| 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 of entry is a Mac with a Retina display.
Minimalist expectations
Like progressive enhancement in an age of JavaScript, many good and sensible accessibility practices are being overlooked or ignored. We’re driving unilateral design decisions that threaten accessibility. We’ve approached every problem with the same solution, grasping on to the integrity of beauty, focusing on expression over users’ needs and content.
Someone once suggested to me that a client’s website should include two states. The first state would be the ideal experience, with low color contrast, light font weights and no differentiation between links and text. It would be the default. The second state would be presented in whatever way was necessary to meet accessibility standards. Users would have to opt out of the default state via a toggle if it wasn’t meeting their needs. A sort of first-class, upper deck cabin equivalent of graceful degradation. That this would divide the user base was irrelevant, as the aesthetics of the brand were absolute.
It may seem like an unusual anecdote, but it isn’t uncommon to see this thinking in our industry. Again and again, we place the burden of responsibility to participate in a usable experience on others. We view accessibility and good design as mutually exclusive. Taking for granted what users will tolerate is usually the forte of monopolistic services, but increasingly we apply the same arrogance to our new products and services.
Imitation without representation
All of us are influenced in one way or another by one another’s work. We are consciously and unconsciously affected by the visual and audible activity around us. This is important and unavoidable. We do not produce work in a vacuum. We respond to technology and culture. We channel language and geography. We absorb the sights and sounds of film, television, news. To mimic and copy is part and parcel of creating something an audience of many can comprehend and respond to. Our clients often look first to their competitors’ products to understand their success.
However, problems arise when we focus on style without context; form without function; mimicry as method. Copied and reused without any of the ethos of the original, stripped of deliberate and informed decision-making, the so-called look and feel becomes nothing more than paint on an empty facade.
The typographic and color choices so in vogue today with our popular digital products and services have little in common with the brands they are meant to represent.
For want of good design, the message was lost
The question to ask is: does the interface truly reflect the product? Is it an accurate characterization of the brand and organizational values? Does the delivery of the content match the tone of voice?
The answer is: probably not. Because every organization, every app or service, is unique. Each with its own personality, its own values and wonderful quirks. Design is communication. We should do everything in our role as professionals to use design to give voice to the message. Our job is to clearly communicate the benefits of a service and unreservedly allow access to information and content. To do otherwise, by obscuring with fashionable styles and elusive information architecture, does a great disservice to the people who chose to engage with and trust our products.
We can achieve hierarchy and visual rhythm without resorting to extreme reduction. We can craft a beautiful experience with fine detail and curiosity while meeting fundamental standards of accessibility (and strive to meet many more).
Standards of excellence
It isn’t always comfortable to step back and objectively question our design choices. We get lost in the flow of our work, using patterns and preferences we’ve tried and tested before. That our decisions often seem like second nature is a gift of experience, but sometimes it prevents us from finding our blind spots.
I was first caught out by my own biases a few years ago, when designing an interface for the Bank of England. After deciding on the colors for the typography and interactive elements, I learned that the site had to meet AAA accessibility standards. My choices quickly fell apart. It was eye-opening. I had to start again with restrictions and use size, weight and placement instead to construct the visual hierarchy.
Even now, I make mistakes. On a recent project, I used large photographs on an organization’s website to promote their products. Knowing that our team had control over the art direction, I felt confident that we could compose the photographs to work with text overlays. Despite our best effort, the cropped images weren’t always consistent, undermining the text’s legibility. If I had the chance to do it again, I would separate the text and image.
So, what practical things can we consider to give our users the experience they deserve?
Put guidelines in place
Think about your brand values. Write down keywords and use them as a framework when choosing a typeface. Explore colors that convey the organization’s personality and emotional appeal.
Define a color palette that is web-ready and meets minimum accessibility standards. Note which colors are suitable for use with text. Only very dark hues of grey are consistently legible so keep them for non-essential text (for example, as placeholders in form inputs).
Find which background colors you can safely use with white text, and consider integrating contrast checks into your workflow.
Use roman and medium weights for body copy. Reserve lighter weights of a typeface for very large text. Thin fonts are usually the first to break down because of aliasing differences across platforms and screens.
Check that the size, leading and length of your type is always legible and readable. Define lower and upper limits. Small text is best left for captions and words in uppercase.
Avoid overlaying text on images unless it’s guaranteed to be legible. If it’s necessary to optimize space in the layout, give the text a container. Scrims aren’t always reliable: the text will inevitably overlap a part of the photograph without a contrasting ground.
Test your work
Review legibility and contrast on different devices. It’s just as important as testing the layout of a responsive website. If you have a local device lab, pay it a visit.
Find a computer monitor near a window when the sun is shining. Step outside the studio and try to read your content on a mobile device with different brightness levels.
Ask your friends and family what they use at home and at work. It’s one way of making sure your feedback isn’t always coming from a closed loop.
Push your limits
You define what the user sees. If you’ve inherited brand guidelines, question them. If you don’t agree with the choices, make the case for why they should change.
Experiment with size, weight and color to find contrast. Objects with low contrast appear similar to one another and undermine the visual hierarchy. Weak relationships between figure and ground diminish visual interest. A balanced level of contrast removes ambiguity and creates focal points. It captures and holds our attention.
If you’re lost for inspiration, look to graphic design in print. We have a wealth of history, full of examples that excel in using contrast to establish visual hierarchy.
Embrace limitations. Use boundaries as an opportunity to explore possibilities.
More than just a facade
Designing with standards encourages legibility and helps to define a strong visual hierarchy. Design without exclusion (through neither negligence or intent) gets around discussions of demographics, speaks to a larger audience and makes good business sense. Following the latest trends not only weakens usability but also hinders a cohesive and distinctive brand.
Users will make means when they need to, by increasing browser font sizes or enabling system features for accessibility. But we can do our part to take as much of that burden off of the user and ask less of those who need it most.
In architecture, it isn’t buildings that mimic what is fashionable that stand the test of time. Nor do we admire buildings that tack on separate, poorly constructed extensions to meet a bare minimum of safety regulations. We admire architecture that offers well-considered, remarkable, usable spaces with universal access.
Perhaps we can take inspiration from these spaces. Let’s give our buildings a bold voice and make sure the doors are open to everyone. |
2015 |
Mark Mitchell |
markmitchell |
2015-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/designing-with-contrast/ |
design |
| 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, and at what time of year is one of the many superpower goals of every budding Naturalist.
Using technology and the croudsourced species observations of the iNaturalist community we can shortcut our way to this superpower!
Finding nearby animals with iNaturalist
We’re going to be getting our information about what animals you can see in Pillar Point using iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a really fun platform that helps connect people to nature and report their findings of life in the outdoors. It is also a community of nature-loving people who help each other identify and confirm those observations. iNaturalist is a project run as a joint initiative by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.
I’ve been using iNaturalist for over two years to record and identify plants and animals that I’ve found in the outdoors. I use their iPhone app to upload my pictures, which then uses machine learning algorithms to make an initial guess at what it is I’ve seen. The community is really active, and I often find someone else has verified or updated my species guess pretty soon after posting.
This process is great because once an observation has been identified by at least two people it becomes ‘verified’ and is considered research grade. Research grade observations get exported and used by scientists, as well as being indexed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF.
iNaturalist has a great API and API explorer, which makes interacting and prototyping using iNaturalist data really fun. For example, if you go to the API explorer and expand the Observations : Search and fetch section and then the GET /observations API, you get a selection of input boxes that allow you to play with options that you can then pass to the API when you click the ‘Try it out’ button.
You’ll then get a URL that looks a bit like
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations?captive=false &geo=true&verifiable=true&taxon_id=47113&lat=37.495461&lng=-122.499584 &radius=5&order=desc&order_by=created_at
which you can call and interrrogate using a programming language of your choice.
If you would like to see an all-JavaScript application that uses the iNaturalist API, take a look at OwlsNearMe.com which Simon and I built one weekend earlier this year. It gets your location and shows you all iNaturalist observations of owls near you and lists which species you are likely to see (not adjusted for season).
Rapid development using Observable Notebooks
We’re going to be using Observable Notebooks to prototype our examples, pulling data down from iNaturalist. I really like using visual notebooks like Observable, they are great for learning and building things quickly. You may be familiar with Jupyter notebooks for Python which is similar but takes a bit of setup to get going - I often use these for prototyping too. Observable is amazing for querying and visualising data with JavaScript and since it is a hosted product it doesn’t require any setup at all.
You can follow along and play with this example on my Observable notebook. If you create an account there you can fork my notebook and create your own version of this example.
Each ‘notebook’ consists of a page with a column of ‘cells’, similar to what you get in a spreadsheet. A cell can contain Markdown text or JavaScript code and the output of evaluating the cell appears above the code that generated it. There are lots of tutorials out there on Observable Notebooks, I like this code introduction one from Observable (and D3) creator Mike Bostock.
Developing your Naturalist superpowers
If you have an idea of what plants and critters you might see in a place at the time you visit, you can hone in on what you want to study and train your Naturalist eye to better identify the life around you.
For our example, we care about wildlife we can see at Pillar Point, so we need a way of letting the iNaturalist API know which area we are interested in.
We could use a latitide, longitude and radius for this, but a rectangular bounding box is a better shape for the reef. We can use this tool to draw the area we want to search within: boundingbox.klokantech.com
The tool lets you export the bounding box in several forms using the dropdown at the bottom left under the map givese We are going to use the ‘DublinCore’ format as it’s closest to the format needed by the iNaturalist API.
westlimit=-122.50542; southlimit=37.492805; eastlimit=-122.492738; northlimit=37.499811
A quick map primer:
The higher the latitude the more north it is
The lower the latitude the more south it is
Latitude 0 = the equator
The higher the longitude the more east it is of Greenwich
The lower the longitude the more west it is of Greenwich
Longitude 0 = Greenwich
In the iNaturalst API we want to use the parameters nelat, nelng, swlat, swlng to create a query that looks inside a bounding box of Pillar Point near Half Moon Bay in California:
nelat = highest latitude = north limit = 37.499811
nelng = highest longitude = east limit = -122.492738
swlat = smallest latitude = south limit = 37.492805
swlng = smallest longitude = west limit = 122.50542
As API parameters these look like this:
?nelat=37.499811&nelng=-122.492738&swlat=37.492805&swlng=122.50542
These parameters in this format can be used for most of the iNaturalist API methods.
Nudibranch seasonality in Pillar Point
We can use the iNaturalist observation_histogram API to get a count of Nudibranch observations per week-of-year across all time and within our Pillar Point bounding box.
In addition to the geographic parameters that we just worked out, we are also sending the taxon_id of 47113, which is iNaturalists internal number associated with the Nudibranch taxon. By using this we can get all species which are under the parent ‘Order Nudibranchia’.
Another useful piece of naturalist knowledge is understanding the biological classification scheme of Taxanomic Rank - roughly, when a species has a Latin name of two words eg ‘Glaucus Atlanticus’ the first Latin word is the ‘Genus’ like a family name ‘Glaucus’, and the second word identifies that particular species, like a given name ‘Atlanticus’.
The two Latin words together indicate a specific species, the term we use colloquially to refer to a type of animal often differs wildly region to region, and sometimes the same common name in two countries can refer to two different species. The common names for the Glaucus Atlanticus (which incidentally is my favourite sea slug) include: sea swallow, blue angel, blue glaucus, blue dragon, blue sea slug and blue ocean slug! Because this gets super confusing, Scientists like using this Latin name format instead.
The following piece of code asks the iNaturalist Histogram API to return per-week counts for verified observations of Nudibranchs within our Pillar Point bounding box:
pillar_point_counts_per_week = fetch(
"https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?taxon_id=47113&nelat=37.499811&nelng=-122.492738&swlat=37.492805&swlng=-122.50542&date_field=observed&interval=week_of_year&verifiable=true"
).then(response => {
return response.json();
})
Our next step is to take this data and draw a graph! We’ll be using Vega-Lite for this, which is a fab JavaScript graphing libary that is also easy and fun to use with Observable Notebooks.
(Here is a great tutorial on exploring data and drawing graphs with Observable and Vega-Lite)
The iNaturalist API returns data that looks like this:
{
"total_results": 53,
"page": 1,
"per_page": 53,
"results": {
"week_of_year": {
"1": 136,
"2": 20,
"3": 150,
"4": 65,
"5": 186,
"6": 74,
"7": 47,
"8": 87,
"9": 64,
"10": 56,
But for our Vega-Lite graph we need data that looks like this:
[{
"week": "01",
"value": 136
}, {
"week": "02",
"value": 20
}, ...]
We can convert what we get back from the API to the second format using a loop that iterates over the object keys:
objects_to_plot = {
let objects = [];
Object.keys(pillar_point_counts_per_week.results.week_of_year).map(function(week_index) {
objects.push({
week: `Wk ${week_index.toString()}`,
observations: pillar_point_counts_per_week.results.week_of_year[week_index]
});
})
return objects;
}
We can then plug this into Vega-Lite to draw us a graph:
vegalite({
data: {values: objects_to_plot},
mark: "bar",
encoding: {
x: {field: "week", type: "nominal", sort: null},
y: {field: "observations", type: "quantitative"}
},
width: width * 0.9
})
It’s worth noting that we have a lot of observations of Nudibranchs particularly at Pillar Point due in no small part to the intertidal monitoring research that Alison Young and Rebecca Johnson facilitate for the California Achademy of Sciences.
So, what if we want to look for the seasonality of observations of a particular species of adorable sea slug? We want our interface to have a select box with a list of all the species you might find at any time of year. We can do this using the species_counts API to create us an object with the iNaturalist species ID and common & Latin names.
pillar_point_nudibranches = {
let api_results = await fetch(
"https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?taxon_id=47113&nelat=37.499811&nelng=-122.492738&swlat=37.492805&swlng=-122.50542&date_field=observed&verifiable=true"
).then(r => r.json())
let species_list = api_results.results.map(i => ({
value: i.taxon.id,
label: `${i.taxon.preferred_common_name} (${i.taxon.name})`
}));
return species_list
}
We can create an interactive select box by importing code from Jeremy Ashkanas’ Observable Notebook: add import {select} from "@jashkenas/inputs" to a cell anywhere in our notebook. Observable is magic: like a spreadsheet, the order of the cells doesn’t matter - if one cell is referenced by any other cell then when that cell updates all the other cells refresh themselves. You can also import and reference one notebook from another!
viewof select_species = select({
title: "Which Nudibranch do you want to see seasonality for?",
options: [{value: "", label: "All the Nudibranchs!"}, ...pillar_point_nudibranches],
value: ""
})
Then we go back to our old favourite, the histogram API just like before, only this time we are calling it with the value created by our select box ${select_species} as taxon_id instead of the number 47113.
pillar_point_counts_per_month_per_species = fetch(
`https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?taxon_id=${select_species}&nelat=37.499811&nelng=-122.492738&swlat=37.492805&swlng=-122.50542&date_field=observed&interval=month_of_year&verifiable=true`
).then(r => r.json())
Now for the fun graph bit! As we did before, we re-format the result of the API into a format compatible with Vega-Lite:
objects_to_plot_species_month = {
let objects = [];
Object.keys(pillar_point_counts_per_month_per_species.results.month_of_year).map(function(month_index) {
objects.push({
month: (new Date(2018, (month_index - 1), 1)).toLocaleString("en", {month: "long"}),
observations: pillar_point_counts_per_month_per_species.results.month_of_year[month_index]
});
})
return objects;
}
(Note that in the above code we are creating a date object with our specific month in, and using toLocalString() to get the longer English name for the month. Because the JavaScript Date object counts January as 0, we use month_index -1 to get the correct month)
And we draw the graph as we did before, only now if you interact with the select box in Observable the graph will dynamically update!
vegalite({
data: {values: objects_to_plot_species_month},
mark: "bar",
encoding: {
x: {field: "month", type: "nominal", sort:null},
y: {field: "observations", type: "quantitative"}
},
width: width * 0.9
})
Now we can see when is the best time of year to plan to go tidepooling in Pillar Point if we want to find a specific species of Nudibranch.
This tool is great for planning when we to go rockpooling at Pillar Point, but what about if you are going this month and want to pre-train your eye with what to look for in order to impress your friends with your knowledge of Nudibranchs?
Well… we can create ourselves a dynamic guide that you can with a list of the species, their photo, name and how many times they have been observed in that month of the year!
Our select box this time looks as follows, simpler than before but assigning the month value to the variable selected_month.
viewof selected_month = select({
title: "When do you want to see Nudibranchs?",
options: [
{ label: "Whenever", value: "" },
{ label: "January", value: "1" },
{ label: "February", value: "2" },
{ label: "March", value: "3" },
{ label: "April", value: "4" },
{ label: "May", value: "5" },
{ label: "June", value: "6" },
{ label: "July", value: "7" },
{ label: "August", value: "8" },
{ label: "September", value: "9" },
{ label: "October", value: "10" },
{ label: "November", value: "11" },
{ label: "December", value: "12" },
],
value: ""
})
We then can use the species_counts API to get all the relevant information about which species we can see in month=${selected_month}. We’ll be able to reference this response object and its values later with the variable we just created, eg: all_species_data.results[0].taxon.name.
all_species_data = fetch(
`https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?taxon_id=47113&month=${selected_month}&nelat=37.499811&nelng=-122.492738&swlat=37.492805&swlng=-122.50542&verifiable=true`
).then(r => r.json())
You can render HTML directly in a notebook cell using Observable’s html tagged template literal:
<style>
.collection { margin-top: 2em }
.collection .species { display: inline-block; width: 9em; margin-bottom: 2em; }
.collection .species-name { font-size: 1em; margin: 0; padding: 0 }
.collection .species-count { margin: 0 0 0.3em 0; padding: 0; font-size: 0.75em; color: #999; font-style: italic; }
.collection img { display: block; width: 100% }
.collection select { font-size: 1.5em; }
</style>
<h2>If you go to Pillar Point ${
{"": "",
"1":"in January",
"2":"in Febrary",
"3":"in March",
"4":"in April",
"5":"in May",
"6":"in June",
"7":"in July",
"8":"in August",
"9":"in September",
"10":"in October",
"11":"in November",
"12":"in December",
}[selected_month]
} you might see…</h2>
<div class="collection">
${all_species_data.results.map(s => `<div class="species"><h3 class="species-name">${s.taxon.name}</h3>
<p class="species-count">Seen ${s.count} times</p>
<img src="${s.taxon.default_photo.medium_url}"></div>
`)}
</div>
These few lines of HTML are all you need to get this exciting dynamic guide to what Nudibranchs you will see in each month!
Play with it yourself in this Observable Notebook.
Conclusion
I hope by playing with these examples you have an idea of how powerful it can be to prototype using Observable Notebooks and how you can use the incredible crowdsourced community data and APIs from iNaturalist to augment your naturalist skills and impress your friends with your new ‘knowledge of nature’ superpower.
Lastly I strongly encourage you to get outside on a low tide to explore your local rocky intertidal habitat, and all the amazing critters that live there.
Here is a great introduction video to tidepooling / rockpooling, by Rebecca Johnson and Alison Young from the California Academy of Sciences. |
2018 |
Natalie Downe |
nataliedowne |
2018-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/observable-notebooks-and-inaturalist/ |
code |
| 47 |
Developing Robust Deployment Procedures |
Once you have developed your site, how do you make it live on your web hosting? For many years the answer was to log on to your server and upload the files via FTP. Over time most hosts and FTP clients began to support SFTP, ensuring your files were transmitted over a secure connection. The process of deploying a site however remained the same.
There are issues with deploying a site in this way. You are essentially transferring files one by one to the server without any real management of that transfer. If the transfer fails for some reason, you may end up with a site that is only half updated. It can then be really difficult to work out what hasn’t been replaced or added, especially where you are updating an existing site. If you are updating some third-party software your update may include files that should be removed, but that may not be obvious to you and you risk leaving outdated files littering your file system. Updating using (S)FTP is a fragile process that leaves you open to problems caused by both connectivity and human error. Is there a better way to do this?
You’ll be glad to know that there is. A modern professional deployment workflow should have you moving away from fragile manual file transfers to deployments linked to code committed into source control.
The benefits of good practice
You may never have experienced any major issues while uploading files over FTP, and good FTP clients can help. However, there are other benefits to moving to modern deployment practices.
No surprises when you launch
If you are deploying in the way I suggest in this article you should have no surprises when you launch because the code you committed from your local environment should be the same code you deploy – and to staging if you have a staging server. A missing vital file won’t cause things to start throwing errors on updating the live site.
Being able to work collaboratively
Source control and good deployment practice makes working with your clients and other developers easy. Deploying first to a staging server means you can show your client updates and then push them live. If you subcontract some part of the work, you can give your subcontractor the ability to deploy to staging, leaving you with the final push to launch, once you know you are happy with the work.
Having a proper backup of site files with access to them from anywhere
The process I will outline requires the use of hosted, external source control. This gives you a backup of your latest commit and the ability to clone those files and start working on them from any machine, wherever you are.
Being able to jump back into a site quickly when the client wants a few changes
When doing client work it is common for some work to be handed over, then several months might go by without you needing to update the site. If you don’t have a good process in place, just getting back to work on it may take several hours for what could be only a few hours of work in itself. A solid method for getting your local copy up to date and deploying your changes live can cut that set-up time down to a few minutes.
The tool chain
In the rest of this article I assume that your current practice is to deploy your files over (S)FTP, using an FTP client. You would like to move to a more robust method of deployment, but without blowing apart your workflow and spending all Christmas trying to put it back together again. Therefore I’m selecting the most straightforward tools to get you from A to B.
Source control
Perhaps you already use some kind of source control for your sites. Today that is likely to be Git but you might also use Subversion or Mercurial. If you are not using any source control at all then I would suggest you choose Git, and that is what I will be working with in this article.
When you work with Git, you always have a local repository. This is where your changes are committed. You also have the option to push those changes to a remote repository; for example, GitHub. You may well have come across GitHub as somewhere you can go to download open source code. However, you can also set up private repositories for sites whose code you don’t want to make publicly accessible.
A hosted Git repository gives you somewhere to push your commits to and deploy from, so it’s a crucial part of our tool chain.
A deployment service
Once you have your files pushed to a remote repository, you then need a way to deploy them to your staging environment and live server. This is the job of a deployment service.
This service will connect securely to your hosting, and either automatically (or on the click of a button) transfer files from your Git commit to the hosting server. If files need removing, the service should also do this too, so you can be absolutely sure that your various environments are the same.
Tools to choose from
What follows are not exhaustive lists, but any of these should allow you to deploy your sites without FTP.
Hosted Git repositories
GitHub
Beanstalk
Bitbucket
Standalone deployment tools
Deploy
dploy.io
FTPloy
I’ve listed Beanstalk as a hosted Git repository, though it also includes a bundled deployment tool. Dploy.io is a standalone version of that tool just for deployment. In this tutorial I have chosen two separate services to show how everything fits together, and because you may already be using source control. If you are setting up all of this for the first time then using Beanstalk saves having two accounts – and I can personally recommend them.
Putting it all together
The steps we are going to work through are:
Getting your local site into a local Git repository
Pushing the files to a hosted repository
Connecting a deployment tool to your web hosting
Setting up a deployment
Get your local site into a local Git repository
Download and install Git for your operating system.
Open up a Terminal window and tell Git your name using the following command (use the name you will set up on your hosted repository).
> git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
Use the next command to give Git your email address. This should be the address that you will use to sign up for your remote repository.
> git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS"
Staying in the command line, change to the directory where you keep your site files. If your files are in /Users/rachel/Sites/mynicewebite you would type:
> cd /Users/rachel/Sites/mynicewebsite
The next command tells Git that we want to create a new Git repository here.
> git init
We then add our files:
> git add .
Then commit the files:
> git commit -m “Adding initial files”
The bit in quotes after -m is a message describing what you are doing with this commit. It’s important to add something useful here to remind yourself later why you made the changes included in the commit.
Your local files are now in a Git repository! However, everything should be just the same as before in terms of working on the files or viewing them in a local web server. The only difference is that you can add and commit changes to this local repository.
Want to know more about Git? There are some excellent resources in a range of formats here.
Setting up a hosted Git repository
I’m going to use Atlassian Bitbucket for my first example as they offer a free hosted and private repository.
Create an account on Bitbucket. Then create a new empty repository and give it a name that will identify the repository easily.
Click Getting Started and under Command Line select “I have an existing project”. This will give you a set of instructions to run on the command line. The first instruction is just to change into your working directory as we did before. We then add a remote repository, and run two commands to push everything up to Bitbucket.
cd /path/to/my/repo
git remote add origin https://myuser@bitbucket.org/myname/24ways-tutorial.git
git push -u origin --all
git push -u origin --tags
When you run the push command you will be asked for the password that you set for Bitbucket. Having entered that, you should be able to view the files of your site on Bitbucket by selecting the navigation option Source in the sidebar.
You will also be able to see commits. When we initially committed our files locally we added the message “Adding initial files”. If you select Commits from the sidebar you’ll see we have one commit, with the message we set locally. You can imagine how useful this becomes when you can look back and see why you made certain changes to a project that perhaps you haven’t worked on for six months.
Before working on your site locally you should run:
> git pull
in your working directory to make sure you have all of the most up-to-date files. This is especially important if someone else might work on them, or you just use multiple machines.
You then make your changes and add any changed or modified files, for example:
> git add index.php
Commit the change locally:
> git commit -m “updated the homepage”
Then push it to Bitbucket:
> git push origin master
If you want to work on your files on a different computer you clone them using the following command:
> git clone https://myuser@bitbucket.org/myname/24ways-tutorial.git
You then have a copy of your files that is already a Git repository with the Bitbucket repository set up as a remote, so you are all ready to start work.
Connecting a deployment tool to your repository and web hosting
The next step is deploying files. I have chosen to use a deployment tool called Deploy as it has support for Bitbucket. It does have a monthly charge – but offers a free account for open source projects.
Sign up for your account then log in and create your first project. Select Create an empty project. Under Configure Repository Details choose Bitbucket and enter your username and password.
If Deploy can connect, it will show you your list of projects. Select the one you want.
The next screen is Add New Server and here you need to configure the server that you want to deploy to. You might set up more than one server per project. In an ideal world you would deploy to a staging server for your client preview changes and then deploy once everything is signed off. For now I’ll assume you just want to set up your live site.
Give the server a name; I usually use Production for the live web server. Then choose the protocol to connect with. Unless your host really does not support SFTP (which is pretty rare) I would choose that instead of FTP.
You now add the same details your host gave you to log in with your SFTP client, including the username and password. The Path on server should be where your files are on the server. When you log in with an SFTP client and you get put in the directory above public_html then you should just be able to add public_html here.
Once your server is configured you can deploy. Click Deploy now and choose the server you just set up. Then choose the last commit (which will probably be selected for you) and click Preview deployment. You will then get a preview of which files will change if you run the deployment: the files that will be added and any that will be removed. At the very top of that screen you should see the commit message you entered right back when you initially committed your files locally.
If all looks good, run the deployment.
You have taken the first steps to a more consistent and robust way of deploying your websites. It might seem like quite a few steps at first, but you will very soon come to realise how much easier deploying a live site is through this process.
Your new procedure step by step
Edit your files locally as before, testing them through a web server on your own computer.
Commit your changes to your local Git repository.
Push changes to the remote repository.
Log into the deployment service.
Hit the Deploy now button.
Preview the changes.
Run the deployment and then check your live site.
Taking it further
I have tried to keep things simple in this article because so often, once you start to improve processes, it is easy to get bogged down in all the possible complexities. If you move from deploying with an FTP client to working in the way I have outlined above, you’ve taken a great step forward in creating more robust processes. You can continue to improve your procedures from this point.
Staging servers for client preview
When we added our server we could have added an additional server to use as a staging server for clients to preview their site on. This is a great use of a cheap VPS server, for example. You can set each client up with a subdomain – clientname.yourcompany.com – and this becomes the place where they can view changes before you deploy them.
In that case you might deploy to the staging server, let the client check it out and then go back and deploy the same commit to the live server.
Using Git branches
As you become more familiar with using Git, and especially if you start working with other people, you might need to start developing using branches. You can then have a staging branch that deploys to staging and a production branch that is always a snapshot of what has been pushed to production. This guide from Beanstalk explains how this works.
Automatic deployment to staging
I wouldn’t suggest doing automatic deployment to the live site. It’s worth having someone on hand hitting the button and checking that everything worked nicely. If you have configured a staging server, however, you can set it up to deploy the changes each time a commit is pushed to it.
If you use Bitbucket and Deploy you would create a deployment hook on Bitbucket to post to a URL on Deploy when a push happens to deploy the code. This can save you a few steps when you are just testing out changes. Even if you have made lots of changes to the staging deployment, the commit that you push live will include them all, so you can do that manually once you are happy with how things look in staging.
Further Reading
The tutorials from Git Client Tower, already mentioned in this article, are a great place to start if you are new to Git.
A presentation from Liam Dempsey showing how to use the GitHub App to connect to Bitbucket
Try Git from Code School
The Git Workbook a self study guide to Git from Lorna Mitchell
Get set up for the new year
I love to start the New Year with a clean slate and improved processes. If you are still wrangling files with FTP then this is one thing you could tick off your list to save you time and energy in 2015. Post to the comments if you have suggestions of tools or ideas for ways to enhance this type of set-up for those who have already taken the first steps. |
2014 |
Rachel Andrew |
rachelandrew |
2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/developing-robust-deployment-procedures/ |
process |
| 154 |
Diagnostic Styling |
We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content.
Note: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I’ll explain why that’s not really a problem near the end of the article — and no, the reason is not “everyone should just ignore IE anyway”.
Basic Diagnostics
To pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles.
font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}
You could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you’ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.)
Not everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don’t affect layout. Eh? Here’s a comparison.
On the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later — which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it.
Okay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no.
Attribution
Let’s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style — that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I’m not going to get anywhere near), as it’s just another side of the same coin of using font: baking the presentation into the document structure instead of putting it somewhere more manageable. So:
*[style], font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}
Adding that attribute selector to the rule’s grouped selector means that we’ll now be outlining any element with a style attribute.
There’s a lot more that attribute selectors will let use diagnose. For example, we can highlight any images that have empty alt or title text.
img[alt=""] {border: 3px dotted red;}
img[title=""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}
Now, you may wonder why one of these rules calls for a border, and the other for an outline. That’s because I want them to “add together” — that is, if I have an image which possesses both alt and title, and the values of both are empty, then I want it to be doubly marked.
See how the middle image there has both red and fuchsia dots running around it? (And am I the only one who sorely misses the actual circular dots drawn by IE5/Mac?) That’s due to its markup, which we can see here in a fragment showing the whole table row.
<tr>
<th scope="row">empty title</th>
<td><img src="comic.gif" title="" /></td>
<td><img src="comic.gif" title="" alt="" /></td>
<td><img src="comic.gif" title="" alt="comical" /></td>
</tr>
Right, that’s all well and good, but it misses a rather more serious situation: the selector img[alt=""] won’t match an img element that doesn’t even have an alt attribute. How to tackle this problem?
Not a Problem
Well, if you want to select something based on a negative, you need a negative selector.
img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;}
This is really quite a break from the rest of CSS selection, which is all positive: “select anything that has these characteristics”. With :not(), we have the ability to say (in supporting browsers) “select anything that hasn’t these characteristics”. In the above example, only img elements that do not have an alt attribute will be selected. So we expand our list of image-related rules to read:
img[alt=""] {border: 3px dotted red;}
img[title=""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}
img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;}
img:not([title]) {outline: 5px solid fuchsia;}
With the following results:
We could expand this general idea to pick up tables who lack a summary, or have an empty summary attribute.
table[summary=""] {outline: 3px dotted red;}
table:not([summary]) {outline: 5px solid red;}
When it comes to selecting header cells that lack the proper scope, however, we have a trickier situation. Finding headers with no scope attribute is easy enough, but what about those that have a scope attribute with an incorrect value?
In this case, we actually need to pull an on-off maneuver. This has us setting all th elements to have a highlight style, and then turn it off for the elements that meet our criteria.
th {border: 2px solid red;}
th[scope="col"], th[scope="row"] {border: none;}
This was necessary because of the way CSS selectors work. For example, consider this:
th:not([scope="col"]), th:not([scope="row"]) {border: 2px solid red;}
That would select…all th elements, regardless of their attrributes. That’s because every th element doesn’t have a scope of col, doesn’t have a scope of row, or doesn’t have either. There’s no escaping this selector o’ doom!
This limitation arises because :not() is limited to containing a single “thing” within its parentheses. You can’t, for example, say “select all elements except those that are images which descend from list items”. Reportedly, this limitation was imposed to make browser implementation of :not() easier.
Still, we can make good use of :not() in the service of further diagnosing. Calling out links in trouble is a breeze:
a[href]:not([title]) {border: 5px solid red;}
a[title=""] {outline: 3px dotted red;}
a[href="#"] {background: lime;}
a[href=""] {background: fuchsia;}
Here we have a set that will call our attention to links missing title information, as well as links that have no valid target, whether through a missing URL or a JavaScript-driven page where there are no link fallbacks in the case of missing or disabled JavaScript (href="#").
And What About IE?
As I said at the beginning, much of what I covered here doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, most particularly :not() and outline. (Oh, so basically everything? -Ed.)
I can’t do much about the latter. For the former, however, it’s possible to hack your way around the problem by doing some layered on-off stuff. For example, for images, you replace the previously-shown rules with the following:
img {border: 5px solid red;}
img[alt][title] {border-width: 0;}
img[alt] {border-color: fuchsia;}
img[alt], img[title] {border-style: double;}
img[alt=""][title],
img[alt][title=""] {border-width: 3px;}
img[alt=""][title=""] {border-style: dotted;}
It won’t have exactly the same set of effects, given the inability to use both borders and outlines, but will still highlight troublesome images.
It’s also the case that IE6 and earlier lack support for even attribute selectors, whereas IE7 added pretty much all the attribute selector types there are, so the previous code block won’t have any effect previous to IE7.
In a broader sense, though, these kinds of styles probably aren’t going to be used in the wild, as it were. Diagnostic styles are something only you see as you work on a site, so you can make sure to use a browser that supports outlines and :not() when you’re diagnosing. The fact that IE users won’t see these styles is irrelevant since users of any browser probably won’t be seeing these styles.
Personally, I always develop in Firefox anyway, thanks to its ability to become a full-featured IDE through the addition of extensions like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.
Yeah, About That…
It’s true that much of what I describe in this article is available in the WDT. I feel there are two advantages to writing your own set of diagnostic styles.
When you write your own styles, you can define exactly what the visual results will be, and how they will interact. The WDT doesn’t let you make its outlines thicker or change their colors.
You can combine a bunch of diagnostics into a single set of rules and add it to your site’s style sheet during the diagnostic portion, thus ensuring they persist as you surf around. This can be done in the WDT, but it isn’t as easy (and, at least for me, not as reliable).
It’s also true that a markup validator will catch many of the errors I mentioned, such as missing alt and summary attributes. For some, that’s sufficient. But it won’t catch everything diagnostic styles can, like empty alt values or untargeted links, which are perfectly valid, syntactically speaking.
Diagnosis Complete?
I hope this has been a fun look at the concept of diagnostic styling as well as a quick introduction into possibly new concepts like :not() and outlines. This isn’t all there is to say, of course: there is plenty more that could be added to a diagnostic style sheet. And everyone’s diagnostics will be different, tuned to meet each person’s unique situation.
Mostly, though, I hope this small exploration triggers some creative thinking about the use of CSS to do more than just lay out pages and colorize text. Given the familiarity we acquire with CSS, it only makes sense to use it wherever it might be useful, and setting up visible diagnostic flags is just one more place for it to help us. |
2007 |
Eric Meyer |
ericmeyer |
2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/diagnostic-styling/ |
process |
| 89 |
Direction, Distance and Destinations |
With all these new smartphones in the hands of lost and confused owners, we need a better way to represent distances and directions to destinations. The immediate examples that jump to mind are augmented reality apps which let you see another world through your phone’s camera. While this is interesting, there is a simpler way: letting people know how far away they are and if they are getting warmer or colder.
In the app world, you can easily tap into the phone’s array of sensors such as the GPS and compass, but what people rarely know is that you can do the same with HTML. The native versus web app debate will never subside, but at least we can show you how to replicate some of the functionality progressively in HTML and JavaScript.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a simple webpage listing distances and directions of a few popular locations around the world. We’ll use JavaScript to access the device’s geolocation API and also attempt to access the compass to get a heading. Both of these APIs are documented, to be included in the W3C geolocation API specification, and can be used on both desktop and mobile devices today.
To get started, we need a list of a few locations around the world. I have chosen the highest mountain peak on each continent so you can see a diverse set of distances and directions.
Mountain
°Latitude
°Longitude
Kilimanjaro
-3.075833
37.353333
Vinson Massif
-78.525483
-85.617147
Puncak Jaya
-4.078889
137.158333
Everest
27.988056
86.925278
Elbrus
43.355
42.439167
Mount McKinley
63.0695
-151.0074
Aconcagua
-32.653431
-70.011083
Source: Wikipedia
We can put those into an HTML list to be styled and accessed by JavaScript to create some distance and directions calculations.
The next thing we need to do is check to see if the browser and operating system have geolocation support. To do this we test to see if the function is available or not using a single JavaScript if statement.
<script>
// If this is true, then the method is supported and we can try to access the location
if (navigator.geolocation) {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(geo_success, geo_error);
}
</script>
The if statement will be false if geolocation support is not present, and then it is up to you to do something else instead as a fallback. For this example, we’ll do nothing since our page should work as is and only get progressively better if more functionality is available.
The if statement will be true if there is support and therefore will continue inside the curly brackets to try to get the location. This should prompt the reader to accept or deny the request to get their location. If they say no, the second function callback is processed, in this case a function called geo_error; whereas if the location is available, it fires the geo_success function callback.
The function geo_error(){ } isn’t that exciting. You can handle this in any way you see fit. The success function is more interesting. We get a position object passed into the function which contains a series of exciting attributes, namely the latitude and longitude of the device’s current location.
function geo_success(position){
gLat = position.coords.latitude;
gLon = position.coords.longitude;
}
Now, in the variables gLat and gLon we have the user’s approximate geographical position. We can use this information to start to calculate some distances between where they are and all the destinations.
At the time of writing, you can also get position.coords.heading, but on Windows and iOS devices this returned NULL. In the future, if and when this is supported, this is also where you can easily grab the compass information.
Inside the geo_success function, we want to loop through the HTML to get all of the mountain peaks’ latitudes and longitudes and compute the distance.
...
$('.geo').each(function(){
// Get the lat/lon from the HTML
tLat = $(this).find('.lat').html()
tLon = $(this).find('.lon').html()
// compute the distances between the current location and this points location
dist = distance(tLat,tLon,gLat,gLon);
// set the return values into something useful
d = parseInt(dist[0]*10)/10;
a = parseFloat(dist[1]);
// display the value in the HTML and style the arrow
$(this).find('.distance').html(d+' km away');
$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + a + 'deg)');
// store the arc for later use if compass is available
$(this).attr('data-arc',a);
}
In the variable d we have the distance between the current location and the location of the mountain peak based on the Haversine Formula. The variable a is the arc, which has a value from 0 to 359.99. This will be useful later if we have compass support. Given these two values we have a distance and a heading to style the HTML.
The next thing we want to do is check to see if the device has a compass and then get access to the the current heading. As we’ll see, there are several ways to do this, some of which work on certain devices but not others. The W3C geolocation spec says that, along with the coordinates, there are several other attributes: accuracy; altitude; and heading. Heading is the direction to true north, which is different than magnetic north! WebKit and Windows return NULL for the heading value, but WebKit has an experimental method to fetch the heading. If you get into accessing these sensors, you’ll have to try to catch a few of these methods to finally get a value. Assuming you do, we can move on to the more interesting display opportunities.
In an ideal world, this would succeed and set a variable we’ll call compassHeading to get a value between 0 and 359.99 degrees. Now we know which direction north is, we also know the direction relative to north of the path to our destination, so we can can subtract the two values to get an arrow to display on the screen. But we’re not finished yet: we also need to get the device’s orientation (landscape or portrait) and subtract the correct amount from the angle for the arrow. Once we have a value, we can use CSS to rotate the arrow the correct number of degrees.
-webkit-transform: rotate(-180deg)
Not all devices support a standard way to access compass information, so in the meantime we need to use a work around. On iOS, you can use the experimental event method e.webkitCompassHeading. We want the compass to update in real time as the device is moved around, so we’ll put this inside an event listener.
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
// Loop through all the locations on the page
$('.geo').each(function(){
// get the arc value from north we computed and stored earlier
destination_arc = parseInt($(this).attr('data-arc'))
compassHeading = e.webkitCompassHeading + window.orientation + destination_arc;
// find the arrow element and rotate it accordingly
$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + compassHeading + 'deg)');
}
}
As the device is rotated, the compass arrow will constantly be updated. If you want to see an example, you can have a look at this page which shows the distances to all the peaks on each continent.
With progressive enhancement, we slowly layer on additional functionality as we go. The reader will first see the list of locations with a latitude and longitude. If the device is capable and permissions allow, it will then compute the distance. If a compass is available, with the correct permissions it will then add the final layer which is direction.
You should consider this code a stub for your projects. If you are making a hyperlocal webpage with restaurant locations, for example, then consider adding these features. Knowing not only how far away a place is, but also the direction can be hugely important, and since the compass is always active, it acts as a guide to the location.
Future developments
Improvements to this could include setting a timer and recalling the navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() function and updating the distances. I chose very distant mountains so kilometres made sense, but you can divide again by 1,000 to convert to metres if you are dealing with much nearer places. Walking or driving would change the distances so the ability to refresh would be important.
It is outside the scope of this article, but if you manage to get this HTML to work offline, then you can make a nice web app which sits on your devices’ homescreens and works even without an internet connection. This could be ideal for travellers in an unknown city looking for your destination. Just with offline storage, base64 encoding and data URIs, it is possible to embed plenty of design and functionality into a small offline webpage.
Now you know how to use JavaScript to look up a destination’s location and figure out the distance and direction – never get lost again. |
2012 |
Brian Suda |
briansuda |
2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/direction-distance-and-destinations/ |
code |
| 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.
As with all formats though, it’s not without its disadvantages:
Icons can only be rendered in monochrome or with a gradient fill in browsers that are capable of rendering CSS3 gradients. Specific parts of the icon can’t be a different colour.
It’s only appropriate when there is an accompanying text to provide meaning. This can be alleviated by wrapping the text label in a tag (I like to use <b> rather than <span>, due to the fact that it’s smaller and isn’ t being used elsewhere) and then hiding it from view with text-indent:-999em.
Creating an icon font can be a complex and time-consuming process. While font editors can carry out hinting automatically, the best results are achieved manually.
Unless you’re adept at creating your own fonts, you’re restricted to what is available in the font. However, fonts like Pictos will cover the most common needs, and icons are most effective when they’re using familiar conventions.
The main complaint about using fonts for icons is that it can mean adding a meaningless character to our markup. The good news is that we can overcome this by using one of two methods – CSS generated content or the data-icon attribute – in combination with the :before and :after pseudo-selectors, to keep our markup minimal and meaningful.
Our simple markup looks like this:
<a href="/basket" class="icon basket">View Basket</a>
Note the multiple class attributes. Next, we’ll import the Pictos font using the @font-face web fonts property in CSS:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Pictos';
src: url('pictos-web.eot');
src: local('☺'),
url('pictos-web.woff') format('woff'),
url('pictos-web.ttf') format('truetype'),
url('pictos-web.svg#webfontIyfZbseF') format('svg');
}
This rather complicated looking set of rules is (at the time of writing) the most bulletproof way of ensuring as many browsers as possible load the font we want. We’ll now use the content property applied to the :before pseudo-class selector to generate our icon. Once again, we’ll use those multiple class attribute values to set common icon styles, then specific styles for .basket. This helps us avoid repeating styles:
.icon {
font-family: 'Pictos';
font-size: 22px:
}
.basket:before {
content: "$";
}
What does the :before pseudo-class do? It generates the dollar character in a browser, even when it’s not present in the markup. Using the generated content approach means our markup stays simple, but we’ll need a new line of CSS, defining what letter to apply to each class attribute for every icon we add.
data-icon is a new alternative approach that uses the HTML5 data- attribute in combination with CSS attribute selectors. This new attribute lets us add our own metadata to elements, as long as its prefixed by data- and doesn’t contain any uppercase letters. In this case, we want to use it to provide the letter value for the icon. Look closely at this markup and you’ll see the data-icon attribute.
<a href="/basket" class="icon" data-icon="$">View Basket</a>
We could add others, in fact as many as we like.
<a href="/" class="icon" data-icon="k">Favourites</a>
<a href="/" class="icon" data-icon="t">History</a>
<a href="/" class="icon" data-icon="@">Location</a>
Then, we need just one CSS attribute selector to style all our icons in one go:
.icon:before {
content: attr(data-icon);
/* Insert your fancy colours here */
}
By placing our custom attribute data-icon in the selector in this way, we can enable CSS to read the value of that attribute and display it before the element (in this case, the anchor tag). It saves writing a lot of CSS rules. I can imagine that some may not like the extra attribute, but it does keep it out of the actual content – generated or not.
This could be used for all manner of tasks, including a media player and large simple illustrations. See the demo for live examples. Go ahead and zoom the page, and the icons will be crisp, with the exception of the examples that use -webkit-background-clip: text as mentioned earlier.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that with both generated content and the data-icon method, the letter will be announced to people using screen readers. For example, with the shopping basket icon above, the reader will say “dollar sign view basket”. As accessibility issues go, it’s not exactly the worst, but could be confusing. You would need to decide whether this method is appropriate for the audience. Despite the disadvantages, icon fonts have huge potential. |
2011 |
Jon Hicks |
jonhicks |
2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/displaying-icons-with-fonts-and-data-attributes/ |
code |
| 226 |
Documentation-Driven Design for APIs |
Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant.
Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do.
Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it?
Documentation needs to have three main features:
It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users.
It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language.
It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released.
But you can also get these bonuses:
Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable.
It can test your API quality.
It can enhance the communication skills within your development team.
So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day leftovers?
Write your documentation first
When I say first, I mean first. Not after you’ve started writing the code. Not even after you’ve started writing your unit tests. First. You may or may not have been provided with a decent specification, but the first job should be to turn your requirements for a feature into documentation.
It works best when it takes the form of in-code comments. It works even better when your in-code comments take a standard documentation format that you can later use to generate published documentation for your users. This has the benefit of immediately making your docs as version controlled as your code-base, and it saves having to rewrite, copy or otherwise harass your docs into something legible later on.
Almost all languages have a self-documentation format these days. My choice of format for JavaScript is JSDocToolkit, and the sort of things I look for are the ability to specify private and public methods, full options object statements (opts as Opts only is a no-no), and the ability to include good examples.
So, our example for today will be a new festive feature for a JavaScript API. We’ve been asked to specify a sled for Santa to get around the world to give out toys:
Santa needs to be able to travel around the world in one night to deliver toys to children, and he’ll need some reindeer to pull his sled.
As documentation, it would look like:
/**
@name Sled
@extends Vehicle
@constructor
@description Create a new sled to send Santa around the world to deliver toys to good kids.
@param {Object} [opts] Options
@param {number} [opts.capacity='50'] Set the capacity of the sled
@param {string} [opts.pilot='santa'] The pilot of the sled.
@example
// Create a sled and specify some reindeer.
new Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Prancer', 'Vixen', 'Comet', 'Cupid']);
*/
By breaking it down as documentation, you can, for example, hand this over to another developer without the need to explain the feature in much depth, and they’ll develop something that has to match this piece of documentation. It specifies everything that is important to this feature – its default values and types, and where it inherits other features from.
We know that we need to specify some way of setting reindeer to pull the sled and also some toys to give, and so we can quickly specify extra methods for the sled:
/*
@name vehicle.Sled#reindeer
@function
@description Set the reindeer that will pull Santa's sled.
@param {string[]} reindeer A list of the reindeer.
@example
// specifying some reindeer
Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Rudolph', 'Vixen']);
*/
/*
@name vehicle.Sled#toys
@function
@description Add a list of toys and recipients to the Sled.
@param {Object[]} toys A list of toys and who will receive them.
@example
// Adding toys to the sled
Sled().toys([
{name:'Brian', toy:'Fire Engine'},
{name:'Drew', toy:'Roller-skates'},
{name:'Anna', toy:'Play-doh'},
...
]);
*/
Job done! You’ve got a specification to share with your team and something useful for your users in the form of full examples, and you didn’t even have to open another text editor.
Use your documentation to share knowledge
Documentation isn’t just for users. It’s also used by internal developers to explain what they’ve written and how it works. This is especially valuable where the team is large or the code-base sprawling.
So, returning to our example, the next step would be to share with the rest of the team (or at least a selection of the team if yours is large) what the documentation looks like. This is useful for two main reasons:
They can see if they understand what the documentation says the feature will do. It’s best if they haven’t seen the requirement before. If your fellow developers can’t work out what ‘MagicMethodX’ is going to return from the docs, neither can your users.
They can check that the feature accomplishes everything that they expect to, and that it’s consistent with the rest of the functionality.
On previous projects, we’ve taken to referring to this stage of the development process as the ‘bun fight’. It’s a chance for everyone to have an honest say and throw a few pies without actually causing anyone to have to rewrite any code. If you can identify at this stage that a feature is over-complicated, lacking or just plain useless, you’ll all be much happier to throw out a few lines of documentation than you may have been to throw out a partial, or even complete, piece of functionality.
Documentation has your back
The final benefit to working in this way is that your documentation not only remains accurate, it’s always as accurate as your latest release. It can’t fall behind. You can increase the likelihood that your docs will remain up to date by unit testing your examples.
Returning to the previous example, we can add a QUnit unit test to the expected output with ease during the build process – we know exactly how the code will look and, with the @example tag, we can identify easily where to find the bits that need testing. If it’s tested it’ll definitely work as you expect it to when a user copy and pastes it. You’re ensuring quality from idea to implementation.
As an extra bauble, the best thing about a system like JSDocToolkit is that it’ll take your inline comments and turn them into beautiful sites, as good systems will allow for customised output templates. You’ll be producing full-featured sites for your projects and plugins with almost no extra effort, but all the benefits. |
2010 |
Frances Berriman |
francesberriman |
2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/ |
process |
| 188 |
Don't Lose Your :focus |
For many web designers, accessibility conjures up images of blind users with screenreaders, and the difficulties in making sites accessible to this particular audience. Of course, accessibility covers a wide range of situations that go beyond the extreme example of screenreader users. And while it’s true that making a complex site accessible can often be a daunting prospect, there are also many small things that don’t take anything more than a bit of judicious planning, are very easy to test (without having to buy expensive assistive technology), and can make all the difference to certain user groups.
In this short article we’ll focus on keyboard accessibility and how careless use of CSS can potentially make your sites completely unusable.
Keyboard Access
Users who for whatever reason can’t use a mouse will employ a keyboard (or keyboard-like custom interface) to navigate around web pages. By default, they will use TAB and SHIFT + TAB to move from one focusable element (links, form controls and area) of a page to the next.
Note: in OS X, you’ll first need to turn on full keyboard access under System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. Safari under Windows needs to have the option Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage in Preferences > Advanced enabled. Opera is the odd one out, as it has a variety of keyboard navigation options – the most relevant here being spatial navigation via Shift+Down, Shift+Up, Shift+Left, and Shift+Right).
But I Don’t Like Your Dotted Lines…
To show users where they are within a page, browsers place an outline around the element that currently has focus. The “problem” with these default outlines is that some browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) also display them when a user clicks on a focusable element with the mouse. Particularly on sites that make extensive use of image replacement on links with “off left” techniques this can create very unsightly outlines that stretch from the replaced element all the way to the left edge of the browser.
Outline bleeding off to the left (image-replacement example from carsonified.com)
There is a trivial workaround to prevent outlines from “spilling over” by adding a simple overflow:hidden, which keeps the outline in check around the clickable portion of the image-replaced element itself.
Outline tamed with overflow:hidden
But for many designers, even this is not enough. As a final solution, many actively suppress outlines altogether in their stylesheets. Controversially, even Eric Meyer’s popular reset.css – an otherwise excellent set of styles that levels the playing field of varying browser defaults – suppresses outlines.
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe ... {
...
outline: 0;
...
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
outline: 0;
}
Yes, in his explanation (and in the CSS itself) Eric does remind designers to define relevant styles for :focus… but judging by the number of sites that seem to ignore this (and often remove the related comment from the stylesheet altogether), the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in.
Anyway… hurrah! No more unsightly dotted lines on our lovely design. But what about keyboard users? Although technically they can still TAB from one element to the next, they now get no default cue as to where they are within the page (one notable exception here is Opera, where the outline is displayed regardless of stylesheets)… and if they’re Safari users, they won’t even get an indication of a link’s target in the status bar, like they would if they hovered over it with the mouse.
Only Suppress outline For Mouse Users
Is there a way to allow users navigating with the keyboard to retain the standard outline behaviour they’ve come to expect from their browser, while also ensuring that it doesn’t show display for mouse users?
Testing some convoluted style combinations
After playing with various approaches (see Better CSS outline suppression for more details), the most elegant solution also seemed to be the simplest: don’t remove the outline on :focus, do it on :active instead – after all, :active is the dynamic pseudo-class that deals explicitly with the styles that should be applied when a focusable element is clicked or otherwise activated.
a:active { outline: none; }
The only minor issues with this method: if a user activates a link and then uses the browser’s back button, the outline becomes visible. Oh, and old versions of Internet Explorer notoriously get confused by the exact meaning of :focus, :hover and :active, so this method fails in IE6 and below. Personally, I can live with both of these.
