have the interface fade away into the background, letting people paint pictures in their minds with our words (if you’ll forgive a little flowery festive flourish). I tend to distinguish between these two broad objectives as designing for impact on the one hand, and designing for immersion on the other. What defines them is interruption. Impact needs an attention-grabbing interruption. Immersion requires us to remove interruption from the interface. Careful design deliberately interrupts but doesn’t accidentally disrupt. If that seems to make sense to you, then you’ll find the following snippets of science as useful as I did. Saccades and fixations As you’re reading this your eyes are skipping along the lines in tiny jumps. During each jump everything is blurred. Each jump ends in a small pause so your brain can take a snapshot of the letters. It arranges them into words, and then parses out the meaning — fast — in around a quarter of a second. The jumps are called saccades. The pauses are called fixations. Sometimes we take regressive saccades, skipping back to reread. There’s a simple example in the excellent little book, Detail in Typography, by Jost Hochuli. If you want to explore the science of reading in much more depth, I recommend the excellent paper, “The Science of Word Recognition”, by Dr Kevin Larson of Microsoft. To design for legibility and readability is to design for saccades and fixations. It’s the craft of making it easy for people’s brains to extract meaning, using techniques like good contrast, font size, spacing and structure, and only interrupting the reading experience deliberately. Scan paths At some point when visiting 24 ways you probably scanned the screen to get orientated. The journey your eyes took is known as a scan path. Scan paths are made up of saccades and fixations. Right now you’re following a scan path as you read, along one line, and down to the next… | 2012 | Jon Tan | jontan | 2012-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/science/ | design |
| 84 | 84 | Responsive Responsive Design | Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things.” With those two sentences, Ethan closed the article that introduced the web to responsive design. Since then, responsive design has taken the web by storm. Seemingly every day, some company is touting their new responsive redesign. Large brands such as Microsoft, Time and Disney are getting in on the action, blowing away the once common criticism that responsive design was a technique only fit for small blogs. Certainly, this is a good thing. As Ethan and John Allsopp before him, were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug. The web’s unique ability to be consumed and interacted with on any number of devices, with any number of input methods is something to be embraced. But there’s one part of the web’s inherent flexibility that seems to be increasingly overlooked: the ability for the web to be interacted with on any number of networks, with a gradient of bandwidth constraints and latency costs, on devices with varying degrees of hardware power. A few months back, Stephanie Rieger tweeted “Shoot me now…responsive design has seemingly become confused with an opportunity to reduce performance rather than improve it.” I would love to disagree, but unfortunately the evidence is damning. Consider the size and number of requests for four highly touted responsive sites that were launched this year: 74 requests, 1,511kb 114 requests, 1,200kb 99 requests, 1,298kb 105 requests, 5,942kb And those numbers were for the small screen versions of each site! These sites were praised for their visual design and responsive nature, and rightfully so. They’re very easy on the eyes and a lot of thought went into their appearance. But the numbers above tell an inconvenient truth: for all the time spent ensuring the visual design was airtight, seemingly very little (if… | 2012 | Tim Kadlec | timkadlec | 2012-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-responsive-design/ | design |
| 93 | 93 | Design Systems | The most important part of responsive web design is that, no matter what the viewport width, the content is accessible in an optimum display. The best responsive designs are those that allow you to go from one optimised display to another, but with the feeling that these experiences are part of a greater product whole. Responsive design: where we’ve been going wrong Responsive web design was a shock to my web designer system. Those of us who had already been designing sites for mobile probably had the biggest leap to make. We might have been detecting user agents in order to deliver a mobile-specific site, or using the slightly more familiar Bushido technique to deliver sites optimised for device type and viewport size, but either way our focus was on devices. A site was optimised for either a mobile phone or a desktop. Responsive web design brought us back to pre-table layout fluid sites that expanded or contracted to fit the viewport. This was a big difference to get our heads around when we were so used to designing for fixed-width layouts. Suddenly, an element could be any width or, at least, we needed to consider its maximum and minimum widths. Pixel perfection, while pretty, became wholly unrealistic, and a whole load of designers who prided themselves in detailed and precise designs got a bit scared. Hanging on to our previous processes and typical deliverables led us to continue to optimise our sites for particular devices and provide pixel-perfect mockups for those device widths. With all this we were concentrating on devices, not content, deliverables and not process, and making assumptions about users and their devices based on nothing but the width of the viewport. I don’t think this is a crime, I think it was inevitable. We can be up to date with our principles and ideals, but it’s never as easy in practice. That’s why it’s more important than ever to share our successful techniques and processes. Let’s drag each other into modern web design. Design systems: the principles What are design sy… | 2012 | Laura Kalbag | laurakalbag | 2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/ | design |