Note: at the last minute before submitting this article, I discovered a fatal flaw in my test. It appears that outline still manages to appear in the time between activating a link and the link target loading (which in hindsight is logical – after activation, the link does indeed receive focus). As my test page only used in-page links, this issue never came up before. The slightly less elegant solution is to also suppress the outline on :hover.
a:hover, a:active { outline: none; }
In Conclusion
Of course, many web designers may argue that they know what’s best, even for their keyboard-using audience. Maybe they’ve removed the default outline and are instead providing some carefully designed :focus styles. If they know for sure that these custom styles are indeed a reliable alternative for their users, more power to them… but, at the risk of sounding like Jakob “blue underlined links” Nielsen, I’d still argue that sometimes the default browser behaviours are best left alone. Complemented, yes (and if you’re already defining some fancy styles for :hover, by all means feel free to also make them display on :focus)… but not suppressed. |
2009 |
Patrick Lauke |
patricklauke |
2009-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/dont-lose-your-focus/ |
code |
| 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 – it takes the URL to some JavaScript code (or a server-side script that produces JavaScript) and loads and executes that code using XMLHttpRequest and eval().
function evalRequest(url) {
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200) {
eval(xmlhttp.responseText);
}
}
xmlhttp.open("GET", url, true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}
If you want this to work with Internet Explorer you’ll need to include this compatibility patch. |
2005 |
Simon Willison |
simonwillison |
2005-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/dont-be-eval/ |
code |
| 40 |
Don’t Push Through the Pain |
In 2004, I lost my web career. In a single day, it was gone. I was in too much pain to use a keyboard, a Wacom tablet (I couldn’t even click the pen), or a trackball. Switching my mouse to use my left (non-dominant) hand only helped a bit; then that hand went, too. I tried all the easy-to-find equipment out there, except for expensive gizmos with foot pedals. I had tingling in my fingers—which, when I was away from the computer, would rhythmically move as if some other being controlled them. I worried about Parkinson’s because the movements were so dramatic. Pen on paper was painful. Finally, I discovered one day that I couldn’t even turn a doorknob.
The only highlight was that I couldn’t dust, scrub, or vacuum. We were forced to hire someone to come in once a week for an hour to whip through the house. You can imagine my disappointment.
My injuries had gradually slithered into my life without notice. I’d occasionally have sore elbows, or my wrist might ache for a day, or my shoulders feel tight. But nothing to keyboard home about. That’s the critical bit of news. One day, you’re pretty fine. The next day, you don’t have your job—or any job that requires the use of your hands and wrists.
I had to walk away from the computer for over four months—and partially for several months more. That’s right: no income. If I hadn’t found a gifted massage therapist, the right book of stretches, the equipment I should have been using all along, and learned how to pay attention to my body—even just a little bit more—I quite possibly wouldn’t be writing this article today. I wouldn’t be writing anything, anywhere.
Most of us have heard of (and even claimed to have read all of) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who describes the state of flow—the place our minds go when we are fully engaged and in our element. This lovely state of highly focused activity is deeply satisfying, often creative, and quite familiar to many of us on the web who just can’t quit until the copy sings or the code is untangled or we get our highest score yet in Angry Birds. Our minds may enter that flow, but too often as our brains take flight, all else recedes. And we leave something very important behind.
Our bodies.
My body wasn’t made to make the same minute movements thousands of times a day, most days of the year, for decades, and neither was yours. The wear and tear sneaks up on you, especially if you’re the obsessive perfectionist that we all pretend not to be. Oh? You’re not obsessed? I wasn’t like this all the time, but I remember sitting across from my husband, eating dinner, and I didn’t hear a word he said. I’d left my brain upstairs in my office, where it was wrestling in a death match with the box model or, God help us all, IE 5.2. I was a writer, too, and I was having my first inkling that I was a content strategist. Work was exciting. I could sit up late, in the flow, fingers flying at warp speed. I could sit until those wretched birds outside mocked me with their damn, cheerful “Hurray, it’s morning!” songs. Suddenly, while, say, washing dishes, the one magical phrase that captured the essence of a voice or idea would pop up, and I would have mowed down small animals and toddlers to get to my computer and hammer out that website or article, to capture that thought before it escaped. Note my use of the word hammer. Sound at all familiar?
But where was my body during my work? Jaw jutting forward to see the screen, feet oddly positioned—and then left in place like chunks of marble—back unsupported, fingers pounding the keys, wrists and arms permanently twisted in unnatural angles that we thought were natural. And clicking. Clicking, clicking, clicking that mouse. Thumbing tiny keyboards on phones. A lethal little gesture for tiny little tendons. Though I was fine from, say 1997 to 2004, by the end of 2004 this behavior culminated in disaster. I had repetitive stress injuries, aka repetitive motion injuries. As the Apple site says, “A brief exposure to these conditions would not cause harm. But a prolonged exposure may, in some people, result in reduced ability to function.” I’ll say.
I frantically turned to people on lists and forums. “Try a track ball.” Already did that. “Try a tablet.” Worse. One person wrote, “I still come here once in a while and can type a couple sentences, but I’ve permanently got thoracic outlet syndrome and I’ll never work again.” Oh, beauteous web, oh, long-distance friends, farewell.
The Wrist Bone’s Connected to the Brain Bone
That variation on the old song tells part of the story. Most people (and many of their physicians) believe that tingling fingers and aching wrists MUST be carpel tunnel syndrome. Nope. If your neck juts forward, it tenses and stays tense the entire time you work in that position. Remember how your muscles felt after holding a landline phone with your neck tilted to one side for a long client meeting? Regrettable. Tensing your shoulders because your chair’s not designed properly puts you at risk for thoracic outlet syndrome, a career-killer if ever there was one. The nerves and tendons in your neck and shoulder refer down your arms, and muscles swell around nerves, causing pain and dysfunction. Your elbows have a tendon that is especially vulnerable to repetitive movements (think tennis elbow). Your wrists are performing something akin to a circus act with one thousand shows a day.
So, all the fine tendons and ligaments in your fingers have problems that may not start at your wrists at all. Though some people truly do have carpal tunnel syndrome, my finger and wrist problems weren’t solved by heavily massaging my fingers (though, that was helpful, too) or my wrists. They were fixed by work on my neck, upper back, shoulders, arms, and elbows. This explains why many people have surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome and just months later say, “What?! How can I possibly have it again? I had an operation!” Well, fellow buckaroo, you may never have had carpel tunnel syndrome. You may have had—or perhaps will have—one long disaster area from your neck to your fingertips.
How to Crawl Back
Before trying extreme measures, you may be able to function again even if you feel hopeless. I managed to heal, and so have others, but I’ll always be at risk.
As Jen Simmons, of The Web Ahead podcast and other projects told me, “It took a long time to injure myself. It took a long time to get back to where I was. My right arm between my elbow and wrist would start aching intermittently. Eventually, my arm even ached at night. I started each day with yesterday’s pain.” Simple measures, used consistently, helped her back.
1. Massage therapy
I don’t remember what the rest of the world is like, but in Portland, Oregon, we have more than one massage therapy college. (Of course we do.) I saw a former teacher at the most respected school. This is not your “It was all so soothing. Why, I fell asleep!” massage. This is “Holy crap, he’s grinding his elbow into my armpit!“ massage therapy, with the emphasis on therapy. I owe him everything. Make sure you have someone who really knows what they’re doing. Get many referrals. Try a question, “Does my psoas muscle affect my back?” If they can’t answer it, flee. Regularly see the one you choose and after a while, depending on how injured you are, you may be able to taper off.
2. Change your equipment
You may need to be hands-on with several pieces of equipment before you find the ones that don’t cause more pain. Many companies have restocking fees, charges to ship the equipment you want to return, and other retail atrocities. Always be sure to ask what the return policies are at any company before purchasing.
Mice
You may have more success than I did with equipment such as the Wacom tablet. Mine came with a pen, and it hurt to repetitively click it. Trackballs are another option but, for many, they are better at prevention than recovery. But let’s get to the really effective stuff. One of the biggest sources of pain is using your mouse. One major reason is that your hand and wrist are in a perpetually unnatural position and you’re also moving your arm quite a bit. Each time you move the mouse, it is placing stress on your neck, shoulders and arms, because you need to lift them slightly in order to move the mouse and you need to angle your wrist. You may also be too injured to use the trackpad all the time, and this mouse, the vertical mouse is a dandy preventative measure, too. Shaking up your patterns is a wise move. I have long fingers, not especially thin, yet the small size works best for me. (They have larger choices available.) What?! A sideways mouse? Yep. All the weight of your hand will be resting on it in the handshake position. Your forearms aren’t constantly twisting over hill and dale. You aren’t using any muscles in your wrist or hand. They are relaxing. You’ll adapt in a day, and oh, oh, what a relief it is.
Keyboards
I really liked doing business with the people at Kinesis-Ergo. (I’m not affiliated with them in any way.) They have the vertical mouse and a number of keyboards. The one that felt the most natural to me, and, once again, it only takes a day to adapt, is the Freestyle2 for the Mac. They have several options. I kept the keyboard halves attached to each other at first, and then spread them apart a little more. I recommend choosing one that slants and can separate. You can adjust the angle. For a little extra, they’ll make sure it’s all set up and ready to go for you. I’m guessing that some Googling will find you similar equipment, wherever you live.
Warning: if you use the ergonomic keyboards, you may have fewer USB ports. The laptop will be too far away to see unless you find a satisfactory setup using a stand. This is the perfect excuse for purchasing a humongous display.
You may not look cool while jetting coast to coast in your skinny jeans and what appears to be the old-time orthopedic shoe version of computing gear. But once you have rested and used many of these suggestions consistently, you may be able to use your laptop or other device in all its lovely sleekness during the trip.
Other doohickies
The Kinesis site and The Human Solution have a wide selection of ergonomic products: standing desks, ergonomically correct chairs, and, yes, even things with foot pedals. Explore!
3. Stop clicking, at least for a while
Use keyboard shortcuts, but use them slowly. This is not the time to show off your skillz. You’ll be sort of like a recovering alcoholic, in that you’ll be a recovering repetitive stress survivor for the rest of your life, once you really injure yourself. Always be vigilant. There’s also a bit of software sold by The Human Solution and other places, and it was my salvation. It’s called the McNib for Macs, and the Nib for PCs. (I’ve only used the McNib.) It’s for click-free mousing. I found it tricky to use when writing markup and code, but you may become quite adept at it. A little rectangle pops up on your screen, you mouse over it and choose, let’s say, “Double-click.” Until you change that choice, if you mouse over a link or anything else, it will double-click it for you. All you do is glide your mouse around. Awkward for a day or two, but you’ll pick it up quickly. Though you can use it all day for work, even if you just use this for browsing LOLcats or Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube videos, it will help you by giving your fingers a sweet break.
But here’s the sad news. The developer who invented this died a few years ago. (Yes, I used to speak to him on the phone.) While it is for sale, it isn’t compatible with Mac OS X Lion or anything subsequent. PowerPC strikes again. His site is still up. Demos for use with older software can be downloaded free at his old site, or at The Human Solution. Perhaps an enterprising developer can invent something that would provide this help, without interfering with patents. Rumor has it among ergonomic retailers (yes, I’m like a police dog sniffing my way to a criminal once I head down a trail) that his company was purchased by a company in China, with no update in sight.
4. Use built-in features
That little microphone icon that comes up alongside the keyboard on your iPhone allows you to speak your message instead of incessantly thumbing it. I believe it works in any program that uses the keyboard. It’s not Siri. She’s for other things, like having a personal relationship with an inanimate object. Apple even has a good section on ergonomics. You think I’m intense about this subject? To improve your repetitive stress, Apple doesn’t want you to use oral contraceptives, alcohol, or tobacco, to which I say, “Have as much sex, bacon, and chocolate as possible to make up for it.”
Apple’s info even has illustrations of things like a faucet dripping into what is labeled a bucket full of “TRAUMA.” Sounds like upgrading to Yosemite, but I digress.
5. Take breaks
If it’s a game or other non-essential activity, take a break for a month. Fine, now that I’ve called games non-essential, I suppose you’ll all unfollow me on Twitter.
6. Whether you are sore or not, do stretches throughout the day
This is a big one. Really big. The best book on the subject of repetitive stress injuries is Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Other Repetitive Strain Injuries: A Self-Care Program by Sharon J. Butler. Don’t worry, most of it is illustrations. Pretend it’s a graphic novel.
I’m notorious for never reading instructions, and who on earth reads the introduction of a book, unless they wrote it? I wrote a book a long time ago, and I bet my house, husband, and life savings that my own parents never read the intro. Well, I did read the intro to this book, and you should, too. Stretching correctly, in a way that doesn’t further hurt you, that keeps you flexible if you aren’t injured, that actually heals you, calls for precision. Read and you’ll see. The key is to stretch just until you start to feel the stretch, even if that’s merely a tiny movement. Don’t force anything past that point. Kindly nurse yourself back to health, or nurture your still-healthy body by stretching. Over the following days, weeks, months, you’ll be moving well past that initial stretch point.
The book is brimming with examples. You only have to pick a few stretches, if this is too much to handle. Do it every single day. I can tell you some of the best ones for me, but it depends on the person. You’ll also discover in Butler’s book that areas that you think are the problem are sometimes actually adjacent to the muscle or tendon that is the source of the problem. Add a few stretches or two for that area, too.
But please follow the instructions in the introduction. If you overdo it, or perform some other crazy-ass hijinks, as I would be tempted to do, I am not responsible for your outcome. I give you fair warning that I am not a healthcare provider. I’m just telling you as a friend, an untrained one, at that, who has been through this experience.
7. Follow good habits
Develop habits like drinking lots of water (which helps with lactic acid buildup in muscles), looking away from the computer for twenty seconds every twenty to thirty minutes, eating right, and probably doing everything else your mother told you to do. Maybe this is a good time to bring up flossing your teeth, and going outside to play instead of watching TV. As your mom would say, “It’s a beautiful day outside, what are you kids doing in here?”
8. Speak instead of writing, if you can
Amber Simmons, who is very smart and funny, once tweeted in front of the whole world that, “@carywood is a Skype whore.” I was always asking people on Twitter if we could Skype instead of using iChat or exchanging emails. (I prefer the audio version so I don’t have to, you know, do something drastic like comb my hair.) Keyboarding is tough on hands, whether you notice it or not at the time, and when doing rapid-fire back-and-forthing with people, you tend to speed up your typing and not take any breaks. This is a hand-killer. Voice chats have made such a difference for me that I am still a rabid Skype whore. Wait, did I say that out loud?
Speak your text or emails, using Dragon Dictate or other software. In about 2005, accessibility and user experience design expert, Derek Featherstone, in Canada, and I, at home, chatted over the internet, each of us using a different voice-to-text program. The programs made so many mistakes communicating with each other that we began that sort of endless, tearful laughing that makes you think someone may need to call an ambulance. This type of software has improved quite a bit over the years, thank goodness. Lack of accessibility of any kind isn’t funny to Derek or me or to anyone who can’t use the web without pain.
9. Watch your position
For example, if you lift up your arms to use the computer, or stare down at your laptop, you’ll need to rearrange your equipment. The internet has a lot of information about ideal ergonomic work areas. Please use a keyboard drawer. Be sure to measure the height carefully so that even a tented keyboard, like the one I recommend, will fit. I also recommend getting the version of the Freestyle with palm supports. Just these two measures did much to help both Jen Simmons and me.
10. If you need to take anti-inflammatories, stop working
If you are all drugged up on ibuprofen, and pounding and clicking like mad, your body will not know when you are tired or injuring yourself. I don’t recommend taking these while using your computing devices. Perhaps just take it at night, though I’m not a fan of that category of medications. Check with your healthcare provider. At least ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, which may help you. In contrast, acetaminophen (paracetamol) only makes your body think it’s not in pain. Ice is great, as is switching back and forth between ice and heat. But again, if you need ice and ibuprofen you really need to take a major break.
11. Don’t forget the rest of your body
I’ve zeroed in on my personal area of knowledge and experience, but you may be setting yourself up for problems in other areas of your body. There’s what is known to bad writers as “a veritable cornucopia” of information on the web about how to help the rest of your body. A wee bit of research on the web and you’ll discover simple exercises and stretches for the rest of your potential catastrophic areas: your upper back, your lower back, your legs, ankles, and eyes. Do gentle stretches, three or four times a day, rather than powering your way through. Ease into new equipment such as standing desks. Stretch those newly challenged areas until your body adapts. Pay attention to your body, even though I too often forget mine.
12. Remember the children
Kids are using equipment to play highly addictive games or to explore amazing software, and if these call for repetitive motions, children are being set up for future injuries. They’ll grab hold of something, as parents out there know, and play it 3,742 times. That afternoon. Perhaps by the time they are adults, everything will just be holograms and mind-reading, but adult fingers and hands are used for most things in life, not just computing devices and phones with keyboards sized for baby chipmunks.
I’ll be watching you
Quickly now, while I (possibly) have your attention. Don’t move a muscle. Is your neck tense? Are you unconsciously lifting your shoulders up? How long since you stopped staring at the screen? How bright is your screen? Are you slumping (c’mon now, ‘fess up) and inviting sciatica problems? Do you have to turn your hands at an angle relative to your wrist in order to type? Uh-oh. That’s a bad one. Your hands, wrists, and forearms should be one straight line while keyboarding. Future you is begging you to change your ways. Don’t let your #ThrowbackThursday in 2020 say, “Here’s a photo from when I used to be able to do so many wonderful things that I can’t do now.” And, whatever you do, don’t try for even a nanosecond to push through the pain, or the next thing you know, you’ll be an unpaid extra in The Expendables 7. |
2014 |
Carolyn Wood |
carolynwood |
2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/ |
business |
| 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 for social media sharing.
This is all fine and well for content that has a very obvious choice of image to go along with it, but what if you don’t necessarily have an image? One approach is to use stock photography, but that’s not going to be right for every situation.
This was something we faced with 24 ways in 2017. We wanted to add images to the tweets we post each day announcing a new article. Some articles have images, but not all, and there tended not to be any consistency in terms of imagery from one article to the next. We always have an author photograph, but those don’t usually lend themselves directly to being the main ‘hero’ image for an article.
Putting his thinking cap on, Paul came up with a design for an image that used the author photo along with a quote extracted from the article.
One of the hand-made sharing images from 2017
Each day we would pick a quote from the article, and Paul would manually compose an image to be uploaded to the site. The results were great, but the whole process was a bit too labour intensive and relied on an individual (Paul) being available each day to do the work. I thought we could probably improve this.
Hatching a new plan
One initial idea I came up with was to script the image editor to dynamically build a new image by pulling content from our database. Sketch has plugins available to pull JSON content into a design, and our CMS can easily output JSON data, so that was one possibility.
The more I thought about this and how much I wish graphic design tools worked just a little bit more like CSS, the obvious solution hit me. We should just build it with CSS!
In fact, as the author name and image already exist in our CMS, and the visual styling is based on the design of the website, couldn’t this just be another page on the site generated by the CMS?
Breaking it down, I figured the steps needed would be something like:
Create the CSS to lay out a component that could be turned into an image
Add a new field to articles in the CMS to hold a handpicked quote
Build a new article template in the CMS to output the author name and quote dynamically for any article
… um … screenshot?
I thought I’d get cracking and see if I could figure out the final steps later.
Building the page
The first thing to tackle was the basic HTML and CSS to lay out the components for our image. That bit was really easy, as I just asked Paul to do it. Everyone should have a Paul.
Paul’s code uses a fixed dimension container in the HTML, set to 600 × 315px. This is to make it the correct aspect ratio for Facebook’s recommended image size. It’s useful to remember here that it doesn’t need to be responsive or robust, as the page only needs to lay out correctly for a screenshot and a fixed size in a known browser.
With the markup and CSS in place, I turned this into a new template. Our CMS can easily display content through any number of templates, so I created a version of the article template that was totally stripped down. It only included the author details and the quote, along with Paul’s markup.
I also added the quote as a new field on the article in the CMS, so each ‘image’ could be quickly and easily customised in the editing process.
I added a new field to the article template to capture the quote.
With very little effort, we quickly had a page to dynamically generate our ‘image’ right from the CMS. You can see any of them by adding /sharing onto the end of an article URL for any 2018 article.
Our automatically generated layout direct from the CMS
It soon became clear that the elusive Step 4 was going to be the tricky part. I can create a small page on the site that looks like an image, but how should I go about turning it into one? An obvious route is to screenshot the page by hand, but that’s going back to some of the manual steps I was trying to eliminate, and also opens up a possibility for errors to be made. But it did lead me to the thought… how could I automatically take a screenshot?
Enter Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a nice API onto Headless Chrome. What is Headless Chrome, you ask? It’s just a version of the Chrome browser than runs from the command line without ever drawing anything to a user interface window. It loads pages, renders CSS, runs JavaScript, pretty much every normal thing that Chrome on the desktop does, but without a clicky user interface.
Headless Chrome can be used for all sorts of things such as running automated tests on front-end code after making changes, or… get this… rendering pages that can be used for screenshots. The actual process of writing some code to control Chrome and to take the screenshot is where Puppeteer comes in. Puppeteer puts a friendly layer in front of big old scary Chrome to enable us to interact with it using simple JavaScript code running in Node.
Using Puppeteer, I can write a small script that will repeatably turn a URL into an image. So simple is it to do this, that’s it’s actually Puppeteer’s ‘hello world’ example.
First you install Puppeteer. It downloads a compatible headless browser (actually Chromium) as a dependancy, so you don’t need to worry about installing that. At the command line:
npm i puppeteer
Then save a new file as example.js with this code:
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});
await browser.close();
})();
and then run it using Node:
node example.js
This will output an image file example.png to disk, which contains a screenshot of, in this case https://example.com. The logic of the code is reasonably easy to follow:
Launch a browser
Open up a new page
Goto a URL
Take a screenshot
Close the browser
The async function and await keywords are a way to have the script pause and wait for normally asynchronous code to return before proceeding. That’s useful with actions like loading a web page that might take some time to complete. They’re used with Promises, and the effect is to make asynchronous code behave as if it’s synchronous. You can read more about async and await at MDN if you’re interested.
That’s a good proof-of-concept using the basic Puppeteer example. I can take a screenshot of a URL! But what happens if I put the URL of my new special page in there?
Our content is up in the corner of the image with lots of empty space.
That’s not great. It’s okay, but not great. It looks like that, by default, Puppeteer takes a screenshot with a resolution of 800 × 600, so we need to find out how to adjust that. Fortunately, the docs aren’t the worst and I was able to find the page.setViewport() method pretty easily.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://24ways.org/2018/clip-paths-know-no-bounds/sharing');
await page.setViewport({
width: 600,
height: 315
});
await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});
await browser.close();
})();
This worked! The screenshot is now 600 × 315 as expected. That’s exactly what we asked for. Trouble is, that’s a bit low res and it is nearly 2019 after all. While in those docs, I noticed the deviceScaleFactor option that can be passed to page.setViewport(). Setting that to 2 gives us an image of the same area of the screen, but with twice as many pixels.
await page.setViewport({
width: 600,
height: 315,
deviceScaleFactor: 2
});
Perfect! We now have a programmatic way of turning a URL into an image.
Improving the script
Rather than having a script with a fixed URL in it that outputs an image called example.png, the next step is to make that a bit more dynamic. The aim here is to have a script that we can run with a URL as an argument and have it output an image for that one page. That way we can run it manually, or hook it into part of our site’s build process to automate the generation of the image.
Our goal is to call the script like this:
node shoot-sharing-image.js https://24ways.org/2018/clip-paths-know-no-bounds/
And I want the image to come out with the name clip-paths-know-no-bounds.png. To do that, I need to have my script look for command arguments, and then to split the URL up to grab the slug from it.
// Get the URL and the slug segment from it
const url = process.argv[2];
const segments = url.split('/');
// Get the second-to-last segment (the slug)
const slug = segments[segments.length-2];
We can then use these variables later in the script, remembering to add sharing back onto the end of the URL to get our dedicated page.
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto(url + 'sharing');
await page.setViewport({
width: 600,
height: 315,
deviceScaleFactor: 2
});
await page.screenshot({path: slug + '.png'});
await browser.close();
})();
Once you’re generating the image with Node, there’s all sorts of things you can do with it. An obvious step is to move it to the correct location within your site or project.
You can also run optimisations on the file. I’m using imagemin with pngquant to reduce the file size a little.
const imagemin = require('imagemin');
const imageminPngquant = require('imagemin-pngquant');
await imagemin([slug + '.png'], 'build', {
plugins: [
imageminPngquant({quality: '75-90'})
]
});
You can see the completed example as a gist.
Integrating it with your CMS
So we now have a command we can run to take a URL and generate a custom image for that URL. It’s in a format that can be called by any sort of build script, or triggered from a publishing hook in a CMS. Exactly how you do that is going to depend on the way your site is built and the technology stack you’re using, but it’s likely not too hard as long as you can run a command as part of the process.
For 24 ways this year, I’ve been running the script by hand once each article is ready. My script adds the file to a git repo and pushes to a deployment remote that is configured to automatically deploy static assets to our server. Along with our theme of making incremental improvements, next year I’ll look to automate this one step further.
We may also look at having a few slightly different layouts to choose from, so that each day isn’t exactly the same as the last. Interestingly, we could even try some A/B tests to see if there’s any particular format of image or type of quote that does a better job of grabbing attention. There are lots of possibilities!
By using a bit of ingenuity, some custom CMS templates, and the very useful Puppeteer project, we’ve been able to reliably produce dynamic social media sharing images for all of our articles. In doing so, we reduced the dependancy on any individual for producing those images, and opened up a world of possibilities in how we use those images.
I hope you’ll give it a try! |
2018 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2018-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/dynamic-social-sharing-images/ |
code |
| 120 |
Easier Page States for Wireframes |
When designing wireframes for web sites and web apps, it is often overlooked that the same ‘page’ can look wildly different depending on its context. A logged-in page will look different from a logged-out page; an administrator’s view may have different buttons than a regular user’s view; a power user’s profile will be more extensive than a new user’s.
These different page states need designing at some point, especially if the wireframes are to form a useful communication medium between designer and developer. Documenting the different permutations can be a time consuming exercise involving either multiple pages in one’s preferred box-and-arrow software, or a fully fledged drawing containing all the possible combinations annotated accordingly.
Enter interactive wireframes and Polypage
Interactive wireframes built in HTML are a great design and communication tool. They provide a clickable prototype, running in the browser as would the final site. As such they give a great feel for how the site will be to use. Once you add in the possibilities of JavaScript and a library such as jQuery, they become even more flexible and powerful.
Polypage is a jQuery plugin which makes it really easy to design multiple page states in HTML wireframes. There’s no JavaScript knowledge required (other than cutting and pasting in a few lines). The page views are created by simply writing all the alternatives into your HTML page and adding special class names to apply state and conditional view logic to the various options.
When the page is loaded Polypage automatically detects the page states defined by the class names and creates a control bar enabling the user to toggle page states with the click of a mouse or the clack of a keyboard.
Using cookies by way of the jQuery cookie plugin, Polypage retains the view state throughout your prototype. This means you could navigate through your wireframes as if you were logged out; as if you were logged in as an administrator; with notes on or off; or with any other view or state you might require. The possibilities are entirely up to you.
How does it work?
Firstly you need to link to jQuery, the jQuery cookie plugin and to Polypage. Something like this:
<script src="javascripts/jquery-1.2.6.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="javascripts/cookie.jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="javascripts/polypage.jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Then you need to initialise Polypage on page load using something along these lines:
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$.polypage.init();
});
</script>
Next you need to define the areas of your wireframe which are particular to a given state or view. Do this by applying classes beginning with pp_. Polypage will ignore all other classes in the document.
The pp_ prefix should be followed by a state name. This can be any text string you like, bearing in mind it will appear in the control bar. Typical page states might include ‘logged_in’, ‘administrator’ or ‘group_owner’. A complete class name would therefore look something like pp_logged_in.
Examples
If a user is logged in, you might want to specify an option for him or her to sign out. Using Polypage, this could be put in the wireframe as follows:
<a href="logout" class="pp_logged_in"> Sign out </a>
Polypage will identify the pp_logged_in class on the link and hide it (as the ‘Sign out’ link should only be shown when the page is in the ‘logged in’ view). Polypage will then automatically write a ‘logged in’ toggle to the control bar, enabling you to show or hide the ‘Sign out’ link by toggling the ‘logged in’ view. The same will apply to all content marked with a pp_logged_in class.
States can also be negated by adding a not keyword to the class name. For example you might want to provide a log in link for users who are not signed in. Using Polypage, you would insert the not keyword after the pp prefix as follows:
<a href="login" class="pp_not_logged_in"> Login </a>
Again Polypage identifies the pp prefix but this time sees that the ‘Login’ link should not be shown when the ‘logged in’ state is selected.
States can also be joined together to add some basic logic to pages. The syntax follows natural language and uses the or and and keywords in addition to the afore-mentioned not. Some examples would be pp_logged_in_and_admin, pp_admin_or_group_owner and pp_logged_in_and_not_admin.
Finally, you can set default states for a page by passing an array to the polypage.init() function like this:
$.polypage.init(['logged_in', 'admin']);
You can see a fully fledged example in this fictional social network group page. The example page defaults to a logged in state. You can see the logged out state by toggling ‘logged in’ off in the Polypage control bar. There are also views specified for a group member, a group admin, a new group and notes.
Where can I get hold of it?
You can download the current version from GitHub.
Polypage was originally developed by Clearleft and New Bamboo, with particular contributions from Andy Kent and Natalie Downe. It has been used in numerous real projects, but it is still an early release so there is bound to be room for improvement. We’re pleased to say that Polypage is now an open source project so any feedback, particularly by way of actual improvements, is extremely welcome. |
2008 |
Richard Rutter |
richardrutter |
2008-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/easier-page-states-for-wireframes/ |
process |
| 101 |
Easing The Path from Design to Development |
As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground.
I don’t believe it has to be a battleground. It’s actually more like being a dance partner – our steps are different, but as long as we know our own part and have a little knowledge of our partner’s steps, it all goes together to form a cohesive dance. Albeit with less spandex and fewer sequins (although that may depend on the project in question).
As the process usually flows from design towards development, it’s most important that designers have a little knowledge of how the site is going to be built. At the specialist web development agency I’m part of, we find that designs that have been well considered from a technical perspective help to keep the project on track and on budget.
Based on that experience, I’ve put together my checklist of things that designers should consider before handing their work over to a developer to build.
Layout
One rookie mistake made by traditionally trained designers transferring to the web is to forget a web browser is not a fixed medium. Unlike designing a magazine layout or a piece of packaging, there are lots of available options to consider. Should the layout be fluid and resize with the window, or should it be set to a fixed width? If it’s fluid, which parts expand and which not? If it’s fixed, should it sit in the middle of the window or to one side?
If any part of the layout is going to be flexible (get wider and narrower as required), consider how any graphics are affected. Images don’t usually look good if displayed at anything other that their original size, so should they behave? If a column is going to get wider than it’s shown in the Photoshop comp, it may be necessary to provide separate wider versions of any background images.
Text size and content volume
A related issue is considering how the layout behaves with both different sizes of text and different volumes of content. Whilst text zooming rather than text resizing is becoming more commonplace as the default behaviour in browsers, it’s still a fundamentally important principal of web design that we are suggesting and not dictating how something should look. Designs must allow for a little give and take in the text size, and how this affects the design needs to be taken into consideration.
Keep in mind that the same font can display differently in different places and platforms. Something as simple as Times will display wider on a Mac than on Windows. However, the main impact of text resizing is the change in how much vertical space copy takes up. This is particularly important where space is limited by the design (making text bigger causes many more problems than making text smaller). Each element from headings to box-outs to navigation items and buttons needs to be able to expand at least vertically, if not horizontally as well. This may require some thought about how elements on the page may wrap onto new lines, as well as again making sure to provide extended versions of any graphical elements.
Similarly, it’s rare theses days to know exactly what content you’re working with when a site is designed. Many, if not most sites are designed as a series of templates for some kind of content management system, and so designs cannot be tweaked around any specific item of content. Designs must be able to cope with both much greater and much lesser volumes of content that might be thrown in at the lorem ipsum phase.
Particular things to watch out for are things like headings (how do they wrap onto multiple lines) and any user-generated items like usernames. It can be very easy to forget that whilst you might expect something like a username to be 8-12 characters, if the systems powering your site allow for 255 characters they’ll always be someone who’ll go there. Expect them to do so.
Again, if your site is content managed or not, consider the possibility that the structure might be expanded in the future. Consider how additional items might be added to each level of navigation. Whilst it’s rarely desirable to make significant changes without revisiting the site’s information architecture more thoroughly, it’s an inevitable fact of life that the structure needs a little bit of flexibility to change over time.
Interactions with and without JavaScript
A great number of sites now make good use of JavaScript to streamline the user interface and make everything just that touch more usable. Remember, though, that any developer worth their salt will start by building the interface without JavaScript, get it all working, and then layer that JavaScript on top. This is to allow for users viewing the site without JavaScript available or enabled in their browser.
Designers need to consider both states of any feature they’re designing – how it looks and functions with and without JavaScript. If the feature does something fancy with Ajax, consider how the same can be achieved with basic HTML forms, links and intermediary pages. These all need to be designed, because this is how some of your users will interact with the site.
Logged in and logged out states
When designing any type of web application or site that has a membership system – that is to say users can create an account and log into the site – the design will need to consider how any element is presented in both logged in and logged out states. For some items there’ll be no difference, whereas for others there may be considerable differences.
Should an item be hidden completely not logged out users? Should it look different in some way? Perhaps it should look the same, but prompt the user to log in when they interact with it. If so, what form should that prompt take on and how does the user progress through the authentication process to arrive back at the task they were originally trying to complete?
Couple logged in and logged out states with the possible absence of JavaScript, and every feature needs to be designed in four different states:
Logged out with JavaScript available
Logged in with JavaScript available
Logged out without JavaScript available
Logged in without JavaScript available
Fonts
There are three main causes of war in this world; religions, politics and fonts. I’ve said publicly before that I believe the responsibility for this falls squarely at the feet of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, like a mistress at a brothel, parades a vast array of ropey, yet strangely enticing typefaces past the eyes of weak, lily-livered designers, who can’t help but crumble to their curvy charms.
Yet, on the web, we have to be a little more restrained in our choice of typefaces. The purest solution is always to make the best use of the available fonts, but this isn’t always the most desirable solution from a design point of view. There are several technical solutions such as techniques that utilise Flash (like sIFR), dynamically generated images and even canvas in newer browsers. Discuss the best approach with your developer, as every different technique has different trade-offs, and this may impact the design in other ways.
Messaging
Any site that has interactive elements, from a simple contact form through to fully featured online software application, involves some kind of user messaging. By this I mean the error messages when something goes wrong and the success and thank-you messages when something goes right. These typically appear as the result of an interaction, so are easy to forget and miss off a Photoshop comp.
For every form, consider what gets displayed to the user if they make a mistake or miss something out, and also what gets displayed back when the interaction is successful. What do they see and where do the go next?
With Ajax interactions, the user doesn’t get any visual feedback of the site waiting for a response from the server unless you design it that way. Consider using a ‘waiting’ or ‘in progress’ spinner to give the user some visual feedback of any background processes. How should these look? How do they animate?
Similarly, also consider the big error pages like a 404. With luck, these won’t often be seen, but it’s at the point that they are when careful design matters the most.
Form fields
Depending on the visual style of your site, the look of a browser’s default form fields and buttons can sometimes jar. It’s understandable that many a designer wants to change the way they look. Depending on the browser in question, various things can be done to style form fields and their buttons (although it’s not as flexible as most would like).
A common request is to replace the default buttons with a graphical button. This is usually achievable in most cases, although it’s not easy to get a consistent result across all browsers – particularly when it comes to vertical positioning and the space surrounding the button. If the layout is very precise, or if space is at a premium, it’s always best to try and live with the browser’s default form controls.
Whichever way you go, it’s important to remember that in general, each form field should have a label, and each form should have a submit button. If you find that your form breaks either of those rules, you should double check.
Practical tips for handing files over
There are a couple of basic steps that a design can carry out to make sure that the developer has the best chance of implementing the design exactly as envisioned.
If working with Photoshop of Fireworks or similar comping tool, it helps to group and label layers to make it easy for a developer to see which need to be turned on and off to get to isolate parts of the page and different states of the design. Also, if you don’t work in the same office as your developer (and so they can’t quickly check with you), provide a PDF of each page and state so that your developer can see how each page should look aside from any confusion with quick layers are switched on or off. These also act as a handy quick reference that can be used without firing up Photoshop (which can kill both productivity and your machine).
Finally, provide a colour reference showing the RGB values of all the key colours used throughout the design. Without this, the developer will end up colour-picking from the comps, and could potentially end up with different colours to those you intended. Remember, for a lot of developers, working in a tool like Photoshop is like presenting a designer with an SSH terminal into a web server. It’s unfamiliar ground and easy to get things wrong. Be the expert of your own domain and help your colleagues out when they’re out of their comfort zone. That goes both ways.
In conclusion
When asked the question of how to smooth hand-over between design and development, almost everyone who has experienced this situation could come up with their own list. This one is mine, based on some of the more common experiences we have at edgeofmyseat.com. So in bullet point form, here’s my checklist for handing a design over.
Is the layout fixed, or fluid?
Does each element cope with expanding for larger text and more content?
Are all the graphics large enough to cope with an area expanding?
Does each interactive element have a state for with and without JavaScript?
Does each element have a state for logged in and logged out users?
How are any custom fonts being displayed? (and does the developer have the font to use?)
Does each interactive element have error and success messages designed?
Do all form fields have a label and each form a submit button?
Is your Photoshop comp document well organised?
Have you provided flat PDFs of each state?
Have you provided a colour reference?
Are we having fun yet? |
2008 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/easing-the-path-from-design-to-development/ |
process |
| 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. Secondly, we need our own JavaScript file for the glue between the interface and the stuff Prototype is doing. Lastly, we need the page (a PHP script in my case) that the Ajax is going to make its call too.
So, to that basic HTML page for the user to interact with. Here’s one I found whilst out carol singing:
<!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>Easy Ajax</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ajax.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<form method="get" action="greeting.php" id="greeting-form">
<div>
<label for="greeting-name">Enter your name:</label>
<input id="greeting-name" type="text" />
<input id="greeting-submit" type="submit" value="Greet me!" />
</div>
<div id="greeting"></div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, I’ve linked in prototype.js, and also a file called ajax.js, which is where we’ll be putting our glue. (Careful where you leave your glue, kids.)
Our basic example is just going to take a name and then echo it back in the form of a seasonal greeting. There’s a form with an input field for a name, and crucially a DIV (greeting) for the result of our call. You’ll also notice that the form has a submit button – this is so that it can function as a regular form when no JavaScript is available. It’s important not to get carried away and forget the basics of accessibility.
Meanwhile, back at the server
So we need a script at the server which is going to take input from the Ajax call and return some output. This is normally where you’d hook into a database and do whatever transaction you need to before returning a result. To keep this as simple as possible, all this example here will do is take the name the user has given and add it to a greeting message. Not exactly Web 2-point-HoHoHo, but there you have it.
Here’s a quick PHP script – greeting.php – that Santa brought me early.
<?php
$the_name = htmlspecialchars($_GET['greeting-name']);
echo "<p>Season's Greetings, $the_name!</p>";
?>
You’ll perhaps want to do something a little more complex within your own projects. Just sayin’.
Gluing it all together
Inside our ajax.js file, we need to hook this all together. We’re going to take advantage of some of the handy listener routines and such that Prototype also makes available. The first task is to attach a listener to set the scene once the window has loaded. He’s how we attach an onload event to the window object and get it to call a function named init():
Event.observe(window, 'load', init, false);
Now we create our init() function to do our evil bidding. Its first job of the day is to hide the submit button for those with JavaScript enabled. After that, it attaches a listener to watch for the user typing in the name field.
function init(){
$('greeting-submit').style.display = 'none';
Event.observe('greeting-name', 'keyup', greet, false);
}
As you can see, this is going to make a call to a function called greet() onkeyup in the greeting-name field. That function looks like this:
function greet(){
var url = 'greeting.php';
var pars = 'greeting-name='+escape($F('greeting-name'));
var target = 'greeting';
var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars});
}
The key points to note here are that any user input needs to be escaped before putting into the parameters so that it’s URL-ready. The target is the ID of the element on the page (a DIV in our case) which will be the recipient of the output from the Ajax call.
That’s it
No, seriously. That’s everything. Try the example. Amaze your friends with your 1337 Ajax sk1llz. |
2005 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2005-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/easy-ajax-with-prototype/ |
code |
| 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 going to be the <p> called desc. The process goes something like this:
Highlight the area onMouseOver
Clear the highlight onMouseOut
If the user clicks, hide the area and replace with a <textarea> and buttons
Remove all of the above if the user cancels the operation
When the Save button is clicked, make an Ajax POST and show that something’s happening
When the Ajax call comes back, update the page with the new content
Events and Highlighting
The first step is to offer feedback to the user that the item is editable. This is done by shading the background colour when the user mouses over. Of course, the CSS :hover pseudo class is a straightforward way to do this, but for three reasons, I’m using JavaScript to switch class names.
:hover isn’t supported on many elements in Internet Explorer for Windows
I want to keep control over when the highlight switches off after an update, regardless of mouse position
If JavaScript isn’t available we don’t want to end up with the CSS suggesting it might be
With this in mind, here’s how editinplace.js starts:
Event.observe(window, 'load', init, false);
function init(){
makeEditable('desc');
}
function makeEditable(id){
Event.observe(id, 'click', function(){edit($(id))}, false);
Event.observe(id, 'mouseover', function(){showAsEditable($(id))}, false);
Event.observe(id, 'mouseout', function(){showAsEditable($(id), true)}, false);
}
function showAsEditable(obj, clear){
if (!clear){
Element.addClassName(obj, 'editable');
}else{
Element.removeClassName(obj, 'editable');
}
}
The first line attaches an onLoad event to the window, so that the function init() gets called once the page has loaded. In turn, init() sets up all the items on the page that we want to make editable. In this example I’ve just got one, but you can add as many as you like.
The function madeEditable() attaches the mouseover, mouseout and click events to the item we’re making editable. All showAsEditable does is add and remove the class name editable from the object. This uses the particularly cunning methods Element.addClassName() and Element.removeClassName() which enable you to cleanly add and remove effects without affecting any styling the object may otherwise have.
Oh, remember to add a rule for .editable to your style sheet:
.editable{
color: #000;
background-color: #ffffd3;
}
The Switch
As you can see above, when the user clicks on an editable item, a call is made to the function edit(). This is where we switch out the static item for a nice editable textarea. Here’s how that function looks.
function edit(obj){
Element.hide(obj);
var textarea ='<div id="' + obj.id + '_editor">
<textarea id="' + obj.id + '_edit" name="' + obj.id + '" rows="4" cols="60">'
+ obj.innerHTML + '</textarea>';
var button = '<input id="' + obj.id + '_save" type="button" value="SAVE" /> OR
<input id="' + obj.id + '_cancel" type="button" value="CANCEL" /></div>';
new Insertion.After(obj, textarea+button);
Event.observe(obj.id+'_save', 'click', function(){saveChanges(obj)}, false);
Event.observe(obj.id+'_cancel', 'click', function(){cleanUp(obj)}, false);
}
The first thing to do is to hide the object. Prototype comes to the rescue with Element.hide() (and of course, Element.show() too). Following that, we build up the textarea and buttons as a string, and then use Insertion.After() to place our new editor underneath the (now hidden) editable object.
The last thing to do before we leave the user to edit is it attach listeners to the Save and Cancel buttons to call either the saveChanges() function, or to cleanUp() after a cancel.
In the event of a cancel, we can clean up behind ourselves like so:
function cleanUp(obj, keepEditable){
Element.remove(obj.id+'_editor');
Element.show(obj);
if (!keepEditable) showAsEditable(obj, true);
}
Saving the Changes
This is where all the Ajax fun occurs. Whilst the previous article introduced Ajax.Updater() for simple Ajax calls, in this case we need a little bit more control over what happens once the response is received. For this purpose, Ajax.Request() is perfect. We can use the onSuccess and onFailure parameters to register functions to handle the response.
function saveChanges(obj){
var new_content = escape($F(obj.id+'_edit'));
obj.innerHTML = "Saving...";
cleanUp(obj, true);
var success = function(t){editComplete(t, obj);}
var failure = function(t){editFailed(t, obj);}
var url = 'edit.php';
var pars = 'id=' + obj.id + '&content=' + new_content;
var myAjax = new Ajax.Request(url, {method:'post',
postBody:pars, onSuccess:success, onFailure:failure});
}
function editComplete(t, obj){
obj.innerHTML = t.responseText;
showAsEditable(obj, true);
}
function editFailed(t, obj){
obj.innerHTML = 'Sorry, the update failed.';
cleanUp(obj);
}
As you can see, we first grab in the contents of the textarea into the variable new_content. We then remove the editor, set the content of the original object to “Saving…” to show that an update is occurring, and make the Ajax POST.
If the Ajax fails, editFailed() sets the contents of the object to “Sorry, the update failed.” Admittedly, that’s not a very helpful way to handle the error but I have to limit the scope of this article somewhere. It might be a good idea to stow away the original contents of the object (obj.preUpdate = obj.innerHTML) for later retrieval before setting the content to “Saving…”. No one likes a failure – especially a messy one.
If the Ajax call is successful, the server-side script returns the edited content, which we then place back inside the object from editComplete, and tidy up.
Meanwhile, back at the server
The missing piece of the puzzle is the server-side script for committing the changes to your database. Obviously, any solution I provide here is not going to fit your particular application. For the purposes of getting a functional demo going, here’s what I have in PHP.
<?php
$id = $_POST['id'];
$content = $_POST['content'];
echo htmlspecialchars($content);
?>
Not exactly rocket science is it? I’m just catching the content item from the POST and echoing it back. For your application to be useful, however, you’ll need to know exactly which record you should be updating. I’m passing in the ID of my <div>, which is not a fat lot of use. You can modify saveChanges() to post back whatever information your app needs to know in order to process the update.
You should also check the user’s credentials to make sure they have permission to edit whatever it is they’re editing. Basically the same rules apply as with any script in your application.
Limitations
There are a few bits and bobs that in an ideal world I would tidy up. The first is the error handling, as I’ve already mentioned. The second is that from an idealistic standpoint, I’d rather not be using innerHTML. However, the reality is that it’s presently the most efficient way of making large changes to the document. If you’re serving as XML, remember that you’ll need to replace these with proper DOM nodes.
It’s also important to note that it’s quite difficult to make something like this universally accessible. Whenever you start updating large chunks of a document based on user interaction, a lot of non-traditional devices don’t cope well. The benefit of this technique, though, is that if JavaScript is unavailable none of the functionality gets implemented at all – it fails silently. It is for this reason that this shouldn’t be used as a complete replacement for a traditional, universally accessible edit form. It’s a great time-saver for those with the ability to use it, but it’s no replacement.
See it in action
I’ve put together an example page using the inert PHP script above. That is to say, your edits aren’t committed to a database, so the example is reset when the page is reloaded. |
2005 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2005-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/edit-in-place-with-ajax/ |
code |
| 238 |
Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t) |
Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.
Still, despite their widespread use (or is it overuse?), the smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. There’s always been a tension between the inherently two-dimensional nature of our medium, and our desire for more intensity, more depth in our designs. And a gradient can evoke so much: the splay of light across your desk, the slow decrease in volume toward the end of your favorite song, the sunset after a long day. When properly applied, graded colors bring a much needed softness to our work.
Of course, that whole ‘proper application’ thing is the tricky bit.
But given their place in our toolkit and their prominence online, it really is heartening to see we can create gradients directly with CSS. They’re part of the draft images module, and implemented in two of the major rendering engines.
Still, I’ve always found CSS gradients to be one of the more confusing aspects of CSS3. So if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser.
Gradient theory 101 (I hope that’s not really a thing)
Right. So before we dive into the code, let’s cover a few basics. Every gradient, no matter how complex, shares a few common characteristics. Here’s a straightforward one:
I spent seconds hours designing this gradient. I hope you like it.
At either end of our image, we have a final color value, or color stop: on the left, our stop is white; on the right, black. And more color-rich gradients are no different:
(Don’t ever really do this. Please. I beg you.)
It’s visually more intricate, sure. But at the heart of it, we have just seven color stops (red, orange, yellow, and so on), making for a fantastic gradient all the way.
Now, color stops alone do not a gradient make. Between each is a transition point, the fail-over point between the two stops. Now, the transition point doesn’t need to fall exactly between stops: it can be brought closer to one stop or the other, influencing the overall shape of the gradient.
A tale of two syntaxes
Armed with our new vocabulary, let’s look at a CSS gradient in the wild. Behold, the simple input button:
There’s a simple linear gradient applied vertically across the button, moving from a bright sunflowerish hue (#FAA51A, for you hex nuts in the audience) to a much richer orange (#F47A20). And here’s the CSS that makes it happen:
input[type=submit] {
background-color: #F47A20;
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
color-stop(1, #F47A20)
);
}
I’ve borrowed David DeSandro’s most excellent formatting suggestions for gradients to make this snippet a bit more legible but, still, the code above might have turned your stomach a bit. And that’s perfectly understandable—heck, it sort of turned mine. But let’s step through the CSS slowly, and see if we can’t make it a little less terrifying.
Verbose WebKit is verbose
Here’s the syntax for our little gradient on WebKit:
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
color-stop(1, #F47A20)
);
Woof. Quite a mouthful, no? Well, here’s what we’re looking at:
WebKit has a single -webkit-gradient property, which can be used to create either linear or radial gradients.
The next two values are the starting and ending positions for our gradient (0 0 and 0 100%, respectively). Linear gradients are simply drawn along the path between those two points, which allows us to change the direction of our gradient simply by altering its start and end points.
Afterward, we specify our color stops with the oh-so-aptly named color-stop parameter, which takes the stop’s position on the gradient (0 being the beginning, and 100% or 1 being the end) and the color itself.
For a simple two-color gradient like this, -webkit-gradient has a bit of shorthand notation to offer us:
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
from(#FAA51A),
to(#FAA51A)
);
from(#FAA51A) is equivalent to writing color-stop(0, #FAA51A), and to(#FAA51A) is the same as color-stop(1, #FAA51A) or color-stop(100%, #FAA51A)—in both cases, we’re simply declaring the first and last color stops in our gradient.
Terse Gecko is terse
WebKit proposed its syntax back in 2008, heavily inspired by the way gradients are drawn in the canvas specification. However, a different, leaner syntax came to the fore, eventually appearing in a draft module specification in CSS3.
Naturally, because nothing on the web was meant to be easy, this is the one that Mozilla has implemented.
Here’s how we get gradient-y in Gecko:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
Wait, what? Done already? That’s right. By default, -moz-linear-gradient assumes you’re trying to create a vertical gradient, starting from the top of your element and moving to the bottom. And, if that’s the case, then you simply need to specify your color stops, delimited with a few commas.
I know: that was almost… painless. But the W3C/Mozilla syntax also affords us a fair amount of flexibility and control, by introducing features as we need them.
We can specify an origin point for our gradient:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%,
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
As well as an angle, to give it a direction:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
And we can specify multiple stops, simply by adding to our comma-delimited list:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#FCC,
#F47A20
);
By adding a percentage after a given color value, we can determine its position along the gradient path:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#FCC 20%,
#F47A20
);
So that’s some of the flexibility implicit in the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax.
Now, I should note that both syntaxes have their respective fans. I will say that the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax makes much more sense to me, and lines up with how I think about creating gradients. But I can totally understand why some might prefer WebKit’s more verbose approach to the, well, looseness behind the -moz syntax. À chacun son gradient syntax.
Still, as the language gets refined by the W3C, I really hope some consensus is reached by the browser vendors. And with Opera signaling that it will support the W3C syntax, I suppose it falls on WebKit to do the same.
Reusing color stops for fun and profit
But CSS gradients aren’t all simple colors and shapes and whatnot: by getting inventive with individual color stops, you can create some really complex, compelling effects.
Tim Van Damme, whose brain, I believe, should be posthumously donated to science, has a particularly clever application of gradients on The Box, a site dedicated to his occasional podcast series. Now, there are a fair number of gradients applied throughout the UI, but it’s the feature image that really catches the eye.
You see, there’s nothing that says you can’t reuse color stops. And Tim’s exploited that perfectly.
He’s created a linear gradient, angled at forty-five degrees from the top left corner of the photo, starting with a fully transparent white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)). At the halfway mark, he’s established another color stop at an only slightly more opaque white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1)), making for that incredibly gradual brightening toward the middle of the photo.
But then he has set another color stop immediately on top of it, bringing it back down to rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) again. This creates that fantastically hard edge that diagonally bisects the photo, giving the image that subtle gloss.
And his final color stop ends at the same fully transparent white, completing the effect. Hot? I do believe so.
Rocking the radials
We’ve been looking at linear gradients pretty exclusively. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention radial gradients as a viable option, including a modest one as a link accent on a navigation bar:
And here’s the relevant CSS:
background: -moz-radial-gradient(50% 100%, farthest-side,
rgb(204, 255, 255) 1%,
rgb(85, 85, 85) 15%,
rgba(85, 85, 85, 0)
);
background: -webkit-gradient(radial, 50% 100%, 0, 50% 100%, 15,
from(rgb(204, 255, 255)),
to(rgba(85, 85, 85, 0))
);
Now, the syntax builds on what we’ve already learned about linear gradients, so much of it might be familiar to you, picking out color stops and transition points, as well as the two syntaxes’ reliance on either a separate property (-moz-radial-gradient) or parameter (-webkit-gradient(radial, …)) to shift into circular mode.
Mozilla introduces another stand-alone property (-moz-radial-gradient), and accepts a starting point (50% 100%) from which the circle radiates. There’s also a size constant defined (farthest-side), which determines the reach and shape of our gradient.
WebKit is again the more verbose of the two syntaxes, requiring both starting and ending points (50% 100% in both cases). Each also accepts a radius in pixels, allowing you to control the skew and breadth of the circle.
Again, this is a fairly modest little radial gradient. Time and article length (and, let’s be honest, your author’s completely inadequate grasp of geometry) prevent me from covering radial gradients in much more detail, because they are incredibly powerful. For those interested in learning more, I can’t recommend the references at Mozilla and Apple strongly enough.
Leave no browser behind
But no matter the kind of gradients you’re working with, there is a large swathe of browsers that simply don’t support gradients. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to declare a sensible fallback—it just depends on the kind of fallback you’d like. Essentially, gradient-blind browsers will disregard any properties containing references to either -moz-linear-gradient, -moz-radial-gradient, or -webkit-gradient, so you simply need to keep your fallback isolated from those properties.
For example: if you’d like to fall back to a flat color, simply declare a separate background-color:
.nav {
background-color: #000;
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
Or perhaps just create three separate background properties.
.nav {
background: #000;
background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
We can even build on this to fall back to a non-gradient image:
.nav {
background: #000 <strong>url("faux-gradient-lol.png") repeat-x</strong>;
background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
No matter the approach you feel most appropriate to your design, it’s really just a matter of keeping your fallback design quarantined from its CSS3-ified siblings.
(If you’re feeling especially masochistic, there’s even a way to get simple linear gradients working in IE via Microsoft’s proprietary filters. Of course, those come with considerable performance penalties that even Microsoft is quick to point out, so I’d recommend avoiding those.
And don’t tell Andy Clarke I told you, or he’ll probably unload his Derringer at me. Or something.)
Go forth and, um, gradientify!
It’s entirely possible your head’s spinning. Heck, mine is, but that might be the effects of the ’nog. But maybe you’re wondering why you should care about CSS gradients. After all, images are here right now, and work just fine.
Well, there are some quick benefits that spring to mind: fewer HTTP requests are needed; CSS3 gradients are easily made scalable, making them ideal for variable widths and heights; and finally, they’re easily modifiable by tweaking a few CSS properties. Because, let’s face it, less time spent yelling at Photoshop is a very, very good thing.
Of course, CSS-generated gradients are not without their drawbacks. The syntax can be confusing, and it’s still under development at the W3C. As we’ve seen, browser support is still very much in flux. And it’s possible that gradients themselves have some real performance drawbacks—so test thoroughly, and gradient carefully.
But still, as syntaxes converge, and support improves, I think generated gradients can make a compelling tool in our collective belts. The tasteful design is, of course, entirely up to you.
So have fun, and get gradientin’. |
2010 |
Ethan Marcotte |
ethanmarcotte |
2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients/ |
code |
| 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 can we expect people to be doing it right and not making stupid mistakes? That being the case, how do we talk about Content? Let’s start by finding a way to talk about it without blushing and scuffing our shoes. And there’s a reason I’ve been treating Content as a Proper Noun.
The first step, and I mean really-first-step-way-back-at-the-beginning-of-the-project-while-you-are-still-scoping-out-what-the-hell-you-might-do-for-each-other-and-it’s-still-all-a-bit-awkward-like-a-first-date, is for you to explain to the client how important it is that you, together, work out what is important to your users as part of the user experience design, so that your users get the best user experience. The trouble is that, in most cases, this would lead to blank stares, possibly followed by a light cough and a query about using Comic Sans because it seems friendly.
Let’s start by ensuring your clients understand the task ahead. You see, all the time we talk about the Content we do our clients a big disservice. Content is poorly defined. It looms over a project completion point like an unscalable (in the sense of a dozen stacked Kilimanjaros), seething, massive, singular entity. The Content.
Defining the problem.
We should really be thinking of the Content as ‘contents’; as many parts that come together to form a mighty experience, like hit 90s kids’ TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers*.
*For those of you who might have missed the Power Rangers, they were five teenagers with attitude, each given crazy mad individual skillz and a coloured lycra suit from an alien overlord. In return, they had to fight a new monster of the week using their abilities and weaponry in sync (even if the audio was not) and then, finally, in thrilling combination as a Humongous Mechanoid Machine of Awesome. They literally joined their individual selves, accessories and vehicles into a big robot. It was a toy manufacturer’s wet dream.
So, why do I say Content is like the Power Rangers? Because Content is not just a humongous mecha. It is a combination of well-crafted pieces of contents that come together to form a well-crafted humongous mecha. Of Content.
The Red Power Ranger was always the leader. You can imagine your text contents, found on about pages, product descriptions, blog articles, and so on, as being your Red Power Ranger.
Maybe your pictures are your Yellow Power Ranger; video is Blue (not used as much as the others, but really impressive when given a good storyline); maybe Pink is your infographics (it’s wrong to find it sexier than the other equally important Rangers, but you kind of do anyway). And so on.
These bits of content – Red Text Ranger, Yellow Picture Ranger and others – often join together on a page, like they are teaming up to fight the bad guy in an action scene, and when they all come together (your standard workaday huge mecha) in a launched site, that’s when Content becomes an entity.
While you might have a vision for the whole site, Content rarely works that way. Of course, you keep your eye on the bigger prize, the completion of your mega robot, but to get there you need to assemble your working parts, the cogs and springs of contents that will mesh together to finally create your Humongous Mecha of Content. You create parts and join them to form a whole. (It’s rarely seamless; often we need to adjust as we go, but we can create our Mecha’s blueprint by making sure we have all the requisite parts.)
The point here is the order these parts were created. No alien overlord plans a Humongous Mechanoid and then thinks, “Gee, how can I split this into smaller fighting units powered by teenagers in snazzy shiny suits?” No toy manufacturer goes into production of a mega robot, made up of model mecha vehicles with detachable arsenal, without thinking how they will easily fit back together to form the ‘Buy all five now to create the mega robot’ set. No good contents are created as a singular entity and chunked up to be slotted in to place any which way, into the body of a site.
Think contents, not the Content. Think of contents as smaller units, or as a plural. The Content is what you have at the end. The contents are what you are creating and they are easy to break down. You are no longer scaling the unscalable. You can draw the map and plot the path, page by page, section by section.
The page table is your friend
To do this, I use a page table. A page table is a simple table template you can create in the word processor of your choice, that you use to tell you everything about the contents of a page – everything except the contents itself.
Here’s a page table I created for an employee’s guide to redundancy in the alpha.gov.uk website:
Guide to redundancy for employees
Page objective: Provide specific information for employees who are facing redundancy about the process, their options and next steps.
Source content: directgov page on Redundancy.
Scope: In scope
Page title
An employee’s guide to redundancy
Priority content
Message: You have rights as an employee facing redundancy
Method: A guide written in plain English, with links to appropriate additional content.
A video guide (out of scope).
Covers the stages of redundancy and rights for those in trade unions and not in trade unions. Glossary of unfamiliar terms.
Call to action: Read full guide, act to explore redundancy actions, benefits or new employment.
Assets: link to redundancy calculator.
Secondary
Related items, or popular additional links.
Additional tools, such as search and suggestions.
location set v not set states
microcopy encouraging location set where location may make a difference to the content – ie, Scotland/Northern Ireland.
Tertiary
Footer and standard links.
Content creation: Content exists but was created within the constraints of the previous CMS. Review, correct and edit where necessary.
Maintenance: should be flagged for review upon advice from Department of Work and Pensions, and annually.
Technology/Publishing/Policy implications: Should be reviewed once the glossary styles have been decided. No video guide in scope at this time, so languages should be simple and screen reader friendly.
Reliance on third parties: None, all content and source exists in house.
Outstanding questions: None.
Download a copy of this page table
This particular page table template owes a lot to Brain Traffic’s version found in Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web. With smaller clients than, say, the government, I might use something a bit more casual. With clients who like timescales and deadlines, I might turn it into a covering sheet, with signatures and agreements from two departments who have to work together to get the piece done on time.
I use page tables, and the process of working through them, to reassure clients that I understand the task they face and that I can help them break it down section by section, page stack to page, down to product descriptions and interaction copy. About 80% of my clients break into relieved smiles. Most clients want to work with you to produce something good, they just don’t understand how, and they want you to show them the mountain path on the map. With page tables, clients can understand that with baby steps they can break down their content requirements and commission content they need in time for the designers to work with it (as opposed to around it). If I was Santa, these clients would be on my nice list for sure.
My own special brand of Voldemort-content-evilness comes in how I wield my page tables for the other 20%. Page tables are not always thrilling, I’ll admit. Sometimes they get ignored in favour of other things, yet they are crucial to the continual growth and maintenance of a truly content-led site. For these naughty list clients who, even when given the gift of the page table, continually say “Ooh, yes. Content. Right”, I have a special gift. I have a stack of recycled paper under my desk and a cheap black and white laser printer. And I print a blank page table for every conceivable page I can find on the planned redesign. If I’m feeling extra nice, I hole punch them and put them in a fat binder.
There is nothing like saying, “This is all the contents you need to have in hand for launch”, and the satisfying thud the binder makes as it hits the table top, to galvanize even the naughtiest clients to start working with you to create the content you need to really create in a content-out way. |
2011 |
Relly Annett-Baker |
rellyannettbaker |
2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/extracting-the-content/ |
content |
| 236 |
Extreme Design |
Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access.
Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias
Wait, no internet?
Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set.
We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org
The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before.
The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly.
What it’s like inside the fort
/dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptions‚ but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a ‘hack first, design later (if at all)’ attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building.
While the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went.
What made this design process work?
A golden ratio of teams
My personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can ‘do everything’ will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface.
More importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don’t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person.
While it’s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers.
photo by Ben Firshman
Equality inside the fortress walls
Something magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods.
Being equal doesn’t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort.
Create a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it’s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial.
photo by Ben Firshman
Hang your heraldry from the rafters
Forts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It’s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see.
Ryan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no “Ah, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y” or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy.
Put a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don’t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference.
Plan more, download less
While internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn’t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets – “loo roll; Tom Stafford photo“.
This changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too.
The path to the internet
For the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process.
Try it at home: unplug once you’ve got the things you need. As an artist, it’s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you’re not looking at other people’s work while creating.
Social design
Finally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly.
At a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over – this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we’d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back.
Put the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it’s better to have your personal headspace.
Gavin called this ‘social design’. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I’d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work – but there’s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That’s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the ‘driver’ and ‘observer’ roles is a key aspect to pairing.
Tackle the forest collectively and the trees individually – it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win.
The return home
Grateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be.
You just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next. |
2010 |
Hannah Donovan |
hannahdonovan |
2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/ |
process |
| 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 similar tune yourself; it goes a little somethin’ like setTimeout(function() { console.log( "this should be happening last" ); }, 1000); . Callbacks are calling callbacks calling callbacks and something is happening somewhere, as the JavaScript interpreter plods through our code start-to-finish, line-by-line, step-by-step. If we need to take actions based on the results of something that could take its sweet time resolving, well, we’d better fiddle with the order of things to make sure those actions don’t happen too soon.
“But I can see a better time,” as the song says, “when all our dreams come true.” So, with that Pogues brand of holiday spirit squarely in mind—by which I mean that your humble narrator is almost certainly drunk, and may be incarcerated at the time of publication—gather ’round for a story of hope, of hardships, of semi-asynchronous JavaScript programming, and ultimately: of Promise unfulfilled.
The Main Thread
JavaScript is single-minded, in a manner of speaking. Anything we tell the JavaScript runtime to do goes into a single-file queue; you’ll see it referred to as the “main thread,” or “UI thread.” That thread can be shared by a number of critical browser processes, like rendering and re-rendering parts of the page, and user interactions ranging from the simple—say, highlighting text—to the more complex—interacting with form elements.
If that sounds a little scary to you, well, that’s because it is. The more complex our scripts, the more we’re cramming into that single-file main thread, to be processed along with—say—some of our CSS animations. Too much JavaScript clogging up the main thread means a lot of user-facing performance jankiness. Getting away from that single thread is a big part of all the excitement around Web Workers, which allow us to offload entire scripts into their own dedicated background threads—though not without limitations of their own. Outside of Web Workers, that everything-thread is the only game in town: scripts executed one thing at a time, functions calling functions calling functions, taking numbers and crowding up the same deli counter as a user’s interactions—which, in this already strained metaphor, would be ham, I guess?
Asynchronous JavaScript
Now, those queued actions may include asynchronous things. For example: AJAX callbacks, setTimeout/setInterval, and addEventListener won’t block the main thread while we’re waiting for a request to come back, a timer to tick away, or an event to trigger. Once those things do kick in, though, the actions they’re meant to perform will get shuffled right back into that single-thread queue.
There are a couple of places you might have written asynchronously-fired JavaScript, even if you’re not super familiar with the overarching concept: XMLHttpRequest—“AJAX,” if ya nasty—or just kicking off a function once a user triggers a click or mouseenter event. Event-driven development is writ a little larger, with the overall flow of the script dictated by events, both internal and external. Writing event-driven JavaScript applications is a step in the right direction for sure—it won’t cure what ails the main thread, but it does work with the medium in a reasonable way. Event-driven development allows us to manage our use of the main thread in a way that makes sense. If any of this rings a bell for you, the motivation for Promises should feel familiar.
For example, a custom init event might kick things off, and fire a create event that applies our classes and restructures our markup which, on completion, fires a bindEvents event to handle all the event listeners for user interaction. There might not sound like much difference between that and one big function that kicks off, manipulates the DOM, and binds our events line-by-line—but in a script of sufficient size and complexity we’re not only provided with a decoupled flow through the script, but obvious touchpoints for future updates and a predictable structure for ongoing maintenance.
This pattern falls apart a little where we were still creating, binding, and listening for events in the same top-to-bottom, one-item-at-a-time way—we had to set a listener on a given object before the event fires, or nothing would happen:
// Create the event:
var event = document.createEvent( "Event" );
// Name the event:
event.initEvent( "doTheStuff", true, true );
// Listen for the custom `doTheStuff` event on `window`:
window.addEventListener( "doTheStuff", initializeEverything );
// Fire the custom event
window.dispatchEvent( event );
This example is a little contrived, and this stuff is a lot more manageable for sure with the addition of a framework, but that’s the basic gist: create and name the event, add a listener for the event, and—after setting our listener—dispatch the event.
Events and callbacks aren’t the only game in town for weaving our way in and out of the main thread, though—at least, not anymore.
Promises
A Promise is, at the risk of sounding sentimental, pure potential—an empty container into which a value eventually results. A Promise can exist in several states: “pending,” while the computation they contain is being performed or “resolved” once that computation is complete. Once resolved, a Promise is “fulfilled” if it gave us back something we expect, or “rejected” if it didn’t.
The Promise constructor accepts a callback with two arguments: resolve and reject. We perform an action—asynchronous or otherwise—within that callback. If everything in there has gone according to plan, we call resolve. If something has gone awry, we call reject—with an error, conventionally. To illustrate, let’s tack something together with a pretty decent chance of doing what we don’t want: a promise meant only to give us the number 1, but has a chance of giving us back a 2. No reasonable person would ever do this, of course, but I wouldn’t necessarily put it past me.
var promisedOne = new Promise( function( resolve, reject ) {
var coinToss = Math.floor( Math.random() * 2 ) + 1;
if( coinToss === 1 ) {
resolve( coinToss );
} else {
reject( new Error( "That ain’t a one." ) );
}
});
There’s nothing too surprising in there, after you boil it all down. It’s a little return-y, with the exception that we’re flagging results as “as expected” or “something went wrong.”
Tapping into that Promise uses another new keyword: then—and as someone who attempts to make sense of JavaScript by breaking it down to plain ol’ human-language, I’m a big fan of this syntax. then is tacked onto our Promise identifier, and does just what it says on the tin: once the Promise is resolved, then do one of two things, both supplied as callbacks: the first in the case of a fulfilled promise, and the second in the case of a rejected one. Those two callbacks will have, as arguments, the results we specified with resolve orreject, respectively. It sounds like a lot in prose, but in code it’s a pretty simple pattern:
promisedOne.then( function( result ) {
console.log( result );
}, function( error ) {
console.error( error );
});
If you’ve spent any time working with AJAX—jQuery-wise, in particular—you’ve seen something like this pattern before: a success callback and an error callback. The state of a promise, once fulfilled or rejected, cannot be changed—any reference we make to promisedOne will have a single, fixed result.
It may not look like too much the way I’m using it here, but it’s powerful stuff—a pattern for asynchronously resolving anything. I’ve recently used Promises alongside a script that emulates Font Load Events, to apply webfonts asynchronously and avoid a potential performance hit. Font Face Observer allows us to, as the name implies, determine when the files referenced by our @font-face rules have finished loading.
var fontObserver = new FontFaceObserver( "Fancy Font" );
fontObserver.check().then(function() {
document.documentElement.className += " fonts-loaded";
}, function( error ) {
console.error( error );
});
fontObserver.check() gives us back a Promise, allowing us to chain on a then containing our callbacks for success and failure. We use the fulfilled callback to bolt a class onto the page once the font file has been fully transferred. We don’t bother including an argument in the first function, since we don’t care about the result itself so much as we care that the promise resolved without error—we’re not doing anything with the resolved value, just adding a class to the page. We do include the error argument, since we’ll want to know what happened should something go wrong.
Now, this isn’t the tidiest syntax around—at least to my eyes—with those two functions just kinda floating in a then. Luckily there’s an similar alternative syntax; one that I find a bit easier to parse at-a-glance:
fontObserver.check()
.then(function() {
document.documentElement.className += " fonts-loaded";
})
.catch(function( error ) {
console.log( error );
});
The first callback inside then provides us with our success state, while the catch provides us with a single, explicit “something went wrong” callback. The two syntaxes aren’t completely identical in all situations, but for a simple case like this, I find it a little neater.
The Common Thread
I guess I still owe you an explanation, huh. Not about the JavaScript-whatever; I think I’ve explained that plenty. No, I mean Fairytale of New York, and why it’s perched up there at the top of the four (4) song heap.
Fairytale is a sad song, ostensibly. If you follow the main thread—start to finish, line-by-line, step by step— Fairytale is a sad song. And I can see you out there, visions of Die Hard dancing in your heads: “but is it a Christmas song?”
Well, for my money, nothing says “holidays” quite like unreliable narration.
Shane MacGowan, the song’s author, has placed the first verse about “Christmas Eve in the drunk tank” as happening right after the “lucky one, came in eighteen-to-one”—not at the chronological end of the story. That means the song might not be mostly drunken flashback, but all of it a single, overarching flashback including a Christmas Eve in protective custody. It could be that the man and woman are, together, recounting times long past—good times and bad times—maybe not even in chronological order. Hell, the “NYPD Choir” mentioned in the chorus? There’s no such thing.
We’re not big Christmas folks, my family and I. But just the same, every year, the handful of us get together, and every year—like clockwork—there’s a lull in conversation, there’s a sharp exhale, and Ma says “we all made it.” Not to a house, not to a dinner, but through another year, to another Christmas. At this point, without fail, someone starts telling a story—and one begets another, and so on. Sometimes the stories are happy, sometimes they’re sad, more often than not they’re both. Some are about things we were lucky to walk away from, some are about a time when another one of us didn’t.
Start-to-finish, line-by-line, step-by-step, the main thread through the year doesn’t change, and maybe there isn’t a whole lot we can do to change it. But by carefully weaving our way in and out of that thread—stories all out of sync and resolving one way or the other, with the results determined by questionably reliable narrators—we can change the way we interact with it and, little by little, we can start making sense of it. |
2016 |
Mat Marquis |
matmarquis |
2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/fairytale-of-new-promise/ |
code |
| 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 without downloading pages that we have already fetched. We can use the --no-clobber option for this.
Tie all of those options together and we get this command:
wget --recursive --wait 2 --no-clobber
-I /2005,/2006,/2007,/2008,/2009,/2010,/2011,/2012,/2013,/2014,/2015,/2016,/2017
-X "/*/*/comments"
https://24ways.org/archives/
If you leave this running for a few minutes, you’ll end up with a folder structure something like this:
$ find 24ways.org
24ways.org
24ways.org/2013
24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility
24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/index.html
24ways.org/2013/levelling-up
24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/index.html
24ways.org/2013/project-hubs
24ways.org/2013/project-hubs/index.html
24ways.org/2013/credits-and-recognition
24ways.org/2013/credits-and-recognition/index.html
...
As a quick sanity check, let’s count the number of HTML pages we have retrieved:
$ find 24ways.org | grep index.html | wc -l
328
There’s one last step! We got everything up to 2017, but we need to fetch the articles for 2018 (so far) as well. They aren’t linked in the /archives/ yet so we need to point our crawler at the site’s front page instead:
wget --recursive --wait 2 --no-clobber
-I /2018
-X "/*/*/comments"
https://24ways.org/
Thanks to --no-clobber, this is safe to run every day in December to pick up any new content.
We now have a folder on our computer containing an HTML file for every article that has ever been published on the site! Let’s use them to build ourselves a search index.
Building a search index using SQLite
There are many tools out there that can be used to build a search engine. You can use an open-source search server like Elasticsearch or Solr, a hosted option like Algolia or Amazon CloudSearch or you can tap into the built-in search features of relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
I’m going to use something that’s less commonly used for web applications but makes for a powerful and extremely inexpensive alternative: SQLite.
SQLite is the world’s most widely deployed database, even though many people have never even heard of it. That’s because it’s designed to be used as an embedded database: it’s commonly used by native mobile applications and even runs as part of the default set of apps on the Apple Watch!
SQLite has one major limitation: unlike databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, it isn’t really designed to handle large numbers of concurrent writes. For this reason, most people avoid it for building web applications.
This doesn’t matter nearly so much if you are building a search engine for infrequently updated content - say one for a site that only publishes new content on 24 days every year.
It turns out SQLite has very powerful full-text search functionality built into the core database - the FTS5 extension.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with SQLite recently, and as part of that, I’ve been building a Python utility library to make building new SQLite databases as easy as possible, called sqlite-utils. It’s designed to be used within a Jupyter notebook - an enormously productive way of interacting with Python code that’s similar to the Observable notebooks Natalie described on 24 ways yesterday.
If you haven’t used Jupyter before, here’s the fastest way to get up and running with it - assuming you have Python 3 installed on your machine. We can use a Python virtual environment to ensure the software we are installing doesn’t clash with any other installed packages:
$ python3 -m venv ./jupyter-venv
$ ./jupyter-venv/bin/pip install jupyter
# ... lots of installer output
# Now lets install some extra packages we will need later
$ ./jupyter-venv/bin/pip install beautifulsoup4 sqlite-utils html5lib
# And start the notebook web application
$ ./jupyter-venv/bin/jupyter-notebook
# This will open your browser to Jupyter at http://localhost:8888/
You should now be in the Jupyter web application. Click New -> Python 3 to start a new notebook.
A neat thing about Jupyter notebooks is that if you publish them to GitHub (either in a regular repository or as a Gist), it will render them as HTML. This makes them a very powerful way to share annotated code. I’ve published the notebook I used to build the search index on my GitHub account.
Here’s the Python code I used to scrape the relevant data from the downloaded HTML files. Check out the notebook for a line-by-line explanation of what’s going on.
from pathlib import Path
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
base = Path("/Users/simonw/Dropbox/Development/24ways-search")
articles = list(base.glob("*/*/*/*.html"))
# articles is now a list of paths that look like this:
# PosixPath('...24ways-search/24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/index.html')
docs = []
for path in articles:
year = str(path.relative_to(base)).split("/")[1]
url = 'https://' + str(path.relative_to(base).parent) + '/'
soup = Soup(path.open().read(), "html5lib")
author = soup.select_one(".c-continue")["title"].split(
"More information about"
)[1].strip()
author_slug = soup.select_one(".c-continue")["href"].split(
"/authors/"
)[1].split("/")[0]
published = soup.select_one(".c-meta time")["datetime"]
contents = soup.select_one(".e-content").text.strip()
title = soup.find("title").text.split(" ◆")[0]
try:
topic = soup.select_one(
'.c-meta a[href^="/topics/"]'
)["href"].split("/topics/")[1].split("/")[0]
except TypeError:
topic = None
docs.append({
"title": title,
"contents": contents,
"year": year,
"author": author,
"author_slug": author_slug,
"published": published,
"url": url,
"topic": topic,
})
After running this code, I have a list of Python dictionaries representing each of the documents that I want to add to the index. The list looks something like this:
[
{
"title": "Why Bother with Accessibility?",
"contents": "Web accessibility (known in other fields as inclus...",
"year": "2013",
"author": "Laura Kalbag",
"author_slug": "laurakalbag",
"published": "2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00",
"url": "https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/",
"topic": "design"
},
{
"title": "Levelling Up",
"contents": "Hello, 24 ways. Iu2019m Ashley and I sell property ins...",
"year": "2013",
"author": "Ashley Baxter",
"author_slug": "ashleybaxter",
"published": "2013-12-06T00:00:00+00:00",
"url": "https://24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/",
"topic": "business"
},
...
My sqlite-utils library has the ability to take a list of objects like this and automatically create a SQLite database table with the right schema to store the data. Here’s how to do that using this list of dictionaries.
import sqlite_utils
db = sqlite_utils.Database("/tmp/24ways.db")
db["articles"].insert_all(docs)
That’s all there is to it! The library will create a new database and add a table to it called articles with the necessary columns, then insert all of the documents into that table.
(I put the database in /tmp/ for the moment - you can move it to a more sensible location later on.)
You can inspect the table using the sqlite3 command-line utility (which comes with OS X) like this:
$ sqlite3 /tmp/24ways.db
sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> .mode column
sqlite> select title, author, year from articles;
title author year
------------------------------ ------------ ----------
Why Bother with Accessibility? Laura Kalbag 2013
Levelling Up Ashley Baxte 2013
Project Hubs: A Home Base for Brad Frost 2013
Credits and Recognition Geri Coady 2013
Managing a Mind Christopher 2013
Run Ragged Mark Boulton 2013
Get Started With GitHub Pages Anna Debenha 2013
Coding Towards Accessibility Charlie Perr 2013
...
<Ctrl+D to quit>
There’s one last step to take in our notebook. We know we want to use SQLite’s full-text search feature, and sqlite-utils has a simple convenience method for enabling it for a specified set of columns in a table. We want to be able to search by the title, author and contents fields, so we call the enable_fts() method like this:
db["articles"].enable_fts(["title", "author", "contents"])
Introducing Datasette
Datasette is the open-source tool I’ve been building that makes it easy to both explore SQLite databases and publish them to the internet.
We’ve been exploring our new SQLite database using the sqlite3 command-line tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use a more human-friendly interface for that?
If you don’t want to install Datasette right now, you can visit https://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/ to try it out against the 24 ways search index data. I’ll show you how to deploy Datasette to Heroku like this later in the article.
If you want to install Datasette locally, you can reuse the virtual environment we created to play with Jupyter:
./jupyter-venv/bin/pip install datasette
This will install Datasette in the ./jupyter-venv/bin/ folder. You can also install it system-wide using regular pip install datasette.
Now you can run Datasette against the 24ways.db file we created earlier like so:
./jupyter-venv/bin/datasette /tmp/24ways.db
This will start a local webserver running. Visit http://localhost:8001/ to start interacting with the Datasette web application.
If you want to try out Datasette without creating your own 24ways.db file you can download the one I created directly from https://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-ae60295.db
Publishing the database to the internet
One of the goals of the Datasette project is to make deploying data-backed APIs to the internet as easy as possible. Datasette has a built-in command for this, datasette publish. If you have an account with Heroku or Zeit Now, you can deploy a database to the internet with a single command. Here’s how I deployed https://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/ (running on Heroku’s free tier) using datasette publish:
$ ./jupyter-venv/bin/datasette publish heroku /tmp/24ways.db --name search-24ways
-----> Python app detected
-----> Installing requirements with pip
-----> Running post-compile hook
-----> Discovering process types
Procfile declares types -> web
-----> Compressing...
Done: 47.1M
-----> Launching...
Released v8
https://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku
If you try this out, you’ll need to pick a different --name, since I’ve already taken search-24ways.
You can run this command as many times as you like to deploy updated versions of the underlying database.
Searching and faceting
Datasette can detect tables with SQLite full-text search configured, and will add a search box directly to the page. Take a look at http://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-b607e21/articles to see this in action.
SQLite search supports wildcards, so if you want autocomplete-style search where you don’t need to enter full words to start getting results you can add a * to the end of your search term. Here’s a search for access* which returns articles on accessibility:
http://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-ae60295/articles?_search=acces%2A
A neat feature of Datasette is the ability to calculate facets against your data. Here’s a page showing search results for svg with facet counts calculated against both the year and the topic columns:
http://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-ae60295/articles?_search=svg&_facet=year&_facet=topic
Every page visible via Datasette has a corresponding JSON API, which can be accessed using the JSON link on the page - or by adding a .json extension to the URL:
http://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-ae60295/articles.json?_search=acces%2A
Better search using custom SQL
The search results we get back from ../articles?_search=svg are OK, but the order they are returned in is not ideal - they’re actually being returned in the order they were inserted into the database! You can see why this is happening by clicking the View and edit SQL link on that search results page.
This exposes the underlying SQL query, which looks like this:
select rowid, * from articles where rowid in (
select rowid from articles_fts where articles_fts match :search
) order by rowid limit 101
We can do better than this by constructing a custom SQL query. Here’s the query we will use instead:
select
snippet(articles_fts, -1, 'b4de2a49c8', '8c94a2ed4b', '...', 100) as snippet,
articles_fts.rank, articles.title, articles.url, articles.author, articles.year
from articles
join articles_fts on articles.rowid = articles_fts.rowid
where articles_fts match :search || "*"
order by rank limit 10;
You can try this query out directly - since Datasette opens the underling SQLite database in read-only mode and enforces a one second time limit on queries, it’s safe to allow users to provide arbitrary SQL select queries for Datasette to execute.
There’s a lot going on here! Let’s break the SQL down line-by-line:
select
snippet(articles_fts, -1, 'b4de2a49c8', '8c94a2ed4b', '...', 100) as snippet,
We’re using snippet(), a built-in SQLite function, to generate a snippet highlighting the words that matched the query. We use two unique strings that I made up to mark the beginning and end of each match - you’ll see why in the JavaScript later on.
articles_fts.rank, articles.title, articles.url, articles.author, articles.year
These are the other fields we need back - most of them are from the articles table but we retrieve the rank (representing the strength of the search match) from the magical articles_fts table.
from articles
join articles_fts on articles.rowid = articles_fts.rowid
articles is the table containing our data. articles_fts is a magic SQLite virtual table which implements full-text search - we need to join against it to be able to query it.
where articles_fts match :search || "*"
order by rank limit 10;
:search || "*" takes the ?search= argument from the page querystring and adds a * to the end of it, giving us the wildcard search that we want for autocomplete. We then match that against the articles_fts table using the match operator. Finally, we order by rank so that the best matching results are returned at the top - and limit to the first 10 results.
How do we turn this into an API? As before, the secret is to add the .json extension. Datasette actually supports multiple shapes of JSON - we’re going to use ?_shape=array to get back a plain array of objects:
JSON API call to search for articles matching SVG
The HTML version of that page shows the time taken to execute the SQL in the footer. Hitting refresh a few times, I get response times between 2 and 5ms - easily fast enough to power a responsive autocomplete feature.
A simple JavaScript autocomplete search interface
I considered building this using React or Svelte or another of the myriad of JavaScript framework options available today, but then I remembered that vanilla JavaScript in 2018 is a very productive environment all on its own.
We need a few small utility functions: first, a classic debounce function adapted from this one by David Walsh:
function debounce(func, wait, immediate) {
let timeout;
return function() {
let context = this, args = arguments;
let later = () => {
timeout = null;
if (!immediate) func.apply(context, args);
};
let callNow = immediate && !timeout;
clearTimeout(timeout);
timeout = setTimeout(later, wait);
if (callNow) func.apply(context, args);
};
};
We’ll use this to only send fetch() requests a maximum of once every 100ms while the user is typing.
Since we’re rendering data that might include HTML tags (24 ways is a site about web development after all), we need an HTML escaping function. I’m amazed that browsers still don’t bundle a default one of these:
const htmlEscape = (s) => s.replace(
/>/g, '>'
).replace(
/</g, '<'
).replace(
/&/g, '&'
).replace(
/"/g, '"'
).replace(
/'/g, '''
);
We need some HTML for the search form, and a div in which to render the results:
<h1>Autocomplete search</h1>
<form>
<p><input id="searchbox" type="search" placeholder="Search 24ways" style="width: 60%"></p>
</form>
<div id="results"></div>
And now the autocomplete implementation itself, as a glorious, messy stream-of-consciousness of JavaScript:
// Embed the SQL query in a multi-line backtick string:
const sql = `select
snippet(articles_fts, -1, 'b4de2a49c8', '8c94a2ed4b', '...', 100) as snippet,
articles_fts.rank, articles.title, articles.url, articles.author, articles.year
from articles
join articles_fts on articles.rowid = articles_fts.rowid
where articles_fts match :search || "*"
order by rank limit 10`;
// Grab a reference to the <input type="search">
const searchbox = document.getElementById("searchbox");
// Used to avoid race-conditions:
let requestInFlight = null;
searchbox.onkeyup = debounce(() => {
const q = searchbox.value;
// Construct the API URL, using encodeURIComponent() for the parameters
const url = (
"https://search-24ways.herokuapp.com/24ways-866073b.json?sql=" +
encodeURIComponent(sql) +
`&search=${encodeURIComponent(q)}&_shape=array`
);
// Unique object used just for race-condition comparison
let currentRequest = {};
requestInFlight = currentRequest;
fetch(url).then(r => r.json()).then(d => {
if (requestInFlight !== currentRequest) {
// Avoid race conditions where a slow request returns
// after a faster one.
return;
}
let results = d.map(r => `
<div class="result">
<h3><a href="${r.url}">${htmlEscape(r.title)}</a></h3>
<p><small>${htmlEscape(r.author)} - ${r.year}</small></p>
<p>${highlight(r.snippet)}</p>
</div>
`).join("");
document.getElementById("results").innerHTML = results;
});
}, 100); // debounce every 100ms
There’s just one more utility function, used to help construct the HTML results:
const highlight = (s) => htmlEscape(s).replace(
/b4de2a49c8/g, '<b>'
).replace(
/8c94a2ed4b/g, '</b>'
);
This is what those unique strings passed to the snippet() function were for.
Avoiding race conditions in autocomplete
One trick in this code that you may not have seen before is the way race-conditions are handled. Any time you build an autocomplete feature, you have to consider the following case:
User types acces
Browser sends request A - querying documents matching acces*
User continues to type accessibility
Browser sends request B - querying documents matching accessibility*
Request B returns. It was fast, because there are fewer documents matching the full term
The results interface updates with the documents from request B, matching accessibility*
Request A returns results (this was the slower of the two requests)
The results interface updates with the documents from request A - results matching access*
This is a terrible user experience: the user saw their desired results for a brief second, and then had them snatched away and replaced with those results from earlier on.
Thankfully there’s an easy way to avoid this. I set up a variable in the outer scope called requestInFlight, initially set to null.
Any time I start a new fetch() request, I create a new currentRequest = {} object and assign it to the outer requestInFlight as well.
When the fetch() completes, I use requestInFlight !== currentRequest to sanity check that the currentRequest object is strictly identical to the one that was in flight. If a new request has been triggered since we started the current request we can detect that and avoid updating the results.
It’s not a lot of code, really
And that’s the whole thing! The code is pretty ugly, but when the entire implementation clocks in at fewer than 70 lines of JavaScript, I honestly don’t think it matters. You’re welcome to refactor it as much you like.
How good is this search implementation? I’ve been building search engines for a long time using a wide variety of technologies and I’m happy to report that using SQLite in this way is genuinely a really solid option. It scales happily up to hundreds of MBs (or even GBs) of data, and the fact that it’s based on SQL makes it easy and flexible to work with.
A surprisingly large number of desktop and mobile applications you use every day implement their search feature on top of SQLite.
More importantly though, I hope that this demonstrates that using Datasette for an API means you can build relatively sophisticated API-backed applications with very little backend programming effort. If you’re working with a small-to-medium amount of data that changes infrequently, you may not need a more expensive database. Datasette-powered applications easily fit within the free tier of both Heroku and Zeit Now.
For more of my writing on Datasette, check out the datasette tag on my blog. And if you do build something fun with it, please let me know on Twitter. |
2018 |
Simon Willison |
simonwillison |
2018-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/fast-autocomplete-search-for-your-website/ |
code |
| 123 |
Fast and Simple Usability Testing |
Everyone knows by now that they should test the usability of their applications, but still hardly anybody actually does it. In this article I’ll share some tips I’ve picked up for doing usability tests quickly and effectively.
Relatively recent tools like Django and Ruby on Rails allow us to develop projects faster and to make significant changes later in the project timeline. Usability testing methods should now be adapted to fit this modern approach to development.
When to test
In an ideal world usability tests would be carried out frequently from an early stage of the project. Time and budget constraints lead this to be impractical; usability is often the first thing to get dropped from the project plan.
If you can only test at one stage in the project, whatever the size, the most valuable time is before your first public beta — leaving long enough to fix issues and not so late that you can’t rethink your scope.
There are three main categories of usability test:
Testing design mockups
Testing a new working application
Testing established applications
Each category requires a slightly different approach. For small modern web projects you are most likely to be testing a new working application. You will of course have already done functional tests so you won’t be worried about the user breaking things. The main differences between the categories apply in how you word The Script.
Testing an established application is the most fun in my opinion. Humans are remarkably adaptable and rapidly develop coping strategies to work around usability issues in software they are forced to use. Uncovering these strategies may lead you to understand previously unspoken needs of your users. Often small changes to the application will have a dramatic affect on their everyday lives.
Who to test
When you have built a project to scratch your own itch, your intended audience will be people just like you. Test subjects in this case should be easy to find – friends, co-workers etc.
This is not always the case; your users may not be like you at all. When they are not, it’s all the more important to run usability tests. Testing on friends, family and co-workers is better than not doing usability tests at all, but it can’t be compared to testing on actual samples of your intended audience. People who would use the system will provide more genuine feedback and deeper insight.
Never let your test subjects put themselves in the shoes of your ‘actual’ users. For example, you should discourage comments like “Well, I would do this BUT if I was a bus driver I’d do that”. Users are not qualified to put themselves in the position of others. Inaccurate data is often worse than no data.
Aim for five or six test subjects: any more and you probably won’t learn anything new; any less and you’re likely to be overwhelmed by issues stemming from people’s individual personalities.
The Script
The Script is a single side of A4 (or letter) paper, consisting of questions for your testers and reminders for yourself. Have a balance of task-based questions and expectation analysis. This helps maintain consistency across tests. Expectation analysis is more important for testing designs and new applications: “Where would you find X?”, “What would you expect to happen if you clicked on Y?”. In an established system users will probably know where these things are though it can still be illuminating to ask these questions though phrased slightly differently.
Task-based questions involve providing a task for the user to complete. If you are testing an established system it is a good idea to ask users to bring in tasks that they would normally perform. This is because the user will be more invested in the outcome of the task and will behave in a more realistic fashion. When designing tasks for new systems and designs ensure you only provide loose task details for the same reason. Don’t tell testers to enter “Chantelle”; have them use their own name instead. Avoid introducing bias with the way questions are phrased.
It’s a good idea to ask for users’ first impressions at the beginning of the test, especially when testing design mockups. “What are the main elements on the page?” or “What strikes you first?”.
You script should run for a maximum of 45 minutes. 30-35 minutes is better; after this you are likely to lose their attention. Tests on established systems can take longer as there is more to learn from them. When scheduling the test you will need to leave yourself 5 minutes between each one to collate your notes and prepare for the next. Be sure to run through the script beforehand.
Your script should be flexible. It is possible that during the test a trend will come to light that opens up whole new avenues of possible questioning. For example, during one initial test of an established system I noticed that the test subject had been printing off items from the application and placing them in a folder in date order (the system ordered alphabetically). I changed the script to ask future participants in that run, if they ever used external tools to help them with tasks within the system. This revealed a number of interesting issues that otherwise would not have been found.
Running the tests
Treat your test subjects like hedgehogs. Depending on your target audience they probably feel a little nervous and perhaps even scared of you. So make them a little nest out of straw, stroke their prickles and give them some cat food. Alternatively, reassure them that you are testing the system and that they can’t give a wrong answer. Reward them with a doughnut or jam tart at the end. Try to ensure the test environment is relaxed and quiet, but also as close as possible to the situation where they would actually use the system.
Have your subjects talk out loud is very important as you can’t read their minds, but it is a very unnatural process. To loosen up your subjects and get them talking in the way you want them to, try the Stapler Trick. Give them a stapler or similar item and ask them to open it, take the staples out, replace them, shut the stapler and staple some paper – talking all the time about what they see, what they expect to happen, what actually happens and how that matches up. Make them laugh at you.
Say how long the test will take up front, and tell your subject why you are doing it. After the test has been completed, conclude by thanking them for their time and assuring them that they were very useful. Then give them the sugary treat.
What to look for
Primarily, you should look out for incidents where the user stops concentrating on her tasks and starts thinking about the tool and how she is going to use it. For example, when you are hammering in a nail you don’t think about how to use a hammer; good software should be the same. Words like ‘it’ and ‘the system’ and are good indications that the test subject has stopped thinking about the task in hand. Note questioning words, especially where testers question their own judgement, “why can’t I find …”, “I expected to see …” etc. as this indicates that the work flow for the task may have broken down.
Also keep an eye on occasions where the user completely fails to do a task. They may need some prompting to unstick them, but you should be careful not to bias the test. These should be the highest priority issues for you to fix. If users recover from getting stuck, make a note of how they recovered. Prolonged periods of silence from the test subject may also require prompting as they should be talking all the time. Ask them what they are thinking or looking for but avoid words like ‘try’ (e.g. ‘what are you trying to do?’) as this implies that they are currently failing.
Be wary of users’ opinions on aesthetics and be prepared to bring them back to the script if they get side-tracked.
Writing it up
Even if you are the only developer it’s important to summarise the key issues that emerged during testing: your notes won’t make much sense to you a week or so after the test.
If you are writing for other people, include a summary no longer than two pages; this can consist of a list or table of the issues including recommendations and their priorities. Remember to anonymise the users in the report. In team situations, you may be surprised at how many people are interested in the results of the usability test even if it doesn’t relate directly to something that they can fix.
To conclude…
Some usability testing is better than none at all, even for small projects or those with strict deadlines. Make the most of the time and resources available. Choose your users carefully, make them comfortable, summarise your report and don’t forget to leave a doughnut for yourself! |
2006 |
Natalie Downe |
nataliedowne |
2006-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/fast-and-simple-usability-testing/ |
process |
| 130 |
Faster Development with CSS Constants |
Anyone even slightly familiar with a programming language will have come across the concept of constants – a fixed value that can be used through your code. For example, in a PHP script I might have a constant which is the email address that all emails generated by my application get sent to.
$adminEmail = 'info@example.com';
I could then use $adminEmail in my script whenever I wanted an email to go to that address. The benefit of this is that when the client decides they want the email to go to a different address, I only need change it in one place – the place where I initially set the constant. I could also quite easily make this value user defined and enable the administrator to update the email address.
Unfortunately CSS doesn’t support constants. It would be really useful to be able to define certain values initially and then use them throughout a CSS file, so in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the methods we do have available and provide pointers to more in depth commentary on each. If you have a different method, or tip to share please add it to the comments.
So what options do we have?
One way to get round the lack of constants is to create some definitions at the top of your CSS file in comments, to define ‘constants’. A common use for this is to create a ‘color glossary’. This means that you have a quick reference to the colors used in the site to avoid using alternates by mistake and, if you need to change the colors, you have a quick list to go down and do a search and replace.
In the below example, if I decide I want to change the mid grey to #999999, all I need to do is search and replace #666666 with #999999 – assuming I’ve remember to always use that value for things which are mid grey.
/*
Dark grey (text): #333333
Dark Blue (headings, links) #000066
Mid Blue (header) #333399
Light blue (top navigation) #CCCCFF
Mid grey: #666666
*/
This is a fairly low-tech method, but if used throughout the development of the CSS files can make changes far simpler and help to ensure consistency in your color scheme.
I’ve seen this method used by many designers however Garrett Dimon documents the method, with more ideas in the comments.
Going server-side
To truly achieve constants you will need to use something other than CSS to process the file before it is sent to the browser. You can use any scripting language – PHP, ASP, ColdFusion etc. to parse a CSS file in which you have entered constants. So that in a constants section of the CSS file you would have:
$darkgrey = '#333333';
$darkblue = '#000066';
The rest of the CSS file is as normal except that when you come to use the constant value you would use the constant name instead of adding the color:
p {
color: $darkgrey;
}
Your server-side script could then parse the CSS file, replace the constant names with the constant values and serve a valid CSS file to the browser. Christian Heilmann has done just this for PHP however this could be adapted for any language you might have available on your server.
Shaun Inman came up with another way
of doing this that removes the need to link to a PHP script and also enables the adding of constants using the syntax of at-rules . This method is again using PHP and will require you to edit an .htaccess file.
A further method is to generate static CSS files either using a script locally – if the constants are just to enable speed of development – or as part of the web application itself. Storing a template stylesheet with constant names in place of the values you will want to update means that your script can simply open the template, replace the variables and save the result as a new stylesheet file.
While CSS constants are a real help to developers, they can also be used to add new functionality to your applications. As with the email address example that I used at the beginning of this article, using a combination of CSS and server-side scripting you could enable a site administrator to select the colours for a new theme to be used on a page of a content managed site. By using constants you need only give them the option to change certain parts of the CSS and not upload a whole different CSS file, which could lead to some interesting results!
As we are unlikely to find real CSS constants under the tree this Christmas the above methods are some possibilities for better management of your stylesheets. However if you have better methods, CSS Constant horror stories or any other suggestions, add your comments below. |
2006 |
Rachel Andrew |
rachelandrew |
2006-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/faster-development-with-css-constants/ |
process |
| 209 |
Feeding the Audio Graph |
In 2004, I was given an iPod.
I count this as one of the most intuitive pieces of technology I’ve ever owned. It wasn’t because of the the snazzy (colour!) menus or circular touchpad. I loved how smoothly it fitted into my life. I could plug in my headphones and listen to music while I was walking around town. Then when I got home, I could plug it into an amplifier and carry on listening there.
There was no faff. It didn’t matter if I could find my favourite mix tape, or if my WiFi was flakey - it was all just there.
Nowadays, when I’m trying to pair my phone with some Bluetooth speakers, or can’t find my USB-to-headphone jack, or even access any music because I don’t have cellular reception; I really miss this simplicity.
The Web Audio API
I think the Web Audio API feels kind of like my iPod did.
It’s different from most browser APIs - rather than throwing around data, or updating DOM elements - you plug together a graph of audio nodes, which the browser uses to generate, process, and play sounds.
The thing I like about it is that you can totally plug it into whatever you want, and it’ll mostly just work.
So, let’s get started. First of all we want an audio source.
<audio src="night-owl.mp3" controls />
(Song - Night Owl by Broke For Free)
This totally works. However, it’s not using the Web Audio API, so we can’t access or modify the sound it makes.
To hook this up to our audio graph, we can use an AudioSourceNode. This captures the sound from the element, and lets us connect to other nodes in a graph.
const audioCtx = new AudioContext()
const audio = document.querySelector('audio')
const input = audioCtx.createAudioSourceNode(audio)
input.connect(audioCtx.destination)
Great. We’ve made something that looks and sounds exactly the same as it did before. Go us.
Gain
Let’s plug in a GainNode - this allows you to alter the amplitude (volume) of an an audio stream.
We can hook this node up to an <input> element by setting the gain property of the node. (The syntax for this is kind of weird because it’s an AudioParam which has options to set values at precise intervals).
const node = audioCtx.createGain()
const input = document.querySelector('input')
input.oninput = () => node.gain.value = parseFloat(input.value)
input.connect(node)
node.connect(audioCtx.destination)
You can now see a range input, which can be dragged to update the state of our graph. This input could be any kind of element, so now you’ll be free to build the volume control of your dreams.
There’s a number of nodes that let you modify/filter an audio stream in more interesting ways. Head over to the MDN Web Audio page for a list of them.
Analysers
Something else we can add to our graph is an AnalyserNode. This doesn’t modify the audio at all, but allows us to inspect the sounds that are flowing through it. We can put this into our graph between our AudioSourceNode and the GainNode.
const analyser = audioCtx.createAnalyser()
input.connect(analyser)
analyser.connect(gain)
gain.connect(audioCtx.destination)
And now we have an analyser. We can access it from elsewhere to drive any kind of visuals. For instance, if we wanted to draw lines on a canvas we could totally do that:
const waveform = new Uint8Array(analyser.fftSize)
const frequencies = new Uint8Array(analyser.frequencyBinCount)
const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d')
const loop = () => {
requestAnimationFrame(loop)
analyser.getByteTimeDomainData(waveform)
analyser.getByteFrequencyData(frequencies)
ctx.beginPath()
waveform.forEach((f, i) => ctx.lineTo(i, f))
ctx.lineTo(0,255)
frequencies.forEach((f, i) => ctx.lineTo(i, 255-f))
ctx.stroke()
}
loop()
You can see that we have two arrays of data available (I added colours for clarity):
The waveform - the raw samples of the audio being played.
The frequencies - a fourier transform of the audio passing through the node.
What’s cool about this is that you’re not tied to any specific functionality of the Web Audio API. If it’s possible for you to update something with an array of numbers, then you can just apply it to the output of the analyser node.
For instance, if we wanted to, we could definitely animate a list of emoji in time with our music.
spans.forEach(
(s, i) => s.style.transform = `scale(${1 + (frequencies[i]/100)})`
)
🔈🎤🎤🎤🎺🎷📯🎶🔊🎸🎺🎤🎸🎼🎷🎺🎻🎸🎻🎺🎸🎶🥁🎶🎵🎵🎷📯🎸🎹🎤🎷🎻🎷🔈🔊📯🎼🎤🎵🎼📯🥁🎻🎻🎤🔉🎵🎹🎸🎷🔉🔈🔉🎷🎶🔈🎸🎸🎻🎤🥁🎼📯🎸🎸🎼🎸🥁🎼🎶🎶🥁🎤🔊🎷🔊🔈🎺🔊🎻🎵🎻🎸🎵🎺🎤🎷🎸🎶🎼📯🔈🎺🎤🎵🎸🎸🔊🎶🎤🥁🎵🎹🎸🔈🎻🔉🥁🔉🎺🔊🎹🥁🎷📯🎷🎷🎤🎸🔉🎹🎷🎸🎺🎼🎤🎼🎶🎷🎤🎷📯📯🎻🎤🎷📯🎹🔈🎵🎹🎼🔊🔉🔉🔈🎶🎸🥁🎺🔈🎷🎵🔉🥁🎷🎹🎷🔊🎤🎤🔊🎤🎤🎹🎸🎹🔉🎷
Generating Audio
So far, we’ve been using the <audio> element as a source of sound.
There’s a few other sources of audio that we can use. We’ll look at the AudioBufferNode - which allows you to manually generate a sound sample, and then connect it to our graph.
First we have to create an AudioBuffer, which holds our raw data, then we pass that to an AudioBufferNode which we can then treat just like our AudioSource node. This can get a bit boring, so we’ll use a helper method that makes it simpler to generate sounds.
const generator = (audioCtx, target) => (seconds, fn) => {
const { sampleRate } = audioCtx
const buffer = audioCtx.createBuffer(
1, sampleRate * seconds, sampleRate
)
const data = buffer.getChannelData(0)
for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
data[i] = fn(i / sampleRate, seconds)
}
return () => {
const source = audioCtx.createBufferSource()
source.buffer = audioBuffer
source.connect(target || audioCtx.destination)
source.start()
}
}
const sound = generator(audioCtx, gain)
Our wrapper will let us provide a function that maps time (in seconds) to a sample (between 1 and -1). This generates a waveform, like we saw before with the analyser node.
For example, the following will generate 0.75 seconds of white noise at 20% volume.
const noise = sound(0.75, t => Math.random() * 0.2)
button.onclick = noise
Noise
Now we’ve got a noisy button! Handy.
Rather than having a static set of audio nodes, each time we click the button, we add a new node to our graph. Although this feels inefficient, it’s not actually too bad - the browser can do a good job of cleaning up old nodes once they’ve played.
An interesting property of defining sounds as functions is that we can combine multiple function to generate new sounds. So if we wanted to fade our noise in and out, we could write a higher order function that does that.
const ease = fn => (t, s) =>
fn(t) * Math.sin((t / s) * Math.PI)
const noise = sound(0.75, ease(t => Math.random() * 0.2))
ease(noise)
And we can do more than just white noise - if we use Math.sin, we can generate some nice pure tones.