| 102 | 102 | Art Directing with Looking Room | Using photographic composition techniques to start to art direct on the template-driven web. Think back to last night. There you are, settled down in front of the TV, watching your favourite soap opera, with nice hot cup of tea in hand. Did you notice – whilst engrossed in the latest love-triangle – that the cameraman has worked very hard to support your eye’s natural movement on-screen? He’s carefully framed individual shots to create balance. Think back to last week. There you were, sat with your mates watching the big match. Did you notice that the cameraman frames the shot to go with the direction of play? A player moving right will always be framed so that he is on the far left, with plenty of ‘room’ to run into. Both of these cameramen use a technique called Looking Room, sometimes called Lead Room. Looking Room is the space between the subject (be it a football, or a face), and the edge of the screen. Specifically, Looking Room is the negative space on the side the subject is looking or moving. The great thing is, it’s not just limited to photography, film or television; we can use it in web design too. Basic Framing Before we get into Looking Room, and how it applies to web, we need to have a look at some basics of photographic composition. Many web sites use imagery, or photographs, to enhance the content. But even with professionally shot photographs, without a basic understanding of framing or composition, you can damage how the image is perceived. A simple, easy way to make photographs more interesting is to fill the frame. Take this rather mundane photograph of a horse: A typical point and click affair. But, we can work with this. By closely cropping, and filling the frame, we can instantly change the mood of the shot. I’ve also added Looking Room on the right of the horse. This is space that the horse would be walking into. It gives the photograph movement. Subject, Space, and Movement Generally speaking, a portrait photograph will have a subject and space around them. Visual inte… | 2008 | Mark Boulton | markboulton | 2008-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/art-directing-with-looking-room/ | design |
| 108 | 108 | A Festive Type Folly | ‘Tis the season to be jolly, so the carol singers tell us. At 24 ways, we’re keeping alive another British tradition that includes the odd faux-Greco-Roman building dotted around the British countryside, Tower Bridge built in 1894, and your Dad’s Christmas jumper with the dancing reindeer motif. ‘Tis the season of the folly! 24 Ways to impress your friends The example is not an image, just text. You may wish to see a screenshot in Safari to compare with your own operating system and browser rendering. Like all follies this is an embellishment — a bit of web typography fun. It’s similar to the masthead text at my place, but it’s also a hyperlink. Unlike the architectural follies of the past, no child labour was used to fund or build it, just some HTML flavoured with CSS, and a heavy dose of Times New Roman. Why Times New Roman, you ask? Well, after a few wasted hours experimenting with heaps of typefaces, seeking an elusive consistency of positioning and rendering across platforms, it proved to be the most consistent. Who’d‘a thought? To make things more interesting, I wanted to use a traditional scale and make the whole thing elastic by using relative lengths that would react to a person’s font size. So, to the meat of this festive frippery: There are three things we rely on to create this indulgence: Descendant selectors Absolute positioning Inheritance HTML & Descendant Selectors The markup for the folly might seem complex at first glance. To semantics pedants and purists it may seem outrageous. If that’s you, read on at your peril! Here it is with lots of whitespace: <div id="type"> <h1> <a href="/"> <em>2 <span>4 <span>w <span>a <span>y <span>s</span> </span> </span> </span> </span> </em> <strong>to <span>i <span>m <span>pre <span>s <span>s <span>your <span>friends</span> </span> … | 2008 | Jon Tan | jontan | 2008-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/a-festive-type-folly/ | design |