// Math.sin with period of 0..1
const wave = v => Math.sin(Math.PI * 2 * v)
const hz = f => t => wave(t * f)
const _440hz = sound(0.75, ease(hz(440)))
const _880hz = sound(0.75, ease(hz(880)))
440Hz
880Hz
We can also make our functions more complex. Below we’re combining several frequencies to make a richer sounding tone.
const harmony = f => [4, 3, 2, 1].reduce(
(v, h, i) => (sin(f * h) * (i+1) ) + v
)
const a440 = sound(0.75, ease(harmony(440)))
440Hz
880Hz
Cool.
We’re still not using any audio-specific functionality, so we can repurpose anything that does an operation on data. For example, we can use d3.js - usually used for interactive data visualisations - to generate a triangular waveform.
const triangle = d3.scaleLinear()
.domain([0, .5, 1])
.range([-1, 1, -1])
const wave = t => triangle(t % 1)
const a440 = sound(0.75, ease(harmony(440)))
440Hz
880Hz
It’s pretty interesting to play around with different functions. I’ve plonked everything in jsbin if you want to have a play yourself.
A departure from best practice
We’ve been generating our audio from scratch, but most of what we’ve looked at can be implemented by a series of native Web Audio nodes. This would be way performant (because it’s not happening on the main thread), and more flexible in some ways (because you can set timings dynamically whilst the note is playing). But we’re going to stay with this approach because it’s fun, and sometimes the fun thing to do might not technically be the best thing to do.
Making a keyboard
Having a button that makes a sound is totally great, but how about lots of buttons that make lots of sounds? Yup, totally greater-er.
The first thing we need to know is the frequency of each note. I thought this would be awkward because pianos were invented more than 250 years before the Hz unit was defined, so surely there wouldn’t be a simple mapping between the two?
const freq = note => 27.5 * Math.pow(2, (note - 21) / 12)
This equation blows my mind; I’d never really figured how tightly music and maths fit together. When you see a chord or melody, you can directly map it back to a mathematical pattern.
Our keyboard is actually an SVG picture of a keyboard, so we can traverse the elements of it and map each element to a sound generated by one of the functions that we came up with before.
Array.from(svg.querySelector('rect'))
.sort((a, b) => + a.x - b.x)
.forEach((key, i) =>
key.addEventListener('touchstart',
sound(0.75, ease(harmony(freq(i + 48))))
)
)
rect {stroke: #ddd;}
rect:hover {opacity: 0.8; stroke: #000}
Et voilà. We have a keyboard.
What I like about this is that it’s completely pure - there’s no lookup tables or hardcoded attributes; we’ve just defined a mapping from SVG elements to the sound they should probably make.
Doing better in the future
As I mentioned before, this could be implemented more performantly with Web Audio nodes, or even better - use something like Tone.js to be performant for you.
Web Audio has been around for a while, though we’re getting new challenges with immersive WebXR experiences, where spatial audio becomes really important. There’s also always support and API improvements (if you like AudioBufferNode, you’re going to love AudioWorklet)
Conclusion
And that’s about it. Web Audio isn’t some black box, you can easily link it with whatever framework, or UI that you’ve built (whether you should is an entirely different question).
If anyone ever asks you “could you turn this SVG into a musical instrument?” you don’t have to stare blankly at them any more.
(function(a,c){var b=a.createElement("script");if(!("noModule"in b)&&"on"+c in b){var d=!1;a.addEventListener(c,function(a){if(a.target===b)d=!0;else if(!a.target.hasAttribute("nomodule")||!d)return;a.preventDefault()},!0);b.type="module";b.src=".";a.head.appendChild(b);b.remove()}})(document,"beforeload"); |
2017 |
Ben Foxall |
benfoxall |
2017-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/feeding-the-audio-graph/ |
code |
| 220 |
Finding Your Way with Static Maps |
Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service.
It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to. Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video.
But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript.
A bit about JavaScript
Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! Developer Network blog ran some tests to measure how many visitors to the Yahoo! home page didn’t have JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. It’s an interesting test when you consider that the audience for the Yahoo! home page (one of the most visited pages on the web) represents about as mainstream a sample as you’ll find. If there’s any such thing as an ‘average Web user’ then this is them.
The results surprised me. It varied from region to region, but at most just two per cent of visitors didn’t have JavaScript running. To be honest, I was expecting it to be higher, but this quote from the article caught my attention:
While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers.
That’s right, of course, and it got me thinking about what that two per cent means. For many sites, two per cent is the number of visitors using the Opera web browser, using IE6, or using Mobile Safari.
So, although a small percentage of the total, users without JavaScript can’t just be forgotten about, and catering for them is at the very heart of how the web is supposed to work.
Starting with content in HTML, we layer on presentation with CSS and then enhance interactivity with JavaScript. If anything fails along the way or the network craps out, or a browser just doesn’t support one of the technologies, the user still gets something they can work with.
It’s progressive enhancement – also known as doing our jobs properly.
Sorry, wasn’t this about maps?
As I was saying, the default code Google provides, and the example code it gives to developers (which typically just gets followed ‘as is’) doesn’t account for users without JavaScript. No JavaScript, no content.
When adding the ability to publish maps to our small content management system Perch, I didn’t want to provide a solution that only worked with JavaScript. I had to go looking for a way to provide maps without JavaScript, too.
There’s a simple solution, fortunately, in the form of static map tiles. All the various slippy map services use a JavaScript interface on top of what are basically rendered map image tiles. Dragging the map loads in more image tiles in the direction you want to view. If you’ve used a slippy map on a slow connection, you’ll be familiar with seeing these tiles load in one by one.
The Static Map API
The good news is that these tiles (or tiles just like them) can be used as regular images on your site. Google has a Static Map API which not only gives you a handy interface to retrieve a tile for the exact area you need, but also allows you to place pins, and zoom and centre the tile so that the image looks just so.
This means that you can create a static, non-JavaScript version of your slippy map’s initial (or ideal) state to load into your page as a regular image, and then have the JavaScript map hijack the image and make it slippy.
Clearly, that’s not going to be a perfect solution for every map’s requirements. It doesn’t allow for panning, zooming or interrogation without JavaScript. However, for the majority of straightforward map uses online, a static map makes a great alternative for those visitors without JavaScript.
Here’s the how
Retrieving a static map tile is staggeringly easy – it’s just a case of forming a URL with the correct arguments and then using that as the src of an image tag.
<img src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap
?center=Bethlehem+Israel
&zoom=5
&size=540x280
&maptype=satellite
&markers=color:red|31.4211,35.1144
&sensor=false"
width="540" height="280" alt="Map of Bethlehem, Israel" />
As you can see, there are a few key options that we pass along to the base URL. All of these should be familiar to anyone who’s worked with the JavaScript API.
center determines the point on which the map is centred. This can be latitude and longitude values, or simply an address which is then geocoded.
zoom sets the zoom level.
size is the pixel dimensions of the image you require.
maptype can be roadmap, satellite, terrain or hybrid.
markers sets one or more pin locations. Markers can be labelled, have different colours, and so on – there’s quite a lot of control available.
sensor states whether you are using a sensor to determine the user’s location. When just embedding a map in a web page, set this to false.
There are many options, including plotting paths and setting the image format, which can all be found in the straightforward documentation.
Adding to your page
If you’ve worked with the JavaScript API, you’ll know that it needs a container element which you inject the map into:
<div id="map"></div>
All you need to do is put your static image inside that container:
<div id="map">
<img src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap[...]" />
</div>
And then, in your JavaScript, find the image and remove it. For example, with jQuery you’d simply use:
$('#map img').remove();
Why not use a <noscript> element around the image? You could, and that would certainly work fine for browsers that do not support JavaScript. What that won’t cover, however, is the situation where the browser has JavaScript support but, for whatever reason, the JavaScript doesn’t run. This could be due to network issues, an aggressive corporate firewall, or even just a bug in your code. So for that reason, we put the image in for all browsers that show images, and then remove it when the JavaScript is successfully running.
See an example in action
About rate limits
The Google Static Map API limits the requests per site viewer – currently at one thousand distinct maps per day per viewer. So, for most sites you really don’t need to worry about the rate limit. Requests for the same tile aren’t normally counted, as the tile has already been generated and is cached. You can embed the images direct from Google and let it worry about the distribution and caching.
In conclusion
As you can see, adding a static map alongside your dynamic map for those users without JavaScript is very easy indeed. There may not be a huge percentage of web visitors browsing without JavaScript but, as we’ve seen, a small percentage of a big number is still a big number. When it’s so easy to add a static map, can you really justify not doing it? |
2010 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/finding-your-way-with-static-maps/ |
code |
| 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 teach WebGL or even Three.js in a way that is approachable for all, I would create my first project using A-Frame and write about that. This is not a tutorial as such, I just want to show how to go about getting involved with VR. The beauty of A-Frame is that it is very similar to web components, you can just write HTML to build worlds that will automatically work on all the different types of devices. It uses WebGL and WebVR but in such a way that it quite drastically reduces the learning curve. That’s not to say you can’t build complex things, you have complete access to write JavaScript and shaders.
I’m lazy. Whenever I learn a new language or framework I have found that the best way, personally, for me to learn is to have a project and to copy the starting code from someone else. A project lets you have a good idea of what you want to produce and it means you can ignore a lot of the irrelevant documentation, focussing purely on what you need. That reduces the stress of figuring things out. Copying code also makes it easier, because you know your boilerplate code is working. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck before anything actually works the first time. So I tinker. I take code and I modify it, I play around. It’s fun.
For this project I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so I can easily explain it without the classic “draw a circle then draw an owl”. I wrote a list of requirements, with some stretch goals that you can give a try yourself if you fancy:
Must work on Google Cardboard at a minimum, because of price
Therefore, it must not rely on having a controller
Auto-moving around a maze would be a good example
Move in direction you look
Stretch goal: Scoring, time until you hit a wall or get stuck in maze
Stretch goal: Levels, so the map doesn’t need to be random
Stretch goal: Snow!
I decided to base this project on an example, Platforms, by Don McCurdy who wrote the really useful aframe-extras. Platforms has random 3D blocks that you can jump onto, going up into the sky. So I took his code and reduced it so that the blocks are randomly spread on the ground.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<title>24 ways</title>
<script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.3.2/aframe.js"></script>
<script src="//cdn.rawgit.com/donmccurdy/aframe-extras/v2.6.1/dist/aframe-extras.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<a-scene>
<a-entity id="player"
camera
universal-controls
kinematic-body
position="0 1.8 0">
</a-entity>
<a-entity id="walls"></a-entity>
<a-grid id="ground" static-body></a-grid>
<a-sky id="sky" color="#AADDF0"></a-sky>
<!-- Lighting -->
<a-light type="ambient" color="#ccc"></a-light>
</a-scene>
<script>
document.querySelector('a-scene').addEventListener('render-target-loaded', function () {
var MAP_SIZE = 10,
PLATFORM_SIZE = 5,
NUM_PLATFORMS = 50;
var platformsEl = document.querySelector('#walls');
var v, box;
for (var i = 0; i < NUM_PLATFORMS; i++) {
// y: 0 is ground
v = {
x: (Math.floor(Math.random() * MAP_SIZE) - PLATFORM_SIZE) * PLATFORM_SIZE,
y: PLATFORM_SIZE / 2,
z: (Math.floor(Math.random() * MAP_SIZE) - PLATFORM_SIZE) * PLATFORM_SIZE
};
box = document.createElement('a-box');
platformsEl.appendChild(box);
box.setAttribute('color', '#39BB82');
box.setAttribute('width', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('height', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('depth', PLATFORM_SIZE);
box.setAttribute('position', v.x + ' ' + v.y + ' ' + v.z);
box.setAttribute('static-body', '');
}
console.info('Platforms loaded.');
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, this is very readable. Especially if you ignore the JavaScript that is used to create the maze. A-Frame (with A-Frame Extras) gives you a lot of power with relatively little to learn. We start with an <a-scene> which is the container for everything that is going to show up on the screen. There are a few <a-entity> which can be compared to <div> as they are essentially non-semantic containers, able to be used for any purpose. The attributes are used to define functionality, for example the camera attribute sets the entity to function as a camera and kinematic-body makes it collide instead of go through objects. Attributes are also used to set position and sizes, often using JavaScript to dynamically define them.
Styling
Now we’ve got the HTML written, we need to style it. To do this we add A-Frame compatible attributes such as color and material. I recommend playing around, you can get some quite impressive effects fairly easily. Originally I wanted a light snowy maze but it ended up being dark and foggy, as I really liked the feeling it gave.
Note, you will probably need a server running for images to work. You can do this by running python -m "SimpleHTTPServer" in the folder where the code is, then go to localhost:8000 in browser.
Textures
Unless you are going for a cartoony style, you probably want to find some textures. I found some on textures.com, one image worked well for the walls and the other for the floor.
<a-assets>
<img id="texture-floor" src="floor.jpg">
<img id="texture-wall" src="wall.jpg">
</a-assets>
The <a-assets> is used to define (as well as preload and cache) all assets, including images, audio and video. As you can see, images in the Asset Management System just use normal img tags. The ids are important here as we can use them later for using the textures.
To apply a texture to an object, you create a material. For a simple material where it just shows the image, you set the src to the id selector of the image.
Replace:
<a-grid id="ground" static-body></a-grid>
With:
<a-grid id="ground" static-body material="src: #texture-floor"></a-grid>
This will automatically make the image repeat over the entire floor, in my case filling it with bricks. The walls are pretty much identical, with the slight exception that it is set in JavaScript as they are dynamically defined.
box.setAttribute('material', 'src: #texture-wall');
That’s it for the textures, for now at least. These will not look completely realistic, as the light will bump off the rectangular wall rather than texture itself. This can be improved by using maps, textures that are used to modify the shape and physical properties of the object.
Lighting
The next part of styling is lighting. By using fog and different types of lighting, we are able to add atmospheric details to the game to make it feel that bit more realistic and polished.
There are lots of types of light in A-Frame (most coming from Three.js). You can add a light either by using the <a-light> entity or by attaching a light attribute to any other entity. If there are no lights defined then A-Frame adds some by default so that the scene is always lit.
To start with I wanted to light up the scene with a general light, type="ambient", so that the whole game felt slightly dark. I chose to set the light to a reddish colour #92455E. After playing around with intensity I chose 0.4, it added enough light to get the feeling I wanted without it being overly red. I also added a blue skybox (<a-sky>), as it looked a bit odd with a white sky.
<a-light type="ambient" color="#92455E" intensity="0.4"></a-light>
<a-sky id="sky" color="#0000ff"></a-sky>
I felt that the maze looked good with a red tinge but it was a bit flat, everything was the same colour and it was a bit dark. So I added a light within the #player entity, this could have been as an attribute but I set it as a child a-light instead. By using type="point" with a high intensity and low distance, it showed close walls as being lighter. It also added a sort-of object to the player, it isn’t a walking human or anything but by moving light where the player is it feels a bit more physical.
<a-light color="#fff" distance="5" intensity="0.7" type="point"></a-light>
By this point it was starting to look decent, so I wanted to add the fog to really give some personality and depth to the maze. To do this I added the fog attribute to the <a-scene> with type=exponential so it looks thicker the further away it is and a mid intensity, so you feel a bit lost but can still see.
I was very happy with this result. It took a lot of playing around with colours and values, which is fun in itself. I highly recommend you take the code (or write your own) and play around with the numbers.
Movement
One of the reasons I decided to use aframe-extras is that it has a few different camera controls built in. As you saw earlier, I am using the universal-controls which gives WASD (keyboard) controls by default. I wanted to make it automatically move in the direction that you’re looking, but I wasn’t quite sure how without rewriting the controls. So I asked Don McCurdy for advice and he very nicely gave me a small snippet of code to get it working.
AFRAME.registerComponent('automove-controls', {
init: function () {
this.speed = 0.1;
this.isMoving = true;
this.velocityDelta = new THREE.Vector3();
},
isVelocityActive: function () {
return this.isMoving;
},
getVelocityDelta: function () {
this.velocityDelta.z = this.isMoving ? -speed : 0;
return this.velocityDelta.clone();
}
});
Replace:
universal-controls
With:
universal-controls="movementControls: automove, gamepad, keyboard"
This works by creating a component automove-controls that adds auto-move to the player without overriding movement completely. It doesn’t even touch direction, it just checks if isMoving is true then moves the player by the set speed. Components can be creating for adding all kinds of functionality with relative ease. It makes it very powerful for people of all difficulty levels.
Building a map
Currently the maze is created randomly, which is great but means there will often be walls that overlap or the player gets trapped with nowhere to go. So to solve this, I decided to use a map editor (Tiled) so that we can create the mazes ourselves. This is a great start towards one of the stretch goals, levels.
I made the maze in Tiled by finding a random tileset online (we don’t need to actually show the images), I used one tile for the wall and another for the player. Then I exported as a JavaScript file and modified it in my text editor to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I made it so 0 is the path, 1 is the wall and 2 is the player. I then added the script to the HTML, as a separate file so it’s easy to update in the future.
var map =
{
"data":[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
"height":10,
"width":10
}
As you can see, this gives a simple 10x10 maze with some dead ends. The player starts in the bottom right corner (my choice, could be anywhere). I rewrote the random platforms code (from Don’s example) to instead loop over the map data and place walls where it is 1 and position the player where data is 2. I set the position so that the origin of the map would be 0,1.5,0. The y axis is in this case the height (ground being 0), but if a wall is positioned at 0 by its centre then some of it is underground. So the y needed to be the height divided by 2.
document.querySelector('a-scene').addEventListener('render-target-loaded', function () {
var WALL_SIZE = 5,
WALL_HEIGHT = 3;
var el = document.querySelector('#walls');
var wall;
for (var x = 0; x < map.height; x++) {
for (var y = 0; y < map.width; y++) {
var i = y*map.width + x;
var position = (x-map.width/2)*WALL_SIZE + ' ' + 1.5 + ' ' + (y-map.height/2)*WALL_SIZE;
if (map.data[i] === 1) {
// Create wall
wall = document.createElement('a-box');
el.appendChild(wall);
wall.setAttribute('color', '#fff');
wall.setAttribute('material', 'src: #texture-wall;');
wall.setAttribute('width', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('height', WALL_HEIGHT);
wall.setAttribute('depth', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('position', position);
wall.setAttribute('static-body', ');
}
if (map.data[i] === 2) {
// Set player position
document.querySelector('#player').setAttribute('position', position);
}
}
}
console.info('Walls added.');
});
With this added, it makes it nice and easy to change around the map as well as to add new features. Perhaps you want monsters or objects. Just set the number in the map data and add an if statement to the loop. In the future you could add layers, so multiple things can be in the same position. Or perhaps even make the maze go up the y axis too, with ramps or staircases. There’s a lot you can do with relative ease. As you can see, A-Frame really does reduce the learning curve of 3D and VR on the web.
It’s Not All Fun And Games
A lot of examples of virtual reality are games, including this one. So it is understandable to think that VR is for gaming, but actually that’s just a tiny subset. There are all sorts of applications for VR, including story telling, data visualisation and even meditation.
There have been a number of cases where it has been shown virtual reality can help as a tool for therapies:
Oxford study finds virtual reality can help treat severe paranoia
Virtual Reality Therapy for Phobias at the Duke Faculty Practice
Bravemind: Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy at the University of Southern California
These are just a few examples of where virtual reality is being used around the world to help people feel better and get through some very tough times. There have also been examples of it being used for simulating war zones or medical situations, both as a teaching and journalism tool.
Wrapping Up
Ten years ago, on this very site, Cameron Moll wrote an article explaining the mobile web. He explained how mobile phones with data plans were becoming increasingly common, that WAP 2.0 included the XHTML Mobile Profile meaning it would be familiar with web folk. “The mobile web is rapidly becoming an XHTML environment, and thus you and I can apply our existing “desktop web” skills to understand how to develop content for it.”
We can look at that and laugh a little, we have come a very long way in the last decade. Even people in developing countries with very little money have mobile phones with access to a web that is far more capable than the “desktop web” Cameron was referring to.
So while I am not saying virtual reality is going to change the world or replace our phones, who knows! We can use our skills as web folk to dabble, we don’t need to learn any new languages. If on the 2026 edition of 24 ways, somebody references this article and looks at how far we have come… well, let’s hope we have used our skills well and made the world just that little bit better. And if VR is a fad? Well it’s fun… have a go anyway. |
2016 |
Shane Hudson |
shanehudson |
2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/ |
code |
| 304 |
Five Lessons From My First 18 Months as a Dev |
I recently moved from Sydney to London to start a dream job with Twitter as a software engineer. A software engineer! Who would have thought.
Having started my career as a journalist, the title ‘engineer’ is very strange to me. The notion of writing in first person is also very strange. Journalists are taught to be objective, invisible, to keep yourself out of the story. And here I am writing about myself on a public platform. Cringe.
Since I started learning to code I’ve often felt compelled to write about my experience. I want to share my excitement and struggles with the world! But as a junior I’ve been held back by thoughts like ‘whatever you have to say won’t be technical enough’, ‘any time spent writing a blog would be better spent writing code’, ‘blogging is narcissistic’, etc.
Well, I’ve been told that your thirties are the years where you stop caring so much about what other people think. And I’m almost 30. So here goes!
These are five key lessons from my first year and a half in tech:
Deployments should delight, not dread
Lesson #1: Making your deployment process as simple as possible is worth the investment.
In my first dev job, I dreaded deployments. We would deploy every Sunday night at 8pm. Preparation would begin the Friday before. A nominated deployment manager would spend half a day tagging master, generating scripts, writing documentation and raising JIRAs. The only fun part was choosing a train gif to post in HipChat: ‘All aboard! The deployment train leaves in 3, 2, 1…”
When Sunday night came around, at least one person from every squad would need to be online to conduct smoke tests. Most times, the deployments would succeed. Other times they would fail. Regardless, deployments ate into people’s weekend time — and they were intense. Devs would rush to have their code approved before the Friday cutoff. Deployment managers who were new to the process would fear making a mistake.
The team knew deployments were a problem. They were constantly striving to improve them. And what I’ve learnt from Twitter is that when they do, their lives will be bliss.
TweetDeck’s deployment process fills me with joy and delight. It’s quick, easy and stress free. In fact, it’s so easy I deployed code on my first day in the job! Anyone can deploy, at any time of day, with a single command. Rollbacks are just as simple. There’s no rush to make the deployment train. No manual preparation. No fuss. Value — whether in the form of big new features, simple UI improvements or even production bug fixes — can be shipped in an instant. The team assures me the process wasn’t always like this. They invested lots of time in making their deployments better. And it’s clearly paid off.
Code reviews need love, time and acceptance
Lesson #2: Code reviews are a three-way gift. Every time I review someone else’s code, I help them, the team and myself.
Code reviews were another pain point in my previous job. And to be honest, I was part of the problem. I would raise code reviews that were far too big. They would take days, sometimes weeks, to get merged. One of my reviews had 96 comments! I would rarely review other people’s code because I felt too junior, like my review didn’t carry any weight.
The review process itself was also tiring, and was often raised in retrospectives as being slow. In order for code to be merged it needed to have ticks of approval from two developers and a third tick from a peer tester. It was the responsibility of the author to assign the reviewers and tester. It was felt that if it was left to team members to assign themselves to reviews, the “someone else will do it” mentality would kick in, and nothing would get done.
At TweetDeck, no-one is specifically assigned to reviews. Instead, when a review is raised, the entire team is notified. Without fail, someone will jump on it. Reviews are seen as blocking. They’re seen to be equally, if not more important, than your own work. I haven’t seen a review sit for longer than a few hours without comments.
We also don’t work on branches. We push single commits for review, which are then merged to master. This forces the team to work in small, incremental changes. If a review is too big, or if it’s going to take up more than an hour of someone’s time, it will be sent back.
What I’ve learnt so far at Twitter is that code reviews must be small. They must take priority. And they must be a team effort. Being a new starter is no “get out of jail free card”. In fact, it’s even more of a reason to be reviewing code. Reviews are a great way to learn, get across the product and see different programming styles. If you’re like me, and find code reviews daunting, ask to pair with a senior until you feel more confident. I recently paired with my mentor at Twitter and found it really helpful.
Get friendly with feature flagging
Lesson #3: Feature flagging gives you complete control over how you build and release a project.
Say you’re implementing a new feature. It’s going to take a few weeks to complete. You’ll complete the feature in small, incremental changes. At what point do these changes get merged to master? At what point do they get deployed? Do you start at the back end and finish with the UI, so the user won’t see the changes until they’re ready? With feature flagging — it doesn’t matter. In fact, with feature flagging, by the time you are ready to release your feature, it’s already deployed, sitting happily in master with the rest of your codebase.
A feature flag is a boolean value that gets wrapped around the code relating to the thing you’re working on. The code will only be executed if the value is true.
if (TD.decider.get(‘new_feature’)) {
//code for new feature goes here
}
In my first dev job, I deployed a navigation link to the feature I’d been working on, making it visible in the product, even though the feature wasn’t ready. “Why didn’t you use a feature flag?” a senior dev asked me. An honest response would have been: “Because they’re confusing to implement and I don’t understand the benefits of using them.” The fix had to wait until the next deployment.
The best thing about feature flagging at TweetDeck is that there is no need to deploy to turn on or off a feature. We set the status of the feature via an interface called Deckcider, and the code makes regular API requests to get the status.
At TweetDeck we are also able to roll our features out progressively. The first rollout might be to a staging environment. Then to employees only. Then to 10 per cent of users, 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and so on. A gradual rollout allows you to monitor for bugs and unexpected behaviour, before releasing the feature to the entire user base.
Sometimes a piece of work requires changes to existing business logic. So the code might look more like this:
if (TD.decider.get(‘change_to_existing_feature’)) {
//new logic goes here
} else {
//old logic goes here
}
This seems messy, right? Riddling your code with if else statements to determine which path of logic should be executed, or which version of the UI should be displayed. But at Twitter, this is embraced. You can always clean up the code once a feature is turned on. This isn’t essential, though. At least not in the early days. When a cheeky bug is discovered, having the flag in place allows the feature to be very quickly turned off again.
Let data and experimentation drive development
Lesson #4: Use data to determine the direction of your product and measure its success.
The first company I worked for placed a huge amount of emphasis on data-driven decision making. If we had an idea, or if we wanted to make a change, we were encouraged to “bring data” to show why it was necessary. “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion,” the chief data scientist would say. This attitude helped to ensure we were building the right things for our customers. Instead of just plucking a new feature out of thin air, it was chosen based on data that reflected its need.
But how do you design that feature? How do you know that the design you choose will have the desired impact? That’s where experiments come into play.
At TweetDeck we make UI changes that we hope will delight our users. But the assumptions we make about our users are often wrong. Our front-end team recently sat in a room and tried to guess which UIs from A/B tests had produced better results. Half the room guessed incorrectly every time.
We can’t assume a change we want to make will have the impact we expect. So we run an experiment. Here’s how it works. Users are placed into buckets. One bucket of users will have access to the new feature, the other won’t. We hypothesise that the bucket exposed to the new feature will have better results. The beauty of running an experiment is that we’ll know for sure. Instead of blindly releasing the feature to all users without knowing its impact, once the experiment has run its course, we’ll have the data to make decisions accordingly.
Hire the developer, not the degree
Lesson #5: Testing candidates on real world problems will allow applicants from all backgrounds to shine.
Surely, a company like Twitter would give their applicants insanely difficult code tests, and the toughest technical questions, that only the cleverest CS graduates could pass, I told myself when applying for the job. Lucky for me, this wasn’t the case. The process was insanely difficult—don’t get me wrong—but the team at TweetDeck gave me real world problems to solve.
The first code test involved bug fixes, performance and testing. The second involved DOM traversal and manipulation. Instead of being put on the spot in a room with a whiteboard and pen I was given a task, access to the internet, and time to work on it. Similarly, in my technical interviews, I was asked to pair program on real world problems that I was likely to face on the job.
In one of my phone screenings I was told Twitter wanted to increase diversity in its teams. Not just gender diversity, but also diversity of experience and background. Six months later, with a bunch of new hires, team lead Tom Ashworth says TweetDeck has the most diverse team it’s ever had. “We designed an interview process that gave us a way to simulate the actual job,” he said. “It’s not about testing whether you learnt an algorithm in school.”
Is this lowering the bar? No. The bar is whether a candidate has the ability to solve problems they are likely to face on the job. I recently spoke to a longstanding Atlassian engineer who said they hadn’t seen an algorithm in their seven years at the company.
These days, only about 50 per cent of developers have computer science degrees. The majority of developers are self taught, learn on the job or via online courses. If you want to increase diversity in your engineering team, ensure your interview process isn’t excluding these people. |
2016 |
Amy Simmons |
amysimmons |
2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/my-first-18-months-as-a-dev/ |
process |
| 33 |
Five Ways to Animate Responsibly |
It’s been two years since I wrote about “Flashless Animation” on this very site. Since then, animation has steadily begun popping up on websites, from sleek app-like user interfaces to interactive magazine-like spreads. It’s an exciting time for web animation wonks, interaction developers, UXers, UI designers and a host of other acronyms!
But in our rush to experiment with animation it seems that we’re having fewer conversations about whether or not we should use it, and more discussions about what we can do with it. We spend more time fretting over how to animate all the things at 60fps than we do devising ways to avoid incapacitating users with vestibular disorders.
I love web animation. I live it. And I make adorably silly things with it that have no place on a self-respecting production website. I know it can be abused. We’ve all made fun of Flash-turbation. But how quickly we forget the lessons we learned from that period of web design. Parallax scrolling effects may be the skip intro of this generation. Surely we have learned better in the sobering up period between Flash and the web animation API.
So here are five bits of advice we can use to pull back from the edge of animation abuse. With these thoughts in mind, we can make 2015 the year web animation came into its own.
Animate deliberately
Sadly, animation is considered decorative by the bulk of the web development community. UI designers and interaction developers know better, of course. But when I’m teaching a workshop on animation for interaction, I know that my students face an uphill battle against decision makers who consider it nice to have, and tack it on at the end of a project, if at all.
This stigma is hard to shake. But it starts with us using animation deliberately or not at all. Poorly considered, tacked-on animation will often cause more harm than good. Users may complain that it’s too slow or too fast, or that they have no idea what just happened.
When I was at Chrome Dev Summit this year, I had the privilege to speak with Roma Sha, the UX lead behind Polymer’s material design (with the wonderful animation documentation). I asked her what advice she’d give to people using animation and transitions in their own designs. She responded simply: animate deliberately. If you cannot afford to slow down to think about animation and make well-informed and well-articulated decisions on behalf of the user, it is better that you not attempt it at all. Animation takes energy to perform, and a bad animation is worse than none at all.
It takes more than twelve principles
We always try to draw correlations between disparate things that spark our interest. Recently it feels like more and more people are putting the The Illusion of Life on their reading shelf next to Understanding Comics. These books give us so many useful insights from other industries. However, we should never mistake a website for a comic book or an animated feature film. Some of these concepts, while they help us see our work in a new light, can be more or less relevant to producing said work.
The illusion of life from cento lodigiani on Vimeo.
I am specifically thinking of the twelve principles of animation put forth by Disney studio veterans in that great tome The Illusion of Life. These principles are very useful for making engaging, lifelike animation, like a ball bouncing or a squirrel scampering, or the physics behind how a lightbox should feel transitioning off a page. But they provide no direction at all for when or how something should be animated as part of a greater interactive experience, like how long a drop-down should take to fully extend or if a group of manipulable objects should be animated sequentially or as a whole.
The twelve principles are a great place to start, but we have so much more to learn. I’ve documented at least six more functions of interactive animation that apply to web and app design. When thinking about animation, we should consider why and how, not just what, the physics. Beautiful physics mean nothing if the animation is superfluous or confusing.
Useful and necessary, then beautiful
There is a Shaker saying: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” When it comes to animation and the web, currently there is very little documentation about what makes it useful or necessary. We tend to focus more on the beautiful, the delightful, the aesthetic. And while aesthetics are important, they take a back seat to the user’s overall experience.
The first time I saw the load screen for Pokemon Yellow on my Game Boy, I was enthralled. By the sixth time, I was mashing the start button as soon as Game Freak’s logo hit the screen. What’s delightful and meaningful to us while working on a project is not always so for our users. And even when a purely delightful animation is favorably received, as with Pokemon Yellow’s adorable opening screen, too many repetitions of the cutest but ultimately useless animation, and users start to resent it as a hindrance.
If an animation doesn’t help the user in some way, by showing them where they are or how two elements on a page relate to each other, then it’s using up battery juice and processing cycles solely for the purpose of delight. Hardly the best use of resources.
Rather than animating solely for the sake of delight, we should first be able to articulate two things the animation does for the user. As an example, take this menu icon from Finethought.com (found via Use Your Interface). The menu icon does two things when clicked:
It gives the user feedback by animating, letting the user know its been clicked.
It demonstrates its changed relationship to the page’s content by morphing into a close button.
Assuming we have two good reasons to animate something, there is no reason our third cannot be to delight the user.
Go four times faster
There is a rule of thumb in the world of traditional animation which is applicable to web animation: however long you think your animation should last, take that time and halve it. Then halve it again! When we work on an animation for hours, our sense of time dilates. What seems fast to us is actually unbearably slow for most users. In fact, the most recent criticism from users of animated interfaces on websites seems to be, “It’s so slow!” A good animation is unobtrusive, and that often means running fast.
When getting your animations ready for prime time, reduce those durations to 25% of their original speed: a four-second fade out should be over in one.
Install a kill switch
No matter how thoughtful and necessary an animation, there will be people who become physically sick from seeing it. For these people, we must add a way to turn off animations on the website.
Fortunately, web designers are already thinking of ways to empower users to make their own decisions about how they experience the web. As an example, this site for the animated film Little from the Fish Shop allows users to turn off most of the parallax effects. While it doesn’t remove the animation entirely, this website does reduce the most nauseating of the animations.
Animation is a powerful tool in our web design arsenal. But we must take care: if we abuse animation it might get a bad reputation; if we underestimate it, it won’t be prioritized. But if we wield it thoughtfully, use it where it is both necessary and useful, and empower users to turn it off, animation is a tool that will help us build things that are easier to use and more delightful for years to come.
Let’s make 2015 the year web animation went to work for users. |
2014 |
Rachel Nabors |
rachelnabors |
2014-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/five-ways-to-animate-responsibly/ |
ux |
| 86 |
Flashless Animation |
Animation in a Flashless world
When I splashed down in web design four years ago, the first thing I wanted to do was animate a cartoon in the browser. I’d been drawing comics for years, and I’ve wanted to see them come to life for nearly as long. Flash animation was still riding high, but I didn’t want to learn Flash. I wanted to learn JavaScript!
Sadly, animating with JavaScript was limiting and resource-intensive. My initial foray into an infinitely looping background did more to burn a hole in my CPU than amaze my friends (although it still looks pretty cool). And there was still no simple way to incorporate audio. The browser technology just wasn’t there.
Things are different now. CSS3 transitions and animations can do most of the heavy lifting and HTML5 audio can serve up the music and audio clips. You can do a lot without leaning on JavaScript at all, and when you lean on JavaScript, you can do so much more!
In this project, I’m going to show you how to animate a simple walk cycle with looping audio. I hope this will inspire you to do something really cool and impress your friends. I’d love to see what you come up with, so please send your creations my way at rachelnabors.com!
Note: Because every browser wants to use its own prefixes with CSS3 animations, and I have neither the time nor the space to write all of them out, I will use the W3C standard syntaxes; that is, going prefix-less. You can implement them out of the box with something like Prefixfree, or you can add prefixes on your own. If you take the latter route, I recommend using Sass and Compass so you can focus on your animations, not copying and pasting.
The walk cycle
Walk cycles are the “Hello world” of animation. One of the first projects of animation students is to spend hours drawing dozens of frames to complete a simple loopable animation of a character walking.
Most animators don’t have to draw every frame themselves, though. They draw a few key frames and send those on to production animators to work on the between frames (or tween frames). This is meticulous, grueling work requiring an eye for detail and natural movement. This is also why so much production animation gets shipped overseas where labor is cheaper.
Luckily, we don’t have to worry about our frame count because we can set our own frames-per-second rate on the fly in CSS3. Since we’re trying to impress friends, not animation directors, the inconsistency shouldn’t be a problem. (Unless your friend is an animation director.)
This is a simple walk cycle I made of my comic character Tuna for my CSS animation talk at CSS Dev Conference this year:
The magic lies here:
animation: walk-cycle 1s steps(12) infinite;
Breaking those properties down:
animation: <name> <duration> <timing-function> <iteration-count>;
walk-cycle is a simple @keyframes block that moves the background sprite on .tuna around:
@keyframes walk-cycle {
0% {background-position: 0 0; }
100% {background-position: 0 -2391px;}
}
The background sprite has exactly twelve images of Tuna that complete a full walk cycle. We’re setting it to cycle through the entire sprite every second, infinitely. So why isn’t the background image scrolling down the .tuna container? It’s all down to the timing function steps(). Using steps() let us tell the CSS to make jumps instead of the smooth transitions you’d get from something like linear. Chris Mills at dev.opera wrote in his excellent intro to CSS3 animation :
Instead of giving a smooth animation throughout, [steps()] causes the animation to jump between a set number of steps placed equally along the duration. For example, steps(10) would make the animation jump along in ten equal steps. There’s also an optional second parameter that takes a value of start or end. steps(10, start) would specify that the change in property value should happen at the start of each step, while steps(10, end) means the change would come at the end.
(Seriously, go read his full article. I’m not going to touch on half the stuff he does because I cannot improve on the basics any more than he already has.)
The background
A cat walking in a void is hardly an impressive animation and certainly your buddy one cube over could do it if he chopped up some of those cat GIFs he keeps using in group chat. So let’s add a parallax background! Yes, yes, all web designers signed a peace treaty to not abuse parallax anymore, but this is its true calling—treaty be damned.
And to think we used to need JavaScript to do this! It’s still pretty CPU intensive but much less complicated. We start by splitting up the page into different layers, .foreground, .midground, and .background. We put .tuna in the .midground.
.background has multiple background images, all set to repeat horizontally:
background-image:
url(background_mountain5.png),
url(background_mountain4.png),
url(background_mountain3.png),
url(background_mountain2.png),
url(background_mountain1.png);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
With parallax, things in the foreground move faster than those in the background. Next time you’re driving, notice how the things closer to you move out of your field of vision faster than something in the distance, like a mountain or a large building. We can imitate that here by making the background images on top (in the foreground, closer to us) wider than those on the bottom of the stack (in the distance).
The different lengths let us use one animation to move all the background images at different rates in the same interval of time:
animation: parallax_bg linear 40s infinite;
The shorter images have less distance to cover in the same amount of time as the longer images, so they move slower.
Let’s have a look at the background’s animation:
@keyframes parallax_bg {
0% {
background-position: -2400px 100%, -2000px 100%, -1800px 100%, -1600px 100%, -1200px 100%;
}
100% {
background-position: 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%;
}
}
At 0%, all the background images are positioned at the negative value of their own widths. Then they start moving toward background-position: 0 100%. If we wanted to move them in the reverse direction, we’d remove the negative values at 0% (so they would start at 2400px 100%, 2000px 100%, etc.). Try changing the values in the codepen above or changing background-repeat to none to see how the images play together.
.foreground and .midground operate on the same principles, only they use single background images.
The music
After finishing the first draft of my original walk cycle, I made a GIF with it and posted it on YTMND with some music from the movie Paprika, specifically the track “The Girl in Byakkoya.” After showing it to some colleagues in my community, it became clear that this was a winning combination sure to drive away dresscode blues. So let’s use HTML5 to get a clip of that music looping in there!
Warning, there is sound. Please adjust your volume or apply headphones as needed.
We’re using HTML5 audio’s loop and autoplay abilities to automatically play and loop a sound file on page load:
<audio loop autoplay>
<source src="http://music.com/clip.mp3" />
</audio>
Unfortunately, you may notice there is a small pause between loops. HTML5 audio, thou art half-baked still. Let’s hope one day the Web Audio API will be able to help us out, but until things improve, we’ll have to hack our way around these shortcomings.
Turns out there’s a handy little script called seamlessLoop.js which we can use to patch this. Mind you, if we were really getting crazy with the Cheese Whiz, we’d want to get out big guns like sound.js. But that’d be overkill for a mere loop (and explaining the Web Audio API might bore, rather than impress your friends)!
Installing seamlessLoop.js will get rid of the pause, and now our walk cycle is complete.
(I’ve done some very rough sniffing to see if the browser can play MP3 files. If not, we fall back to using .ogg formatted clips (Opera and Firefox users, you’re welcome).)
Really impress your friends by adding a run cycle
So we have music, we have a walk cycle, we have parallax. It will be a snap to bring them all together and have a simple, endless animation. But let’s go one step further and knock the socks off our viewers by adding a run cycle.
The run cycle
Tacking a run cycle on to our walk cycle will require a third animation sequence: a transitional animation of Tuna switching from walking to running. I have added all these to the sprite:
Let’s work on getting that transition down. We’re going to use multiple animations on the same .tuna div, but we’re going to kick them off at different intervals using animation-delay—no JavaScript required! Isn’t that magical?
It requires a wee bit of math (not much, it doesn’t hurt) to line them up. We want to:
Loop the walk animation twice
Play the transitional cycle once (it has a finite beginning and end perfectly drawn to pick up between the last frame of the walk cycle and the first frame of the run cycle—no looping this baby)
RUN FOREVER.
Using the pattern animation: <name> <duration> <timing-function> <delay> <iteration-count>, here’s what that looks like:
animation:
walk-cycle 1s steps(12) 2,
walk-to-run .75s steps(12) 2s 1,
run-cycle .75s steps(13) 2.75s infinite;
I played with the times to get make the movement more realistic. You may notice that the running animation looks smoother than the walking animation. That’s because it has 13 keyframes running over .75 second instead of 12 running in one second. Remember, professional animation studios use super-high frame counts. This little animation isn’t even up to PBS’s standards!
The music: extended play with HTML5 audio sprites
My favorite part in the The Girl in Byakkoya is when the calm opening builds and transitions into a bouncy motif. I want to start with Tuna walking during the opening, and then loop the running and bounciness together for infinity.
The intro lasts for 24 seconds, so we set our 1 second walk cycle to run for 24 repetitions:
walk-cycle 1s steps(12) 24
We delay walk-to-run by 24 seconds so it runs for .75 seconds before…
We play run-cycle at 24.75 seconds and loop it infinitely
For the music, we need to think of it as two parts: the intro and the bouncy loop. We can do this quite nicely with audio sprites: using one HTML5 audio element and using JavaScript to change the play head location, like skipping tracks with a CD player. Although this technique will result in a small gap in music shifts, I think it’s worth using here to give you some ideas.
// Get the audio element
var byakkoya = document.querySelector('audio');
// create function to play and loop audio
function song(a){
//start playing at 0
a.currentTime = 0;
a.play();
//when we hit 64 seconds...
setTimeout(function(){
// skip back to 24.5 seconds and keep playing...
a.currentTime = 24.55;
// then loop back when we hit 64 again, or every 59.5 seconds.
setInterval(function(){
a.currentTime = 24.55;
},39450);
},64000);
}
The load screen
I’ve put it off as long as I can, but now that the music and the CSS are both running on their own separate clocks, it’s imperative that both images and music be fully downloaded and ready to run when we kick this thing off. So we need a load screen (also, it’s nice to give people a heads-up that you’re about to blast them with music, no matter how wonderful that music may be).
Since the two timers are so closely linked, we’d best not run the animations until we run the music:
* { animation-play-state: paused; }
animation-play-state can be set to paused or running, and it’s the most useful thing you will learn today.
First we use an event listener to see when the browser thinks we can play through from the beginning to end of the music without pause for buffering:
byakkoya.addEventListener("canplaythrough", function () { });
(More on HTML5 audio’s media events at HTML5doctor.com)
Inside our event listener, I use a bit of jQuery to add class of .playable to the body when we’re ready to enable the play button:
$("body").addClass("playable");
$("#play-me").html("Play me.").click(function(){
song(byakkoya);
$("body").addClass("playing");
});
That .playing class is special because it turns on the animations at the same time we start playing the song:
.playing * { animation-play-state: running; }
The background
We’re almost done here! When we add the background, it needs to speed up at the same time that Tuna starts running. The music picks up speed around 24.75 seconds in, and so we’re going to use animation-delay on those backgrounds, too.
This will require some math. If you try to simply shorten the animation’s duration at the 24.75s mark, the backgrounds will, mid-scroll, jump back to their initial background positions to start the new animation! Argh! So let’s make a new @keyframe and calculate where the background position would be just before we speed up the animation.
Here’s the formula:
new 0% value = delay ÷ old duration × length of image
new 100% value = new 0% value + length of image
Here’s the formula put to work on a smaller scale:
Voilà! The finished animation!
I’ve always wanted to bring my illustrations to life. Then I woke up one morning and realized that I had all the tools to do so in my browser and in my head. Now I have fallen in love with Flashless animation.
I’m sure there will be detractors who say HTML wasn’t meant for this and it’s a gross abuse of the DOM! But I say that these explorations help us expand what we expect from devices and software and challenge us in good ways as artists and programmers. The browser might not be the most appropriate place for animation, but is certainly a fun place to start.
There is so much you can do with the spec implemented today, and so much of the territory is still unexplored. I have not yet begun to show you everything. In eight months I expect this demo will represent the norm, not the bleeding edge. I look forward to seeing the wonderful things you create.
(Also, someone, please, do something about that gappy HTML5 audio looping. It’s a crying shame!) |
2012 |
Rachel Nabors |
rachelnabors |
2012-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/flashless-animation/ |
code |
| 302 |
Flexible Project Management in Inflexible Environments |
Handling unforeseen circumstances is an inevitable part of any project. It’s also often the most uncomfortable, and there is no amount of skill or planning that will fully eradicate the need to adapt to change. The ability to be flexible, responsive, and unafraid of facing not only problems, but also potentially positive scope changes and new ideas, isn’t an easy one to master. I am by no means saying that I have, but what I have learned is that there is often the temptation to shut out anything that might derail your plan, even sometimes at the cost of the quality you’re committed to.
The reality is that as someone leading a project you know there will be challenges, but, in general, it’s a hassle to try keep the landscape open. Problems are bridges we should cross when we come to them, but intentional changes to the plan, and adapting for the sake of improving your first idea, is harder. There are tight schedules, resource is planned miles ahead, and you’re already juggling twenty other things. If you’re passionate about the quality of work you deliver and are working somewhere that considers itself expert within the field of digital, then having an attitude of flexibility is extremely important. It’s important when you’re overcoming a challenge or problem, but it’s also important for allowing ideas to evolve and be refined as much as they can be throughout the course of a project.
Where theory falls short
The premise of any Agile methodology, Scrum for example, is based around being able to work efficiently, react quickly and deliver relevant chunks of a product in manageable increments. It’s often hailed as king of flexible management and it can work really well, especially for in-house software products developed over a long or even an indefinite period of time. It holds off defining scope too far ahead and lets teams focus on smaller amounts of work, and allows them to regularly reprioritise. Unfortunately though, not all environments lend themselves as easily to a fully Agile setup. Even the ones that do may be restrained from putting it fully into practice for an array of other internal reasons.
Delivering digital services to clients—within an agency setting or as a freelancer—often demands a more rigid structure. You need clear sign-off points, there’s a lot less flexibility in defining features, or working within budgets and timeframes. To start with, for a project to warrant a fully Agile team working on it, and especially for agencies, you need clients big enough and rich enough to justify the resource. You also need a lot of client trust to propose defining features and scope as you go. Although this is achievable—and there are agencies that operate an agile setup—it takes a long journey to reach that scale in the full sense of the word. Building a reputation that commands unconditional trust and reaching the point where your projects are consistently of a certain size often requires backing by long journey of success and excellence.
So there is a lot of room left for understanding how we can best strive to still deliver excellent projects within more constrained structures. We know that rigid waterfall planning, more often than not, falls over as soon as a project gets anything past a basic brochure site. There are many critiques of the system, but one of the main ones tends to be that nobody considers each other’s work properly, which can result in very expensive and inefficient development.
Equally, for reasons we’ve already touched upon, running fully agile teams often isn’t the right answer. So many companies, individuals, and organisations look for a middle-ground that balances being flexible and adaptive, but also provides enough upfront commitment to agree budgets, get client/stakeholder sign off, and effectively coordinate internal resource across multiple parallel projects.
Although I don’t have a perfect formula—and can very much assert there is no one perfect way of managing a project because every project is different to the next—I’ve identified a few different ways you can approach flexibility that have really helped me in running projects more smoothly within more realistic constraints.
Planned Flexibility
Drawing on some of the traditional methodologies such as PRINCE2, a good starting point for aspiring to be flexible is by planning for it from the start.
Planning flexibility comes in a few forms. For one, you can regularly identify and log potential risks as a generally good, on-going habit over the course of the project. This essentially just involves scanning the horizon for potential blips on a regular basis (for example weekly) by consulting with your team and documenting it somewhere. It means you have a checkpoint when you sit down and make sure you’re minimising what will or may catch you by surprise. A good time to do this is in a weekly catch up meeting. It’s not going to fix all your problems, but it will make sure you have a head start on the ones you can see coming.
On the subject of team meetings, setting up recurring project events, including a weekly call, a weekly team meeting and (depending on the size of the project) I like to try also do a stand-up as often as possible. Keeping everyone involved and bought in to a project is going to help you infinitely when you need to spot a problem or manage changes to the plan. It will be the difference between your designer spotting an issue and making a mental note to ‘tell you later’, and them actually coming over to tell you directly and immediately. Despite the overhead of meetings, and looping people into stages that they aren’t directly responsible for, the business benefits are chances for success are drastically increased. Planning in, and being aware of how important your team is, will help you be flexible.
Building contingency (formally know as slack) into your project plan from the word go is another well-known and essential way of planning to be flexible. Your project plan will change a lot over the course of a project, but there are still the days that you estimate a job will take, and the days you should actually plan in. Most sensible management teams understand that budgets need to be agreed with this slack in mind or you will not be able to deliver a quality service. I believe that commercial awareness is one of the most valuable skills a project manager can have, but penny pinching will ruin client and team relationships, destroy buy-in and creativity, and often end you up with a much more expensive, hacky, and resented product.
It’s not a justification to let budgets spiral out of control, but a way of thinking about the bigger picture and wider plan of the company itself. It’s unlikely you want high staff turnover because everyone fell out while you were screaming money at them and they didn’t feel like they could do a good job. It’s also unlikely that you will be able to deliver quality products, which will win you a strong reputation and subsequently bigger and better projects. Evaluating risk factors and building in the right amount of slack from the start will give you more wriggle room when you need to adapt and react. On the flip side, also keeping an overview of the wider workload (that you’re not necessarily responsible for), and knowing who to talk if resource is becoming free or needs filling, is another handy way of being able to react quickly and ensuring your management system is respected. You want pockets of backup time planned in, but you also want everyone being as productive as they can most of the time. Never run at 100% capacity: as soon as something does need to change, you’re left with nowhere to move.
Transparency
Having a client or stakeholder that trusts you is a really powerful aid in any regard, but especially so when you need to communicate an issue or new suggestion. Positioning yourself and your team as experts and taking the time to delve into the wider picture—and the goals surrounding your client’s reasons to commission the project in the first place—will make you more valuable to them. Clients and stakeholders will always be different, and sometimes you will get people who are just plain difficult, but more often than not people will listen if you’re willing to talk and explain things.
As I’m sure all of us have realised at one point or another, a lot of people think they know what they want, and it’s usually the wrong thing. Managing key stakeholders in your project is arguably your biggest challenge, if they are on the your side and feel like the team is genuinely working to give them something of quality and value, then they will make your job easier. It’s often down to you to educate them, and to help them recognise and understand the work involved and you and your team’s reasoning behind your decisions.
Being overly submissive or overly secretive will foster a dynamic in which they feel expected to steer the project. In this situation they may not respect the team’s suggestions or may come up with some unreasonable and counterproductive ideas that are likely to hinder progress and lower morale. Getting the stakeholder on board and making them feel a part of the wider picture will make things easier. Pushing back and challenging ideas or working hard to justify something they don’t quite understand will often work in your favour and protects your team. On quite a basic level it also shows you care and are invested; on another, it shows you feel confident in your expertise within your field and that is ultimately the reason they hired you.
Taking the time to think about and be aware of this relationship, will make it easier to be flexible and handle new ideas or suggestions that pop up as the project goes along. Change doesn’t need to be ‘scope creep’ if it’s raised in a practical, value-orientated, and level headed discussion. There is usually a way forward for new ideas, as long as they’re valuable and support the wider goals. Maybe the deadline gets pushed back, maybe you get more budget, maybe the client is happy to forgo something else. As long as there’s value and reason, it shows integrity to the project and respect for its success. You can’t expect for this to go smoothly without having invested in the client relationship, so it’s a large point in paving the way to handling change well.
Reactive Flexibility
Finally, if you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll know by now that you can’t anticipate everything. Sometimes you will have to react and change the plan under circumstances that aren’t easy. When an unexpected problem first rears its head—a client’s casual afterthought that’s threatening the scope of the project, an internal resource conflict, a junior member of staff that’s not grasping the ropes quite as quickly as you’d hoped—you have to react quickly.
In his book, ‘Pitch Anything’, Oren Klaff talks about people’s first reactions being processed by their ‘crocodile brain’ before they’ve had a chance to refine and digest the information more intelligibly. As project managers, product owners, or scrum masters, it’s natural for our immediate reactions to an unexpected problem to cause a pang of stress. But after that initial jolt you need to turn to practical solutions and start racking your brain for different ways forward. It’s here you need to remember to not let your imagination get the better of you, especially if you’ve been putting in the legwork with your team and your client. There is always a way forward and moments like this can be a good opportunity to develop your negotiation and diplomacy skills. Don’t let your immediate reaction be shutting the problem down; instead, take a second to think about it before you decide on the best direction. In a stressful situation, your first idea probably won’t be your best one.
From an internal point of view, it’s very important that whatever went wrong doesn’t turn into a finger pointing exercise and you don’t lose your cool. Getting caught up in a blame game or a witch hunt is never productive. Relationship cultivating can sometimes be the pillar that gets you through a stressful blip. Biggest tip for staying flexible when you’re reacting to a problem—apart form obviously thinking of ways forward—is to communicate. Don’t go quiet until you feel like you have a plan, you’ll often need to put everyone else at ease before you can move things forward. Problem solving is part of the job and will need to happen in even the most flexible of product delivery systems.
In conclusion, being flexible is never simple but there are things you can do to make your life easier. Owning a position of expertise, putting together a team that’s involved in each other’s work and cultivating a client/stakeholder relationship that’s as transparent and respectful as possible will get you a long way. In times of crisis, believe in your skills and be open to adapting over getting frustrated. |
2016 |
Gillian Sibthorpe |
gilliansibthorpe |
2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/flexible-project-management/ |
process |
| 139 |
Flickr Photos On Demand with getFlickr |
In case you don’t know it yet, Flickr is great. It is a lot of fun to upload, tag and caption photos and it is really handy to get a vast network of contacts through it.
Using Flickr photos outside of it is a bit of a problem though. There is a Flickr API, and you can get almost every page as an RSS feed, but in general it is a bit tricky to use Flickr photos inside your blog posts or web sites. You might not want to get into the whole API game or use a server side proxy script as you cannot retrieve RSS with Ajax because of the cross-domain security settings.
However, Flickr also provides an undocumented JSON output, that can be used to hack your own solutions in JavaScript without having to use a server side script.
If you enter the URL http://flickr.com/photos/tags/panda you get to the flickr page with photos tagged “panda”.
If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=rss_200 you get the same page as an RSS feed.
If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=json you get a JavaScript function called jsonFlickrFeed with a parameter that contains the same data in JSON format
You can use this to easily hack together your own output by just providing a function with the same name. I wanted to make it easier for you, which is why I created the helper getFlickr for you to download and use.
getFlickr for Non-Scripters
Simply include the javascript file getflickr.js and the style getflickr.css in the head of your document:
<script type="text/javascript" src="getflickr.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="getflickr.css" type="text/css">
Once this is done you can add links to Flickr pages anywhere in your document, and when you give them the CSS class getflickrphotos they get turned into gallery links. When a visitor clicks these links they turn into loading messages and show a “popup” gallery with the connected photos once they were loaded. As the JSON returned is very small it won’t take long. You can close the gallery, or click any of the thumbnails to view a photo. Clicking the photo makes it disappear and go back to the thumbnails.
Check out the example page and click the different gallery links to see the results.
Notice that getFlickr works with Unobtrusive JavaScript as when scripting is disabled the links still get to the photos on Flickr.
getFlickr for JavaScript Hackers
If you want to use getFlickr with your own JavaScripts you can use its main method leech():
getFlickr.leech(sTag, sCallback);
sTag
the tag you are looking for
sCallback
an optional function to call when the data was retrieved.
After you called the leech() method you have two strings to use:
getFlickr.html[sTag]
contains an HTML list (without the outer UL element) of all the images linked to the correct pages at flickr. The images are the medium size, you can easily change that by replacing _m.jpg with _s.jpg for thumbnails.
getFlickr.tags[sTag]
contains a string of all the other tags flickr users added with the tag you searched for(space separated)
You can call getFlickr.leech() several times when the page has loaded to cache several result feeds before the page gets loaded. This’ll make the photos quicker for the end user to show up. If you want to offer a form for people to search for flickr photos and display them immediately you can use the following HTML:
<form onsubmit="getFlickr.leech(document.getElementById('tag').value, 'populate');return false">
<label for="tag">Enter Tag</label>
<input type="text" id="tag" name="tag" />
<input type="submit" value="energize" />
<h3>Tags:</h3><div id="tags"></div>
<h3>Photos:</h3><ul id="photos"></ul>
</form>
All the JavaScript you’ll need (for a basic display) is this:
function populate(){
var tag = document.getElementById('tag').value;
document.getElementById('photos').innerHTML = getFlickr.html[tag].replace(/_m\.jpg/g,'_s.jpg');
document.getElementById('tags').innerHTML = getFlickr.tags[tag];
return false;
}
Easy as pie, enjoy!
Check out the example page and try the form to see the results. |
2006 |
Christian Heilmann |
chrisheilmann |
2006-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/flickr-photos-on-demand/ |
code |
| 78 |
Fluent Design through Early Prototyping |
There’s a small problem with wireframes. They’re not good for showing the kind of interactions we now take for granted – transitions and animations on the web, in Android, iOS, and other platforms. There’s a belief that early prototyping requires a large amount of time and effort, and isn’t worth an early investment. But it’s not true!
It’s still normal to spend a significant proportion of time working in wireframes. Given that wireframes are high-level and don’t show much detail, it’s tempting to give up control and responsibility for things like transitions and other things sidelined as visual considerations. These things aren’t expressed well, and perhaps not expressed at all, in wireframes, yet they critically influence the quality of a product. Rapid prototyping early helps to bring sidelined but significant design considerations into focus.
Speaking fluent design
Fluency in a language means being able to speak it confidently and accurately. The Latin root means flow.
By design fluency, I mean using a set of skills in order to express or communicate an idea. Prototyping is a kind of fluency. It takes designers beyond the domain of grey and white boxes to consider all the elements that make up really good product design.
Designers shouldn’t be afraid of speaking fluent design. They should think thoroughly about product decisions beyond their immediate role — not for the sake of becoming some kind of power-hungry design demigod, but because it will lead to better, more carefully considered product design.
Wireframes are incomplete sentences
Wireframes, once they’ve served their purpose, are a kind of self-imposed restriction.
Mostly made out of grey and white boxes, they deliberately express the minimum. Important details — visuals, nuanced transitions, sounds — are missing. Their appearance bears little resemblance to the final thing. Responsibility for things that traditionally didn’t matter (or exist) is relinquished. Animations and transitions in particular are increasingly relevant to the mobile designer’s methods. And rather than being fanciful and superfluous visual additions to a product, they help to clarify designs and provide information about context.
Wireframes are useful in the early stages. As a designer trying to persuade stakeholders, clients, or peers, sometimes it will be in your interests to only tell half the story. They’re ideal for gauging whether a design is taking the right direction, and they’re the right medium for deciding core things, such as the overall structure and information architecture.
But spending a long time in wireframes means delaying details to a later stage in the project, or to the end, when the priority is shifted to getting designs out of the door. This leaves little time to test, finesse and perfect things which initially seemed to be less important. I think designers should move away from using wireframes as primary documentation once the design has reached a certain level of maturity.
A prototype is multiple complete sentences
Paragraphs, even.
Unlike a wireframe, a prototype is a persuasive storyteller. It can reveal the depth and range of design decisions, not just the layout, but also motion: animations and transitions. If it’s a super-high-fidelity prototype, it’s a perfect vessel for showing the visual design as well. It’s all of these things that contribute to the impression that a product is good… and useful, and engaging, and something you’d like to use.
A prototype is impressive. A good prototype can help to convince stakeholders and persuade clients. With a compelling demo, people can more easily imagine that this thing could actually exist. “Hey”, they’re thinking. “This might actually be pretty good!”
How to make a prototype in no time and with no effort
Now, it does take time and effort to make a prototype. However, good news! It used to require a lot more effort. There are tools that make prototyping much quicker and easier.
If you’re making a mobile prototype (this seems quite likely), you will want to test and show this on the actual device. This sounds like it could be a pain, but there are a few ways to do this that are quite easy.
Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, is an unlikely candidate for a prototyping tool, but surprisingly great and easy for creating prototypes with transitions that can be shown on different devices.
Keynote enables you to do a few useful, excellent things. You can make each screen in your design a slide, which can be linked together to allow you to click through the prototype. You can add customisable transitions between screens. If you want to show a panel that can slide open or closed on your iPad mockup, for example, transitions can also be added to individual elements on the screen. The design can be shown on tablet and mobile devices, and interacted with like it’s a real app. Another cool feature is that you can export the prototype as a video, which works as another effective format for demoing a design.
Overall, Keynote offers a very quick, lightweight way to prototype a design. Once you’ve learned the basics, it shouldn’t take longer than a few hours – at most – to put together a respectable clickable prototype with transitions.
Download the interactive MOV example
Holly icon by Megan Sheehan from The Noun Project
This is a Quicktime movie exported from Keynote. This version is animated for demonstration purposes, but download the interactive original and you can click the screen to move through the prototype. It demonstrates the basic interactivity of an iPhone app. This anonymised example was used on a project at Fjord to create a master example of an app’s transitions.
Prototyping drawbacks, and perceived drawbacks
If prototyping is so great, then why do we leave it to the end, or not bother with it at all? There are multiple misconceptions about prototyping: they’re too difficult to make; they take too much time; or they’re inaccurate (and dangerous) documentation.
A prototype is a preliminary model. There should always be a disclaimer that it’s not the real thing to avoid setting up false expectations.
A prototype doesn’t have to be the main deliverable. It can be a key one that’s supported by visual and interaction specifications. And a prototype is a lightweight means of managing and reflecting changes and requirements in a project.
An actual drawback of prototyping is that to make one too early could mean being gung-ho with what you thought a client or stakeholder wanted, and delivering something inappropriate. To avoid this, communicate, iterate, and keep things simple until you’re confident that the client or other stakeholders are happy with your chosen direction.
The key throughout any design project is iteration. Designers build iterative models, starting simple and becoming increasingly sophisticated. It’s a process of iterative craft and evolution. There’s no perfect methodology, no magic recipe to follow.
What to do next
Make a prototype! It’s the perfect way to impress your friends.
It can help to advance a brilliant idea with a fraction of the effort of complete development. Sketches and wireframes are perfect early on in a project, but once they’ve served their purpose, prototypes enable the design to advance, and push thinking towards clarifying other important details including transitions.
For Keynote tutorials, Keynotopia is a great resource. Axure is standard and popular prototyping software many UX designers will already be familiar with; it’s possible to create transitions in Axure. POP is an iPhone app that allows you to design apps on paper, take photos with your phone, and turn them into interactive prototypes. Ratchet is an elegant iPhone prototyping tool aimed at web developers.
There are perhaps hundreds of different prototyping tools and methods. My final advice is not to get bogged down in (or limited by) any particular tool, but to remember you’re making quick and iterative models. Experiment and play!
Prototyping will push you and your designs to a scary place without limitations. No more grey and white boxes, just possibilities! |
2012 |
Rebecca Cottrell |
rebeccacottrell |
2012-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/fluent-design-through-early-prototyping/ |
ux |
| 270 |
From Side Project to Not So Side Project |
In the last article I wrote for 24 ways, back in 2009, I enthused about the benefits of having a pet project, suggesting that we should all have at least one so that we could collaborate with our friends, escape our day jobs, fulfil our own needs, help others out, raise our profiles, make money, and — most importantly — have fun. I don’t think I need to offer any further persuasions: it seems that designers and developers are launching their own pet projects left, right and centre. This makes me very happy.
However, there still seems to be something of a disconnect between having a side project and turning it into something that is moderately successful; in particular, the challenge of making enough money to sustain the project and perhaps even elevating it from the sidelines so that it becomes something not so on the side at all.
Before we even begin this, let’s spend a moment talking about money, also known as…
Evil, nasty, filthy money
Over the last couple of years, I’ve started referring to myself as an accidental businessman. I say accidental because my view of the typical businessman is someone who is driven by money, and I usually can’t stand such people. Those who are motivated by profit, obsessed with growth, and take an active interest in the world’s financial systems don’t tend to be folks with whom I share a beer, unless it’s to pour it over them. Especially if they’re wearing pinstriped suits.
That said, we all want to make money, don’t we? And most of us want to make a relatively decent amount, too. I don’t think there’s any harm in admitting that, is there? Hello, I’m Elliot and I’m a capitalist.
The key is making money from doing what we love. For most people I know in our community, we’ve already achieved that — I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who isn’t extremely passionate about working in our industry and I think it’s one of the most positive, unifying benefits we enjoy as a group of like-minded people — but side projects usually arise from another kind of passion: a passion for something other than what we do as our day jobs. Perhaps it’s because your clients are driving you mental and you need a break; perhaps it’s because you want to create something that is truly your own; perhaps it’s because you’re sick of seeing your online work disappear so fast and you want to try your hand at print in order to make a more permanent mark.
The three factors I listed there led me to create 8 Faces, a printed magazine about typography that started as a side project and is now a very significant part of my yearly output and income.
Like many things that prove fruitful, 8 Faces’ success was something of an accident, too. For a start, the magazine was never meant to be profitable; its only purpose at all was to scratch my own itch. Then, after the first issue took off and I realized how much time I needed to spend in order to make the next one decent, it became clear that I would have to cover more than just the production costs: I’d have to take time out from client work as well. Doing this meant I’d have to earn some money. Probably not enough to equate to the exact amount of time lost when I could be doing client work (not that you could ever describe time as being lost when you work on something you love), but enough to survive; for me to feel that I was getting paid while doing all of the work that 8 Faces entailed. The answer was to raise money through partnerships with some cool companies who were happy to be associated with my little project.
A sustainable business model
Business model! I can’t believe I just wrote those words! But a business model is really just a loose plan for how not to screw up. And all that stuff I wrote in the paragraph above about partnering with companies so I could get some money in while I put the magazine together? Well, that’s my business model.
If you’re making any product that has some sort of production cost, whether that’s physical print run expenses or up-front dev work to get an app built, covering those costs before you even release your product means that you’ll be in profit from the first copy you sell. This is no small point: production expenses are pretty much the only cost you’ll ever need to recoup, so having them covered before you launch anything is pretty much the best possible position in which you could place yourself. Happy days, as Jamie Oliver would say.
Obtaining these initial funds through partnerships has another benefit. Sure, it’s a form of advertising but, done right, your partners can potentially provide you with great content, too. In the case of 8 Faces, the ads look as nice as the rest of the magazine, and a couple of our partners also provide proper articles: genuinely meaningful, relevant, reader-pleasing articles at that. You’d be amazed at how many companies are willing to become partners and, as the old adage goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
With profit comes responsibility
Don’t forget about the responsibility you have to your audience if you engage in a relationship with a partner or any type of advertiser: although I may have freely admitted my capitalist leanings, I’m still essentially a hairy hippy, and I feel that any partnership should be good for me as a publisher, good for the partner and — most importantly — good for the reader. Really, the key word here is relevance, and that’s where 99.9% of advertising fails abysmally.
(99.9% is not a scientific figure, but you know what I’m on about.)
The main grey area when a side project becomes profitable is how you share that profit, partly because — in my opinion, at least — the transition from non-profitable side project to relatively successful source of income can be a little blurred. Asking for help for nothing when there’s no money to be had is pretty normal, but sometimes it’s easy to get used to that free help even once you start making money. I believe the best approach is to ask for help with the promise that it will always be rewarded as soon as there’s money available. (Oh, god: this sounds like one of those nightmarish client proposals. It’s not, honest.) If you’re making something cool, people won’t mind helping out while you find your feet.
Events often think that they’re exempt from sharing profit. Perhaps that’s because many event organizers think they’re doing the speakers a favour rather than the other way around (that’s a whole separate article), but it’s shocking to see how many people seem to think they can profit from content-makers — speakers, for example — and yet not pay for that content. It was for this reason that Keir and I paid all of our speakers for our Insites: The Tour side project, which we ran back in July. We probably could’ve got away without paying them, especially as the gig was so informal, but it was the right thing to do.
In conclusion: money as a by-product
Let’s conclude by returning to the slightly problematic nature of money, because it’s the pivot on which your side project’s success can swing, regardless of whether you measure success by monetary gain. I would argue that success has nothing to do with profit — it’s about you being able to spend the time you want on the project. Unfortunately, that is almost always linked to money: money to pay yourself while you work on your dream idea; money to pay for more servers when your web app hits the big time; money to pay for efforts to get the word out there. The key, then, is to judge success on your own terms, and seek to generate as much money as you see fit, whether it’s purely to cover your running costs, or enough to buy a small country. There’s nothing wrong with profit, as long as you’re ethical about it. (Pro tip: if you’ve earned enough to buy a small country, you’ve probably been unethical along the way.)
The point at which individuals and companies fail — in the moral sense, for sure, but often in the competitive sense, too — is when money is the primary motivation. It should never be the primary motivation. If you’re not passionate enough about something to do it as an unprofitable side project, you shouldn’t be doing it all.
Earning money should be a by-product of doing what you love. And who doesn’t want to spend their life doing what they love? |
2011 |
Elliot Jay Stocks |
elliotjaystocks |
2011-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/from-side-project-to-not-so-side-project/ |
business |
| 175 |
Front-End Code Reusability with CSS and JavaScript |
Most web standards-based developers are more than familiar with creating their sites with semantic HTML with lots and lots of CSS. With each new page in a design, the CSS tends to grow and grow and more elements and styles are added. But CSS can be used to better effect.
The idea of object-oriented CSS isn’t new. Nicole Sullivan has written a presentation on the subject and outlines two main concepts: separate structure and visual design; and separate container and content. Jeff Croft talks about Applying OOP Concepts to CSS:
I can make a class of .box that defines some basic layout structure, and another class of .rounded that provides rounded corners, and classes of .wide and .narrow that define some widths, and then easily create boxes of varying widths and styles by assigning multiple classes to an element, without having to duplicate code in my CSS.
This concept helps reduce CSS file size, allows for great flexibility, rapid building of similar content areas and means greater consistency throughout the entire design. You can also take this concept one step further and apply it to site behaviour with JavaScript.
Build a versatile slideshow
I will show you how to build multiple slideshows using jQuery, allowing varying levels of functionality which you may find on one site design. The code will be flexible enough to allow you to add previous/next links, image pagination and the ability to change the animation type. More importantly, it will allow you to apply any combination of these features.
Image galleries are simply a list of images, so the obvious choice of marking the content up is to use a <ul>. Many designs, however, do not cater to non-JavaScript versions of the website, and thus don’t take in to account large multiple images. You could also simply hide all the other images in the list, apart from the first image. This method can waste bandwidth because the other images might be downloaded when they are never going to be seen.
Taking this second concept — only showing one image — the only code you need to start your slideshow is an <img> tag. The other images can be loaded dynamically via either a per-page JavaScript array or via AJAX.
The slideshow concept is built upon the very versatile Cycle jQuery Plugin and is structured in to another reusable jQuery plugin. Below is the HTML and JavaScript snippet needed to run every different type of slideshow I have mentioned above.
<img src="path/to/image.jpg" alt="About the image" title="" height="250" width="400" class="slideshow">
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery().ready(function($) {
$('img.slideshow').slideShow({
images: ['1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg']
});
});
</script>
Slideshow plugin
If you’re not familiar with jQuery or how to write and author your own plugin there are plenty of articles to help you out.
jQuery has a chainable interface and this is something your plugin must implement. This is easy to achieve, so your plugin simply returns the collection it is using:
return this.each(
function () {}
};
Local Variables
To keep the JavaScript clean and avoid any conflicts, you must set up any variables which are local to the plugin and should be used on each collection item. Defining all your variables at the top under one statement makes adding more and finding which variables are used easier. For other tips, conventions and improvements check out JSLint, the “JavaScript Code Quality Tool”.
var $$, $div, $images, $arrows, $pager,
id, selector, path, o, options,
height, width,
list = [], li = 0,
parts = [], pi = 0,
arrows = ['Previous', 'Next'];
Cache jQuery Objects
It is good practice to cache any calls made to jQuery. This reduces wasted DOM calls, can improve the speed of your JavaScript code and makes code more reusable.
The following code snippet caches the current selected DOM element as a jQuery object using the variable name $$. Secondly, the plugin makes its settings available to the Metadata plugin‡ which is best practice within jQuery plugins.
For each slideshow the plugin generates a <div> with a class of slideshow and a unique id. This is used to wrap the slideshow images, pagination and controls.
The base path which is used for all the images in the slideshow is calculated based on the existing image which appears on the page. For example, if the path to the image on the page was /img/flowers/1.jpg the plugin would use the path /img/flowers/ to load the other images.
$$ = $(this);
o = $.metadata ? $.extend({}, settings, $$.metadata()) : settings;
id = 'slideshow-' + (i++ + 1);
$div = $('<div />').addClass('slideshow').attr('id', id);
selector = '#' + id + ' ';
path = $$.attr('src').replace(/[0-9]\.jpg/g, '');
options = {};
height = $$.height();
width = $$.width();
Note: the plugin uses conventions such as folder structure and numeric filenames. These conventions help with the reusable aspect of plugins and best practices.
Build the Images
The cycle plugin uses a list of images to create the slideshow. Because we chose to start with one image we must now build the list programmatically. This is a case of looping through the images which were added via the plugin options, building the appropriate HTML and appending the resulting <ul> to the DOM.
$.each(o.images, function () {
list[li++] = '<li>';
list[li++] = '<img src="' + path + this + '" height="' + height + '" width="' + width + '">';
list[li++] = '</li>';
});
$images = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-images');
$images.append(list.join('')).appendTo($div);
Although jQuery provides the append method it is much faster to create one really long string and append it to the DOM at the end.
Update the Options
Here are some of the options we’re making available by simply adding classes to the <img>. You can change the slideshow effect from the default fade to the sliding effect. By adding the class of stopped the slideshow will not auto-play and must be controlled via pagination or previous and next links.
// different effect
if ($$.is('.slide')) {
options.fx = 'scrollHorz';
}
// don't move by default
if ($$.is('.stopped')) {
options.timeout = 0;
}
If you are using the same set of images throughout a website you may wish to start on a different image on each page or section. This can be easily achieved by simply adding the appropriate starting class to the <img>.
// based on the class name on the image
if ($$.is('[class*=start-]')) {
options.startingSlide = parseInt($$.attr('class').replace(/.*start-([0-9]+).*/g, "$1"), 10) - 1;
}
For example:
<img src="/img/slideshow/3.jpg" alt="About the image" title="" height="250" width="400" class="slideshow start-3">
By default, and without JavaScript, the third image in this slideshow is shown. When the JavaScript is applied to the page the slideshow must know to start from the correct place, this is why the start class is required.
You could capture the default image name and parse it to get the position, but only the default image needs to be numeric to work with this plugin (and could easily be changed in future). Therefore, this extra specifically defined option means the plugin is more tolerant.
Previous/Next Links
A common feature of slideshows is previous and next links enabling the user to manually progress the images. The Cycle plugin supports this functionality, but you must generate the markup yourself. Most people add these directly in the HTML but normally only support their behaviour when JavaScript is enabled. This goes against progressive enhancement. To keep with the best practice progress enhancement method the previous/next links should be generated with JavaScript.
The follow snippet checks whether the slideshow requires the previous/next links, via the arrows class. It restricts the Cycle plugin to the specific slideshow using the selector we created at the top of the plugin. This means multiple slideshows can run on one page without conflicting each other.
The code creates a <ul> using the arrows array we defined at the top of the plugin. It also adds a class to the slideshow container, meaning you can style different combinations of options in your CSS.
// create the arrows
if ($$.is('.arrows') && list.length > 1) {
options.next = selector + '.next';
options.prev = selector + '.previous';
$arrows = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-arrows');
$.each(arrows, function (i, val) {
parts[pi++] = '<li class="' + val.toLowerCase() + '">';
parts[pi++] = '<a href="#' + val.toLowerCase() + '">';
parts[pi++] = '<span>' + val + '</span>';
parts[pi++] = '</a>';
parts[pi++] = '</li>';
});
$arrows.append(parts.join('')).appendTo($div);
$div.addClass('has-cycle-arrows');
}
The arrow array could be placed inside the plugin settings to allow for localisation.
Pagination
The Cycle plugin creates its own HTML for the pagination of the slideshow. All our plugin needs to do is create the list and selector to use. This snippet creates the pagination container and appends it to our specific slideshow container. It sets the Cycle plugin pager option, restricting it to the specific slideshow using the selector we created at the top of the plugin. Like the previous/next links, a class is added to the slideshow container allowing you to style the slideshow itself differently.
// create the clickable pagination
if ($$.is('.pagination') && list.length > 1) {
options.pager = selector + '.cycle-pagination';
$pager = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-pagination');
$pager.appendTo($div);
$div.addClass('has-cycle-pagination');
}
Note: the Cycle plugin creates a <ul> with anchors listed directly inside without the surrounding <li>. Unfortunately this is invalid markup but the code still works.
Demos
Well, that describes all the ins-and-outs of the plugin, but demos make it easier to understand! Viewing the source on the demo page shows some of the combinations you can create with a simple <img>, a few classes and some thought-out JavaScript.
View the demos →
Decide on defaults
The slideshow plugin uses the exact same settings as the Cycle plugin, but some are explicitly set within the slideshow plugin when using the classes you have set.
When deciding on what functionality is going to be controlled via this class method, be careful to choose your defaults wisely. If all slideshows should auto-play, don’t make this an option — make the option to stop the auto-play. Similarly, if every slideshow should have previous/next functionality make this the default and expose the ability to remove them with a class such as “no-pagination”.
In the examples presented on this article I have used a class on each <img>. You can easily change this to anything you want and simply apply the plugin based on the jQuery selector required.
Grab your images
If you are using AJAX to load in your images, you can speed up development by deciding on and keeping to a folder structure and naming convention. There are two methods: basing the image path based on the current URL; or based on the src of the image. The first allows a different slideshow on each page, but in many instances a site will have a couple of sets of images and therefore the second method is probably preferred.
Metadata ‡
A method which allows you to directly modify settings in certain plugins, which also uses the classes from your HTML already exists. This is a jQuery plugin called Metadata. This method allows for finer control over the plugin settings themselves. Some people, however, may dislike the syntax and prefer using normal classes, like above which when sprinkled with a bit more JavaScript allows you to control what you need to control.
The takeaway
Hopefully you have understood not only what goes in to a basic jQuery plugin but also learnt a new and powerful idea which you can apply to other areas of your website.
The idea can also be applied to other common interfaces such as lightboxes or mapping services such as Google Maps — for example creating markers based on a list of places, each with different pin icons based the anchor class. |
2009 |
Trevor Morris |
trevormorris |
2009-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/front-end-code-reusability-with-css-and-javascript/ |
code |
| 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 are all signs that this is a building meant for something the creators deemed important. Alternatively consider a set of large, clean, well-positioned, well-lit doors on the ground floor of an office block: they don’t need an “entrance” sign to communicate their use and to stop people trying to use a nearby fire exit to get into the building. The design of the doors signify their usage. Sometimes a more literal and less awe-inspiring approach to communicating a building’s purpose happens, but the affect is similar: the building is signifying something about its purpose.
HTML has over 115 elements, many of which have semantics to signify structure and affordance to people, browsers, and assistive technology. The HTML 5.1 specification mentions semantics, stating:
Elements, attributes, and attribute values in HTML are defined … to have certain meanings (semantics). For example, the <ol> element represents an ordered list, and the lang attribute represents the language of the content.
HTML 5.1 Semantics, structure, and APIs of HTML documents
HTML’s baked-in semantics means that developers can architect their code to signify structure, create relationships between elements, and label content so people can understand what they’re interacting with. Structuring and labelling information to make it available, usable, and understandable to people is what an information architect does. It’s also what a front-end developer does, whether they realise it or not.
A brief introduction to information architecture
We’re going to start by looking at what an information architect is. There are many definitions, and I’m going to quote Richard Saul Wurman, who is widely regarded as the father of information architecture. In 1976 he said an information architect is:
the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.
Of Patterns And Structures
To me, this clearly defines any developer who creates code that a browser, or other user agent (for example, a screen reader), uses to create a structured, navigable place for people.
Just as there are many definitions of what an information architect is, there are for information architecture itself. I’m going to use the definition from the fourth edition of Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, in which the authors define it as:
The structural design of shared information environments.
The synthesis of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within digital, physical, and cross-channel ecosystems.
The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability, findability, and understanding.
Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, 4th Edition
To me, this describes front-end development. Done properly, there is an art to creating robust, accessible, usable, and findable spaces that delight all our users. For example, at 2015’s State Of The Browser conference, Edd Sowden talked about the accessibility of <table>s. He discovered that by simply not using the semantically-correct <th> element to mark up <table> headings, in some situations browsers will decide that a <table> is being used for layout and essentially make it invisible to assistive technology. Another example of how coding practices can affect the usability and findability of content is shown by Léonie Watson in her How ARIA landmark roles help screen reader users video. By using ARIA landmark roles, people who use screen readers are quickly able to identify and jump to common parts of a web page.
Our definitions of information architects and information architecture mention patterns, rules, organisation, labelling, structure, and relationships. There are numerous different models for how these elements get boiled down to their fundamentals. In his Understanding Context book, Andrew Hinton calls them Labels, Relationships, and Rules; Jorge Arango calls them Links, Nodes, And Order; and Dan Klyn uses Ontology, Taxonomy, and Choreography, which is the one we’re going to use. Dan defines these terms as:
Ontology
The definition and articulation of the rules and patterns that govern the meaning of what we intend to communicate.
What we mean when we say what we say.
Taxonomy
The arrangements of the parts. Developing systems and structures for what everything’s called, where everything’s sorted, and the relationships between labels and categories
Choreography
Rules for interaction among the parts. The structures it creates foster specific types of movement and interaction; anticipating the way users and information want to flow and making affordance for change over time.
We now have definitions of an information architect, information architecture, and a model of the elements of information architecture. But is writing HTML really creating information or is it just wrangling data and metadata? When does data turn into information? In his book Managing For The Future Peter Drucker states:
… data is not information. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose.
Managing For The Future
If we use the correct semantic element to mark up content then we’re developing with purpose and creating relevance. For example, if we follow the advice of the HTML 5.1 specification and mark up headings using heading rank instead of the outline algorithm, we’re creating a structure where the depth of one heading is relevant to the previous one. Architected correctly, an <h2> element should be relevant to its parent, which should be the <h1>. By following the HTML specification we can create a structured, searchable, labeled document that will hopefully be relevant to what our users need to be successful. If you’ve never used a screen reader, you might be wondering how the headings on a page are searchable. Screen readers give users the ability to interact with headings in a couple of ways:
by creating a list of headings so users can quickly scan the page for information
by using a keyboard command to cycle through one heading at a time
If we had a document for Christmas Day TV we might structure it something like this:
<h1>Christmas Day TV schedule</h1>
<h2>BBC1</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>BBC2</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>ITV</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
<h2>Channel 4</h2>
<h3>Morning</h3>
<h3>Evening</h3>
If I use VoiceOver to generate a list of headings, I get this:
Once I have that list I can use keyboard commands to filter the list based on the heading level. For example, I can press 2 to hear just the <h2>s:
If we hadn’t used headings, of if we’d nested them incorrectly, our users would be frustrated.
Putting this together
Let’s put this together with an example of a button that, when pressed, toggles the appearance of a panel of links. There are numerous ways we could create a button on a web page, but the best way is to just use a <button>. Every browser understands what a <button> is, how it works, and what keyboard shortcuts should be used with them. The HTML specification for the <button> element says:
The <button> element represents a button labeled by its contents.
The contents that a <button> can have include the type attribute, any relevant ARIA attributes, and the actual text label that the user sees. This information is more important than the visual design: it doesn’t matter how beautiful or obtuse the design is, if the underlying code is non-semantic and poorly labelled, people are going to struggle to use it. Here are three buttons, each created with the same HTML but with different designs:
Regardless of what they look like, because we’ve used semantic HTML instead of a bunch of meaningless <div>s or <span>s, people who use assistive technology are going to benefit. Out of the box, without any extra development effort, a <button> is accessible and usable with a keyboard. We don’t have to write event handlers to listen for people pressing the Enter key or the space bar, which we would have to do if we’d faked a button with non-semantic elements. Our <button> can also be quickly findable: for example, in the same way it’s possible to create a list of headings with a screen reader, I can also create a list of form elements and then quickly jump to the one I want.
Now we have our <button>, let’s add the panel we’re toggling the appearance of. Here’s our code:
<button aria-controls="panel" aria-expanded="false" class="settings" id="settings" type="button">Settings</button>
<div class="panel hidden" id="panel">
<ul aria-labelledby="settings">
<li><a href="…">Account</a></li>
<li><a href="…">Privacy</a></li>
<li><a href="…">Security</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
There’s quite a bit going on here. We’re using the:
aria-controls attribute to architect a connection between the <button> element and the panel whose appearance it controls. When some assistive technology, for example the JAWS screen reader, encounters an element with aria-controls it audibly tells a user about the controlled expanded element and gives them the ability to move focus to it.
aria-expanded attribute to denote whether the panel is visible or not. We toggle this value using JavaScript to true when the panel is visible and false when it’s not. This important attribute tells people who use screen readers about the state of the elements they’re interacting with. For example, VoiceOver announces Settings expanded button when the panel is visible and Settings collapsed button when it’s hidden.
aria-labelledby attribute to give the list a title of “Settings”. This can benefit some users of assistive technology. For example, screen readers can cycle through all the lists on a page, so being able to title them can improve findability. Being able to hear list Settings three items is, I’d argue, more useful than list three items. By doing this we’re supporting usability and findability.
<ul> element to contain our list of links in our panel.
Let’s look at the choice of <ul> to contain our settings choices. Firstly, our settings are related items, so they belong in a structure that semantically groups things. This is something that a list can do that other elements or patterns can’t. This pattern, for example, isn’t semantic and has no structure:
<div><a href="…">Account</a></div>
<div><a href="…">Privacy</a></div>
<div><a href="…">Security</a></div>
All we have there is three elements next to each other on the screen and in the DOM. That is not robust code that signifies anything.
Why are we using an unordered list as opposed to an ordered list or a definition list? A quick look at the HTML specification tells us why:
The <ul> element represents a list of items, where the order of the items is not important — that is, where changing the order would not materially change the meaning of the document.
The HTML 5.1 specification’s description of the element
Will the meaning of our document materially change if we moved the order of our links around? Nope. Therefore, I’d argue, we’ve used the correct element to structure our content.
These coding decisions are information architecture
I believe that what we’ve done here is pure information architecture. Going back to Dan Klyn’s model, we’ve practiced ontology by looking at the meaning of what we’re intending to communicate:
we want to communicate there is an interactive element that toggles the appearance of an element on a page so we’ve used one, a <button>, with those semantics.
programmatically we’ve used the type='button' attribute to signify that the button isn’t a menu, reset, or submit element.
visually we’ve designed our <button> look like something that can be interacted with and, importantly, we haven’t removed the focus ring.
we’ve labelled the <button> with the word “Settings” so that our users will hopefully understand what the button is for.
we’ve used an <ul> element to structure and communicate our list of related items.
We’ve also practiced taxonomy by developing systems and structures and creating relationships between our elements:
by connecting the <button> to the panel using the aria-controls attribute we’ve programmatically created a relationship between two elements.
we’ve developed a structure in our elements by labelling our <ul> with the same name as the <button> that controls its appearance.
And finally we’ve practiced choreography by creating elements that foster movement and interaction. We’ve anticipated the way users and information want to flow:
we’ve used a <button> element that is interactive and accessible out of the box.
our aria-controls attribute can help some people who use screen readers move easily from the <button> to the panel it controls.
by toggling the value of the aria-expanded attribute we’ve developed a system that tells assistive technology about the status of the relationship between our elements: the panel is visible or the panel is hidden.
we’ve made sure our information is more usable and findable no matter how our users want or need to interact with it. Regardless of how someone “sees” our work they’re going to be able to use it because we’ve architected multiple ways to access our information.
Information architecture, robust code, and accessibility
The United Nations estimates that around 10% of the world’s population has some form of disability which, at the time of writing, is around 740,000,000 people. That’s a lot of people who rely on well-architected semantic code that can be interpreted by whatever assistive technology they may need to use.
If everyone involved in the creation of our places made of information practiced information architecture it would make satisfying the WCAG 2.0 POUR principles so much easier. Our digital construction practices directly affect the quality of life of millions of people, and we have a responsibility to make technology available to them. In her book How To Make Sense Of Any Mess, Abby Covert states:
If we’re going to be successful in this new world, we need to see information as a workable material and learn to architect it in a way that gets us to our goals.
How To Make Sense Of Any Mess
I believe that the world will be a better place if we start treating front-end development as information architecture. |
2016 |
Francis Storr |
francisstorr |
2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/ |
code |
| 282 |
Front-end Style Guides |
We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work.
To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand uses, along with when and where it is appropriate to use them.
Design guidelines
Some design guidelines focus on visual branding and identity. The UK National Health Service (NHS) refer to theirs as “brand guidelines”. They help any designer create something such as a trustworthy leaflet for an NHS doctor’s surgery. Similarly, Transport for London’s “design standards” ensure the correct logos and typefaces are used in communications, and that they comply with the Disability Discrimination Act.
Some guidelines go further, encompassing a whole experience, from the visual branding to the messaging, and the icon sets used. The BBC calls its guidelines a “Global Experience Language” or GEL. It’s essential for maintaining coherence across multiple sites under the same BBC brand.
The BBC’s Global Experience Language.
Design guidelines may be brief and loose to promote creativity, like Mozilla’s “brand toolkit”, or be precise and run to many pages to encourage greater conformity, such as Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines”.
Whatever name or form they’re given, documenting reusable styles is invaluable when maintaining a brand identity over time, particularly when more than one person (who may not be a designer) is producing material.
Code standards documents
We can make a similar argument for code. For example, in open source projects, where hundreds of developers are submitting code, it makes sense to set some standards. Drupal and Wordpress have written standards that make editing code less confusing for users, and more maintainable for contributors.
Each community has nuances: Drupal requests that developers indent with two spaces, while Wordpress stipulates a tab. Whatever the rules, good code standards documents also explain why they make their recommendations.
The front-end developer’s style guide
Design style guides and code standards documents have been a successful way of ensuring brand and code consistency, but in between the code and the design examples, web-based style guides are emerging. These are maintained by front-end developers, and are more dynamic than visual design guidelines, documenting every component and its code on the site in one place.
Here are a few examples I’ve seen in the wild:
Natalie Downe’s pattern portfolio
Natalie created the pattern portfolio system while working at Clearleft. The phrase describes a single HTML page containing all the site’s components and styles that can act as a deliverable.
Pattern portfolio by Natalie Downe for St Paul’s School, kept up to date when new components are added. The entire page is about four times the length shown.
Each different item within a pattern portfolio is a building block or module. The components are decoupled from the layout, and linearized so they can slot into anywhere on a page.
The pattern portfolio expresses every component and layout structure in the smallest number of documents. It sets out how the markup and CSS should be, and is used to illustrate the project’s shared vocabulary.
Natalie Downe
By developing a system, rather than individual pages, the result is flexible when the client wants to add more pages later on.
Paul Lloyd’s style guide
Paul Lloyd has written an extremely comprehensive style guide for his site. Not only does it feature every plausible element, but it also explains in detail when it’s appropriate to use each one.
Paul’s style guide is also great educational material for people learning to write code.
Oli Studholme’s style guide
Even though Oli’s style guide is specific to his site, he’s written it as though it’s for someone else. It’s exhaustive and gives justifications for all his decisions. In some places, he links to browser bug tickets and makes recommendations for cross-browser compatibility.
Oli has released his style guide under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, and encourages others to create their own versions.
Jeremy Keith’s pattern primer
Front-end style guides may have comments written in the code, annotations that appear on the page, or they may list components alongside their code, like Jeremy’s pattern primer.
You can watch or fork Jeremy’s pattern primer on Github.
Linearizing components like this resembles a kind of mobile first approach to development, which Jeremy talks about on the 5by5 podcast: The Web Ahead 3.
The benefits of maintaining a front-end style guide
If you still need convincing that producing documentation like this for every project is worth the effort, here are a few nice side-effects to working this way:
Easier to test
A unified style guide makes it easier to spot where your design breaks. It’s simple to check how components adapt to different screen widths, test for browser bugs and develop print style sheets when everything is on the same page. When I worked with Natalie, she’d resize the browser window and bump the text size up and down during development to see if anything would break.
Better workflow
The approach also forces you to think how something works in relation to the whole site, rather than just a specific page, making it easier to add more pages later on. Starting development by creating a style guide makes a lot more sense than developing on a page-by-page basis.
Shared vocabulary
Natalie’s pattern portfolio in particular creates a shared vocabulary of names for components (teaser, global navigation, carousel…), so a team can refer to different regions of the site and have a shared understanding of its meaning.
Useful reference
A combined style guide also helps designers and writers to see the elements that will be incorporated in the site and, therefore, which need to be designed or populated. A boilerplate list of components for every project can act as a reminder of things that may get missed in the design, such as button states or error messages.
Creating your front-end style guide
As you’ve seen, there are plenty of variations on the web style guide. Which method is best depends on your project and workflow. Let’s say you want to show your content team how blockquotes and asides look, when it’s appropriate to use them, and how to create them within the CMS. In this case, a combination of Jeremy’s pattern primer and Paul’s descriptive style guide – with the styled component alongside a code snippet and a description of when to use it – may be ideal.
Start work on your style guide as soon as you can, preferably during the design stage:
Simply presenting flat image comps is by no means enough - it’s only the start… As layouts become more adaptable, flexible and context-specific, so individual components will become the focus of our design. It is therefore essential to get the foundational aspects of our designs right, and style guides allow us to do that.
Paul Lloyd on Style guides for the Web
Print out the designs and label the unique elements and components you’ll need to add to your style guide. Make a note of the purpose of each component. While you’re doing this, identify the main colours used for things like links, headings and buttons.
I draw over the print-outs on to tracing paper so I can make more annotations. Here, I’ve started annotating the widths from the designer’s mockup so I can translate these into percentages.
Start developing your style guide with base styles that target core elements: headings, links, tables, blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists and forms. For these elements, you could maintain a standard document to reuse for every project.
Next, add the components that override the base styles, like search boxes, breadcrumbs, feedback messages and blog comments. Include interaction styles, such as hover, focus and visited state on links, and hover, focus and active states on buttons.
Now start adding layout and begin slotting the components into place. You may want to present each layout as a separate document, or you could have them all on the same page stacked beneath one another.
Document code practices
Code can look messy when people use different conventions, so note down a standard approach alongside your style guide. For example, Paul Stanton has documented how he writes CSS.
The gift wrapping
Presenting this documentation to your client may be a little overwhelming so, to be really helpful, create a simple page that links together all your files and explains what each of them do.
This is an example of a contents page that Clearleft produce for their clients. They’ve added date stamps, subversion revision numbers and written notes for each file.
Encourage participation
There’s always a risk that the person you’re writing the style guide for will ignore it completely, so make your documentation as user-friendly as possible. Justify why you do things a certain way to make it more approachable and encourage similar behaviour.
As always, good communication helps. Working with the designer to put together this document will improve the site. It’s often not practical for designers to provide a style for everything, so drafting a web style guide and asking for feedback gives designers a chance to make sure any default styles fit in.
If you work in a team with other developers, documenting your code and development decisions will not only be useful as a deliverable, but will also force you to think about why you do things a certain way.
Future-friendly
The roles of designer and developer are increasingly blurred, yet all too often we work in isolation. Working side-by-side with designers on web style guides can vastly improve the quality of our work, and the collaborative approach can spark discussions like “how would this work on a smaller screen?”
Sometimes we can be so focused on getting the site ready and live, that we lose sight of what happens after it’s launched, and how it’s going to be maintained. A simple web style guide can make all the difference.
If you make your own style guide, I’d love to add it to my stash of examples so please share a link to it in the comments. |
2011 |
Anna Debenham |
annadebenham |
2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/front-end-style-guides/ |
process |
| 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 look easy at first sight, because they look very repetitive, but they can be a bit tricky.
Zoomed in pattern fragment with point of reference shown:
Example 2
Some patterns have a clear repeating point that can guide you, such as the blue small circle of this pattern as you can see from this zoomed in screenshot:
Zoomed in pattern fragment with point of reference shown:
Example 3
The different diagonal colors makes a bit more tricky to extract the correct pattern fragment.
The orange dot, which is the starting point of the selection is captured a few times inside the fragment selection: |
2008 |
Veerle Pieters |
veerlepieters |
2008-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/geometric-background-patterns/ |
design |
| 109 |
Geotag Everywhere with Fire Eagle |
A note from the editors: Since this article was written Yahoo! has retired the Fire Eagle service.
Location, they say, is everywhere. Everyone has one, all of the time. But on the web, it’s taken until this year to see the emergence of location in the applications we use and build.
The possibilities are broad. Increasingly, mobile phones provide SDKs to approximate your location wherever you are, browser extensions such as Loki and Mozilla’s Geode provide browser-level APIs to establish your location from the proximity of wireless networks to your laptop. Yahoo’s Brickhouse group launched Fire Eagle, an ambitious location broker enabling people to take their location from any of these devices or sources, and provide it to a plethora of web services. It enables you to take the location information that only your iPhone knows about and use it anywhere on the web.
That said, this is still a time of location as an emerging technology. Fire Eagle stores your location on the web (protected by application-specific access controls), but to try and give an idea of how useful and powerful your location can be — regardless of the services you use now — today’s 24ways is going to build a bookmarklet to call up your location on demand, in any web application.
Location Support on the Web
Over the past year, the number of applications implementing location features has increased dramatically. Plazes and Brightkite are both full featured social networks based around where you are, whilst Pownce rolled in Fire Eagle support to allow geotagging of all the content you post to their microblogging service. Dipity’s beautiful timeline shows for you moving from place to place and Six Apart’s activity stream for Movable Type started exposing your movements.
The number of services that hook into Fire Eagle will increase as location awareness spreads through the developer community, but you can use your location on other sites indirectly too.
Consider Flickr. Now world renowned for their incredible mapping and places features, geotagging on Flickr started out as a grassroots extension of regular tagging. That same technique can be used to start rolling geotagging in any publishing platform you come across, for any kind of content. Machine-tags (geo:lat= and geo:lon=) and the adr and geo microformats can be used to enhance anything you write with location information.
A crash course in avian inflammability
Fire Eagle is a location store. A broker between services and devices which provide location and those which consume it. It’s a switchboard that controls which pieces of your location different applications can see and use, and keeps hidden anything you want kept private. A blog widget that displays your current location in public can be restricted to display just your current city, whilst a service that provides you with a list of the nearest ATMs will operate better with a precise street address.
Even if your iPhone tells Fire Eagle exactly where you are, consuming applications only see what you want them to see. That’s important for users to realise that they’re in control, but also important for application developers to remember that you cannot rely on having super-accurate information available all the time. You need to build location aware applications which degrade gracefully, because users will provide fuzzier information — either through choice, or through less accurate sources.
Application specific permissions are controlled through an OAuth API. Each application has a unique key, used to request a second, user-specific key that permits access to that user’s information. You store that user key and it remains valid until such a time as the user revokes your application’s access. Unlike with passwords, these keys are unique per application, so revoking the access rights of one application doesn’t break all the others.
Building your first Fire Eagle app; Geomarklet
Fire Eagle’s developer documentation can take you through examples of writing simple applications using server side technologies (PHP, Python). Here, we’re going to write a client-side bookmarklet to make your location available in every site you use. It’s designed to fast-track the experience of having location available everywhere on web, and show you how that can be really handy. Hopefully, this will set you thinking about how location can enhance the new applications you build in 2009.
An oddity of bookmarklets
Bookmarklets (or ‘favlets’, for those of an MSIE persuasion) are a strange environment to program in. Critically, you have no persistent storage available. As such, using token-auth APIs in a static environment requires you to build you application in a slightly strange way; authing yourself in advance and then hardcoding the keys into your script.
Get started
Before you do anything else, go to http://fireeagle.com and log in, get set up if you need to and by all means take a look around. Take a look at the mobile updaters section of the application gallery and perhaps pick out an app that will update Fire Eagle from your phone or laptop.
Once that’s done, you need to register for an application key in the developer section. Head straight to /developer/create and complete the form. Since you’re building a standalone application, choose ‘Auth for desktop applications’ (rather than web applications), and select that you’ll be ‘accessing location’, not updating.
At the end of this process, you’ll have two application keys, a ‘Consumer Key’ and a ‘Consumer Secret’, which look like these:
Consumer Key
luKrM9U1pMnu
Consumer Secret
ZZl9YXXoJX5KLiKyVrMZffNEaBnxnd6M
These keys combined allow your application to make requests to Fire Eagle.
Next up, you need to auth yourself; granting your new application permission to use your location. Because bookmarklets don’t have local storage, you can’t integrate the auth process into the bookmarklet itself — it would have no way of storing the returned key. Instead, I’ve put together a simple web frontend through which you can auth with your application.
Head to Auth me, Amadeus!, enter the application keys you just generated and hit ‘Authorize with Fire Eagle’. You’ll be taken to the Fire Eagle website, just as in regular Fire Eagle applications, and after granting access to your app, be redirected back to Amadeus which will provide you your user tokens. These tokens are used in subsequent requests to read your location.
And, skip to the end…
The process of building the bookmarklet, making requests to Fire Eagle, rendering it to the page and so forth follows, but if you’re the impatient type, you might like to try this out right now. Take your four API keys from above, and drag the following link to your Bookmarks Toolbar; it contains all the code described below. Before you can use it, you need to edit in your own API keys. Open your browser’s bookmark editor and where you find text like ‘YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY_HERE’, swap in the corresponding key you just generated.
Get Location
Bookmarklet Basics
To start on the bookmarklet code, set out a basic JavaScript module-pattern structure:
var Geomarklet = function() {
return ({
callback: function(json) {},
run: function() {}
});
};
Geomarklet.run();
Next we’ll add the keys obtained in the setup step, and also some basic Fire Eagle support objects:
var Geomarklet = function() {
var Keys = {
consumer_key: 'IuKrJUHU1pMnu',
consumer_secret: 'ZZl9YXXoJX5KLiKyVEERTfNEaBnxnd6M',
user_token: 'xxxxxxxxxxxx',
user_secret: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
};
var LocationDetail = {
EXACT: 0,
POSTAL: 1,
NEIGHBORHOOD: 2,
CITY: 3,
REGION: 4,
STATE: 5,
COUNTRY: 6
};
var index_offset;
return ({
callback: function(json) {},
run: function() {}
});
};
Geomarklet.run();
The Location Hierarchy
A successful Fire Eagle query returns an object called the ‘location hierarchy’. Depending on the level of detail shared, the index of a particular piece of information in the array will vary. The LocationDetail object maps the array indices of each level in the hierarchy to something comprehensible, whilst the index_offset variable is an adjustment based on the detail of the result returned.
The location hierarchy object looks like this, providing a granular breakdown of a location, in human consumable and machine-friendly forms.
"user": {
"location_hierarchy": [{
"level": 0,
"level_name": "exact",
"name": "707 19th St, San Francisco, CA",
"normal_name": "94123",
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [ - 0.2347530752, 67.232323]
},
"label": null,
"best_guess": true,
"id": ,
"located_at": "2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00",
"query": "q=707%2019th%20Street,%20Sf"
},
{
"level": 1,
"level_name": "postal",
"name": "San Francisco, CA 94114",
"normal_name": "12345",
"woeid": ,
"place_id": "",
"geometry": {
"type": "Polygon",
"coordinates": [],
"bbox": []
},
"label": null,
"best_guess": false,
"id": 59358791,
"located_at": "2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00"
},
{
"level": 2,
"level_name": "neighborhood",
"name": "The Mission, San Francisco, CA",
"normal_name": "The Mission",
"woeid": 23512048,
"place_id": "Y12JWsKbApmnSQpbQg",
"geometry": {
"type": "Polygon",
"coordinates": [],
"bbox": []
},
"label": null,
"best_guess": false,
"id": 59358801,
"located_at": "2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00"
},
}
In this case the first object has a level of 0, so the index_offset is also 0.
Prerequisites
To query Fire Eagle we call in some existing libraries to handle the OAuth layer and the Fire Eagle API call. Your bookmarklet will need to add the following scripts into the page:
The SHA1 encryption algorithm
The OAuth wrapper
An extension for the OAuth wrapper
The Fire Eagle wrapper itself
When the bookmarklet is first run, we’ll insert these scripts into the document. We’re also inserting a stylesheet to dress up the UI that will be generated.
If you want to follow along any of the more mundane parts of the bookmarklet, you can download the full source code.
Rendering
This bookmarklet can be extended to support any formatting of your location you like, but for sake of example I’m going to build three common formatters that you’ll find useful for common location scenarios: Sites which already ask for your location; and in publishing systems that accept tags or HTML mark-up.
All the rendering functions are items in a renderers object, so they can be iterated through easily, making it trivial to add new formatting functions as your find new use cases (just add another function to the object).
var renderers = {
geotag: function(user) {
if(LocationDetail.EXACT !== index_offset) {
return false;
}
else {
var coords =
user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.EXACT].geometry.coordinates;
return "geo:lat=" + coords[0] + ", geo:lon=" + coords[1];
}
},
city: function(user) {
if(LocationDetail.CITY < index_offset) {
return false;
}
else {
return user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.CITY - index_offset].name;
}
}
You should always fail gracefully, and in line with catering to users who choose not to share their location precisely, always check that the location has been returned at the level you require. Geotags are expected to be precise, so if an exact location is unavailable, returning false will tell the rendering aspect of the bookmarklet to ignore the function altogether.