| 111 | 111 | Geometric Background Patterns | When the design is finished and you’re about to start the coding process, you have to prepare your graphics. If you’re working with a pattern background you need to export only the repeating fragment. It can be a bit tricky to isolate a fragment to achieve a seamless pattern background. For geometric patterns there is a method I always follow and that I want to share with you. Take for example a perfect 45° diagonal line pattern. How do you define this pattern fragment so it will be rendered seamlessly? Here is the method I usually follow to avoid a mismatch. First, zoom in so you see enough detail and you can distinguish the pixels. Select the Rectangular Marquee Selection tool and start your selection at the intersection of 2 different colors of a diagonal line. Hold down the Shift key while dragging so you drag a perfect square. Release the mouse when you reach the exact same intesection (as your starting) point at the top right. Copy this fragment (using Copy Merged: Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + C) and paste the fragment in a new layer. Give this layer the name ‘pattern’. Now hold down the Command Key (Control Key on Windows) and click on the ‘pattern’ layer in the Layers Palette to select the fragment. Now go to Edit > Define Pattern, enter a name for your pattern and click OK. Test your pattern in a new document. Create a new document of 600 px by 400px, hit Cmd/Ctrl + A and go to Edit > Fill… and choose your pattern. If the result is OK, you have created a perfect pattern fragment. Below you see this pattern enlarged. The guides show the boundaries of the pattern fragment and the red pixels are the reference points. The red pixels at the top right, bottom right and bottom left should match the red pixel at the top left. This technique should work for every geometric pattern. Some patterns are easier than others, but this, and the Photoshop pattern fill test, has always been my guideline. Other geometric pattern examples Example 1 Not all geometric pattern fragments are squares. Some patterns … | 2008 | Veerle Pieters | veerlepieters | 2008-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/geometric-background-patterns/ | design |
| 131 | 131 | Random Lines Made With Mesh | I know that Adobe Illustrator can be a bit daunting for people who aren’t really advanced users of the program, but you would be amazed by how easy you can create cool effects or backgrounds. In this short tutorial I show you how to create a cool looking background only in 5 steps. Step 1 – Create Lines Create lines using random widths and harmonious suitable colors. If you get stuck on finding the right colors, check out Adobe’s Kuler and start experimenting. Step 2 – Convert Strokes to Fills Select all lines and convert them to fills. Go to the Object menu, select Path > Outline Stroke. Select the Rectangle tool and draw 1 big rectangle on top the lines. Give the rectangle a suitable color. With the rectangle still selected, go to the Object menu, select Arrange > Send to Back. Step 3 – Convert to Mesh Select all objects by pressing the command key (for Mac users), control key (for Windows users) + the “a” key. Go to the Object menu and select the Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh option. Enter 2 rows and 2 columns. Check the preview box to see what happens and click the OK button. Step 4 – Play Around with The Mesh Points Play around with the points of the mesh using the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow in the Toolbox). Click on the top right point of the mesh. Once you’re starting to drag hold down the shift key and move the point upwards. Now start dragging the bezier handles on the mesh to achieve the effect as shown in the above picture. Of course you can try out all kind of different effects here. The Final Result This is an example of how the final result can look. You can try out all kinds of different shapes dragging the handles of the mesh points. This is just one of the many results you can get. So next time you haven’t got inspiration for a background of a header, a banner or whatever, just experiment with a few basic shapes such as lines and try out the ‘Envelope Distort’ options in Illustrator or the ‘Make with Mesh’ option and experiment, you’ll be amazed by the u… | 2006 | Veerle Pieters | veerlepieters | 2006-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/random-lines-made-with-mesh/ | design |
| 133 | 133 | Gravity-Defying Page Corners | While working on Stikkit, a “page curl” came to be. Not being as crafty as Veerle, you see. I fired up Photoshop to see what could be. “Another copy is running on the network“ … oopsie. With license issues sorted out and a concept in mind I set out to create something flexible and refined. One background image and code that is sure to be lean. A simple solution for lazy people like me. The curl I’ll be showing isn’t a curl at all. It’s simply a gradient that’s 18 pixels tall. With a fade to the left that’s diagonally aligned and a small fade on the right that keeps the illusion defined. Create a selection with the marquee tool (keeping in mind a reasonable minimum width) and drag a gradient (black to transparent) from top to bottom. Now drag a gradient (the background color of the page to transparent) from the bottom left corner to the top right corner. Finally, drag another gradient from the right edge towards the center, about 20 pixels or so. But the top is flat and can be positioned precisely just under the bottom right edge very nicely. And there it will sit, never ever to be busted by varying sizes of text when adjusted. <div id="page"> <div id="page-contents"> <h2>Gravity-Defying!</h2> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor ...</p> </div> </div> Let’s dive into code and in the markup you’ll see “is that an extra div?” … please don’t kill me? The #page div sets the width and bottom padding whose height is equal to the shadow we’re adding. The #page-contents div will set padding in ems to scale with the text size the user intends. The background color will be added here too but not overlapping the shadow where #page’s padding makes room. A simple technique that you may find amusing is to substitute a PNG for the GIF I was using. For that would be crafty and future-proof, too. The page curl could sit on any background hue. I hope you’ve enjoyed this easy little trick. It’s hardly earth-shattering, and arguably slick. But it could come in handy, you just never know. Happy Holidays! And pleasant dreams o… | 2006 | Dan Cederholm | dancederholm | 2006-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/gravity-defying-page-corners/ | design |
| 134 | 134 | Photographic Palettes | How many times have you seen a colour combination that just worked, a match so perfect that it just seems obvious? Now, how many times do you come up with those in your own work? A perfect palette looks easy when it’s done right, but it’s often maddeningly difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. Choosing effective colour schemes will always be more art than science, but there are things you can do that will make coming up with that oh-so-smooth palette just a little a bit easier. A simple trick that can lead to incredibly gratifying results lies in finding a strong photograph and sampling out particularly harmonious colours. Photo Selection Not all photos are created equal. You certainly want to start with imagery that fits the eventual tone you’re attempting to create. A well-lit photo of flowers might lead to a poor colour scheme for a funeral parlour’s web site, for example. It’s worth thinking about what you’re trying to say in advance, and finding a photo that lends itself to your message. As a general rule of thumb, photos that have a lot of neutral or de-saturated tones with one or two strong colours make for the best palette; bright and multi-coloured photos are harder to derive pleasing results from. Let’s start with a relatively neutral image. Sampling In the above example, I’ve surrounded the photo with three different background colours directly sampled from the photo itself. Moving from left to right, you can see how each of the sampled colours is from an area of increasingly smaller coverage within the photo, and yet there’s still a strong harmony between the photo and the background image. I don’t really need to pick the big obvious colours from the photo to create that match, I can easily concentrate on more interesting colours that might work better for what I intend. Using a similar palette, let’s apply those colour choices to a more interesting layout: In this mini-layout, I’ve re-used the same tan colour from the previous middle image as a background, and sampled out a nicely… | 2006 | Dave Shea | daveshea | 2006-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/photographic-palettes/ | design |
| 137 | 137 | Cheating Color | Have you ever been strapped to use specific colors outlined in a branding guide? Felt restricted because those colors ended up being too light or dark for the way you want to use them? Here’s the solution: throw out your brand guide. gasp! OK, don’t throw it out. Just put it in a drawer for a few minutes. Branding Guides be Damned When dealing with color on screen, it’s easy to get caught up in literal values from hex colors, you can cheat colors ever so slightly to achieve the right optical value. This is especially prevalent when trying to bring a company’s identity colors to a screen design. Because the most important idea behind a brand guide is to help a company maintain the visual integrity of their business, consider hex numbers to be guidelines rather than law. Once you are familiar enough with the colors your company uses, you can start to flex them a bit, and take a few liberties. This is a quick method for cheating to get the color you really want. With a little sleight of design, we can swap a color that might be part of your identity guidelines, with one that works better optically, and no one will be the wiser! Color is a Wily Beast This might be hard: You might have to break out of the idea that a color can only be made using one method. Color is fluid. It interacts and changes based on its surroundings. Some colors can appear lighter or darker based on what color they appear on or next to. The RGB gamut is additive color, and as such, has a tendency to push contrast in the direction that objects may already be leaning—increasing the contrast of light colors on dark colors and decreasing the contrast of light on light. Obviously, because we are talking about monitors here, these aren’t hard and fast rules. Cheat and Feel Good About It On a light background, when you have a large element of a light color, a small element of the same color will appear lighter. Enter our fake company: Double Dagger. They manufacture footnotes. Take a look at Fig. 1 below. The logo (Double Dagger), rule, and… | 2006 | Jason Santa Maria | jasonsantamaria | 2006-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/cheating-color/ | design |