These first two are quite simple, geotag returns geo:lat=-0.2347530752, geo:lon=67.232323 and city returns San Francisco, CA.
This final renderer creates a chunk of HTML using the adr and geo microformats, using all available aspects of the location hierarchy, and can be used to geotag any content you write on your blog or in comments:
html: function(user) {
var geostring = '';
var adrstring = '';
var adr = [];
adr.push('<p class="adr">');
// city
if(LocationDetail.CITY >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n <span class="locality">'
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.CITY-index_offset].normal_name
+ '</span>,'
);
}
// county
if(LocationDetail.REGION >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n <span class="region">'
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.REGION-index_offset].normal_name
+ '</span>,'
);
}
// locality
if(LocationDetail.STATE >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n <span class="region">'
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.STATE-index_offset].normal_name
+ '</span>,'
);
}
// country
if(LocationDetail.COUNTRY >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n <span class="country-name">'
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.COUNTRY-index_offset].normal_name
+ '</span>'
);
}
// postal
if(LocationDetail.POSTAL >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n <span class="postal-code">'
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.POSTAL-index_offset].normal_name
+ '</span>,'
);
}
adr.push('\n</p>\n');
adrstring = adr.join('');
if(LocationDetail.EXACT === index_offset) {
var coords =
user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.EXACT].geometry.coordinates;
geostring = '<p class="geo">'
+'\n <span class="latitude">'
+ coords[0]
+ '</span>;'
+ '\n <span class="longitude">'
+ coords[1]
+ '</span>\n</p>\n';
}
return (adrstring + geostring);
}
Here we check the availability of every level of location and build it into the adr and geo patterns as appropriate. Just as for the geotag function, if there’s no exact location the geo markup won’t be returned.
Finally, there’s a rendering method which creates a container for all this data, renders all the applicable location formats and then displays them in the page for a user to copy and paste. You can throw this together with DOM methods and some simple styling, or roll in some components from YUI or JQuery to handle drawing full featured overlays.
You can see this simple implementation for rendering in the full source code.
Make the call
With a framework in place to render Fire Eagle’s location hierarchy, the only thing that remains is to actually request your location. Having already authed through Amadeus earlier, that’s as simple as instantiating the Fire Eagle JavaScript wrapper and making a single function call. It’s a big deal that whilst a lot of new technologies like OAuth add some complexity and require new knowledge to work with, APIs like Fire Eagle are really very simple indeed.
return {
run: function() {
insert_prerequisites();
setTimeout(
function() {
var fe = new FireEagle(
Keys.consumer_key,
Keys.consumer_secret,
Keys.user_token,
Keys.user_secret
);
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = fe.getUserUrl(
FireEagle.RESPONSE_FORMAT.json,
'Geomarklet.callback'
);
document.body.appendChild(script);
},
2000
);
},
callback: function(json) {
if(json.rsp && 'fail' == json.rsp.stat) {
alert('Error ' + json.rsp.code + ": " + json.rsp.message);
}
else {
index_offset = json.user.location_hierarchy[0].level;
draw_selector(json);
}
}
};
We first insert the prerequisite scripts required for the Fire Eagle request to function, and to prevent trying to instantiate the FireEagle object before it’s been loaded over the wire, the remaining instantiation and request is wrapped inside a setTimeout delay.
We then create the request URL, referencing the Geomarklet.callback callback function and then append the script to the document body — allowing a cross-domain request.
The callback itself is quite simple. Check for the presence and value of rsp.status to test for errors, and display them as required. If the request is successful set the index_offset — to adjust for the granularity of the location hierarchy — and then pass the object to the renderer.
The result? When Geomarklet.run() is called, your location from Fire Eagle is read, and each renderer displayed on the page in an easily copy and pasteable form, ready to be used however you need.
Deploy
The final step is to convert this code into a long string for use as a bookmarklet. Easiest for Mac users is the JavaScript bundle in TextMate — choose Bundles: JavaScript: Copy as Bookmarklet to Clipboard. Then create a new ‘Get Location’ bookmark in your browser of choice and paste in.
Those without TextMate can shrink their code down into a single line by first running their code through the JSLint tool (to ensure the code is free from errors and has all the required semi-colons) and then use a find-and-replace tool to remove line breaks from your code (or even run your code through JSMin to shrink it down).
With the bookmarklet created and added to your bookmarks bar, you can now call up your location on any page at all. Get a feel for a web where your location is just another reliable part of the browsing experience.
Where next?
So, the Geomarklet you’ve been guided through is a pretty simple premise and pretty simple output. But from this base you can start to extend: Add code that will insert each of the location renderings directly into form fields, perhaps, or how about site-specific handlers to add your location tags into the correct form field in Wordpress or Tumblr? Paste in your current location to Google Maps? Or Flickr?
Geomarklet gives you a base to start experimenting with location on your own pages and the sites you browse daily.
The introduction of consumer accessible geo to the web is an adventure of discovery; not so much discovering new locations, but discovering location itself. |
2008 |
Ben Ward |
benward |
2008-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/geotag-everywhere-with-fire-eagle/ |
code |
| 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 an image that visitors see before they read, and that’s your chance to choose a typeface that immediately expresses what the text, and indeed the entire website, stands for. What expectations of the text do you want to set up? Youthful enthusiasm? Businesslike? Cutting-edge? Hipster? Sensible and secure? Fun and informal? Authoritarian?
Typography conveys much more than just information. It imparts feeling, emotion and sentiment, and arouses preconceived ideas of trust, tone and content. Think about taking advantage of this by introducing impactful, expressive typography to your designs on the web. You can alter the way your reader feels, so what emotion do you want to provoke?
Maybe you want them to feel inspired like this stop smoking campaign:
helsenorge.no
Perhaps they should be moved and intrigued, as with Makeshift magazine:
mkshft.org
Or calmly reassured:
www.cleopatra-marina.gr
Fonts also tap into the complex library of associations that we’ve been accumulating in our brains all of our lives. You build up these associations every time you see a font from the context that you see it in. All of us associate certain letterforms with topics, times and places.
Retiro is obviously Spanish:
Retiro by Typofonderie
Bodoni and Eurostile used in this menu couldn’t be much more Italian:
Bodoni and Eurostile, both designed in Italy
To me, Clarendon gives a sense of the 1960s and 1970s. I’m not sure if that’s what Costa was going for, but that’s what it means to me:
Costa coffee flier
And Knockout and Gotham really couldn’t be much more American:
Knockout and Gotham by Hoefler & Co
When it comes to choosing your display typeface, the type designer Christian Schwartz says there are two kinds. First are the workhorse typefaces that will do whatever you want them to do. Helvetica, Proxima Nova and Futura are good examples. These fonts can be shaped in many different ways, but this also means they are found everywhere and take great skill and practice to work with in a unique and striking manner.
The second kind of typeface is one that does most of the work for you. Like finely tailored clothing, it’s the detail in the design that adds interest.
Setting headings in Bree rather than Helvetica makes a big difference to the tone of the article
Such typefaces carry much more inherent character, but are also less malleable and harder to adapt to different contexts. Good examples are Marr Sans, FS Clerkenwell, Strangelove and Bree.
Push the boat out
Remember, all type can have an effect on the reader. Take advantage of that and allow your type to have its own vernacular and impact. Be expressive with your type. Don’t be too reverential, dogmatic – or ordinary. Be brave and push a few boundaries.
Adapted from Web Typography a book in progress by Richard Rutter. |
2015 |
Richard Rutter |
richardrutter |
2015-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/get-expressive-with-your-typography/ |
design |
| 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 navigation wasn’t considered during the design process.
Here’s another example: Gmail. Great email client, but did you ever closely look at what’s going on in that left hand navigation? The continuous blue bar around the message area spills out into the navigation. If we remove all text, we’re left with this odd configuration:
Though the reasoning for anchoring the navigation highlight against the message area might be sound, the result is an irregular shape that doesn’t correspond with anything in reality. You may never consciously notice it, but once you do it’s hard to miss. One other example courtesy of last.fm:
The two header areas are the same shade of pink so they appear to be closely connected. When reduced to their outlines it’s easy to see that this combination is off-balance: the edges don’t align, the sharp corners of the top shape aren’t consistent with the rounded corners of the bottom, and the part jutting out on the right of the bottom one seems fairly random. The result is a duo of oddly mis-matched shapes.
Design Strategies
Our minds tend to pick out familiar patterns. A clever designer can exploit this by creating references in his or her work to shapes and combinations with which viewers are already familiar. There are a few simple ideas that can be employed to help you achieve this: consistency, balance, and completion.
Consistency
A fairly simple way to unify the various disparate shapes on a page is by designing them with a certain amount of internal consistency. You don’t need to apply an identical size, colour, border, or corner treatment to every single shape; devolving a design into boring repetition isn’t what we’re after here. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to apply a set of common rules to most shapes within your work.
Consider purevolume and its multiple rounded-corner panels. From the bottom of the site’s main navigation to the grey “Extras” panels halfway down the page (shown above), multiple shapes use a common border radius for unity. Different colours, different sizes, different content, but the consistent outlines create a strong sense of similarity. Not that every shape on the site follows this rule; they break the pattern right at the top with a darker sharp-cornered header, and again with the thumbnails below. But the design remains unified, nonetheless.
Balance
Arguably the biggest problem with the last.fm example earlier is one of balance. The area poking out of the bottom shape created a fairly obvious imbalance for no apparent reason. The right hand side is visually emphasized due to the greater area of pink coverage, but with the white gap left beside it, the emphasis seems unwarranted. It’s possible to create tension in your design by mismatching shapes and throwing off the balance, but when that happens unintentionally it can look like a mistake.
Above are a few examples of design elements in balanced and unbalanced configurations. The examples in the top row are undeniably more pleasing to the eye than those in the bottom row. If these were fleshed out into full designs, those derived from the templates in the top row would naturally result in stronger work.
Take a look at the header on 9Rules for a study in well-considered balance. On the left you’ll see a couple of paragraphs of text, on the right you have floating navigational items, and both flank the site’s logo. This unusual layout combines multiple design elements that look nothing alike, and places them together in a way that anchors each so that no one weighs down the header.
Completion
And finally we come to the idea of completion. Shapes don’t necessarily need hard outlines to be read visually as shapes, which can be exploited for various purposes. Notice how Zend’s mid-page “Business Topics” and “News” items (below) fade out to the right and bottom, but the placement of two of these side-by-side creates an impression of two panels rather than three disparate floating columns. By allowing the viewer’s eye to complete the shapes, they’ve lightened up the design of the page and removed inessential lines. In a busy design this technique could prove quite handy.
Along the same lines, the individual shapes within your design may also be combined visually to form outlines of larger shapes. The differently-coloured header and main content/sidebar shapes on Veerle’s blog come together to form a single central panel, further emphasized by the slight drop shadow to the right.
Implementation
Studying how shape can be used effectively in design is simply a starting point. As with all things design-related, there are no hard and fast rules here; ultimately you may choose to bring these principles into your work more often, or break them for effect. But understanding how shapes interact within a page, and how that effect is ultimately perceived by viewers, is a key design principle you can use to impress your friends. |
2007 |
Dave Shea |
daveshea |
2007-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/get-in-shape/ |
design |
| 7 |
Get Started With GitHub Pages (Plus Bonus Jekyll) |
After several failed attempts at getting set up with GitHub Pages, I vowed that if I ever figured out how to do it, I’d write it up. Fortunately, I did eventually figure it out, so here is my write-up.
Why I think GitHub Pages is cool
Normally when you host stuff on GitHub, you’re just storing your files there. If you push site files, what you’re storing is the code, and when you view a file, you’re viewing the code rather than the output. What GitHub Pages lets you do is store those files, and if they’re HTML files, you can view them like any other website, so there’s no need to host them separately yourself.
GitHub Pages accepts static HTML but can’t execute languages like PHP, or use a database in the way you’re probably used to, so you’ll need to output static HTML files. This is where templating tools such as Jekyll come in, which I’ll talk about later.
The main benefit of GitHub Pages is ease of collaboration. Changes you make in the repository are automatically synced, so if your site’s hosted on GitHub, it’s as up-to-date as your GitHub repository. This really appeals to me because when I just want to quickly get something set up, I don’t want to mess around with hosting; and when people submit a pull request, I want that change to be visible as soon as I merge it without having to set up web hooks.
Before you get started
If you’ve used GitHub before, already have an account and know the basics like how to set up a repository and clone it to your computer, you’re good to go. If not, I recommend getting familiar with that first. The GitHub site has extensive documentation on getting started, and if you’re not a fan of using the command line, the official GitHub apps for Mac and Windows are great.
I also found this tutorial about GitHub Pages by Thinkful really useful, and it contains details on how to turn an existing repository into a GitHub Pages site.
Although this involves a bit of using the command line, it’s minimal, and I’ll guide you through the basics.
Setting up GitHub Pages
For this demo we’re going to build a Christmas recipe site — nothing complex, just a place to store recipes so we can share them with people, and they can fork or suggest changes to ones they like. My GitHub username is maban, and the project I’ve set up is called christmas-recipes, so once I’ve set up GitHub Pages, the site can be found here: http://maban.github.io/christmas-recipes/
You can set up a custom domain, but by default, the URL for your GitHub Pages site is your-username.github.io/your-project-name.
Set up the repository
The first thing we’re going to do is create a new GitHub repository, in exactly the same way as normal, and clone it to the computer. Let’s give it the name christmas-recipes. There’s nothing in it at the moment, but that’s OK.
After setting up the repository on the GitHub website, I cloned it to my computer in my Sites folder using the GitHub app (you can clone it somewhere else, if you want), and now I have a local repository synced with the remote one on GitHub.
Navigate to the repository
Now let’s open up the command line and navigate to the local repository. The easiest way to do this in Terminal is by typing cd and dragging and dropping the folder into the terminal window and pressing Return. You can refer to Chris Coyier’s GIF illustrating this very same thing, from last week’s 24 ways article “Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard” (which is excellent).
So, for me, that’s…
cd /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes
Create a special GitHub Pages branch
So far we haven’t done anything different from setting up a regular repository, but here’s where things change.
Now we’re in the right place, let’s create a gh-pages branch. This tells GitHub that this is a special branch, and to treat the contents of it differently.
Make sure you’re still in the christmas-recipes directory, and type this command to create the gh-pages branch:
git checkout --orphan gh-pages
That --orphan option might be new to you. An orphaned branch is an empty branch that’s disconnected from the branch it was created off, and it starts with no commits, making it a special standalone branch. checkout switches us from the branch we were on to that branch.
If all’s gone well, we’ll get a message saying Switched to a new branch ‘gh-pages’.
You may get an error message saying you don’t have admin privileges, in which case you’ll need to type sudo at the start of that command.
Make gh-pages your default branch (optional)
The gh-pages branch is separate to the master branch, but by default, the master branch is what will show up if we go to our repository’s URL on GitHub. To change this, go to the repository settings and select gh-pages as the default branch.
If, like me, you only want the one branch, you can delete the master branch by following Oli Studholme’s tutorial. It’s actually really easy to do, and means you only have to worry about keeping one branch up to date.
If you prefer to work from master but push updates to the gh-pages branch, Lea Verou has written up a quick tutorial on how to do this, and it basically involves working from the master branch, and using git rebase to bring one branch up to date with another.
At the moment, we’ve only got that branch on the local machine, and it’s empty, so to be able to see something at our special GitHub Pages URL, we’ll need to create a page and push it to the remote repository.
Make a page
Open up your favourite text editor, create a file called index.html in your christmas-recipes folder, and put some exciting text in it. Don’t worry about the markup: all we need is text because right now we’re just checking it works.
Now, let’s commit and push our changes. You can do that in the command line if you’re comfortable with that, or you can do it via the GitHub app. Don’t forget to add a useful commit message.
Now we’re ready to see our gorgeous new site! Go to your-username.github.io/your-project-name and, hopefully, you’ll see your first GitHub Pages site. If not, don’t panic, it can take up to ten minutes to publish, so you could make a quick cake in a cup while you wait.
After a short wait, our page should be live! Hopefully that wasn’t too traumatic. Now we know it works, we can add some proper markup and CSS and even some more pages.
If you’re feeling brave, how about we take it to the next level…
Setting up Jekyll
Since GitHub Pages can’t execute languages like PHP, we need to give it static HTML files. This is fine if there are only a few pages, but soon we’ll start to miss things like PHP includes for content that’s the same on every page, like headers and footers.
Jekyll helps set up templates and turn them into static HTML. It separates markup from content, and makes it a lot easier for people to edit pages collaboratively. With our recipe site, we want to make it really easy for people to fix typos or add notes, without having to understand PHP. Also, there’s the added benefit that static HTML pages load really fast.
Jekyll isn’t officially supported on Windows, but it is still possible to run it if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty.
Install Jekyll
Back in Terminal, we’re going to install Jekyll…
gem install jekyll
…and wait for the script to run. This might take a few moments. It might take so long that you get worried its broken, but resist the urge to start mashing your keyboard like I did.
Get Jekyll to run on the repository
Fingers crossed nothing has gone wrong so far. If something did go wrong, don’t give up! Check this helpful post by Andy Taylor – you probably just need to install something else first.
Now we’re going to tell Jekyll to set up a new project in the repository, which is in my Sites folder (yours may be in a different place). Remember, we can drag the directory into the terminal window after the command.
jekyll new /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes
If everything went as expected, we should get this error message: Conflict: /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes exists and is not empty.
But that’s OK. It’s just upset because we’ve got that index.html file and possibly also a README.md in there that we made earlier. So move those onto your desktop for the moment and run the command again.
jekyll new /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes
It should say that the site has installed.
Check you’re in the repository, and if you’re not, navigate to it by typing cd , drag the christmas-recipes directory into terminal…
jekyll cd /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes
…and type this command to tell Jekyll to run:
jekyll serve --watch
By adding --watch at the end, we’re forcing Jekyll to rebuild the site every time we hit Save, so we don’t have to keep telling it to update every time we want to view the changes. We’ll need to run this every time we start work on the project, otherwise changes won’t be applied. For now, wait while it does its thing.
Update the config file
When it’s finished, we’ll see the text press ctrl-c to stop. Don’t do that, though. Instead, open up the directory. You’ll notice some new files and folders in there. There’s one called _site, and that’s where all the site files are saved when they’re turned into static HTML. Don’t touch the files in here — they’re the generated files and will get overwritten every time we make changes to pages and layouts.
There’s a file in our directory called _config.yml. This has some settings we can change, one of them being what our base URL is. GitHub Pages will assume the base URL is above the project repository, so changing the settings here will help further down the line when setting up navigation links.
Replace the contents of the _config.yml file with this:
name: Christmas Recipes
markdown: redcarpet
pygments: true
baseurl: /christmas-recipes
Set up your files
Overwrite the index.html file in the root with the one we made earlier (you might want to pop the README.md back in there, too).
Delete the files in the css folder — we’ll add our own later.
View the Jekyll site
Open up your favourite browser and type http://localhost:4000/christmas-recipes in the address bar.
Check it out, that’s your site! But it could do with a bit more love.
Set up the _includes files
It’s always useful to be able to pull in snippets of content onto pages, such as the header and footer, so they only need to be updated in one place. That’s what an _includes folder is for in Jekyll. Create a folder in the root called _includes, and within it add two files: head.html and foot.html.
In head.html, paste the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>{{ page.title }}</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ site.baseurl }}/css/main.css" >
</head>
<body>
and in foot.html:
</body>
</html>
Whenever we want to pull in something from the _includes folder, we can use {% include filename.html %} in the layout file — I’ll show you how to set that up in next step.
Making layouts
In our directory, there’s a folder called _layouts and this lets us create a reusable template for pages. Inside that is a default.html file.
Delete everything in default.html and paste in this instead:
{% include head.html %}
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
{{ content }}
{% include foot.html %}
That’s a very basic page with a header, footer, page title and some content. To apply this template to a page, go back into the index.html page and add this snippet to the very top of the file:
---
layout: default
title: Home
---
Now save the index.html file and hit Refresh in the browser. We should see a heading where {{ page.title }} was in the layout, which matches what comes after title: on the page itself (in this case, Home). So, if we wanted a subheading to appear on every page, we could add {{ page.subheading }} to where we want it to appear in our layout file, and a line that says subheading: This is a subheading in between the dashes at the top of the page itself.
Using Markdown for templates
Anything on a page that sits under the closing dashes is output where {{ content }} appears in the template file. At the moment, this is being output as HTML, but we can use Markdown instead, and Jekyll will convert that into HTML. For this recipe site, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to collaborate, and also have the markup separate from the content, so let’s use Markdown instead of HTML for the recipes.
Telling a page to use Markdown instead of HTML is incredibly simple. All we need to do is change the filename from .html to .md, so let’s rename the index.html to index.md. Now we can use Markdown, and Jekyll will output that as HTML.
Create a new layout
We’re going to create a new layout called recipe which is going to be the template for any recipe page we create. Let’s keep it super simple.
In the _layouts folder, create a file called recipe.html and paste in this:
{% include head.html %}
<main>
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
{{ content }}
<p>Recipe by <a href="{{ page.recipe-attribution-link }}">{{ page.recipe-attribution }}</a>.</p>
</main>
{% include nav.html %}
{% include foot.html %}
That’s our template. The content that goes on the recipe layout includes a page title, the recipe content, a recipe attribution and a recipe attribution link.
Adding some recipe pages
Create a new file in the root of the christmas-recipes folder and call it gingerbread.md. Paste the following into it:
---
layout: recipe
title: Gingerbread
recipe-attribution: HungryJenny
recipe-attribution-link: http://www.opensourcefood.com/people/HungryJenny/recipes/soft-christmas-gingerbread-cookies
---
Makes about 15 small cookies.
## Ingredients
* 175g plain flour
* 90g brown sugar
* 50g unsalted butter, diced, at room temperature
* 2 tbsp golden syrup
* 1 egg, beaten
* 1 tsp ground ginger
* 1 tsp cinnamon
* 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
* Icing sugar to dust
## Method
1. Sift the flour, ginger, cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl.
2. Use your fingers to rub in the diced butter. Mix in the sugar.
3. Mix the egg with the syrup then pour into the flour mixture. Fold in well to form a dough.
4. Tip some flour onto the work surface and knead the dough until smooth.
5. Preheat the oven to 180°C.
6. Roll the dough out flat and use a shaped cutter to make as many cookies as you like.
7. Transfer the cookies to a tray and bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Lightly dust the cookies with icing sugar.
The content is in Markdown, and when we hit Save, it’ll be converted into HTML in the _site folder. Save the file, and go to http://localhost:4000/christmas-recipes/gingerbread.html in your favourite browser.
As you can see, the Markdown content has been converted into HTML, and the attribution text and link has been inserted in the right place.
Add some navigation
In your _includes folder, create a new file called nav.html. Here is some code that will generate your navigation:
<nav class="nav-primary" role="navigation" >
<ul>
{% for p in site.pages %}
<li>
<a {% if p.url == page.url %}class="active"{% endif %} href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ p.url }}">{{ p.title }}</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</nav>
This is going to look for all pages and generate a list of them, and give the navigation item that is currently active a class of active so we can style it differently.
Now we need to include that navigation snippet in our layout. Paste {% include nav.html %} in default.html file, under {{ content }}.
Push the changes to GitHub Pages
Now we’ve got a couple of pages, it’s time to push our changes to GitHub. We can do this in exactly the same way as before. Check your special GitHub URL (your-username.github.io/your-project-name) and you should see your site up and running.
If you quit Terminal, don’t forget to run jekyll serve --watch from within the directory the next time you want to work on the files.
Next steps
Now we know the basics of creating Jekyll templates and publishing them as GitHub Pages, we can have some fun adding more pages and styling them up.
Here’s one I made earlier
I’ve only been using Jekyll for a matter of weeks, mainly for prototyping. It’s really good as a content management system for blogs, and a lot of people host their Jekyll blogs on GitHub, such as Harry Roberts
By hosting the code so openly it will make me take more pride in it and allow me to work on it much more easily; no excuses now!
Overall, the documentation for Jekyll feels a little sparse and geared more towards blogs than other sites, but as more people discover the benefits of it, I’m sure this will improve over time.
If you’re interested in poking about with some code, all the files from this tutorial are available on GitHub. |
2013 |
Anna Debenham |
annadebenham |
2013-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/get-started-with-github-pages/ |
|
| 163 |
Get To Grips with Slippy Maps |
Online mapping has definitely hit mainstream. Google Maps made ‘slippy maps’ popular and made it easy for any developer to quickly add a dynamic map to his or her website. You can now find maps for store locations, friends nearby, upcoming events, and embedded in blogs.
In this tutorial we’ll show you how to easily add a map to your site using the Mapstraction mapping library. There are many map providers available to choose from, each with slightly different functionality, design, and terms of service. Mapstraction makes deciding which provider to use easy by allowing you to write your mapping code once, and then easily switch providers.
Assemble the pieces
Utilizing any of the mapping library typically consists of similar overall steps:
Create an HTML div to hold the map
Include the Javascript libraries
Create the Javascript Map element
Set the initial map center and zoom level
Add markers, lines, overlays and more
Create the Map Div
The HTML div is where the map will actually show up on your page. It needs to have a unique id, because we’ll refer to that later to actually put the map here. This also lets you have multiple maps on a page, by creating individual divs and Javascript map elements. The size of the div also sets the height and width of the map. You set the size using CSS, either inline with the element, or via a CSS reference to the element id or class. For this example, we’ll use inline styling.
<div id="map" style="width: 400px; height: 400px;"></div>
Include Javascript libraries
A mapping library is like any Javascript library. You need to include the library in your page before you use the methods of that library. For our tutorial, we’ll need to include at least two libraries: Mapstraction, and the mapping API(s) we want to display. Our first example we’ll use the ubiquitous Google Maps library. However, you can just as easily include Yahoo, MapQuest, or any of the other supported libraries.
Another important aspect of the mapping libraries is that many of them require an API key. You will need to agree to the terms of service, and get an API key these.
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=YOUR_KEY" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mapstraction.com/src/mapstraction.js"></script>
Create the Map
Great, we’ve now put in all the pieces we need to start actually creating our map. This is as simple as creating a new Mapstraction object with the id of the HTML div we created earlier, and the name of the mapping provider we want to use for this map.
With several of the mapping libraries you will need to set the map center and zoom level before the map will appear. The map centering actually triggers the initialization of the map.
var mapstraction = new Mapstraction('map','google');
var myPoint = new LatLonPoint(37.404,-122.008);
mapstraction.setCenterAndZoom(myPoint, 10);
A note about zoom levels. The setCenterAndZoom function takes two parameters, the center as a LatLonPoint, and a zoom level that has been defined by mapping libraries. The current usage is for zoom level 1 to be “zoomed out”, or view the entire earth – and increasing the zoom level as you zoom in. Typically 17 is the maximum zoom, which is about the size of a house.
Different mapping providers have different quality of zoomed in maps over different parts of the world. This is a perfect reason why using a library like Mapstraction is very useful, because you can quickly change mapping providers to accommodate users in areas that have bad coverage with some maps.
To switch providers, you just need to include the Javascript library, and then change the second parameter in the Mapstraction creation. Or, you can call the switch method to dynamically switch the provider.
So for Yahoo Maps (demo):
var mapstraction = new Mapstraction('map','yahoo');
or Microsoft Maps (demo):
var mapstraction = new Mapstraction('map','microsoft');
want a 3D globe in your browser? try FreeEarth (demo):
var mapstraction = new Mapstraction('map','freeearth');
or even OpenStreetMap (free your data!) (demo):
var mapstraction = new Mapstraction('map','openstreetmap');
Visit the Mapstraction multiple map demo page for an example of how easy it is to have many maps on your page, each with a different provider.
Adding Markers
While adding your first map is fun, and you can probably spend hours just sliding around, the point of adding a map to your site is usually to show the location of something. So now you want to add some markers. There are a couple of ways to add to your map.
The simplest is directly creating markers. You could either hard code this into a rather static page, or dynamically generate these using whatever tools your site is built on.
var marker = new Marker( new LatLonPoint(37.404,-122.008) );
marker.setInfoBubble("It's easy to add maps to your site");
mapstraction.addMarker( marker );
There is a lot more you can do with markers, including changing the icon, adding timestamps, automatically opening the bubble, or making them draggable.
While it is straight-forward to create markers one by one, there is a much easier way to create a large set of markers. And chances are, you can make it very easy by extending some data you already are sharing: RSS.
Specifically, using GeoRSS you can easily add a large set of markers directly to a map. GeoRSS is a community built standard (like Microformats) that added geographic markup to RSS and Atom entries. It’s as simple as adding <georss:point>42 -83</georss:point> to your feeds to share items via GeoRSS. Once you’ve done that, you can add that feed as an ‘overlay’ to your map using the function:
mapstraction.addOverlay("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=322338@N20&format=rss_200&georss=1");
Mapstraction also supports KML for many of the mapping providers. So it’s easy to add various data sources together with your own data. Check out Mapufacture for a growing index of available GeoRSS feeds and KML documents.
Play with your new toys
Mapstraction offers a lot more functionality you can utilize for demonstrating a lot of geographic data on your website. It also includes geocoding and routing abstraction layers for making sure your users know where to go. You can see more on the Mapstraction website: http://mapstraction.com. |
2007 |
Andrew Turner |
andrewturner |
2007-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/get-to-grips-with-slippy-maps/ |
code |
| 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
250
A problem with using vw in this manner is the difference in text block proportions between portrait and landscape devices. Because the font size is based on the viewport width, the text on a landscape display is far bigger than when rendered on the same device held in a portrait orientation.
Landscape text is much bigger than portrait text when using vw units.
The proportions of the display text relative to the screen are so dissimilar that each orientation has its own different character, losing the inconsistency and considered design you would want when designing to make an impression.
However if the text was the same size in both orientations, the visual effect would be much more consistent. This where vmin comes into its own. Set the font size using vmin and the size is now set as a proportion of the smallest side of the viewport, giving you a far more consistent rendering.
h1 {
font-size: 13vmin;
}
Landscape text is consistent with portrait text when using vmin units.
Comparing vw and vmin renderings for various common screen dimensions, you can see how using vmin keeps the text size down to a usable magnitude:
Rendered font size (px)
Viewport
13 vw
13 vmin
320 × 480
42
42
414 × 736
54
54
768 × 1024
100
100
1024 × 768
133
100
1280 × 720
166
94
1366 × 768
178
100
1440 × 900
187
117
1680 × 1050
218
137
1920 × 1080
250
140
2560 × 1440
333
187
Hybrid font sizing
Using vertical media queries to set text in direct proportion to screen dimensions works well when sizing display text. In can be less desirable when sizing supporting text such as sub-headings, which you may not want to scale upwards at the same rate as the display text. For example, we can size a subheading using vmin so that it starts at 16 px on smaller screens and scales up in the same way as the main heading:
h1 {
font-size: 13vmin;
}
h2 {
font-size: 5vmin;
}
Using vmin alone for supporting text can scale it too quickly
The balance of display text to supporting text on the phone works well, but the subheading text on the tablet, even though it has been increased in line with the main heading, is starting to feel disproportionately large and a little clumsy. This problem becomes magnified on even bigger screens.
A solution to this is use a hybrid method of sizing text2. We can use the CSS calc() function to calculate a font size simultaneously based on both rems and viewport units. For example:
h2 {
font-size: calc(0.5rem + 2.5vmin);
}
For a 320 px wide screen, the font size will be 16 px, calculated as follows:
(0.5 × 16) + (320 × 0.025) = 8 + 8 = 16px
For a 768 px wide screen, the font size will be 27 px:
(0.5 × 16) + (768 × 0.025) = 8 + 19 = 27px
This results in a more balanced subheading that doesn’t take emphasis away from the main heading:
To give you an idea of the effect of using a hybrid approach, here’s a side-by-side comparison of hybrid and viewport text sizing:
table.ex--scale{width:100%;overflow: hidden;} table.ex--scale td{vertical-align:baseline;text-align:center;padding:0} tr.ex--scale-key{color:#666} tr.ex--scale-key td{font-size:.875rem;padding:0 0.125em} .ex--scale-2 tr.ex--scale-size{color:#ccc} tr.ex--scale-size td{font-size:1em;line-height:.34em;padding-bottom:.5rem} td.ex--scale-step{color:#000} td.ex--scale-hilite{color:red} .ex--scale-3 tr.ex--scale-size td{line-height:.9em}
top: calc() hybrid method; bottom: vmin only
16
20
27
32
35
40
44
16
24
38
48
54
64
72
320
480
768
960
1080
1280
1440
Over this festive period, try experiment with the proportion of rem and vmin in your hybrid calculation to see what feels best for your particular setting.
A reference pixel is based on the logical resolution of a device which takes into account double density screens such as Retina displays. ↩︎
For even more sophisticated uses of hybrid text sizing see the work of Mike Riethmuller. ↩︎ |
2016 |
Richard Rutter |
richardrutter |
2016-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/responsive-display-text/ |
code |
| 206 |
Getting Hardboiled with CSS Custom Properties |
Custom Properties are a fabulous new feature of CSS and have widespread support in contemporary browsers. But how do we handle browsers without support for CSS Custom Properties? Do we wait until those browsers are lying dead in a ditch before we use them? Do we tool up and prop up our CSS using a post-processor? Or do we get tough? Do we get hardboiled?
Previously only pre-processing tools like LESS and Sass enabled developers to use variables in their stylesheets, but now Custom Properties have brought variables natively to CSS.
How do you write a custom property? It’s hardly a mystery. Simply add two dashes to the start of a style rule. Like this:
--color-text-default : black;
If you’re more the underscore type, try this:
--color_text_default : black;
Hyphens or underscores are allowed in property names, but don’t be a chump and try to use spaces.
Custom property names are also case-sensitive, so --color-text-default and --Color_Text_Default are two distinct properties.
To use a custom property in your style rules, var() tells a browser to retrieve the value of a property. In the next example, the browser retrieves the black colour from the color-text-default variable and applies it to the body element:
body {
color : var(--color-text-default);
}
Like variables in LESS or Sass, CSS Custom Properties mean you don’t have to be a dumb mug and repeat colour, font, or size values multiple times in your stylesheets. Unlike a preprocessor variable though, CSS Custom Properties use the cascade, can be modified by media queries and other state changes, and can also be manipulated by Javascript.
(Serg Hospodarets wrote a fabulous primer on CSS Custom Properties where he dives deeper into the code and possible applications.)
Browser support
Now it’s about this time that people normally mention browser support. So what about support for CSS Custom Properties? Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari are all good. Internet Explorer 11 and before? Opera Mini? Nasty.
Sound familiar?
Can I Use css-variables? Data on support for the css-variables feature across the major browsers from caniuse.com.
Not to worry, we can manually check for Custom Property support in a browser by using an @support directive, like this:
--color-text-default : black;
body {
color : black;
}
@supports ((--foo : bar)) {
body {
color : var(--color-text-default);
}
}
In that example we first set body element text to black and then override that colour with a Custom Property value when the browser supports our fictitious foo bar variable.
Substitutions
If we reference a variable that hasn’t been defined, that won’t be a problem as browsers are smart enough to ignore the value altogether. If we need a cast iron alibi, use substitutions to specify a fall-back value.
body {
color : var(--color-text-default, black);
}
Substitutions are similar to font stacks in that they contain a comma separated list of values. If there’s no value associated with a property, a browser will ignore it and move onto the next value in the list.
Post-processing
Of course we could use a post-processor plugin to turn Custom Properties into plain CSS, but hang on one goddam minute kiddo.
Haven’t we been down this road before? Didn’t we engineer elaborate workarounds to enable us to use ‘advanced’ CSS3 properties like border-radius, CSS columns, and Flexbox in the past? We did what we had to do to get the job done, but came away feeling dirty.
I think there’s a better way, one that allows us to enjoy the benefits of CSS Custom Properties in browsers that support them, while providing an appropriate, but not identical experience, for people who use less capable browsers. Guess what, I’ve been down this road before too.
2Tone Stuff & Nonsense
When Internet Explorer 6 was the big dumb browser everyone hated, I served two different designs on my website.
For the modern browsers of the time, mod arrows and targets were everywhere in glorious red, white, and blue, and I implemented all of them using CSS attribute selectors which were considered advanced at the time:
[class="banner"] {
background-colour : red;
}
Internet Explorer 6 ignored any selectors it didn’t understand, so people using that browser saw a simpler black and white, 2Tone-based design that I’d implemented for them using class selectors:
.banner {
background-colour : black;
}
[class="banner"] {
background-colour : red;
}
You don’t have to be a detective to find out that most people thought I’d lost my wits, but Microsoft even used my website as a reference when they tested attribute selectors in Internet Explorer 7. They did, as I suggested, “Stomp to da betta browser.”
Dumb browsers look the other way
So how does this approach relate to tackling any lack of support for CSS Custom Properties? How can we take advantage of them without worrying about browsers with no support and having to implement complex workarounds, or spending hours specifying fallbacks that perfectly match our designs?
Turns out, the answer is built into CSS, and always has been, because when browsers don’t know what they’re looking at, they look away.
All we have to do is first specify values for a simpler design first, and then follow that up with the values in our CSS Custom Properties:
body {
color : black;
color : var(--color-text-default, black);
}
All browsers understand the first value (black,) and if they‘re smart enough to understand the second (var(--color-text-default)), they’ll use it and override the first. If they’re too damn stupid to understand the custom property value, they’ll ignore it. Nobody dies.
Repeat this for every style that contains a variable, baking an alternative, perhaps simpler design into your stylesheets for people who use less capable browsers, just like I did with Stuff & Nonsense.
Conclusion
I doubt that anyone agrees with presenting a design that looks broken or unloved—and I’m not advocating for that—but websites need not look the same in every browser. We can use substitutions to present a simpler design to people using less capable browsers.
The decision when to start using new CSS properties isn‘t always a technical one. Sometimes a change in attitude about browser support is all that’s required. So get tough with dumb browsers and benefit from all the advantages that CSS Custom Properties offer. Get hardboiled.
Resources:
It’s Time To Start Using CSS Custom Properties—Smashing Magazine
Using CSS variables correctly—Mike Riethmuller
Developing Inspired Guides with CSS Custom Properties (variables)—Andy Clarke |
2017 |
Andy Clarke |
andyclarke |
2017-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/getting-hardboiled-with-css-custom-properties/ |
code |
| 268 |
Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics |
Something a bit different for today’s 24 ways article. For starters, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m an evil man who sells things to people on the internet. Second, this article will likely be a little more nebulous than you’re used to, since it covers quite a number of points in a relatively short space.
This isn’t going to be the complete Google Analytics Conversion University IQ course compressed into a single article, obviously. What it will be, however, is a primer on setting up and using Google Analytics in real life, and a great deal of what I’ve learned using Google Analytics nearly every working day for the past six (crikey!) years.
Also, to be clear, I’ll be referencing new Google Analytics here; old Google Analytics is for loooosers (and those who want reliable e-commerce conversion data per site search term, natch).
You may have been running your Analytics account for several years now, dipping in and out, checking traffic levels, seeing what’s popular… and that’s about it. Google Analytics provides so much more than that, but the number of reports available can often intimidate users, and documentation and case studies on their use are minimal at best.
Let’s start! Setting up your Analytics profile
Before we plough on, I just want to run through a quick checklist that some basic settings have been enabled for your profile. If you haven’t clicked it, click the big cog on the top-right of Google Analytics and we’ll have a poke about.
If you have an e-commerce site, e-commerce tracking has been enabled
If your site has a search function, site search tracking has been enabled.
Query string parameters that you do not want tracked as separate pages have been excluded (for example, any parameters needed for your platform to function, otherwise you’ll get multiple entries for the same page appearing in your reports)
Filters have been enabled on your main profile to exclude your office IP address and any IPs of people who frequently access the site for work purposes. In decent numbers they tend to throw data off a tad.
You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segments. For example, at Lovehoney we have seventeen separate profiles that allow me quick access to certain countries, devices and traffic sources without having to segment first. You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles that only include, say, mobile visits, or UK visitors, so you can quickly analyse important segments.
Matt, what’s a segment?
A segment is a subsection of your visitor base, which you define and then call on in reports to see specific data for that subsection. For example, in this report I’ve defined two segments, the first for IE6 users and the second for IE7.
Segments are easily created by clicking the Advanced Segments tabs at the top of any report and clicking +New Custom Segment.
What does your site do?
Understanding the goals of your site is an oft-covered topic, but it’s necessary not just to form a better understand of your business and prioritize your time. Understanding what you wish visitors to do on your site translates well into a goal-driven analytics package like Google Analytics.
Every site exists essentially to sell something, either financially through e-commerce, or to sell an idea or impart information, get people to download a CV or enquire about service, or to sell space on that website to advertisers. If the site did not provide a positive benefit to its owners, it would not have a reason for being.
Once you have understood the reason why you have a site, you can map that reason on to one of the three goal types Google Analytics provides.
E-commerce
This conversion type registers transactions as part of a sales process which requires a monetary value, what products have been bought, an SKU (stock keeping unit), affiliation (if you’re then attributing the sale to a third party or franchise) and so on.
The benefit of e-commerce tracking is not only assigning non-arbitrary monetary value to behaviour of visitors on your site, as well as being able to see ancillary costs such as shipping, but seeing product-level information, like which products are preferred from various channels, popular categories, and so on.
However, I find the e-commerce tracking options also useful for non-e-commerce sites. For example, if you’re offering downloads or subscriptions and having an email address or user’s details is worth something to you, you can set up e-commerce tracking to understand how much value your site is bringing. For example, an email address might be worth 20p to you, but if it also includes a name it’s worth 50p. A contact telephone number is worth £2, and so on.
Page goals
Page goals, unsurprisingly, track a visit to a page (often with a sequence of pages leading up to that page). This is what’s referred to as a goal funnel, and is generally used to track how visitors behave in a multistep checkout.
Interestingly, the page doesn’t have to actually exist. For example, if you have a single page checkout, you can register virtual page views using trackPageview() when a visitor clicks into a particular section of the checkout or other form. If your site is geared towards getting someone to a particular page, but where there isn’t a transaction (for example, a subscription page) this is for you.
There are also behavioural goals, such as time on site and number of pages viewed, which are geared towards sites that make money from advertising.
But, going back to the page goals, these can be abstracted using regular expressions, meaning that you can define a funnel based on page type rather than having to set individual folders.
In this example, I’ve created regexes for the main page types on my site, so I can create a wide funnel that captures visitors from where they enter through to checkout.
Events
Event tracking registers a predefined event, such as playing a video, or some interaction that can trigger JavaScript, such as a Tweet This button. Events can then be triggered using the trackEvent() call. If you want someone to complete watching a video, you would code your player to fire trackEvent() upon completion.
While I don’t use events as goals, I use events elsewhere to see how well a video play aids to conversion. This not only helps me justify the additional spend on creating video content, but also quickly highlights which videos are underperforming as sales tools.
What a visitor can tell you
Now you have some proper goals set up, we can start to see how changes in content (on-site and external) affect those goals.
Ultimately, when a visitor comes to your site, they bring information with them:
where they came from (a search engine – including: keyword searched for; a referral; direct; affiliate; or ad campaign)
demographics (country; whether they’re new or returning, within thirty days)
technical information (browser; screen size; device; bandwidth)
site-specific information (landing page; next click; previous values assigned to them as custom variables*)
* A note about custom variables. There’s no hope in hell that I can cover custom variables in this article. Go research them. Custom variables are the single best way to hack Google Analytics and bend it to your will. Custom variables allow you to record anything you want about a visitor, which that visitor will then carry around with them between visits. It’s also great for plugging other services into Google Analytics (as shown by the marvelous way Visual Website Optimizer allows you to track and segment tests within the GA interface). Just make sure not to breach the terms of service, eh?
CSI your website
Police procedural TV shows are all the same: the investigators are called to a crime and come across a clue; there’s then an autopsy; new evidence leads them to a new location; they find a new clue; they put two and two together; they solve the mystery.
This is your life now. Exciting!
So, now you’re gathering a wealth of information about what sort of people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and what eventually gets them to drive value to you. It’s now your job to investigate all these little clues to see which types of people drive the most value, and what you can change to improve it.
Maybe not that exciting.
However, Google Analytics comes pre-armed with extensive reports for you to delve into. As an e-commerce guy (as opposed to a page goal guy) my day pretty much follows the pattern below.
Look at e-commerce conversion rate by traffic source compared to the same day in the previous week and previous month. As ours is an e-commerce site, we have weekly and monthly trends. A big spike on Sundays and Mondays, and payday towards the end of the month is always good; on the third week of a month there tends to be a lull. Spend time letting your Google Analytics data brew, understand your own trends and patterns, and you’ll start to get a feel for when something isn’t quite right.
Traffic Sources → Sources → All Traffic
Look at the conversion rate by landing page for any traffic source that feels significantly different to what’s expected. Check bounce rates, drill down to likely landing pages and check search keyword or referral site to see if it’s a particular subset of visitor. You can do this by clicking Secondary Dimension and choosing Keyword or Source. If it’s direct, choose Visitor Type to break down by new or returning visitor.
Content → Site Content → Landing Pages
I then tend to flip into Content Drilldown to see what the next clicks were from those landing pages, and whether they changed significantly to the date I’m comparing with. If they have, that’s usually an indicator of changed content (or its relevancy). Remember, if a bunch of people have found their way to your page via a method you’re not expecting (such as a mention on a Spanish radio station – this actually happened to me once), while the content hasn’t changed, the relevancy of it to the audience may have.
Content → Site Content → Content Drilldown
Once I have an idea of what content was consumed, and whether it was relevant to the user, I then look at the visitor specifics, such as browser or demographic data, to see again whether the change was limited to a specific subset. Site speed, for example, is normally a good factor towards bounce rate, so compare that with previous data as well.
Now, to be investigating at this level you still need a serious amount of data, in order to tell what’s a significant change or not. If you’re struggling with a small number of visitors, you might find reporting on a weekly or fortnightly basis more appropriate.
However, once you’ve looked into the basics of why changes happen to the value of your site, you’ll soon find yourself limited by the reports offered in Standard Reporting. So, it’s time to build your own. Hooray!
Custom reporting
Google Analytics provides the tools to build reports specific to the types of investigations you frequently perform.
Welcome to my world.
Custom reports are quite simple to build: first, you determine the metric you want the report to cover (number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on), then choose a set of dimensions that you’d like to segment the report by (say, the source of the traffic, and whether they were new or returning users). You can filter the report, including or excluding particular dimension values, and you can assign the report to any of the profiles you created earlier.
In the example below, I’ve created a report that shows me visits and conversion rate for any Google traffic that landed directly only on a product page. I can then drill down on each product page to see the complete phrases use to search. I can use this information in two ways:
I can see which products aren’t converting, which shows me where I need to work harder on merchandising.
I can give this information to my content team, showing them the actual phrases visitors used to reach our product content, helping them write better targeted product descriptions.
The possibilities here are nearly endless, but here are a few examples of reports I find useful:
Non-brand inbound search
By creating a report that shows inbound search traffic which doesn’t include your brand, you can see more clearly the behaviour of visitors most likely to be unfamiliar with your site and brand values, without having to rely on the clumsy new or returning demographic date.
Traffic/conversion/sales by hour
This is pure stats porn, but actually more useful than real-time data. By seeing this data broken down at an hourly level, you can not only compare the current day to previous days, but also see the best performing times for email broadcasts and tweets.
Visits, load time, conversion and sales by page and browser
Page speed can often kill conversion rates, but it’s difficult to prove the value of focusing on speed in monetary terms. Having this report to hand helps me drive Operation Greenbelt, our effort to get into the sub-1.5 second band in Google Webmaster Tools.
Useful things you can’t do in custom reporting
If you have a search function on your website, then Conversion Rate and Products Bought by Site Search Term is an incredibly useful report that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine at returning products and content related to the search term used. By including the products actually bought by visitors who searched for each term, you can use this information to better searchandise these results, escalating high propensity and high value products to the top of the results.
However, it’s not possible to get this information out of new Google Analytics.
Try it, select the following in the report builder:
Metrics: total unique searches; e-commerce or goal conversion rate
Dimensions: search term; product
You’ll see that the data returned is a little nonsensical, though a 2,000% conversion rate would be nice. However, you can get more accurate information using advanced segments. By creating individual segments to define users who have searched for a particular term, you can run the sales performance and product performance reports as normal. It’s laborious, but it teaches a good lesson: data that seems inaccessible can normally be found another way!
Reporting infrastructure
Now that you have a series of reports that you can refer to on a daily or weekly basis, it’s time to put together a regular reporting infrastructure.
Even if you’re not reporting to someone, having a set of key performance indicators that you can use to see how your performance is improving over time allows you to set yourself business goals on a monthly and annual basis.
For my own reporting, I take some high-level metrics (such as visitors, conversion rate and average order value), and segment them by traffic source and, separately, landing page. These statistics I record weekly and report:
current week compared with previous week
same week previous year (if available)
4 week average
13 week average
52 week average (if available)
This takes into account weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual trends, and gives you a much clearer view of your performance.
Getting data in other ways
If you’re using Google Analytics frequently, with any large site you’ll come to a couple of conclusions:
Doing any kind of practical comparative analysis is unwieldy.
Boy, Google Analytics is slow!
As you work with bigger datasets and put together more complex queries, you’ll see the loading graphic more than you’ll see actual data. So when you reach that level, there are ways to completely bypass the Google Analytics interface altogether, and get data into your own spreadsheet application for manipulation.
Data Feed Query Explorer
If you just want to pull down some quick statistics but still use complex filters and exotic metric and dimension combinations, the Data Feed Query Explorer is the quickest way of doing so. Authenticate with your Google Analytics account, select a profile, and you can start selecting metrics and dimensions to be generated in a handy, selectable tabulated format.
Google Analytics API
If you’re feeling clever, you can bypass having to copy and paste data by pulling in directly into Excel, Google Docs or your own application using the Google Analytics API. There are several scripts and plugins available to do this. I use Automate Analytics Google Docs code (there’s also a paid version that simplifies setup and creates some handy reports for you).
New shiny things
Well, now that that’s over, I can show you some cool stuff. Well, at least it’s cool to me. Google Analytics is being constantly improved and new functionality is introduced nearly every month. Here are a couple of my favourites.
Multichannel attribution
Not every visitor converts on your site on the first visit. They may not even do so on the second visit, or third. If they convert on the fourth visit, but each time they visit they do so via a different channel (for example, Search PPC, Search Organic, Direct, Email), which channel do you attribute the conversion to? The last channel, or the first? Dilemma!
Google now has a Multichannel Attribution report, available in the Conversion category, which shows how each channel assists in converting, the overlap between channels, and where in the process that channel was important.
For example, you may have analysed your blog traffic from Twitter and become disheartened that not many people were subscribing after visiting from Twitter links, but instead your high-value subscribers were coming from natural search. On the face of it, you’d spend less time tweeting, but a multichannel report may tell you that visitors first arrived via a Twitter link and didn’t subscribe, but then came back later after searching for your blog name on Google, after which they did. Don’t pack Twitter in yet!
Visitor and goal flow
Visitor and goal flow are amazing reports that help you visualize the flow of traffic through your site and, ultimately, into your checkout funnel or similar goal path. Flow reports are perfect for understanding drop-off points in your process, as well as what the big draws are on each page.
Previously, if you wanted to visualize this data you had to set up several abstracted microgoals and chain them together in custom reports. Frankly, it was a pain in the arse and burned through your precious and limited goal allocation.
Visitor flow bypasses all that and produces the report in an interactive flow diagram. While it doesn’t show you the holy grail of conversion likelihood by each path, you can segment visitor flow so that you can see very specifically how different segments of your visitor base behave.
Go play with it now! |
2011 |
Matt Curry |
mattcurry |
2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/ |
business |
| 118 |
Ghosts On The Internet |
By rights the internet should be full of poltergeists, poor rootless things looking for their real homes. Many events on the internet are not properly associated with their correct timeframe. I don’t mean a server set to the wrong time, though that happens too. Much of the content published on the internet is separated from any proper reference to its publication time. What does publication even mean? Let me tell you a story…
“It is 2019 and this is Kathy Clees reporting on the story of the moment, the shock purchase of Microsoft by Apple Inc. A Internet Explorer security scare story from 2008 was responsible, yes from 11 years ago, accidently promoted by an analyst, who neglected to check the date of their sources.”
If you think this is fanciful nonsense, then cast your mind back to September 2008, this story in Wired or The Times (UK) about a huge United Airlines stock tumble. A Florida newspaper had a automated popular story section. A random reader looking at a story about United’s 2002 Bankruptcy proceedings caused this story to get picked up by Google’s later visit to the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s news home page.
The story was undated, Google’s news engine apparently gave it a 2008 date, an analyst picked it up and pushed it to Bloomberg and within minutes the United stock was tumbling. Their stock price dropped from $12 to $3, then recovered to $11 over the day. An eight percent fall in share price over a mis-configured date
Completing this out of order Christmas Carol, lets look at what is current practice and how dates are managed, we might even get to clank some chains. Publication date used to be inseparable from publication, the two things where stamped on the same piece of paper. How can we determine when things have been published, now?
Determining publication dates
Time as defined by http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime extends ISO 8601, mandating the use of a year value. This is pretty well defined, we can even get very accurate timings down to milliseconds, Ruby and other languages can even handle Calendar reformation. So accuracy is not the issue.
One problem is that there are many dates which could be interpreted as the publication date. Publication can mean any of date written or created; date placed on server; last modified date; or the current date from the web server. Created and modified have parallels with file systems, but the large number of database driven websites means that this no longer holds much meaning, as there are no longer any files.
Checking web server HEAD may also not correspond, it might give the creation time for the HTML file you are viewing or it might give the last modified time for a file from disk. It is too unreliable and lacking in context to be of real value. So if the web server will not help, then how can we get the right timeframe for our content?
We are left with URLs and the actual page content.
Looking at Flickr, this picture (by Douglas County History Research Center) has four date values which can be associated with it. It was taken around 1900, scanned in 1992 and placed on Flickr on July 29th, 2008 and replaced later that day. Which dates should be represented here?
This is hard question to answer, but currently the date of upload to Flickr is the best represented in terms of the date URL, /photos/douglascountyhistory/archives/date-posted/2008/07/29/, plus some Dublin Core RDF for the year. Flickr uses 2008 as the value for this image. Not accurate, but a reasonable compromise for the millions of other images on their site.
Flickr represents location much better than it represents time. For the most part this is fine, but once you go back in time to the 1800s then the maps of the world start to change a lot and you need to reference both time and place.
The Google timeline search offers another interesting window on the world, showing results organised by decade for any search term. Being able to jump to a specific occurrence of a term makes it easier to get primary results rather than later reporting.
The 1918 “Spanish flu” results jump out in this timeline.
Any major news event will have multiple analysis articles after the event, finding the original reporting of hurricane Katrina is harder now. Many publishers are putting older content online, e.g. Harpers or Nature or The Times, often these use good date based URLs, sometimes they are unhelpful database references. If this content is available for free, then how much better would it be to provide good metadata on date of publication.
Date based URLs
A quick word on date based URLs, they can be brilliant at capturing first published date. However they can be hard to interpret. Is /03/04 a date in March or April, what about 08/03/04? Obviously 2008/03/04 is easier to understand, it is probably March 4th. Including a proper timestamp in the page content avoid this kind of guesswork.
Many sites represent the date as a plain text string; a few hook an HTML class of date around it, a very few provide an actual timestamp. Associating the date with the individual content makes it harder to get the date wrong.
Movable Type and TypePad are a notable exceptions, they will embed Dublin Core RDF to represent each posting e.g. dc:date="2008-12-18T02:57:28-08:00". WordPress doesn’t support date markup out of the box, though there is a patch and a howto for hAtom available.
In terms of newspapers, the BBC use <meta name="OriginalPublicationDate" content="2008/12/18 18:52:05" /> along with opaque URLs such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7787335.stm.
The Guardian use nice clear URLs http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/18/car-industry-recession but have no marked up date on the page.
The New York Times are similar to the Guardian with nice URLs, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/business/19markets.html, but again no timestamps. All of these papers have all the data available, but it is not marked up in a useful manner.
Syndication formats
Syndication formats are better at supporting dates, RSS uses RFC 822 for dates, just like email so dates such as Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:52:40 GMT are valid, with all the white space issues that entails.
The Atom syndication format uses the much clearer http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339 with timestamps of the form 1996-12-19T16:39:57-08:00. Both syndication formats encourage the use of last modified. This is understandable, but a pity as published date is a very useful value. The Atom syndication format supports “published” and mandates “updated” as timestamps, see the Atom RFC 4287 for more detail.
Marking up dates
However the aim of this short article is to encourage you to use microformats or RDF to encode dates. A good example of this is Twitter, they use hAtom for each individual entry, http://twitter.com/zzgavin/status/1065835819 contains the following markup, which represents a human and a machine readable version of the time of that tweet.
<span class="published" title="2008-12-18T22:01:27+00:00">about 3 hours ago</span>
The spec for datetime is still draft at the minute and there is still ongoing conversation around the right format and semantics for representing date and time in microformats, see the datetime design pattern for details.
The hAtom example page shows the minimal changes required to implement hAtom on well formed blog post content and for other less well behaved content. You have the information already in your content publication systems, this is not some additional onerous content entry task, simply some template formatting.
I started to see this as a serious issue after reading Stewart Brand’s Clock of the Long Now about five years ago. Brand’s book explores the issues of short term thinking that permeate our society, thinking beyond the end of the financial year is a stretch for many people. The Long Now has a world view of a 10,000 year timeframe, see http://longnow.org/ for much more information. Freebase from Long Now Board member Danny Hillis, supports dates quite well – see the entry for A Christmas Carol.
In conclusion
I feel we should be making it easier for people searching for our content in the future. We’ve moved through tagging content and on to geo-tagging content. Now it is time to get the timestamps right on our content. How do I know when something happened and how can I find other things that happened at the same time is a fair question. This should be something I can satisfy simply and easily. There are a range of tools available to us in either hAtom or RDF to specify time accurately alongside the content, so what is stopping you?
Thinking of the long term it is hard for us to know now what will be of relevance for future generations, so we should aim to raise the floor for publishing tools so that all content has the right timeframe associated with it. We are moving from publishing words and pictures on the internet to being able to associate publication with an individual via XFN and OpenID. We can associate place quite well too, the last piece of useful metadata is timeframe. |
2008 |
Gavin Bell |
gavinbell |
2008-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/ghosts-on-the-internet/ |
ux |
| 52 |
Git Rebasing: An Elfin Workshop Workflow |
This year Santa’s helpers have been tasked with making a garland. It’s a pretty simple task: string beads onto yarn in a specific order. When the garland reaches a specific length, add it to the main workshop garland. Each elf has a specific sequence they’re supposed to chain, which is given to them via a work order. (This is starting to sound like one of those horrible calculus problems. I promise it isn’t. It’s worse; it’s about Git.)
For the most part, the system works really well. The elves are able to quickly build up a shared chain because each elf specialises on their own bit of garland, and then links the garland together. Because of this they’re able to work independently, but towards the common goal of making a beautiful garland.
At first the elves are really careful with each bead they put onto the garland. They check with one another before merging their work, and review each new link carefully. As time crunches on, the elves pour a little more cheer into the eggnog cooler, and the quality of work starts to degrade. Tensions rise as mistakes are made and unkind words are said. The elves quickly realise they’re going to need a system to change the beads out when mistakes are made in the chain.
The first common mistake is not looking to see what the latest chain is that’s been added to the main garland. The garland is huge, and it sits on a roll in one of the corners of the workshop. It’s a big workshop, so it is incredibly impractical to walk all the way to the roll to check what the last link is on the chain. The elves, being magical, have set up a monitoring system that allows them to keep a local copy of the main garland at their workstation. It’s an imperfect system though, so the elves have to request a manual refresh to see the latest copy. They can request a new copy by running the command
git pull --rebase=preserve
(They found that if they ran git pull on its own, they ended up with weird loops of extra beads off the main garland, so they’ve opted to use this method.) This keeps the shared garland up to date, which makes things a lot easier. A visualisation of the rebase process is available.
The next thing the elves noticed is that if they worked on the main workshop garland, they were always running into problems when they tried to share their work back with the rest of the workshop. It was fine if they were working late at night by themselves, but in the middle of the day, it was horrible. (I’ve been asked not to talk about that time the fight broke out.) Instead of trying to share everything on their local copy of the main garland, the elves have realised it’s a lot easier to work on a new string and then knot this onto the main garland when their pattern repeat is finished. They generate a new string by issuing the following commands:
git checkout master
git checkout -b 1234_pattern-name
1234 represents the work order number and pattern-name describes the pattern they’re adding. Each bead is then added to the new link (git add bead.txt) and locked into place (git commit). Each elf repeats this process until the sequence of beads described in the work order has been added to their mini garland.
To combine their work with the main garland, the elves need to make a few decisions. If they’re making a single strand, they issue the following commands:
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only 1234_pattern-name
To share their work they publish the new version of the main garland to the workshop spool with the command git push origin master.
Sometimes this fails. Sharing work fails because the workshop spool has gotten new links added since the elf last updated their copy of the main workshop spool. This makes the elves both happy and sad. It makes them happy because it means the other elves have been working too, but it makes them sad because they now need to do a bit of extra work to close their work order.
To update the local copy of the workshop spool, the elf first unlinks the chain they just linked by running the command:
git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD
This works because the garland magic notices when the elves are doing a particularly dangerous thing and places a temporary, invisible bookmark to the last safe bead in the chain before the dangerous thing happened. The garland no longer has the elf’s work, and can be updated safely. The elf runs the command git pull --rebase=preserve and the changes all the other elves have made are applied locally.
With these new beads in place, the elf now has to restring their own chain so that it starts at the right place. To do this, the elf turns back to their own chain (git checkout 1234_pattern-name) and runs the command git rebase master. Assuming their bead pattern is completely unique, the process will run and the elf’s beads will be restrung on the tip of the main workshop garland.
Sometimes the magic fails and the elf has to deal with merge conflicts. These are kind of annoying, so the elf uses a special inspector tool to figure things out. The elf opens the inspector by running the command git mergetool to work through places where their beads have been added at the same points as another elf’s beads. Once all the conflicts are resolved, the elf saves their work, and quits the inspector. They might need to do this a few times if there are a lot of new beads, so the elf has learned to follow this update process regularly instead of just waiting until they’re ready to close out their work order.
Once their link is up to date, the elf can now reapply their chain as before, publish their work to the main workshop garland, and close their work order:
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only 1234_pattern-name
git push origin master
Generally this process works well for the elves. Sometimes, though, when they’re tired or bored or a little drunk on festive cheer, they realise there’s a mistake in their chain of beads. Fortunately they can fix the beads without anyone else knowing. These tools can be applied to the whole workshop chain as well, but it causes problems because the magic assumes that elves are only ever adding to the main chain, not removing or reordering beads on the fly. Depending on where the mistake is, the elf has a few different options.
Let’s pretend the elf has a sequence of five beads she’s been working on. The work order says the pattern should be red-blue-red-blue-red.
If the sequence of beads is wrong (for example, blue-blue-red-red-red), the elf can remove the beads from the chain, but keep the beads in her workstation using the command git reset --soft HEAD~5.
If she’s been using the wrong colours and the wrong pattern (for example, green-green-yellow-yellow-green), she can remove the beads from her chain and discard them from her workstation using the command git reset --hard HEAD~5.
If one of the beads is missing (for example, red-blue-blue-red), she can restring the beads using the first method, or she can use a bit of magic to add the missing bead into the sequence.
Using a tool that’s a bit like orthoscopic surgery, she first selects a sequence of beads which contains the problem. A visualisation of this process is available.
Start the garland surgery process with the command:
git rebase --interactive HEAD~4
A new screen comes up with the following information (the oldest bead is on top):
pick c2e4877 Red bead
pick 9b5555e Blue bead
pick 7afd66b Blue bead
pick e1f2537 Red bead
The elf adjusts the list, changing “pick” to “edit” next to the first blue bead:
pick c2e4877 Red bead
edit 9b5555e Blue bead
pick 7afd66b Blue bead
pick e1f2537 Red bead
She then saves her work and quits the editor. The garland magic has placed her back in time at the moment just after she added the first blue bead.
She needs to manually fix up her garland to add the new red bead. If the beads were files, she might run commands like vim beads.txt and edit the file to make the necessary changes.
Once she’s finished her changes, she needs to add her new bead to the garland (git add --all) and lock it into place (git commit). This time she assigns the commit message “Red bead – added” so she can easily find it.
The garland magic has replaced the bead, but she still needs to verify the remaining beads on the garland. This is a mostly automatic process which is started by running the command git rebase --continue.
The new red bead has been assigned a position formerly held by the blue bead, and so the elf must deal with a merge conflict. She opens up a new program to help resolve the conflict by running git mergetool.
She knows she wants both of these beads in place, so the elf edits the file to include both the red and blue beads.
With the conflict resolved, the elf saves her changes and quits the mergetool.
Back at the command line, the elf checks the status of her work using the command git status.
rebase in progress; onto 4a9cb9d
You are currently rebasing branch '2_RBRBR' on '4a9cb9d'.
(all conflicts fixed: run "git rebase --continue")
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
modified: beads.txt
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
beads.txt.orig
She removes the file added by the mergetool with the command rm beads.txt.orig and commits the edits she just made to the bead file using the commands:
git add beads.txt
git commit --message "Blue bead -- resolved conflict"
With the conflict resolved, the elf is able to continue with the rebasing process using the command git rebase --continue. There is one final conflict the elf needs to resolve. Once again, she opens up the visualisation tool and takes a look at the two conflicting files.
She incorporates the changes from the left and right column to ensure her bead sequence is correct.
Once the merge conflict is resolved, the elf saves the file and quits the mergetool. Once again, she cleans out the backup file added by the mergetool (rm beads.txt.orig) and commits her changes to the garland:
git add beads.txt
git commit --message "Red bead -- resolved conflict"
and then runs the final verification steps in the rebase process (git rebase --continue).
The verification process runs through to the end, and the elf checks her work using the command git log --oneline.
9269914 Red bead -- resolved conflict
4916353 Blue bead -- resolved conflict
aef0d5c Red bead -- added
9b5555e Blue bead
c2e4877 Red bead
She knows she needs to read the sequence from bottom to top (the oldest bead is on the bottom). Reviewing the list she sees that the sequence is now correct.
Sometimes, late at night, the elf makes new copies of the workshop garland so she can play around with the bead sequencer just to see what happens. It’s made her more confident at restringing beads when she’s found real mistakes. And she doesn’t mind helping her fellow elves when they run into trouble with their beads. The sugar cookies they leave her as thanks don’t hurt either. If you would also like to play with the bead sequencer, you can get a copy of the branches the elf worked.
Our lessons from the workshop:
By using rebase to update your branches, you avoid merge commits and keep a clean commit history.
If you make a mistake on one of your local branches, you can use reset to take commits off your branch. If you want to save the work, but uncommit it, add the parameter --soft. If you want to completely discard the work, use the parameter, --hard.
If you have merged working branch changes to the local copy of your master branch and it is preventing you from pushing your work to a remote repository, remove these changes using the command reset with the parameter --merge ORIG_HEAD before updating your local copy of the remote master branch.
If you want to make a change to work that was committed a little while ago, you can use the command rebase with the parameter --interactive. You will need to include how many commits back in time you want to review. |
2015 |
Emma Jane Westby |
emmajanewestby |
2015-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/git-rebasing/ |
code |
| 15 |
Git for Grown-ups |
You are a clever and talented person. You create beautiful designs, or perhaps you have architected a system that even my cat could use. Your peers adore you. Your clients love you. But, until now, you haven’t *&^#^! been able to make Git work. It makes you angry inside that you have to ask your co-worker, again, for that *&^#^! command to upload your work.
It’s not you. It’s Git. Promise.
Yes, this is an article about the popular version control system, Git. But unlike just about every other article written about Git, I’m not going to give you the top five commands that you need to memorize; and I’m not going to tell you all your problems would be solved if only you were using this GUI wrapper or that particular workflow. You see, I’ve come to a grand realization: when we teach Git, we’re doing it wrong.
Let me back up for a second and tell you a little bit about the field of adult education. (Bear with me, it gets good and will leave you feeling both empowered and righteous.) Andragogy, unlike pedagogy, is a learner-driven educational experience. There are six main tenets to adult education:
Adults prefer to know why they are learning something.
The foundation of the learning activities should include experience.
Adults prefer to be able to plan and evaluate their own instruction.
Adults are more interested in learning things which directly impact their daily activities.
Adults prefer learning to be oriented not towards content, but towards problems.
Adults relate more to their own motivators than to external ones.
Nowhere in this list does it include “memorize the five most popular Git commands”. And yet this is how we teach version control: init, add, commit, branch, push. You’re an expert! Sound familiar? In the hierarchy of learning, memorizing commands is the lowest, or most basic, form of learning. At the peak of learning you are able to not just analyze and evaluate a problem space, but create your own understanding in relation to your existing body of knowledge.
“Fine,” I can hear you saying to yourself. “But I’m here to learn about version control.” Right you are! So how can we use this knowledge to master Git? First of all: I give you permission to use Git as a tool. A tool which you control and which you assign tasks to. A tool like a hammer, or a saw. Yes, your mastery of your tools will shape the kinds of interactions you have with your work, and your peers. But it’s yours to control. Git was written by kernel developers for kernel development. The web world has adopted Git, but it is not a tool designed for us and by us. It’s no Sass, y’know? Git wasn’t developed out of our frustration with managing CSS files in an increasingly complex ecosystem of components and atomic design. So, as you work through the next part of this article, give yourself a bit of a break. We’re in this together, and it’s going to be OK.
We’re going to do a little activity. We’re going to create your perfect Git cheatsheet.
I want you to start by writing down a list of all the people on your code team. This list may include:
developers
designers
project managers
clients
Next, I want you to write down a list of all the ways you interact with your team. Maybe you’re a solo developer and you do all the tasks. Maybe you only do a few things. But I want you to write down a list of all the tasks you’re actually responsible for. For example, my list looks like this:
writing code
reviewing code
publishing tested code to your server(s)
troubleshooting broken code
The next list will end up being a series of boxes in a diagram. But to start, I want you to write down a list of your tools and constraints. This list potentially has a lot of noun-like items and verb-like items:
code hosting system (Bitbucket? GitHub? Unfuddle? self-hosted?)
server ecosystem (dev/staging/live)
automated testing systems or review gates
automated build systems (that Jenkins dude people keep referring to)
Brilliant! Now you’ve got your actors and your actions, it’s time to shuffle them into a diagram. There are many popular workflow patterns. None are inherently right or wrong; rather, some are more or less appropriate for what you are trying to accomplish.
Centralized workflow
Everyone saves to a single place. This workflow may mean no version control, or a very rudimentary version control system which only ever has a single copy of the work available to the team at any point in time.
Branching workflow
Everyone works from a copy of the same place, merging their changes into the main copy as their work is completed. Think of the branches as a motorcycle sidecar: they’re along for the ride and probably cannot exist in isolation of the main project for long without serious danger coming to the either the driver or sidecar passenger. Branches are a fundamental concept in version control — they allow you to work on new features, bug fixes, and experimental changes within a single repository, but without forcing the changes onto others working from the same branch.
Forking workflow
Everyone works from their own, independent repository. A fork is an exact duplicate of a repository that a developer can make their own changes to. It can be kept up to date with additional changes made in other repositories, but it cannot force its changes onto another’s repository. A fork is a complete repository which can use its own workflow strategies. If developers wish to merge their work with the main project, they must make a request of some kind (submit a patch, or a pull request) which the project collaborators may choose to adopt or reject. This workflow is popular for open source projects as it enforces a review process.
Gitflow workflow
A specific workflow convention which includes five streams of parallel coding efforts: master, development, feature branches, release branches, and hot fixes. This workflow is often simplified down to a few elements by web teams, but may be used wholesale by software product teams. The original article describing this workflow was written by Vincent Driessen back in January 2010.
But these workflows aren’t about you yet, are they? So let’s make the connections.
From the list of people on your team you identified earlier, draw a little circle. Give each of these circles some eyes and a smile. Now I want you to draw arrows between each of these people in the direction that code (ideally) flows. Does your designer create responsive prototypes which are pushed to the developer? Draw an arrow to represent this.
Chances are high that you don’t just have people on your team, but you also have some kind of infrastructure. Hopefully you wrote about it earlier. For each of the servers and code repositories in your infrastructure, draw a square. Now, add to your diagram the relationships between the people and each of the machines in the infrastructure. Who can deploy code to the live server? How does it really get there? I bet it goes through some kind of code hosting system, such as GitHub. Draw in those arrows.
But wait!
The code that’s on your development machine isn’t the same as the live code. This is where we introduce the concept of a branch in version control. In Git, a repository contains all of the code (sort of). A branch is a fragment of the code that has been worked on in isolation to the other branches within a repository. Often branches will have elements in common. When we compare two (or more) branches, we are asking about the difference (or diff) between these two slivers. Often the master branch is used on production, and the development branch is used on our dev server. The difference between these two branches is the untested code that is not yet deployed.
On your diagram, see if you can colour-code according to the branch names at each of the locations within your infrastructure. You might find it useful to make a few different copies of the diagram to isolate each of the tasks you need to perform. For example: our team has a peer review process that each branch must go through before it is merged into the shared development branch.
Finally, we are ready to add the Git commands necessary to make sense of the arrows in our diagram. If we are bringing code to our own workstation we will issue one of the following commands: clone (the first time we bring code to our workstation) or pull. Remembering that a repository contains all branches, we will issue the command checkout to switch from one branch to another within our own workstation. If we want to share a particular branch with one of our team mates, we will push this branch back to the place we retrieved it from (the origin). Along each of the arrows in your diagram, write the name of the command you are are going to use when you perform that particular task.
From here, it’s up to you to be selfish. Before asking Git what command it would like you to use, sketch the diagram of what you want. Git is your tool, you are not Git’s tool. Draw the diagram. Communicate your tasks with your team as explicitly as you can. Insist on being a selfish adult learner — demand that others explain to you, in ways that are relevant to you, how to do the things you need to do today. |
2013 |
Emma Jane Westby |
emmajanewestby |
2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/git-for-grownups/ |
code |
| 76 |
Giving CSS Animations and Transitions Their Place |
CSS animations and transitions may not sit squarely in the realm of the behaviour layer, but they’re stepping up into this area that used to be pure JavaScript territory. Heck, CSS might even perform better than its JavaScript equivalents in some cases. That’s pretty serious! With CSS’s new tricks blurring the lines between presentation and behaviour, it can start to feel bloated and messy in our CSS files. It’s an uncomfortable feeling.
Here are a pair of methods I’ve found to be pretty helpful in keeping the potential bloat and wire-crossing under control when CSS has its hands in both presentation and behaviour.
Same eggs, more baskets
Structuring your CSS to have separate files for layout, typography, grids, and so on is a fairly common approach these days. But which one do you put your transitions and animations in? The initial answer, as always, is “it depends”.
Small effects here and there will likely sit just fine with your other styles. When you move into more involved effects that require multiple animations and some logic support from JavaScript, it’s probably time to choose none of the above, and create a separate CSS file just for them.
Putting all your animations in one file is a huge help for code organization. Even if you opt for a name less literal than animations.css, you’ll know exactly where to go for anything CSS animation related. That saves time and effort when it comes to editing and maintenance. Keeping track of which animations are still currently used is easier when they’re all grouped together as well. And as an added bonus, you won’t have to look at all those horribly unattractive and repetitive prefixed @-keyframe rules unless you actually need to.
An animations.css file might look something like the snippet below. It defines each animation’s keyframes and defines a class for each variation of that animation you’ll be using. Depending on the situation, you may also want to include transitions here in a similar way. (I’ve found defining transitions as their own class, or mixin, to be a huge help in past projects for me.)
// defining the animation
@keyframes catFall {
from { background-position: center 0;}
to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-webkit-keyframes catFall {
from { background-position: center 0;}
to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-moz-keyframes catFall {
from { background-position: center 0;}
to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-ms-keyframes catFall {
from { background-position: center 0;}
to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
…
// class that assigns the animation
.catsBackground {
height: 100%;
background: transparent url(../endlessKittens.png) 0 0 repeat-y;
animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
-webkit-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
-moz-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
-ms-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
}
If we don’t need it, why load it?
Having all those CSS animations and transitions in one file gives us the added flexibility to load them only when we want to. Loading a whole lot of things that will never be used might seem like a bit of a waste.
While CSS has us impressed with its motion chops, it falls flat when it comes to the logic and fine-grained control. JavaScript, on the other hand, is pretty good at both those things. Chances are the content of your animations.css file isn’t acting alone. You’ll likely be adding and removing classes via JavaScript to manage your CSS animations at the very least. If your CSS animations are so entwined with JavaScript, why not let them hang out with the rest of the behaviour layer and only come out to play when JavaScript is supported?
Dynamically linking your animations.css file like this means it will be completely ignored if JavaScript is off or not supported. No JavaScript? No additional behaviour, not even the parts handled by CSS.
<script>
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="animations.css">');
</script>
This technique comes up in progressive enhancement techniques as well, but it can help here to keep your presentation and behaviour nicely separated when more than one language is involved. The aim in both cases is to avoid loading files we won’t be using.
If you happen to be doing something a bit fancier – like 3-D transforms or critical animations that require more nuanced fallbacks – you might need something like modernizr to step in to determine support more specifically. But the general idea is the same.
Summing it all up
Using a couple of simple techniques like these, we get to pick where to best draw the line between behaviour and presentation based on the situation at hand, not just on what language we’re using. The power of when to separate and how to reassemble the individual pieces can be even greater if you use preprocessors as part of your process. We’ve got a lot of options! The important part is to make forward-thinking choices to save your future self, and even your current self, unnecessary headaches. |
2012 |
Val Head |
valhead |
2012-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/giving-css-animations-and-transitions-their-place/ |
code |
| 95 |
Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout |
Browser support for many of the modules that are part of CSS3 have enabled us to use CSS for many of the things we used to have to use images for. The rise of mobile browsers and the concept of responsive web design has given us a whole new way of looking at design for the web. However, when it comes to layout, we haven’t moved very far at all. We have talked for years about separating our content and source order from the presentation of that content, yet most of us have had to make decisions on source order in order to get a certain visual layout.
Owing to some interesting specifications making their way through the W3C process at the moment, though, there is hope of change on the horizon. In this article I’m going to look at one CSS module, the CSS3 grid layout module, that enables us to define a grid and place elements on to it. This article comprises a practical demonstration of the basics of grid layout, and also a discussion of one way in which we can start thinking of content in a more adaptive way.
Before we get started, it is important to note that, at the time of writing, these examples work only in Internet Explorer 10. CSS3 grid layout is a module created by Microsoft, and implemented using the -ms prefix in IE10. My examples will all use the -ms prefix, and not include other prefixes simply because this is such an early stage specification, and by the time there are implementations in other browsers there may be inconsistencies. The implementation I describe today may well change, but is also there for your feedback.
If you don’t have access to IE10, then one way to view and test these examples is by signing up for an account with Browserstack – the free trial would give you time to have a look. I have also included screenshots of all relevant stages in creating the examples.
What is CSS3 grid layout?
CSS3 grid layout aims to let developers divide up a design into a grid and place content on to that grid. Rather than trying to fabricate a grid from floats, you can declare an actual grid on a container element and then use that to position the elements inside. Most importantly, the source order of those elements does not matter.
Declaring a grid
We declare a grid using a new value for the display property: display: grid. As we are using the IE10 implementation here, we need to prefix that value: display: -ms-grid;.
Once we have declared our grid, we set up the columns and rows using the grid-columns and grid-rows properties.
.wrapper {
display: -ms-grid;
-ms-grid-columns: 200px 20px auto 20px 200px;
-ms-grid-rows: auto 1fr;
}
In the above example, I have declared a grid on the .wrapper element. I have used the grid-columns property to create a grid with a 200 pixel-wide column, a 20 pixel gutter, a flexible width auto column that will stretch to fill the available space, another 20 pixel-wide gutter and a final 200 pixel sidebar: a flexible width layout with two fixed width sidebars. Using the grid-rows property I have created two rows: the first is set to auto so it will stretch to fill whatever I put into it; the second row is set to 1fr, a new value used in grids that means one fraction unit. In this case, one fraction unit of the available space, effectively whatever space is left.
Positioning items on the grid
Now I have a simple grid, I can pop items on to it. If I have a <div> with a class of .main that I want to place into the second row, and the flexible column set to auto I would use the following CSS:
.content {
-ms-grid-column: 3;
-ms-grid-row: 2;
-ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}
If you are old-school, you may already have realised that we are essentially creating an HTML table-like layout structure using CSS. I found the concept of a table the most helpful way to think about the grid layout module when trying to work out how to place elements.
Creating grid systems
As soon as I started to play with CSS3 grid layout, I wanted to see if I could use it to replicate a flexible grid system like this fluid 16-column 960 grid system.
I started out by defining a grid on my wrapper element, using fractions to make this grid fluid.
.wrapper {
width: 90%;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
display: -ms-grid;
-ms-grid-columns: 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16];
-ms-grid-rows: (auto 20px)[24];
}
Like the 960 grid system I was using as an example, my grid starts with a gutter, followed by the first actual column, plus another gutter repeated sixteen times. What this means is that if I want to span two columns, as far as the grid layout module is concerned that is actually three columns: two wide columns, plus one gutter. So this needs to be accounted for when positioning items.
I created a CSS class for each positioning option: column position; rows position; and column span. For example:
.grid1 {-ms-grid-column: 2;} /* applying this class positions an item in the first column (the gutter is column 1) */
.grid2 {-ms-grid-column: 4;} /* 2nd column - gutter|column 1|gutter */
.grid3 {-ms-grid-column: 6;} /* 3rd column - gutter|column 1|gutter|column2|gutter */
.row1 {-ms-grid-row:1;}
.row2 {-ms-grid-row:3;}
.row3 {-ms-grid-row:5;}
.colspan1 {-ms-grid-column-span:1;}
.colspan2 {-ms-grid-column-span:3;}
.colspan3 {-ms-grid-column-span:5;}
I could then add multiple classes to each element to set the position on on the grid.
This then gives me a replica of the fluid grid using CSS3 grid layout. To see this working fire up IE10 and view Example 1.
This works, but…
This worked, but isn’t ideal. I considered not showing this stage of my experiment – however, I think it clearly shows how the grid layout module works and is a useful starting point. That said, it’s not an approach I would take in production. First, we have to add classes to our markup that tie an element to a position on the grid. This might not be too much of a problem if we are always going to maintain the sixteen-column grid, though, as I will show you that the real power of the grid layout module appears once you start to redefine the grid, using different grids based on media queries. If you drop to a six-column layout for small screens, positioning items into column 16 makes no sense any more.
Calculating grid position using LESS
As we’ve seen, if you want to use a grid with main columns and gutters, you have to take into account the spacing between columns as well as the actual columns. This means we have to do some calculating every time we place an item on the grid. In my example above I got around this by creating a CSS class for each position, allowing me to think in sixteen rather than thirty-two columns. But by using a CSS preprocessor, I can avoid using all the classes yet still think in main columns.
I’m using LESS for my example. My simple grid framework consists of one simple mixin.
.position(@column,@row,@colspan,@rowspan) {
-ms-grid-column: @column*2;
-ms-grid-row: @row*2-1;
-ms-grid-column-span: @colspan*2-1;
-ms-grid-row-span: @rowspan*2-1;
}
My mixin takes four parameters: column; row; colspan; and rowspan. So if I wanted to place an item on column four, row three, spanning two columns and one row, I would write the following CSS:
.box {
.position(4,3,2,1);
}
The mixin would return:
.box {
-ms-grid-column: 8;
-ms-grid-row: 5;
-ms-grid-column-span: 3;
-ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}
This saves me some typing and some maths. I could also add other prefixed values into my mixin as other browsers started to add support.
We can see this in action creating a new grid. Instead of adding multiple classes to each element, I can add one class; that class uses the mixin to create the position. I have also played around with row spans using my mixin and you can see we end up with a quite complicated arrangement of boxes. Have a look at example two in IE10. I’ve used the JavaScript LESS parser so that you can view the actual LESS that I use. Note that I have needed to escape the -ms prefixed properties with ~"" to get LESS to accept them.
This is looking better. I don’t have direct positioning information on each element in the markup, just a class name – I’ve used grid(x), but it could be something far more semantic. We can now take the example a step further and redefine the grid based on screen width.
Media queries and the grid
This example uses exactly the same markup as the previous example. However, we are now using media queries to detect screen width and redefine the grid using a different number of columns depending on that width.
I start out with a six-column grid, defining that on .wrapper, then setting where the different items sit on this grid:
.wrapper {
width: 90%;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
display: ~"-ms-grid"; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
-ms-grid-columns: ~"1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[6]"; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
-ms-grid-rows: ~"(auto 20px)[40]"; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... see example for all declarations ... */
Using media queries, I redefine the grid to nine columns when we hit a minimum width of 700 pixels.
@media only screen and (min-width: 700px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns: ~"1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[9]";
-ms-grid-rows: ~"(auto 20px)[50]";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... */
}
Finally, we redefine the grid for 960 pixels, back to the sixteen-column grid we started out with.
@media only screen and (min-width: 940px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns:~" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]";
-ms-grid-rows:~" (auto 20px)[24]";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... */
}
If you view example three in Internet Explorer 10 you can see how the items reflow to fit the window size. You can also see, looking at the final set of blocks, that source order doesn’t matter. You can pick up a block from anywhere and place it in any position on the grid.
Laying out a simple website
So far, like a toddler on Christmas Day, we’ve been playing with boxes rather than thinking about what might be in them. So let’s take a quick look at a more realistic layout, in order to see why the CSS3 grid layout module can be really useful. At this time of year, I am very excited to get out of storage my collection of odd nativity sets, prompting my family to suggest I might want to open a museum. Should I ever do so, I’ll need a website, and here is an example layout.
As I am using CSS3 grid layout, I can order my source in a logical manner. In this example my document is as follows, though these elements could be in any order I please:
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="welcome">
...
</div>
<article class="main">
...
</article>
<div class="info">
...
</div>
<div class="ads">
...
</div>
</div>
For wide viewports I can use grid layout to create a sidebar, with the important information about opening times on the top righ,t with the ads displayed below it. This creates the layout shown in the screenshot above.
@media only screen and (min-width: 940px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns:~" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]";
-ms-grid-rows:~" (auto 20px)[24]";
}
.welcome {
.position(1,1,12,1);
padding: 0 5% 0 0;
}
.info {
.position(13,1,4,1);
border: 0;
padding:0;
}
.main {
.position(1,2,12,1);
padding: 0 5% 0 0;
}
.ads {
.position(13,2,4,1);
display: block;
margin-left: 0;
}
}
In a floated layout, a sidebar like this often ends up being placed under the main content at smaller screen widths. For my situation this is less than ideal. I want the important information about opening times to end up above the main article, and to push the ads below it. With grid layout I can easily achieve this at the smallest width .info ends up in row two and .ads in row five with the article between.
.wrapper {
display: ~"-ms-grid";
-ms-grid-columns: ~"1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[4]";
-ms-grid-rows: ~"(auto 20px)[40]";
}
.welcome {
.position(1,1,4,1);
}
.info {
.position(1,2,4,1);
border: 4px solid #fff;
padding: 10px;
}
.content {
.position(1,3,4,5);
}
.main {
.position(1,3,4,1);
}
.ads {
.position(1,4,4,1);
}
Finally, as an extra tweak I add in a breakpoint at 600 pixels and nest a second grid on the ads area, arranging those three images into a row when they sit below the article at a screen width wider than the very narrow mobile width but still too narrow to support a sidebar.
@media only screen and (min-width: 600px) {
.ads {
display: ~"-ms-grid";
-ms-grid-columns: ~"20px 1fr 20px 1fr 20px 1fr";
-ms-grid-rows: ~"1fr";
margin-left: -20px;
}
.ad:nth-child(1) {
.position(1,1,1,1);
}
.ad:nth-child(2) {
.position(2,1,1,1);
}
.ad:nth-child(3) {
.position(3,1,1,1);
}
}
View example four in Internet Explorer 10.
This is a very simple example to show how we can use CSS grid layout without needing to add a lot of classes to our document. It also demonstrates how we can mainpulate the content depending on the context in which the user is viewing it.
Layout, source order and the idea of content priority
CSS3 grid layout isn’t the only module that starts to move us away from the issue of visual layout being linked to source order. However, with good support in Internet Explorer 10, it is a nice way to start looking at how this might work. If you look at the grid layout module as something to be used in conjunction with the flexible box layout module and the very interesting CSS regions and exclusions specifications, we have, tantalizingly on the horizon, a powerful set of tools for layout.
I am particularly keen on the potential separation of source order from layout as it dovetails rather neatly into something I spend a lot of time thinking about. As a CMS developer, working on larger scale projects as well as our CMS product Perch, I am interested in how we better enable content editors to create content for the web. In particular, I search for better ways to help them create adaptive content; content that will work in a variety of contexts rather than being tied to one representation of that content.
If the concept of adaptive content is new to you, then Karen McGrane’s presentation Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content is the place to start. Karen talks about needing to think of content as chunks, that might be used in many different places, displayed differently depending on context.
I absolutely agree with Karen’s approach to content. We have always attempted to move content editors away from thinking about creating a page and previewing it on the desktop. However at some point content does need to be published as a page, or a collection of content if you prefer, and bits of that content have priority. Particularly in a small screen context, content gets linearized, we can only show so much at a time, and we need to make sure important content rises to the top. In the case of my example, I wanted to ensure that the address information was clearly visible without scrolling around too much. Dropping it with the entire sidebar to the bottom of the page would not have been so helpful, though neither would moving the whole sidebar to the top of the screen so a visitor had to scroll past advertising to get to the article.
If our layout is linked to our source order, then enabling the content editor to make decisions about priority is really hard. Only a system that can do some regeneration of the source order on the server-side – perhaps by way of multiple templates – can allow those kinds of decisions to be made. For larger systems this might be a possibility; for smaller ones, or when using an off-the-shelf CMS, it is less likely to be. Fortunately, any system that allows some form of custom field type can be used to pop a class on to an element, and with CSS grid layout that is all that is needed to be able to target that element and drop it into the right place when the content is viewed, be that on a desktop or a mobile device.
This approach can move us away from forcing editors to think visually. At the moment, I might have to explain to an editor that if a certain piece of content needs to come first when viewed on a mobile device, it needs to be placed in the sidebar area, tying it to a particular layout and design. I have to do this because we have to enforce fairly strict rules around source order to make the mechanics of the responsive design work. If I can instead advise an editor to flag important content as high priority in the CMS, then I can make decisions elsewhere as to how that is displayed, and we can maintain the visual hierarchy across all the different ways content might be rendered.
Why frustrate ourselves with specifications we can’t yet use in production?
The CSS3 grid layout specification is listed under the Exploring section of the list of current work of the CSS Working Group. While discussing a module at this stage might seem a bit pointless if we can’t use it in production work, there is a very real reason for doing so. If those of us who will ultimately be developing sites with these tools find out about them early enough, then we can start to give our feedback to the people responsible for the specification. There is information on the same page about how to get involved with the disussions.
So, if you have a bit of time this holiday season, why not have a play with the CSS3 grid layout module? I have outlined here some of my thoughts on how grid layout and other modules that separate layout from source order can be used in the work that I do. Likewise, wherever in the stack you work, playing with and thinking about new specifications means you can think about how you would use them to enhance your work. Spot a problem? Think that a change to the specification would improve things for a specific use case? Then you have something you could post to www-style to add to the discussion around this module.
All the examples are on CodePen so feel free to play around and fork them. |
2012 |
Rachel Andrew |
rachelandrew |
2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/css3-grid-layout/ |
code |
| 224 |
Go Forth and Make Awesomeness |
We’ve all dreamed of being a superhero: maybe that’s why we’ve ended up on the web—a place where we can do good deeds and celebrate them on a daily basis.
Wear your dreams
At age four, I wore my Wonder Woman Underoos around my house, my grandparents’ house, our neighbor’s house, and even around the yard. I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up. I was crushed to learn that there is no school for superheroes—no place to earn a degree in how to save the world from looming evil. Instead, I—like everyone else—was destined to go to ordinary school to focus on ABCs and 123s. Even still, I want to save the world.
Intend your goodness
Random acts of kindness make a difference. Books, films, and advertising campaigns tout random acts of kindness and the positive influence they can have on the world. But why do acts of kindness have to be so random? Why can’t we intend to be kind? A true superhero wakes each morning intending to perform selfless acts for the community. Why can’t we do the same thing?
As a child, my mother taught me to plan to do at least three good deeds each day. And even now, years later, I put on my invisible cape looking for ways to do good.
Here are some examples:
slowing down to allow another driver in before me from the highway on-ramp
bringing a co-worker their favorite kind of coffee or tea
sharing my umbrella on a rainy day
holding a door open for someone with full hands
listening intently when someone shares a story
complimenting someone on a job well done
thanking someone for a job well done
leaving a constructive, or even supportive comment on someone’s blog
As you can see, these acts are simple. Doing good and being kind is partially about being aware—aware of the words we speak and the actions we take. Like superheroes, we create our own code of conduct to live by. Hopefully, we choose to put the community before ourselves (within reason) and to do our best not to damage it as we move through our lives.
Take a bite out of the Apple
With some thought, we can weave this type of thinking and action into our business choices. We can take the simple acts of kindness concept and amplify it a bit. With this amplification, we can be a new kind of superhero.
In 1997, during a presentation, Steve Jobs stated Apple’s core value in a simple, yet powerful, sentence:
We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.
Apple fan or not, those are powerful words.
Define your core
Every organization must define its core values. Core values help us to frame, recognize, and understand the principles our organization embodies and practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting a new organization or you want to define values within an existing organization. Even if you’re a freelancer, defining core values will help guide your decisions and actions.
If you can, work as a team to define core values. Gather the people who are your support system—your business partners, your colleagues, and maybe even a trusted client—this is now your core value creation team. Have a brainstorming session with your team. Let ideas flow. Give equal weight to the things people say. You may not hear everything you thought you might hear—that’s OK. You want the session to be free-flowing and honest. Ask yourself and your team questions like:
What do you think my/our/your core values are?
What do you think my/our/your priorities are?
What do you think my/our/your core values should be?
What do you think my/our/your priorities should be?
How do you think I/we should treat customers, clients, and each other?
How do we want others to treat us?
What are my/our/your success stories?
What has defined these experiences as successful?
From this brainstorming session, you will craft your superhero code of conduct. You will decide what you will and will not do. You will determine how you will and will not act. You’re setting the standards that you will live and work by—so don’t take this exercise lightly. Take your time. Use the exercise as a way to open a discussion about values. Find out what you and your team believe in. Set these values and keep them in place. Write them down and share these with your team and with the world. By sharing your core values, you hold yourself more accountable to them. You also send a strong message to the rest of the world about what type of organization you are and what you believe in. Other organizations and people may decide to align or not to align themselves with you because of your core values. This is good. Chances are, you’ll be happier and more profitable if you work with other organizations and people who share similar core values.
Photo: Laura Winn
During your brainstorming session, list keywords. Don’t edit. Allow things to take their course. Some examples of keywords might be:
Ability · Achievement · Adventure · Ambition · Altruism · Awareness · Balance · Caring · Charity · Citizenship · Collaboration · Commitment · Community · Compassion · Consideration · Cooperation · Courage · Courtesy · Creativity · Democracy · Dignity · Diplomacy · Discipline · Diversity · Education · Efficiency · Energy · Equality · Excellence · Excitement · Fairness · Family · Freedom · Fun · Goodness · Gratefulness · Growth · Happiness · Harmony · Helping · Honor · Hope · Humility · Humor · Imagination · Individuality · Innovation · Integrity · Intelligence · Joy · Justice · Kindness · Knowledge · Leadership · Learning · Loyalty · Meaning · Mindfulness · Moderation · Modesty · Nurture · Openness · Organization · Passion · Patience · Peace · Planning · Principles · Productivity · Purpose · Quality · Reliability · Respectfulness · Responsibility · Security · Sensitivity · Service · Sharing · Simplicity · Stability · Tolerance · Transparency · Trust · Truthfulness · Understanding · Unity · Variety · Vision · Wisdom
After you have a list of keywords, create your core values statement using the themes from your brainstorming session. There are no rules: while above, Steve Jobs summed up Apple’s core values in one sentence, Zappos has ten core values:
Deliver WOW Through Service
Embrace and Drive Change
Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
Pursue Growth and Learning
Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
Be Passionate and Determined
Be Humble
To see how Zappos’ employees embrace these core values, watch the video they created and posted on their website.
Dog food is yummy
Although I find merit in every keyword listed, I’ve distilled my core values to their simplest form:
Make awesomeness. Do good.
How do you make awesomeness and do good? You need ambition, balance, collaboration, commitment, fun, and you need every keyword listed to support these actions. Again, there are no rules: your core values can be one sentence or a bulleted list. What matters is being true to yourself and creating core values that others can understand. Before I start any project I ask myself: is there a way to make awesomeness and to do good? If the answer is “yes,” I embrace the endeavor because it aligns with my core values. If the answer is “no,” I move on to a project that supports my core values.
Unleash your powers
Although every organization will craft different core values, I imagine that you want to be a superhero and that you will define “doing good” (or something similar) as one of your core values. Whether you work by yourself or with a team, you can use the web as a tool to help do good. It can be as simple as giving a free hug, or something a little more complex to help others and help your organization meet the bottom line. Some interesting initiatives that use the web to do good are:
Yahoo!: How Good Grows
Desigual: Happy Hunters
Edge Shave Gel: Anti-irritation campaign
Knowing your underlying desire to return to your Underoos-and-cape-sporting childhood and knowing that you don’t always have the opportunity to develop an entire initiative to “do good,” remember that as writers, designers, and developers, we can perform superhero acts on a daily basis by making content, design, and development accessible to the greatest number of people. By considering other people’s needs, we are intentionally performing acts of kindness—we’re doing good. There are many ways to write, design, and develop websites—many of which will be discussed in other 24ways.org articles. As we make content, design, and development decisions—as we develop campaigns and initiatives—we need to keep our core values in mind. It’s easy to make a positive difference in the world. Just be the superhero you’ve always wanted to be. Go forth and make awesomeness.
If you would like to do good today, support The United Nations Children’s Fund, an organization that works for children’s rights, their survival, development and protection, by purchasing this year’s 24 ways Annual 2010 created by Five Simple Steps. All proceeds go to UNICEF. |
2010 |
Leslie Jensen-Inman |
lesliejenseninman |
2010-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/go-forth-and-make-awesomeness/ |
business |
| 278 |
Going Both Ways |
It’s that time of the year again: Santa is getting ready to travel the world. Up until now, girls and boys from all over have sent in letters asking for what they want. I hope that Santa and his elves have—unlike me—learned more than just English.
On the Internet, those girls and boys want to participate in sharing their stories and videos of opening presents and of being with friends and family. Ah, yes, the wonders of user generated content. But more than that, people also want to be able to use sites in the language they know.
While you and I might expect the text to read from left to right, not all languages do. Some go from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. (Some also go from top to bottom, but for now, let’s just worry about those first two directions!)
If we were building a site for girls and boys to send their letters to Santa, we need to consider having the interface in the language and direction that they prefer. On the elves’ side, they may be viewing the site in one direction but reading the user generated content in the other direction. We need to build a site that supports bidirectional (or bidi) text.
Let’s take a look at some things to be aware of when it comes to building bidi interfaces.
Setting the direction of the interface
Right off the bat, we need to tell the browser what direction the text should be going in. To do this, we add the dir attribute to an HTML element and set it to either LTR (for left to right) or RTL (for right to left).
<body dir="rtl">
You can add the dir attribute to any element and it will set or change the direction for the content within that element.
<body dir="ltr">
Here is English Content.
<div dir="rtl">الموضوع</div>
</body>
You can also set the direction via CSS.
.rtl {
direction: rtl;
}
It’s generally recommended that you don’t use CSS to set the direction of the text. Text direction is an important part of the content that should be retained even in environments where the CSS may not be available or fails to load.
How things change with the direction attribute
Just adding the dir attribute tells the browser to render the content within it differently.
The text aligns to the right of the page and, interestingly, punctuation appears at the left of the sentence. (We’ll get to that in a little bit.)
Scrollbars in most browsers will appear on the left instead of the right. Webkit is the notable exception here which always shows the scrollbar on the right, no matter what the text direction is. Avoid having a design that has an expectation that the scrollbar will be in a specific place (and a specific size).
Changing the order of text mid-way
As we saw in that previous example, the punctuation appeared at the beginning of the sentence instead of the end, even though the text was English. At Yahoo!, we have an interesting dilemma where the company name has punctuation in it. Therefore, when the name appears in the middle of (for example) Arabic text, the exclamation mark appears at the beginning of the word instead of the end.
There are two ways in which this problem can be solved:
1. Use HTML around the left-to-right content, or
To solve the problem of the Yahoo! name in the midst of Arabic text, we can wrap a span around it and change the direction on that element.
2. Use a text direction mark in the content.
Unicode has two marks, U+200E and U+200F, that tell the browser that the text is in a particular direction. Placing this right after the punctuation will correct the placement.
Using the HTML entity:
Yahoo!
Tables
Thankfully, the cells of a data table also get reordered from right to left. Equally as nice, if you’re using display:table, the content will still get reordered.
CSS
So far, we’ve seen that the dir attribute does a pretty decent job of getting content flowing in the direction that we need it. Unfortunately, there are huge swaths of design that is handled by CSS that the handy dir attribute has zero effect over.
Many properties, like float or absolute positioning with left and right values, are unaffected and must be handled manually. Elements that were floated left must now by floated right. Left margins and paddings must now move to the right and the right margins and paddings must now move to the left.
Since the browser won’t handle this for us, we have a couple approaches that we can use:
CSS Only
We can take advantage of the attribute selector to target CSS to apply in one direction or another.
[dir=ltr] .module {
float: left;
margin: 0 0 0 20px;
}
[dir=rtl] .module {
float: right;
margin: 0 20px 0 0;
}
As you can see from this example, both of the properties have been modified for the flipped interface. If your interface is rather complicated, you will have to create a lot of duplicate rules to have the site looking good in both directions while serving up a single stylesheet.
CSSJanus
Google has a tool called CSSJanus. It’s a Python script that runs over the LTR versions of your CSS files and generates RTL versions. For the RTL version of the site, just serve up those CSS files instead of the LTR versions.
The script looks for keywords and value combinations and automatically swaps them so you don’t have to.
At Yahoo!, CSSJanus was a huge help in speeding up our development of a bidi interface. We’ve also made a number of improvements to the script to better handle border radius, background positioning, and gradients. We will be pushing those changes back into the CSSJanus project.
Background Images
Background images, especially for things like CSS sprites, also raise an interesting dilemma. Background images are positioned relative to the left of the element. In a flipped interface, however, we need to position it relative to the right. An icon that would be to the left of some text will now need to appear on the right.
If the x position of the background is percentage-based, then it’s fairly easy to swap the values. 0 becomes 100%, 10% becomes 90% and so on. If the x position is pixel-based, then we’re in a bit of a pickle. There’s no way to say that the image should be a certain number of pixels from the right.
Therefore, you’ll need to ensure that any background image that needs to be swapped should be percentage-based. (99.9% of the the time, the background position will need to be 0 so that it can be changed to 100% for RTL.)
If you’re taking an existing implementation, background positioning will likely be the biggest hurdle you’ll have to overcome in swapping your interface around. If you make sure your x position is always percentage-based from the beginning, you’ll have a much smoother process ahead of you!
Flipping Images
This is a more subtle point and one where you’ll really want an expert with the region to weigh in on. In RTL interfaces, users may expect certain icons to also be flipped. Pencil icons that skew to the right in LTR interfaces might need to be swapped to skew to the left, instead. Chat bubbles that come from the left will need to come from the right.
The easiest way to handle this is to create new images. Name the LTR versions with -ltr in the name and name the RTL versions with -rtl in the name. CSSJanus will automatically rename all file references from -ltr to -rtl.
The Future
Thankfully, those within the W3C recognize that CSS should be more agnostic. As a result, they’ve begun introducing new properties that allow the browser to manage the swapping from left to right for us.
The CSS3 specification for backgrounds allows for the background-position to be relative to other corners other than the top left by specifying keywords before each position.
This will position the background 5px from the bottom right of the element.
background-position: right 5px bottom 5px;
Opera 11.60 is currently the only browser that supports this syntax.
For margin and padding, we have margin-start and margin-end. In LTR interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-left and in RTL interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-right.
Firefox and Webkit support these but with vendor prefixes right now:
-webkit-margin-start: 20px;
-moz-margin-start: 20px;
In the CSS3 Images working draft specification, there’s an image() property that allows us to specify image fallbacks and whether those fallbacks are for LTR or RTL interfaces.
background: image('sprite.png' ltr, 'sprite-rtl.png' rtl);
Unfortunately, no browser supports this yet but it’s nice to be able to dream of how much easier this will be in the future!
Ho Ho Ho
Hopefully, after all of this, you’re full of cheer knowing that you’re well on your way to creating interfaces that can go both ways! |
2011 |
Jonathan Snook |
jonathansnook |
2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2011/going-both-ways/ |
ux |
| 180 |
Going Nuts with CSS Transitions |
I’m going to show you how CSS 3 transforms and WebKit transitions can add zing to the way you present images on your site.
Laying the foundations
First we are going to make our images look like mini polaroids with captions. Here’s the markup:
<div class="polaroid pull-right">
<img src="../img/seal.jpg" alt="">
<p class="caption">Found this little cutie on a walk in New Zealand!</p>
</div>
You’ll notice we’re using a somewhat presentational class of pull-right here. This means the logic is kept separate from the code that applies the polaroid effect. The polaroid class has no positioning, which allows it to be used generically anywhere that the effect is required. The pull classes set a float and add appropriate margins—they can be used for things like blockquotes as well.
.polaroid {
width: 150px;
padding: 10px 10px 20px 10px;
border: 1px solid #BFBFBF;
background-color: white;
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4);
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4);
box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4);
}
The actual polaroid effect itself is simply applied using padding, a border and a background colour. We also apply a nice subtle box shadow, using a property that is supported by modern WebKit browsers and Firefox 3.5+. We include the box-shadow property last to ensure that future browsers that support the eventual CSS3 specified version natively will use that implementation over the legacy browser specific version.