| 140 | 140 | Styling hCards with CSS | There are plenty of places online where you can learn about using the hCard microformat to mark up contact details at your site (there are some resources at the end of the article). But there’s not yet been a lot of focus on using microformats with CSS. So in this installment of 24 ways, we’re going to look at just that – how microformats help make CSS based styling simpler and more logical. Being rich, quite complex structures, hCards provide designers with a sophisticated scaffolding for styling them. A recent example of styling hCards I saw, playing on the business card metaphor, was by Andy Hume, at http://thedredge.org/2005/06/using-hcards-in-your-blog/. While his approach uses fixed width cards, let’s take a look at how we might style a variable width business card style for our hCards. Let’s take a common hCard, which includes address, telephone and email details <div class="vcard"> <p class="fn org">Web Directions North <a href="http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http://north.webdirections.org/contact/"> <img src="images/vcard-add.png" alt="download vcard icon"></a> </p> 1485 Laperrière Avenue Ottawa ON K1Z 7S8 Canada Phone/Fax: Work: 61 2 9365 5007 Email: info@webdirections.org We’ll be using a variation on the now well established “sliding doors” technique (if you create a CSS technique, remember it’s very important to give it a memorable name or acronym, and bonus points if you get your name in there!) by Douglas Bowman, enhanced by Scott Schiller (see http://www.schillmania.com/projects/dialog/,) which will give us a design which looks like this The technique, in a nutshell, uses background images on four elements, two at the top, and two at the bottom, to add each rounded corner. We are going to make this design “fluid” in the sense that it grows and shrinks in proportion with the size of the font that the text of the element is displayed with. This is sometimes referred to as an “em driven design” (we’ll see why in a moment). To see how this w… | 2006 | John Allsopp | johnallsopp | 2006-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/styling-hcards-with-css/ | design |
| 141 | 141 | Compose to a Vertical Rhythm | “Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.” So says the typographer Robert Bringhurst, and just as regular use of time provides rhythm in music, so regular use of space provides rhythm in typography, and without rhythm the listener, or the reader, becomes disorientated and lost. On the Web, vertical rhythm – the spacing and arrangement of text as the reader descends the page – is contributed to by three factors: font size, line height and margin or padding. All of these factors must calculated with care in order that the rhythm is maintained. The basic unit of vertical space is line height. Establishing a suitable line height that can be applied to all text on the page, be it heading, body copy or sidenote, is the key to a solid dependable vertical rhythm, which will engage and guide the reader down the page. To see this in action, I’ve created an example with headings, footnotes and sidenotes. Establishing a suitable line height The easiest place to begin determining a basic line height unit is with the font size of the body copy. For the example I’ve chosen 12px. To ensure readability the body text will almost certainly need some leading, that is to say spacing between the lines. A line-height of 1.5em would give 6px spacing between the lines of body copy. This will create a total line height of 18px, which becomes our basic unit. Here’s the CSS to get us to this point: body { font-size: 75%; } html>body { font-size: 12px; } p { line-height 1.5em; } There are many ways to size text in CSS and the above approach provides and accessible method of achieving the pixel-precision solid typography requires. By way of explanation, the first font-size reduces the body text from the 16px default (common to most browsers and OS set-ups) down to the 12px we require. This rule is primarily there for Internet Explorer 6 and below on Windows: the percentage value means that the t… | 2006 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2006-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm/ | design |
| 146 | 146 | Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix | Web pages built in plain old HTML and CSS are displayed using only the fonts installed on users’ computers (@font-face implementations excepted). To enable this, CSS provides the font-family property for specifying fonts in order of preference (often known as a font stack). For example: h1 {font-family: 'Egyptienne F', Cambria, Georgia, serif} So in the above rule, headings will be displayed in Egyptienne F. If Egyptienne F is not available then Cambria will be used, failing that Georgia or the final fallback default serif font. This everyday bit of CSS will be common knowledge among all 24 ways readers. It is also a commonly held belief that the only fonts we can rely on being installed on users’ computers are the core web fonts of Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia and friends. But is that really true? If you look in the fonts folder of your computer, or even your Mum’s computer, then you are likely to find a whole load of fonts besides the core ones. This is because many software packages automatically install extra typefaces. For example, Office 2003 installs over 100 additional fonts. Admittedly not all of these fonts are particularly refined, and not all are suitable for the Web. However they still do increase your options. The Matrix I have put together a matrix of (western) fonts showing which are installed with Mac and Windows operating systems, which are installed with various versions of Microsoft Office, and which are installed with Adobe Creative Suite. The matrix is available for download as an Excel file and as a CSV. There are no readily available statistics regarding the penetration of Office or Creative Suite, but you can probably take an educated guess based on your knowledge of your readers. The idea of the matrix is that use can use it to help construct your font stack. First of all pick the font you’d really like for your text – this doesn’t have to be in the matrix. Then pick the generic family (serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy or monospace) and a font from each of the … | 2007 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2007-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix/ | design |
| 148 | 148 | Typesetting Tables | Tables have suffered in recent years on the web. They were used for laying out web pages. Then, following the Web Standards movement, they’ve been renamed by the populous as `data tables’ to ensure that we all know what they’re for. There have been some great tutorials for the designing tables using CSS for presentation and focussing on the semantics in the displaying of data in the correct way. However, typesetting tables is a subtle craft that has hardly had a mention. Table design can often end up being a technical exercise. What data do we need to display? Where is the data coming from and what form will it take? When was the last time your heard someone talk about lining numerals? Or designing to the reading direction? Tables are not read like sentences When a reader looks at, and tries to understand, tabular data, they’re doing a bunch of things at the same time. Generally, they’re task based; they’re looking for something. They are reading horizontally AND vertically Reading a table is not like reading a paragraph in a novel, and therefore shouldn’t be typeset in the same way. Designing tables is information design, it’s functional typography—it’s not a time for eye candy. Typesetting tables Typesetting great looking tables is largely an exercise in restraint. Minimal interference with the legibility of the table should be in the forefront of any designers mind. When I’m designing tables I apply some simple rules: Plenty of negative space Use the right typeface Go easy on the background tones, unless you’re giving reading direction visual emphasis Design to the reading direction By way of explanation, here are those rules as applied to the following badly typeset table. Your default table This table is a mess. There is no consideration for the person trying to read it. Everything is too tight. The typeface is wrong. It’s flat. A grim table indeed. Let’s see what we can do about that. Plenty of negative space The badly typeset table has been set with default padding. There has bee… | 2007 | Mark Boulton | markboulton | 2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/typesetting-tables/ | design |
| 149 | 149 | Underpants Over My Trousers | With Christmas approaching faster than a speeding bullet, this is the perfect time for you to think about that last minute present to buy for the web geek in your life. If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone, forget about that svelte iPhone case carved from solid mahogany and head instead to your nearest comic-book shop and pick up a selection of comics or graphic novels. (I’ll be using some of my personal favourite comic books as examples throughout). Trust me, whether your nearest and dearest has been reading comics for a while or has never peered inside this four-colour world, they’ll thank-you for it. Aside from indulging their superhero fantasies, comic books can provide web designers with a rich vein of inspiring ideas and material to help them create shirt button popping, trouser bursting work for the web. I know from my own personal experience, that looking at aspects of comic book design, layout and conventions and thinking about the ways that they can inform web design has taken my design work in often-unexpected directions. There are far too many fascinating facets of comic book design that provide web designers with inspiration to cover in the time that it takes to pull your underpants over your trousers. So I’m going to concentrate on one muscle bound aspect of comic design, one that will make you think differently about how you lay out the content of your pages in panels. A suitcase full of Kryptonite Now, to the uninitiated onlooker, the panels of a comic book may appear to perform a similar function to still frames from a movie. But inside the pages of a comic, panels must work harder to help the reader understand the timing of a story. It is this method for conveying narrative timing to a reader that I believe can be highly useful to designers who work on the web as timing, drama and suspense are as important in the web world as they are in worlds occupied by costumed crime fighters and superheroes. I’d like you to start by closing your eyes and thinking about your own proces… | 2007 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/underpants-over-my-trousers/ | design |
| 151 | 151 | Get In Shape | Pop quiz: what’s wrong with the following navigation? Maybe nothing. But then again, maybe there’s something bugging you about the way it comes together, something you can’t quite put your finger on. It seems well-designed, but it also seems a little… off. The design decisions that led to this eventual form were no doubt well-considered: Client: The top level needs to have a “current page” status indicator of some sort. Designer: How about a white tab? Client: Great! The second level needs to show up underneath the first level though… Designer: Okay, but that white tab I just added makes it hard to visually connect the bottom nav to the top. Client: Too late, we’ve seen the white tab and we love it. Try and make it work. Designer: Right. So I placed the second level in its own box. Client: Hmm. They seem too separated. I can’t tell that the yellow nav is the second level of the first. Designer: How about an indicator arrow? Client: Brilliant! The problem is that the end result feels awkward and forced. During the design process, little decisions were made that ultimately affect the overall shape of the navigation. What started out as a neatly contained rounded rectangle ended up as an ambiguous double shape that looks funny, though it’s often hard to pinpoint precisely why. The Shape of Things Well the why in this case is because seemingly unrelated elements in a design still end up visually interacting. Adding a new item to a page impacts everything surrounding it. In this navigation example, we’re looking at two individual objects that are close enough to each other that they form a relationship; if we reduce them to strictly their outlines, it’s a little easier to see that this particular combination registers oddly. The two shapes float with nothing really grounding them. If they were connected, perhaps it would be a different story. The white tab divides the top shape in half, leaving a gap in the middle of it. There’s very little balance in this pairing because the overall shape of the… | 2007 | Dave Shea | daveshea | 2007-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/get-in-shape/ | design |
| 152 | 152 | CSS for Accessibility | CSS is magical stuff. In the right hands, it can transform the plainest of (well-structured) documents into a visual feast. But it’s not all fur coat and nae knickers (as my granny used to say). Here are some simple ways you can use CSS to improve the usability and accessibility of your site. Even better, no sexy visuals will be harmed by the use of these techniques. Promise. Nae knickers This is less of an accessibility tip, and more of a reminder to check that you’ve got your body background colour specified. If you’re sitting there wondering why I’m mentioning this, because it’s a really basic thing, then you might be as surprised as I was to discover that from a sample of over 200 sites checked last year, 35% of UK local authority websites were missing their body background colour. Forgetting to specify your body background colour can lead to embarrassing gaps in coverage, which are not only unsightly, but can prevent your users reading the text on your site if they use a different operating system colour scheme. All it needs is the following line to be added to your CSS file: body {background-color: #fff;} If you pair it with color: #000; … you’ll be assured of maintaining contrast for any areas you inadvertently forget to specify, no matter what colour scheme your user needs or prefers. Even better, if you’ve got standard reset CSS you use, make sure that default colours for background and text are specified in it, so you’ll never be caught with your pants down. At the very least, you’ll have a white background and black text that’ll prompt you to change them to your chosen colours. Elbow room Paying attention to your typography is important, but it’s not just about making it look nice. Careful use of the line-height property can make your text more readable, which helps everyone, but is particularly helpful for those with dyslexia, who use screen magnification or simply find it uncomfortable to read lots of text online. When lines of text are too close together, it can cause the eye to s… | 2007 | Ann McMeekin | annmcmeekin | 2007-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/css-for-accessibility/ | design |
| 167 | 167 | Back To The Future of Print | By now we have weathered the storm that was the early days of web development, a dangerous time when we used tables, inline CSS and separate pages for print only versions. We can reflect in a haggard old sea-dog manner (“yarrr… I remember back in the browser wars…”) on the bad practices of the time. We no longer need convincing that print stylesheets are the way to go1, though some of the documentation for them is a little outdated now. I am going to briefly cover 8 tips and 4 main gotchas when creating print stylesheets in our more enlightened era. Getting started As with regular stylesheets, print CSS can be included in a number of ways2, for our purposes we are going to be using the link element. <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css"> This is still my favourite way of linking to CSS files, its easy to see what files are being included and to what media they are being applied to. Without the media attribute specified the link element defaults to the media type ‘all’ which means that the styles within then apply to print and screen alike. The media type ‘screen’ only applies to the screen and wont be picked up by print, this is the best way of hiding styles from print. Make sure you include your print styles after all your other CSS, because you will need to override certain rules and this is a lot easier if you are flowing with the cascade than against it! Another thing you should be thinking is ‘does it need to be printed’. Consider the context3, if it is not a page that is likely to be printed, such as a landing page or a section index then the print styles should resemble the way the page looks on the screen. Context is really important for the design of your print stylesheet, all the tips and tricks that follow should be taken in the context of the page. If for example you are designing a print stylesheet for an item in a shopping cart, it is irrelevant for the user to know the exact url of the link that takes them to your checkout. Tips and tricks During these tip’… | 2007 | Natalie Downe | nataliedowne | 2007-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/back-to-the-future-of-print/ | design |
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