The box-shadow property takes four values: three lengths and a colour. The first is the horizontal offset of the shadow—positive values place the shadow on the right, while negative values place it to the left. The second is the vertical offset, positive meaning below. If both of these are set to 0, the shadow is positioned equally on all four sides. The last length value sets the blur radius—the larger the number, the blurrier the shadow (therefore the darker you need to make the colour to have an effect).
The colour value can be given in any format recognised by CSS. Here, we’re using rgba as explained by Drew behind the first door of this year’s calendar.
Rotation
For browsers that understand it (currently our old favourites WebKit and FF3.5+) we can add some visual flair by rotating the image, using the transform CSS 3 property.
-webkit-transform: rotate(9deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(9deg);
transform: rotate(9deg);
Rotations can be specified in degrees, radians (rads) or grads. WebKit also supports turns unfortunately Firefox doesn’t just yet.
For our example, we want any polaroid images on the left hand side to be rotated in the opposite direction, using a negative degree value:
.pull-left.polaroid {
-webkit-transform: rotate(-9deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(-9deg);
transform: rotate(-9deg);
}
Multiple class selectors don’t work in IE6 but as luck would have it, the transform property doesn’t work in any current IE version either. The above code is a good example of progressive enrichment: browsers that don’t support box-shadow or transform will still see the image and basic polaroid effect.
Animation
WebKit is unique amongst browser rendering engines in that it allows animation to be specified in pure CSS. Although this may never actually make it in to the CSS 3 specification, it degrades nicely and more importantly is an awful lot of fun!
Let’s go nuts.
In the next demo, the image is contained within a link and mousing over that link causes the polaroid to animate from being angled to being straight.
Here’s our new markup:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliedowne/2340993237/" class="polaroid">
<img src="../img/raft.jpg" alt="">
White water rafting in Queenstown
</a>
And here are the relevant lines of CSS:
a.polaroid {
/* ... */
-webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 0.5s ease-in;
}
a.polaroid:hover,
a.polaroid:focus,
a.polaroid:active {
/* ... */
-webkit-transform: rotate(0deg);
}
The @-webkit-transition@ property is the magic wand that sets up the animation. It takes three values: the property to be animated, the duration of the animation and a ‘timing function’ (which affects the animation’s acceleration, for a smoother effect).
-webkit-transition only takes affect when the specified property changes. In pure CSS, this is done using dynamic pseudo-classes. You can also change the properties using JavaScript, but that’s a story for another time.
Throwing polaroids at a table
Imagine there are lots of differently sized polaroid photos scattered on a table. That’s the effect we are aiming for with our next demo.
As an aside: we are using absolute positioning to arrange the images inside a flexible width container (with a minimum and maximum width specified in pixels). As some are positioned from the left and some from the right when you resize the browser they shuffle underneath each other. This is an effect used on the UX London site.
This demo uses a darker colour shadow with more transparency than before. The grey shadow in the previous example worked fine, but it was against a solid background. Since the images are now overlapping each other, the more opaque shadow looked fake.
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
On hover, as well as our previous trick of animating the image rotation back to straight, we are also making the shadow darker and setting the z-index to be higher than the other images so that it appears on top.
And Finally…
Finally, for a bit more fun, we’re going to simulate the images coming towards you and lifting off the page. We’ll achieve this by making them grow larger and by offsetting the shadow & making it longer.
Screenshot 1 shows the default state, while 2 shows our previous hover effect. Screenshot 3 is the effect we are aiming for, illustrated by demo 4.
a.polaroid {
/* ... */
z-index: 2;
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
-webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(10deg);
transform: rotate(10deg);
-webkit-transition: all 0.5s ease-in;
}
a.polaroid:hover,
a.polaroid:focus,
a.polaroid:active {
z-index: 999;
border-color: #6A6A6A;
-webkit-box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
-moz-box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
-webkit-transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
-moz-transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
}
You’ll notice we are now giving the transform property another transform function: scale, which takes increases the size by the specified factor. Other things you can do with transform include skewing, translating or you can go mad creating your own transforms with a matrix.
The box-shadow has both its offset and blur radius increased dramatically, and is darkened using the alpha channel of the rgba colour.
And because we want the effects to all animate smoothly, we pass a value of all to the -webkit-transition property, ensuring that any changed property on that link will be animated.
Demo 5 is the finished example, bringing everything nicely together.
CSS transitions and transforms are a great example of progressive enrichment, which means improving the experience for a portion of the audience without negatively affecting other users. They are also a lot of fun to play with!
Further reading
-moz-transform – the mozilla developer center has a comprehensive explanation of transform that also applies to -webkit-transform and transform.
CSS: Animation Using CSS Transforms – this is a good, more indepth tutorial on animations.
CSS Animation – the Safari blog explains the usage of -webkit-transform.
Dinky pocketbooks with transform – another use for transforms, create your own printable pocketbook.
A while back, Simon wrote a little bookmarklet to spin the entire page… warning: this will spin the entire page. |
2009 |
Natalie Downe |
nataliedowne |
2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/going-nuts-with-css-transitions/ |
code |
| 222 |
Golden Spirals |
As building blocks go, the rectangle is not one to overwhelm the designer with decisions. On the face of it, you have two options: you can set the width, and the height. But despite this apparent simplicity, there are combinations of width and height that can look unbalanced. If a rectangle is too tall and slim, it might appear precarious. If it is not tall enough, it may simply look flat. But like a guitar string that’s out of tune, you can tweak the proportions little by little until a rectangle feels, as Goldilocks said, just right.
A golden rectangle has its height and width in the golden ratio, which is approximately 1:1.618. These proportions have long been recognised as being aesthetically harmonious. Whether through instruction or by intuition, artists have understood how to exploit these proportions over the centuries. Examples can be found in classical architecture, medieval book construction, and even in the recent #newtwitter redesign.
A mathematical curiosity
The golden rectangle is unique, in that if you remove a square section from it, what is left behind is itself a golden rectangle. The removal of a square can be repeated on the rectangle that is left behind, and then repeated again, as many times as you like. This means that the golden rectangle can be treated as a building block for recursive patterns. In this article, we will exploit this property to build a golden spiral, using only HTML and CSS.
The markup
The HTML we’ll use for this study is simply a series of nested <div>s.
<body>
<div id="container">
<div class="cycle">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div class="cycle">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div class="cycle">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div class="cycle"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
The first of these has the class cycle, and so does every fourth ancestor thereafter. The spiral completes a cycle every four steps, so this class allows styles to be reused on <div>s that appear at the same position in each cycle.
Golden proportions
To create our spiral we are going to exploit the unique properties of the golden rectangle, so our first priority is to ensure that we have a golden rectangle to begin with. If we pick a length for the short edge – say, 288 pixels – we can then calculate the length of the long edge by multiplying this value by 1.618. In this case, 288 × 1.618 = 466, so our starting point will be a <div> with these properties:
#container > div {
width: 466px;
height: 288px;
}
The greater than symbol is used here to single out the immediate child of the #container element, without affecting the grandchild or any of the more distant descendants.
We could go on to specify the precise pixel dimensions of every child element, but that means doing a lot of sums. It would be much easier if we just specified the dimensions for each element as a percentage of the width and height of its parent. This also has the advantage that if you change the size of the outermost container, all nested elements would be resized automatically – something that we shall exploit later.
The approximate value of 38.2% can be derived from (100 × 1 − phi) ÷ phi, where the Greek letter phi (ϕ) stands for the golden ratio. The value of phi can be expressed as phi = (1 + √5 ) ÷ 2, which is approximately 1.618. You don’t have to understand the derivation to use it. Just remember that if you start with a golden rectangle, you can slice 38.2% from it to create a new golden rectangle.
This can be expressed in CSS quite simply:
.cycle,
.cycle > div > div {
height: 38.2%;
width: 100%;
}
.cycle > div,
.cycle > div > div > div {
width: 38.2%;
height: 100%;
}
You can see the result so far by visiting Demo One. With no borders or shading, there is nothing to see yet, so let’s address that next.
Shading with transparency
We’ll need to apply some shading to distinguish each segment of the spiral from its neighbours. We could start with a white background, then progress through shades of grey: #eee, #ddd, #ccc and so on, but this means hard-coding the background-color for every element. A more elegant solution would be to use the same colour for every element, but to make each one slightly transparent.
The nested <div>s that we are working with could be compared to layers in Photoshop. By applying a semi-transparent shade of grey, each successive layer can build on top of the darker layers beneath it. The effect accumulates, causing each successive layer to appear slightly darker than the last. In his 2009 article for 24 ways, Drew McLellan showed how to create a semi-transparent effect by working with RGBA colour. Here, we’ll use the colour black with an alpha value of 0.07.
#container div { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.07) }
Note that I haven’t used the immediate child selector here, which means that this rule will apply to all <div> elements inside the #container, no matter how deeply nested they are. You can view the result in Demo Two. As you can see, the golden rectangles alternate between landscape and portrait orientation.
Demo Three).
CSS3 specification indicates that a percentage can be used to set the border-radius property, but using percentages does not achieve consistent results in browsers today. Luckily, if you specify a border-radius in pixels using a value that is greater than the width and height of the element, then the resulting curve will use the shorter length side as its radius. This produces exactly the effect that we want, so we’ll use an arbitrarily high value of 10,000 pixels for each border-radius:
.cycle {
border-radius: 0px;
border-bottom-left-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div {
border-radius: 0px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div {
border-radius: 0px;
border-top-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div > div {
border-radius: 0px;
border-top-left-radius: 10000px;
}
Note that the specification for the border-radius property is still in flux, so it is advisable to use vendor-specific prefixes. I have omitted them from the example above for the sake of clarity, but if you view source on Demo Four then you’ll see that the actual styles are not quite as brief.
Filling the available space
We have created an approximation of the Golden Spiral using only HTML and CSS. Neat! It’s a shame that it occupies just a fraction of the available space. As a finishing touch, let’s make the golden spiral expand or contract to use the full space available to it.
Ideally, the outermost container should use the full available width or height that could accomodate a rectangle of golden proportions. This behaviour is available for background images using the “ background-size: contain; property, but I know of no way to make block level HTML elements behave in this fashion (if I’m missing something, please enlighten me). Where CSS fails to deliver, JavaScript can usually provide a workaround. This snippet requires jQuery:
$(document).ready(function() {
var phi = (1 + Math.sqrt(5))/2;
$(window).resize(function() {
var goldenWidth = windowWidth = $(this).width(),
goldenHeight = windowHeight = $(this).height();
if (windowWidth/windowHeight > phi) {
// panoramic viewport – use full height
goldenWidth = windowHeight * phi;
} else {
// portrait viewport – use full width
goldenHeight = windowWidth / phi;
};
$("#container > div.cycle")
.width(goldenWidth)
.height(goldenHeight);
}).resize();
});
You can view the result by visiting Demo Five.
Is it just me, or can you see an elephant in there?
You can probably think of many ways to enhance this further, but for this study we’ll leave it there. It has been a good excuse to play with proportions, positioning and the immediate child selector, as well as new CSS3 features such as border-radius and RGBA colours. If you are not already designing with golden proportions, then perhaps this will inspire you to begin. |
2010 |
Drew Neil |
drewneil |
2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/ |
design |
| 225 |
Good Ideas Grow on Paper |
Great designers have one thing in common: their design process is centred on ideas; ideas that are more often than not developed on paper. Though it’s often tempting to take the path of least resistance, turning to the computer in the headlong rush to complete a project (often in the face of formidable client pressure), resist the urge and – for a truly great idea – start first on paper.
The path of least resistance is often characterised by cliché and overused techniques – one per cent noise, border-radius, text-shadow – the usual suspects – techniques that are ten-a-penny at the gallery sites. Whilst all are useful, and technique and craft are important, great design isn’t about technique alone – it’s about technique in the service of good ideas.
But how do we generate those ideas?
Inspiration can certainly come to you out of the blue. When working as a designer in a role which often consists of incubating good ideas, however, idly waiting for the time-honoured lightbulb to appear above your head just isn’t good enough. We need to establish an environment where we tip the odds of getting good ideas in our favour.
So, when faced with the blank canvas, what do we do to unlock the proverbial tidal wave of creativity? Fear not. We’re about to share with you a couple of stalwart techniques that will stand you in good stead when you need that good idea, in the face of the pressure of yet another looming deadline.
Get the process right
Where do ideas come from? In many cases they come from anywhere but the screen. Hence, our first commandment is to close the lid of your computer and, for a change, work on paper. It might seem strange, it might also seem like a distraction, but – trust us – the time invested here will more than pay off.
Idea generation should be a process of rapid iteration, sketching and thinking aloud, all processes best undertaken in more fast paced, analogue media. Our tool of choice is the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©, intentionally low resolution to encourage lo-fi idea generation. In short, your tools should be designed not to be precious, but to quickly process your thoughts. Ideas can be expressed with a thick line marker or by drawing with a stick in the sand; it’s the ideas that matter, not the medium.
Input > Synthesise > Output
Ideas don’t materialise in a vacuum. Without constant input, the outputs will inevitably remain the same. As such, it’s essential to maintain an inquisitive mind, ensuring a steady flow of new triggers and stimuli that enable your thinking to evolve.
What every designer brings to the table is their prior experience and unique knowledge. It should come as no surprise to discover that a tried and tested method of increasing that knowledge is, believe it or not, to read – often and widely. The best and most nuanced ideas come after many years of priming the brain with an array of diverse material, a point made recently in Jessica Hische’s aptly named Why You Should Know Your Shit.
One of the best ways of synthesising the knowledge you accumulate is to write. The act of writing facilitates your thinking and stores the pieces of the jigsaw you’ll one day return to. You don’t have to write a book or a well-articulated article; a scribbled note in the margin will suffice in facilitating the process of digestion.
As with writing, we implore you to make sketching an essential part of your digestion process. More immediate than writing, sketching has the power to put yet unformed ideas down on paper, giving you an insight into the fantastic conceptions you’re more often than not still incubating.
Our second commandment is a practical one: always carry a sketchbook and a pen. Although it seems that the very best ideas are scribbled on the back of a beer mat or a wine-stained napkin, always carrying your ‘thinking utensils’ should be as natural as not leaving the house without your phone, wallet, keys or pants.
Further, the more you use your sketchbook, the less precious you’ll find yourself becoming. Sketching isn’t about being an excellent draughtsman, it’s about synthesising and processing your thoughts and ideas, as Jason Santa Maria summarises nicely in his article Pretty Sketchy:
Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.
Jason Santa Maria
The sketchbook and pen should become your trusted tools in your task to constantly survey the world around you. As Paul Smith says, You Can Find Inspiration in Anything; close the lid, look beyond the computer; there’s a whole world of inspiration out there.
Learn to love old dusty buildings
So, how do you learn? How do you push beyond the predictable world pre-filtered by Mr Google? The answer lies in establishing a habit of exploring the wonderful worlds of museums and libraries, dusty old buildings that repay repeated visits.
Once the primary repositories of thought and endless sources of inspiration, these institutions are now often passed over for the quick fix of a Google search or Wikipedia by you, the designer, chained to a desk and manacled to a MacBook. Whilst others might frown, we urge you to get away from your desk and take an eye-opening stroll through the knowledge-filled corridors of yore (and don’t forget to bring your sketchbook).
Here you’ll find ideas aplenty, ideas that will set you apart from your peers, who remain ever-reliant on the same old digital sources.
The idea generation toolbox
Now that we’ve established the importance of getting the process and the context right, it’s time to meet the idea generation toolbox: a series of tools and techniques that can be applied singularly or in combination to solve the perennial problem of the blank canvas.
The clean sheet of paper, numbing in its emptiness, can prove an insurmountable barrier to many a project, but the route beyond it involves just a few, well-considered steps. The route to a good idea lies in widening your pool of inspiration at the project outset. Let go and generate ideas quickly; it’s critical to diverge before you converge – but how do we do this and what exactly do we mean by this?
The temptation is to pull something out of your well-worn box of tricks, something that you know from experience will do the job. We urge you, however, not to fall prey to this desire. You can do better; better still, a few of you putting your minds together can do a lot better. By avoiding the path of least resistance, you can create something extraordinary.
Culturally, we value logical, linear thinking. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, critical thinking, deduction and the pursuit of truth have been rewarded. To generate creative ideas, however, we need to start thinking sideways, making connections that don’t necessarily follow logically. Lateral thinking, a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, aptly describes this very process:
With logic you start out with certain ingredients, just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces – lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces.
Edward de Bono
One of the easiest ways to start thinking laterally is to start with a mind map, a perfect tool for widening the scope of a project beyond the predictable and an ideal one for getting the context right for discovery.
Making connections
Mind maps can be used to generate, visualise and structure ideas. Arranged intuitively and classified around groupings, mind maps allow chance connections to be drawn across related groups of information, and are perfect for exposing alogical associations and unexpected relationships.
Get a number of people together in a room, equipped with the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©. Give yourself a limited amount of time – half an hour should prove more than enough – and you’ll be surprised at the results a few well-chosen people can generate in a very short space of time. The key is to work fast, diverge and not inhibit thinking.
We’ve been embracing Tony Buzan’s methods in our teaching for over a decade. His ideas on the power of radiant thinking and how this can be applied to mind maps, uncover the real power which lies in the human brain’s ability to spot connections across a mapped out body of diverse knowledge.
Frank Chimero wrote about this recently in How to Have an Idea, which beautifully illustrates Mr Buzan’s theories, articulating the importance of the brain’s ability to make abstract connections, finding unexpected pairings when a concept is mapped out on paper.
Once a topic is surveyed and a rich set of stimuli articulated, the next stage is to draw connections, pulling from opposite sides of the mind map. It’s at this point, when defining alogical connections, that the truly interesting and unexpected ideas are often uncovered.
The curve ball
If you’ve followed our instructions so far, all being well, you should have a number of ideas. Good news: we have one last technique to throw into the mix. We like to call it ‘the curve ball’, that last minute ‘something’ that forces you to rethink and encourages you to address a problem from a different direction.
There are a number of ways of throwing in a curve ball – a short, sharp, unexpected impetus – but we have a firm favourite we think you’ll appreciate. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies – subtitled ‘Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas’ – are the perfect creative tool for throwing in a spot of unpredictability. As Eno and Schmidt put it:
The Oblique Strategies can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt
Simply pick a card and apply the strategy to the problem at hand. The key here, as with de Bono’s techniques, is to embrace randomness and provocation to inspire lateral creative approaches.
To assist this process, you might wish to consult one of the many virtual decks of Oblique Strategies online.
Wrapping up
To summarise, it’s tempting to see the route to the fastest satisfactory conclusion in a computer when, in reality, that’s the last place you should start. The tools we’ve introduced, far from time-consuming, are hyper-efficient, always at hand and, if you factor them into your workflow, the key to unlocking the ideas that set the great designers apart.
We wish you well on your quest in search of the perfect idea, now armed with the knowledge that the quest begins on paper. |
2010 |
The Standardistas |
thestandardistas |
2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2010/good-ideas-grow-on-paper/ |
process |
| 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 of web three point oh. |
2006 |
Dan Cederholm |
dancederholm |
2006-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/gravity-defying-page-corners/ |
design |
| 68 |
Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout |
Three years ago for 24 ways 2012, I wrote an article about a new CSS layout method I was excited about. A specification had emerged, developed by people from the Internet Explorer team, bringing us a proper grid system for the web. In 2015, that Internet Explorer implementation is still the only public implementation of CSS grid layout. However, in 2016 we should be seeing it in a new improved form ready for our use in browsers.
Grid layout has developed hidden behind a flag in Blink, and in nightly builds of WebKit and, latterly, Firefox. By being developed in this way, breaking changes could be safely made to the specification as no one was relying on the experimental implementations in production work.
Another new layout method has emerged over the past few years in a more public and perhaps more painful way. Shipped prefixed in browsers, The flexible box layout module (flexbox) was far too tempting for developers not to use on production sites. Therefore, as changes were made to the specification, we found ourselves with three different flexboxes, and browser implementations that did not match one another in completeness or in the version of specified features they supported.
Owing to the different ways these modules have come into being, when I present on grid layout it is often the very first time someone has heard of the specification. A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks.
If there is to be a loser in the battle of the layouts, my hope is that it will be the layout frameworks that tie our design to our markup. They have been a necessary placeholder while we waited for a true web layout system, but I believe that in a few years time we’ll be easily able to date a website to circa 2015 by seeing <div class="row"> or <div class="col-md-3"> in the markup.
In this article, I’m going to take a look at the common features of our new layout systems, along with a couple of examples which serve to highlight the differences between them.
To see the grid layout examples you will need to enable grid in your browser. The easiest thing to do is to enable the experimental web platform features flag in Chrome. Details of current browser support can be found here.
Relationship
Items only become flex or grid items if they are a direct child of the element that has display:flex, display:grid or display:inline-grid applied. Those direct children then understand themselves in the context of the complete layout. This makes many things possible. It’s the lack of relationship between elements that makes our existing layout methods difficult to use. If we float two columns, left and right, we have no way to tell the shorter column to extend to the height of the taller one. We have expended a lot of effort trying to figure out the best way to make full-height columns work, using techniques that were never really designed for page layout.
At a very simple level, the relationship between elements means that we can easily achieve full-height columns. In flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Alignment
Full-height columns rely on our flex and grid items understanding themselves as part of an overall layout. They also draw on a third new specification: the box alignment module. If vertical centring is a gift you’d like to have under your tree this Christmas, then this is the box you’ll want to unwrap first.
The box alignment module takes the alignment and space distribution properties from flexbox and applies them to other layout methods. That includes grid layout, but also other layout methods. Once implemented in browsers, this specification will give us true vertical centring of all the things.
Our examples above achieved full-height columns because the default value of align-items is stretch. The value ensured our columns stretched to the height of the tallest. If we want to use our new vertical centring abilities on all items, we would set align-items:center on the container. To align one flex or grid item, apply the align-self property.
The examples below demonstrate these alignment properties in both grid layout and flexbox. The portrait image of Widget the cat is aligned with the default stretch. The other three images are aligned using different values of align-self.
Take a look at an example in flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And also in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The alignment properties used with CSS grid layout.
Fluid grids
A cornerstone of responsive design is the concept of fluid grids.
“[…]every aspect of the grid—and the elements laid upon it—can be expressed as a proportion relative to its container.”
—Ethan Marcotte, “Fluid Grids”
The method outlined by Marcotte is to divide the target width by the context, then use that value as a percentage value for the width property on our element.
h1 {
margin-left: 14.575%; /* 144px / 988px = 0.14575 */
width: 70.85%; /* 700px / 988px = 0.7085 */
}
In more recent years, we’ve been able to use calc() to simplify this (at least, for those of us able to drop support for Internet Explorer 8). However, flexbox and grid layout make fluid grids simple.
The most basic of flexbox demos shows this fluidity in action. The justify-content property – another property defined in the box alignment module – can be used to create an equal amount of space between or around items. As the available width increases, more space is assigned in proportion.
In this demo, the list items are flex items due to display:flex being added to the ul. I have given them a maximum width of 250 pixels. Any remaining space is distributed equally between the items as the justify-content property has a value of space-between.
See the Pen Flexbox: justify-content by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
For true fluid grid-like behaviour, your new flexible friends are flex-grow and flex-shrink. These properties give us the ability to assign space in proportion.
The flexbox flex property is a shorthand for:
flex-grow
flex-shrink
flex-basis
The flex-basis property sets the default width for an item. If flex-grow is set to 0, then the item will not grow larger than the flex-basis value; if flex-shrink is 0, the item will not shrink smaller than the flex-basis value.
flex: 1 1 200px: a flexible box that can grow and shrink from a 200px basis.
flex: 0 0 200px: a box that will be 200px and cannot grow or shrink.
flex: 1 0 200px: a box that can grow bigger than 200px, but not shrink smaller.
In this example, I have a set of boxes that can all grow and shrink equally from a 100 pixel basis.
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
What I would like to happen is for the first element, containing a portrait image, to take up less width than the landscape images, thus keeping it more in proportion. I can do this by changing the flex-grow value. By giving all the items a value of 1, they all gain an equal amount of the available space after the 100 pixel basis has been worked out.
If I give them all a value of 3 and the first box a value of 1, the other boxes will be assigned three parts of the available space while box 1 is assigned only one part. You can see what happens in this demo:
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Once you understand flex-grow, you should easily be able to grasp how the new fraction unit (fr, defined in the CSS grid layout specification) works. Like flex-grow, this unit allows us to assign available space in proportion. In this case, we assign the space when defining our track sizes.
In this demo (which requires a CSS grid-supporting browser), I create a four-column grid using the fraction unit to define my track sizes. The first track is 1fr in width, and the others 2fr.
grid-template-columns: 1fr 2fr 2fr 2fr;
See the Pen Grid fraction units by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The four-track grid.
Separation of concerns
My younger self petitioned my peers to stop using tables for layout and to move to CSS. One of the rallying cries of that movement was the concept of separating our source and content from how they were displayed. It was something of a failed promise given the tools we had available: the display leaked into the markup with the need for redundant elements to cope with browser bugs, or visual techniques that just could not be achieved without supporting markup.
Browsers have improved, but even now we can find ourselves compromising the ideal document structure so we can get the layout we want at various breakpoints. In some ways, the situation has returned to tables-for-layout days. Many of the current grid frameworks rely on describing our layout directly in the markup. We add divs for rows, and classes to describe the number of desired columns. We nest these constructions of divs inside one another.
Here is a snippet from the Bootstrap grid examples – two columns with two nested columns:
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-8">
.col-md-8
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6">
.col-md-6
</div>
<div class="col-md-6">
.col-md-6
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-4">
.col-md-4
</div>
</div>
Not a million miles away from something I might have written in 1999.
<table>
<tr>
<td class="col-md-8">
.col-md-8
<table>
<tr>
<td class="col-md-6">
.col-md-6
</td>
<td class="col-md-6">
.col-md-6
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td class="col-md-4">
.col-md-4
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Grid and flexbox layouts do not need to be described in markup. The layout description happens entirely in the CSS, meaning that elements can be moved around from within the presentation layer.
Flexbox gives us the ability to reverse the flow of elements, but also to set the order of elements with the order property. This is demonstrated here, where Widget the cat is in position 1 in the source, but I have used the order property to display him after the things that are currently unimpressive to him.
See the Pen Flexbox: order by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Grid layout takes this a step further. Where flexbox lets us set the order of items in a single dimension, grid layout gives us the ability to position things in two dimensions: both rows and columns. Defined in the CSS, this positioning can be changed at any breakpoint without needing additional markup. Compare the source order with the display order in this example (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid positioning in two dimensions by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Laying out our items in two dimensions using grid layout.
As these demos show, a straightforward way to decide if you should use grid layout or flexbox is whether you want to position items in one dimension or two. If two, you want grid layout.
A note on accessibility and reordering
The issues arising from this powerful ability to change the way items are ordered visually from how they appear in the source have been the subject of much discussion. The current flexbox editor’s draft states
“Authors must use order only for visual, not logical, reordering of content. Style sheets that use order to perform logical reordering are non-conforming.”
—CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1, Editor’s Draft (3 December 2015)
This is to ensure that non-visual user agents (a screen reader, for example) can rely on the document source order as being correct. Take care when reordering that you do so from the basis of a sound document that makes sense in terms of source order. Avoid using visual order to convey meaning.
Automatic content placement with rules
Having control over the order of items, or placing items on a predefined grid, is nice. However, we can often do that already with one method or another and we have frameworks and tools to help us. Tools such as Susy mean we can even get away from stuffing our markup full of grid classes. However, our new layout methods give us some interesting new possibilities.
Something that is useful to be able to do when dealing with content coming out of a CMS or being pulled from some other source, is to define a bunch of rules and then say, “Display this content, using these rules.”
As an example of this, I will leave you with a Christmas poem displayed in a document alongside Widget the cat and some of the decorations that are bringing him no Christmas cheer whatsoever.
The poem is displayed first in the source as a set of paragraphs. I’ve added a class identifying each of the four paragraphs but they are displayed in the source as one text. Below that are all my images, some landscape and some portrait; I’ve added a class of landscape to the landscape ones.
The mobile-first grid is a single column and I use line-based placement to explicitly position my poem paragraphs. The grid layout auto-placement rules then take over and place the images into the empty cells left in the grid.
At wider screen widths, I declare a four-track grid, and position my poem around the grid, keeping it in a readable order.
I also add rules to my landscape class, stating that these items should span two tracks. Once again the grid layout auto-placement rules position the rest of my images without my needing to position them. You will see that grid layout takes items out of source order to fill gaps in the grid. It does this because I have set the property grid-auto-flow to dense. The default is sparse meaning that grid will not attempt this backfilling behaviour.
Take a look and play around with the full demo (requires a CSS grid layout-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid auto-flow with rules by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The final automatic placement example.
My wish for 2016
I really hope that in 2016, we will see CSS grid layout finally emerge from behind browser flags, so that we can start to use these features in production — that we can start to move away from using the wrong tools for the job.
However, I also hope that we’ll see developers fully embracing these tools as the new system that they are. I want to see people exploring the possibilities they give us, rather than trying to get them to behave like the grid systems of 2015. As you discover these new modules, treat them as the new paradigm that they are, get creative with them. And, as you find the edges of possibility with them, take that feedback to the CSS Working Group. Help improve the layout systems that will shape the look of the future web.
Some further reading
I maintain a site of grid layout examples and resources at Grid by Example.
The three CSS specifications I’ve discussed can be found as editor’s drafts: CSS grid, flexbox, box alignment.
I wrote about the last three years of my interest in CSS grid layout, which gives something of a history of the specification.
More examples of box alignment and grid layout.
My presentation at Fronteers earlier this year, in which I explain more about these concepts. |
2015 |
Rachel Andrew |
rachelandrew |
2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/grid-flexbox-box-alignment-our-new-system-for-layout/ |
code |
| 18 |
Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard |
Front-end developers are often told to do certain things:
Work in as small chunks of CSS and JavaScript as makes sense to you, then concatenate them together for the production website.
Compress your CSS and minify your JavaScript to make their file sizes as small as possible for your production website.
Optimize your images to reduce their file size without affecting quality.
Use Sass for CSS authoring because of all the useful abstraction it allows.
That’s not a comprehensive list of course, but those are the kind of things we need to do. You might call them tasks.
I bet you’ve heard of Grunt. Well, Grunt is a task runner. Grunt can do all of those things for you. Once you’ve got it set up, which isn’t particularly difficult, those things can happen automatically without you having to think about them again.
But let’s face it: Grunt is one of those fancy newfangled things that all the cool kids seem to be using but at first glance feels strange and intimidating. I hear you. This article is for you.
Let’s nip some misconceptions in the bud right away
Perhaps you’ve heard of Grunt, but haven’t done anything with it. I’m sure that applies to many of you. Maybe one of the following hang-ups applies to you.
I don’t need the things Grunt does
You probably do, actually. Check out that list up top. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves. They are pretty vital parts of website development these days. If you already do all of them, that’s awesome. Perhaps you use a variety of different tools to accomplish them. Grunt can help bring them under one roof, so to speak. If you don’t already do all of them, you probably should and Grunt can help. Then, once you are doing those, you can keep using Grunt to do more for you, which will basically make you better at doing your job.
Grunt runs on Node.js — I don’t know Node
You don’t have to know Node. Just like you don’t have to know Ruby to use Sass. Or PHP to use WordPress. Or C++ to use Microsoft Word.
I have other ways to do the things Grunt could do for me
Are they all organized in one place, configured to run automatically when needed, and shared among every single person working on that project? Unlikely, I’d venture.
Grunt is a command line tool — I’m just a designer
I’m a designer too. I prefer native apps with graphical interfaces when I can get them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen with Grunt1.
The extent to which you need to use the command line is:
Navigate to your project’s directory.
Type grunt and press Return.
After set-up, that is, which again isn’t particularly difficult.
OK. Let’s get Grunt installed
Node is indeed a prerequisite for Grunt. If you don’t have Node installed, don’t worry, it’s very easy. You literally download an installer and run it. Click the big Install button on the Node website.
You install Grunt on a per-project basis. Go to your project’s folder. It needs a file there named package.json at the root level. You can just create one and put it there.
package.json at root
The contents of that file should be this:
{
"name": "example-project",
"version": "0.1.0",
"devDependencies": {
"grunt": "~0.4.1"
}
}
Feel free to change the name of the project and the version, but the devDependencies thing needs to be in there just like that.
This is how Node does dependencies. Node has a package manager called NPM (Node packaged modules) for managing Node dependencies (like a gem for Ruby if you’re familiar with that). You could even think of it a bit like a plug-in for WordPress.
Once that package.json file is in place, go to the terminal and navigate to your folder. Terminal rubes like me do it like this:
Terminal rube changing directories
Then run the command:
npm install
After you’ve run that command, a new folder called node_modules will show up in your project.
Example of node_modules folder
The other files you see there, README.md and LICENSE are there because I’m going to put this project on GitHub and that’s just standard fare there.
The last installation step is to install the Grunt CLI (command line interface). That’s what makes the grunt command in the terminal work. Without it, typing grunt will net you a “Command Not Found”-style error. It is a separate installation for efficiency reasons. Otherwise, if you had ten projects you’d have ten copies of Grunt CLI.
This is a one-liner again. Just run this command in the terminal:
npm install -g grunt-cli
You should close and reopen the terminal as well. That’s a generic good practice to make sure things are working right. Kinda like restarting your computer after you install a new application was in the olden days.
Let’s make Grunt concatenate some files
Perhaps in our project there are three separate JavaScript files:
jquery.js – The library we are using.
carousel.js – A jQuery plug-in we are using.
global.js – Our authored JavaScript file where we configure and call the plug-in.
In production, we would concatenate all those files together for performance reasons (one request is better than three). We need to tell Grunt to do this for us.
But wait. Grunt actually doesn’t do anything all by itself. Remember Grunt is a task runner. The tasks themselves we will need to add. We actually haven’t set up Grunt to do anything yet, so let’s do that.
The official Grunt plug-in for concatenating files is grunt-contrib-concat. You can read about it on GitHub if you want, but all you have to do to use it on your project is to run this command from the terminal (it will henceforth go without saying that you need to run the given commands from your project’s root folder):
npm install grunt-contrib-concat --save-dev
A neat thing about doing it this way: your package.json file will automatically be updated to include this new dependency. Open it up and check it out. You’ll see a new line:
"grunt-contrib-concat": "~0.3.0"
Now we’re ready to use it. To use it we need to start configuring Grunt and telling it what to do.
You tell Grunt what to do via a configuration file named Gruntfile.js2
Just like our package.json file, our Gruntfile.js has a very special format that must be just right. I wouldn’t worry about what every word of this means. Just check out the format:
module.exports = function(grunt) {
// 1. All configuration goes here
grunt.initConfig({
pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),
concat: {
// 2. Configuration for concatinating files goes here.
}
});
// 3. Where we tell Grunt we plan to use this plug-in.
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-concat');
// 4. Where we tell Grunt what to do when we type "grunt" into the terminal.
grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat']);
};
Now we need to create that configuration. The documentation can be overwhelming. Let’s focus just on the very simple usage example.
Remember, we have three JavaScript files we’re trying to concatenate. We’ll list file paths to them under src in an array of file paths (as quoted strings) and then we’ll list a destination file as dest. The destination file doesn’t have to exist yet. It will be created when this task runs and squishes all the files together.
Both our jquery.js and carousel.js files are libraries. We most likely won’t be touching them. So, for organization, we’ll keep them in a /js/libs/ folder. Our global.js file is where we write our own code, so that will be right in the /js/ folder. Now let’s tell Grunt to find all those files and squish them together into a single file named production.js, named that way to indicate it is for use on our real live website.
concat: {
dist: {
src: [
'js/libs/*.js', // All JS in the libs folder
'js/global.js' // This specific file
],
dest: 'js/build/production.js',
}
}
Note: throughout this article there will be little chunks of configuration code like above. The intention is to focus in on the important bits, but it can be confusing at first to see how a particular chunk fits into the larger file. If you ever get confused and need more context, refer to the complete file.
With that concat configuration in place, head over to the terminal, run the command:
grunt
and watch it happen! production.js will be created and will be a perfect concatenation of our three files. This was a big aha! moment for me. Feel the power course through your veins. Let’s do more things!
Let’s make Grunt minify that JavaScript
We have so much prep work done now, adding new tasks for Grunt to run is relatively easy. We just need to:
Find a Grunt plug-in to do what we want
Learn the configuration style of that plug-in
Write that configuration to work with our project
The official plug-in for minifying code is grunt-contrib-uglify. Just like we did last time, we just run an NPM command to install it:
npm install grunt-contrib-uglify --save-dev
Then we alter our Gruntfile.js to load the plug-in:
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-uglify');
Then we configure it:
uglify: {
build: {
src: 'js/build/production.js',
dest: 'js/build/production.min.js'
}
}
Let’s update that default task to also run minification:
grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat', 'uglify']);
Super-similar to the concatenation set-up, right?
Run grunt at the terminal and you’ll get some deliciously minified JavaScript:
Minified JavaScript
That production.min.js file is what we would load up for use in our index.html file.
Let’s make Grunt optimize our images
We’ve got this down pat now. Let’s just go through the motions. The official image minification plug-in for Grunt is grunt-contrib-imagemin. Install it:
npm install grunt-contrib-imagemin --save-dev
Register it in the Gruntfile.js:
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-imagemin');
Configure it:
imagemin: {
dynamic: {
files: [{
expand: true,
cwd: 'images/',
src: ['**/*.{png,jpg,gif}'],
dest: 'images/build/'
}]
}
}
Make sure it runs:
grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat', 'uglify', 'imagemin']);
Run grunt and watch that gorgeous squishification happen:
Squished images
Gotta love performance increases for nearly zero effort.
Let’s get a little bit smarter and automate
What we’ve done so far is awesome and incredibly useful. But there are a couple of things we can get smarter on and make things easier on ourselves, as well as Grunt:
Run these tasks automatically when they should
Run only the tasks needed at the time
For instance:
Concatenate and minify JavaScript when JavaScript changes
Optimize images when a new image is added or an existing one changes
We can do this by watching files. We can tell Grunt to keep an eye out for changes to specific places and, when changes happen in those places, run specific tasks. Watching happens through the official grunt-contrib-watch plugin.
I’ll let you install it. It is exactly the same process as the last few plug-ins we installed. We configure it by giving watch specific files (or folders, or both) to watch. By watch, I mean monitor for file changes, file deletions or file additions. Then we tell it what tasks we want to run when it detects a change.
We want to run our concatenation and minification when anything in the /js/ folder changes. When it does, we should run the JavaScript-related tasks. And when things happen elsewhere, we should not run the JavaScript-related tasks, because that would be irrelevant. So:
watch: {
scripts: {
files: ['js/*.js'],
tasks: ['concat', 'uglify'],
options: {
spawn: false,
},
}
}
Feels pretty comfortable at this point, hey? The only weird bit there is the spawn thing. And you know what? I don’t even really know what that does. From what I understand from the documentation it is the smart default. That’s real-world development. Just leave it alone if it’s working and if it’s not, learn more.
Note: Isn’t it frustrating when something that looks so easy in a tutorial doesn’t seem to work for you? If you can’t get Grunt to run after making a change, it’s very likely to be a syntax error in your Gruntfile.js. That might look like this in the terminal:
Errors running Grunt
Usually Grunt is pretty good about letting you know what happened, so be sure to read the error message. In this case, a syntax error in the form of a missing comma foiled me. Adding the comma allowed it to run.
Let’s make Grunt do our preprocessing
The last thing on our list from the top of the article is using Sass — yet another task Grunt is well-suited to run for us. But wait? Isn’t Sass technically in Ruby? Indeed it is. There is a version of Sass that will run in Node and thus not add an additional dependency to our project, but it’s not quite up-to-snuff with the main Ruby project. So, we’ll use the official grunt-contrib-sass plug-in which just assumes you have Sass installed on your machine. If you don’t, follow the command line instructions.
What’s neat about Sass is that it can do concatenation and minification all by itself. So for our little project we can just have it compile our main global.scss file:
sass: {
dist: {
options: {
style: 'compressed'
},
files: {
'css/build/global.css': 'css/global.scss'
}
}
}
We wouldn’t want to manually run this task. We already have the watch plug-in installed, so let’s use it! Within the watch configuration, we’ll add another subtask:
css: {
files: ['css/*.scss'],
tasks: ['sass'],
options: {
spawn: false,
}
}
That’ll do it. Now, every time we change any of our Sass files, the CSS will automaticaly be updated.
Let’s take this one step further (it’s absolutely worth it) and add LiveReload. With LiveReload, you won’t have to go back to your browser and refresh the page. Page refreshes happen automatically and in the case of CSS, new styles are injected without a page refresh (handy for heavily state-based websites).
It’s very easy to set up, since the LiveReload ability is built into the watch plug-in. We just need to:
Install the browser plug-in
Add to the top of the watch configuration:
. watch: {
options: {
livereload: true,
},
scripts: {
/* etc */
Restart the browser and click the LiveReload icon to activate it.
Update some Sass and watch it change the page automatically.
Live reloading browser
Yum.
Prefer a video?
If you’re the type that likes to learn by watching, I’ve made a screencast to accompany this article that I’ve published over on CSS-Tricks: First Moments with Grunt
Leveling up
As you might imagine, there is a lot of leveling up you can do with your build process. It surely could be a full time job in some organizations.
Some hardcore devops nerds might scoff at the simplistic setup we have going here. But I’d advise them to slow their roll. Even what we have done so far is tremendously valuable. And don’t forget this is all free and open source, which is amazing.
You might level up by adding more useful tasks:
Running your CSS through Autoprefixer (A+ Would recommend) instead of a preprocessor add-ons.
Writing and running JavaScript unit tests (example: Jasmine).
Build your image sprites and SVG icons automatically (example: Grunticon).
Start a server, so you can link to assets with proper file paths and use services that require a real URL like TypeKit and such, as well as remove the need for other tools that do this, like MAMP.
Check for code problems with HTML-Inspector, CSS Lint, or JS Hint.
Have new CSS be automatically injected into the browser when it ever changes.
Help you commit or push to a version control repository like GitHub.
Add version numbers to your assets (cache busting).
Help you deploy to a staging or production environment (example: DPLOY).
You might level up by simply understanding more about Grunt itself:
Read Grunt Boilerplate by Mark McDonnell.
Read Grunt Tips and Tricks by Nicolas Bevacqua.
Organize your Gruntfile.js by splitting it up into smaller files.
Check out other people’s and projects’ Gruntfile.js.
Learn more about Grunt by digging into its source and learning about its API.
Let’s share
I think some group sharing would be a nice way to wrap this up. If you are installing Grunt for the first time (or remember doing that), be especially mindful of little frustrating things you experience(d) but work(ed) through. Those are the things we should share in the comments here. That way we have this safe place and useful resource for working through those confusing moments without the embarrassment. We’re all in this thing together!
1 Maybe someday someone will make a beautiful Grunt app for your operating system of choice. But I’m not sure that day will come. The configuration of the plug-ins is the important part of using Grunt. Each plug-in is a bit different, depending on what it does. That means a uniquely considered UI for every single plug-in, which is a long shot.
Perhaps a decent middleground is this Grunt DevTools Chrome add-on.
2 Gruntfile.js is often referred to as Gruntfile in documentation and examples. Don’t literally name it Gruntfile — it won’t work. |
2013 |
Chris Coyier |
chriscoyier |
2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/ |
code |
| 80 |
HTML5 Video Bumpers |
Video is a bigger part of the web experience than ever before. With native browser support for HTML5 video elements freeing us from the tyranny of plugins, and the availability of faster internet connections to the workplace, home and mobile networks, it’s now pretty straightforward to publish video in a way that can be consumed in all sorts of ways on all sorts of different web devices.
I recently worked on a project where the client had shot some dedicated video shorts to publish on their site. They also had some five-second motion graphics produced to top and tail the videos with context and branding. This pretty common requirement is a great idea on the web, where a user might land at your video having followed a link and be viewing a page without much context.
Known as bumpers, these short introduction clips help brand a video and make it look a lot more professional.
Adding bumpers to a video
The simplest way to add bumpers to a video would be to edit them on to the start and end of the video file itself. Cooking the bumpers into the video file is easy, but should you ever want to update them it can become a real headache. If the branding needs updating, for example, you’d need to re-edit and re-encode all your videos. Not a fun task.
What if the bumpers could be added dynamically? That would enable you to use the same bumper for multiple videos (decreasing download time for users who might watch more than one) and to update the bumpers whenever you wanted. You could change them seasonally, update them for special promotions, run different advertising slots, perform multivariate testing, or even target different bumpers to different users.
The trade-off, of course, is that if you dynamically add your bumpers, there’s a chance that a user in a given circumstance might not see the bumper. For example, if the main video feature was uploaded to YouTube, you’d have no way to control the playback. As always, you need to weigh up the pros and cons and make your choice.
HTML5 bumpers
If you wanted to dynamically add bumpers to your HTML5 video, how would you go about it? That was the question I found myself needing to answer for this particular client project.
My initial thought was to treat it just like an image slideshow. If I were building a slideshow that moved between images, I’d use CSS absolute positioning with z-index to stack the images up on top of each other in a pile, with the first image on top. To transition to the second image, I’d use JavaScript to fade the top image out, revealing the second image beneath it.
Now that video is just a native object in the DOM, just like an image, why not do the same? Stack the videos up with the opening bumper on top, listen for the video’s onended event, and fade it out to reveal the main feature behind. Good idea, right?
Wrong
Remember that this is the web. It’s never going to be that easy. The problem here is that many non-desktop devices use native, dedicated video players. Think about watching a video on a mobile phone – when you play the video, the phone often goes full-screen in its native player, leaving the web page behind. There’s no opportunity to fade or switch z-index, as the video isn’t being viewed in the page. Your page is left powerless. Powerless!
So what can we do? What can we control?
Those of us with particularly long memories might recall a time before CSS, when we’d have to use JavaScript to perform image rollovers. As CSS background images weren’t a practical reality, we would use lots of <img> elements, and perform a rollover by modifying the src attribute of the image.
Turns out, this old trick of modifying the source can help us out with video, too. In most cases, modifying the src attribute of a <video> element, or perhaps more likely the src attribute of a source element, will swap from one video to another.
Swappin’ it
Let’s take a deliberately simple example of a super-basic video tag:
<video src="mycat.webm" controls>no fallback coz i is lame, innit.</video>
We could very simply write a script to find all video tags and give them a new src to show our bumper.
<script>
var videos, i, l;
videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
videos[i].setAttribute('src', 'bumper-in.webm');
}
</script>
View the example in a browser with WebM support. You’ll see that the video is swapped out for the opening bumper. Great!
Beefing it up
Of course, we can’t just publish video in one format. In practical use, you need a <video> element with multiple <source> elements containing your different source formats.
<video controls>
<source src="mycat.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="mycat.webm" type="video/webm" />
<source src="mycat.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>
This time, our script needs to loop through the sources, not the videos. We’ll use a regular expression replacement to swap out the file name while maintaining the correct file extension.
<script>
var sources, i, l, orig;
sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
// reload the video
sources[i].parentNode.load();
}
</script>
The difference this time is that when changing the src of a <source> we need to call the .load() method on the video to get it to acknowledge the change.
See the code in action, this time in a wider range of browsers.
But, my video!
I guess we should get the original video playing again. Keeping the same markup, we need to modify the script to do two things:
Store the original src in a data- attribute so we can access it later
Add an event listener so we can detect the end of the bumper playing, and load the original video back in
As we need to loop through the videos this time to add the event listener, I’ve moved the .load() call into that loop. It’s a bit more efficient to call it only once after modifying all the video’s sources.
<script>
var videos, sources, i, l, orig;
sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig', orig);
sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
}
videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
videos[i].load();
videos[i].addEventListener('ended', function(){
sources = this.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
orig = sources[i].getAttribute('data-orig');
if (orig) {
sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig);
}
sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig','');
}
this.load();
this.play();
});
}
</script>
Again, view the example to see the bumper play, followed by our spectacular main feature. (That’s my cat, Widget. His interests include sleeping and internet marketing.)
Tidying things up
The final thing to do is add our closing bumper after the main video has played. This involves the following changes:
We need to keep track of whether the src has been changed, so we only play the video if it’s changed. I’ve added the modified variable to track this, and it stops us getting into a situation where the video just loops forever.
Add an else to the event listener, for when the orig is false (so the main feature has been playing) to load in the end bumper. We also check that we’re not already playing the end bumper. Because looping.
<script>
var videos, sources, i, l, orig, current, modified;
sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig', orig);
sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
}
videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
videos[i].load();
modified = false;
videos[i].addEventListener('ended', function(){
sources = this.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
orig = sources[i].getAttribute('data-orig');
if (orig) {
sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig);
modified = true;
}else{
current = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
if (current.indexOf('bumper-out')==-1) {
sources[i].setAttribute('src', current.replace(/([w]+).(w+)/, 'bumper-out.$2'));
modified = true;
}else{
this.pause();
modified = false;
}
}
sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig','');
}
if (modified) {
this.load();
this.play();
}
});
}
</script>
Yo ho ho, that’s a lot of JavaScript. See it in action – you should get a bumper, the cat video, and an end bumper.
Of course, this code works fine for demonstrating the principle, but it’s very procedural. Nothing wrong with that, but to do something similar in production, you’d probably want to make the code more modular to ease maintainability. Besides, you may want to use a framework, rather than basic JavaScript.
The end credits
One really important principle here is that of progressive enhancement. If the browser doesn’t support JavaScript, the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video. If the browser supports JavaScript but doesn’t allow you to modify the src (as was the case with older versions of iOS), the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video.
If a search engine or social media bot grabs your page and looks for content, they won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video – which is absolutely what you want.
This means that if the bumper is absolutely crucial, you may still need to cook it into the video. However, for many applications, running it dynamically can work quite well.
As always, it comes down to three things:
Measure your audience: know how people access your site
Test the solution: make sure it works for your audience
Plan for failure: it’s the web and that’s how things work ‘round these parts
But most of all play around with it, have fun and build something awesome. |
2012 |
Drew McLellan |
drewmclellan |
2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/html5-video-bumpers/ |
code |
| 177 |
HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa? |
It would lead to unseasonal arguments to discuss the title of this piece here, and the arguments are as indigestible as the fourth turkey curry of the season, so we’ll restrict our article to the practical rather than the philosophical: what HTML5 can you reasonably expect to be able to use reliably cross-browser in the early months of 2010?
The answer is that you can use more than you might think, due to the seasonal tinsel of feature-detection and using the sparkly pixie-dust of IE-only VML (but used in a way that won’t damage your Elf).
Canvas
canvas is a 2D drawing API that defines a blank area of the screen of arbitrary size, and allows you to draw on it using JavaScript. The pictures can be animated, such as in this canvas mashup of Wolfenstein 3D and Flickr. (The difference between canvas and SVG is that SVG uses vector graphics, so is infinitely scalable. It also keeps a DOM, whereas canvas is just pixels so you have to do all your own book-keeping yourself in JavaScript if you want to know where aliens are on screen, or do collision detection.)
Previously, you needed to do this using Adobe Flash or Java applets, requiring plugins and potentially compromising keyboard accessibility. Canvas drawing is supported now in Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The reindeer in the corner is, of course, Internet Explorer, which currently has zero support for canvas (or SVG, come to that).
Now, don’t pull a face like all you’ve found in your Yuletide stocking is a mouldy satsuma and a couple of nuts—that’s not the end of the story. Canvas was originally an Apple proprietary technology, and Internet Explorer had a similar one called Vector Markup Language which was submitted to the W3C for standardisation in 1998 but which, unlike canvas, was not blessed with retrospective standardisation.
What you need, then, is some way for Internet Explorer to translate canvas to VML on-the-fly, while leaving the other, more standards-compliant browsers to use the HTML5. And such a way exists—it’s a JavaScript library called excanvas. It’s downloadable from http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/ and it’s simple to include it via a conditional comment in the head for IE:
<!--[if IE]>
<script src="excanvas.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
Simply include this, and your canvas will be natively supported in the modern browsers (and the library won’t even be downloaded) whereas IE will suddenly render your canvas using its own VML engine. Be sure, however, to check it carefully, as the IE JavaScript engine isn’t so fast and you’ll need to be sure that performance isn’t too degraded to use.
Forms
Since the beginning of the Web, developers have been coding forms, and then writing JavaScript to check whether an input is a correctly formed email address, URL, credit card number or conforms to some other pattern. The cumulative labour of the world’s developers over the last 15 years makes whizzing round in a sleigh and delivering presents seem like popping to the corner shop in comparison.
With HTML5, that’s all about to change. As Yaili began to explore on Day 3, a host of new attributes to the input element provide built-in validation for email address formats (input type=email), URLs (input type=url), any pattern that can be expressed with a JavaScript-syntax regex (pattern="[0-9][A-Z]{3}") and the like. New attributes such as required, autofocus, input type=number min=3 max=50 remove much of the tedious JavaScript from form validation.
Other, really exciting input types are available (see all input types). The datalist is reminiscent of a select box, but allows the user to enter their own text if they don’t want to choose one of the pre-defined options. input type=range is rendered as a slider, while input type=date pops up a date picker, all natively in the browser with no JavaScript required at all.
Currently, support is most complete in an experimental implementation in Opera and a number of the new attributes in Webkit-based browsers. But don’t let that stop you! The clever thing about the specification of the new Web Forms is that all the new input types are attributes (rather than elements). input defaults to input type=text, so if a browser doesn’t understand a new HTML5 type, it gracefully degrades to a plain text input.
So where does that leave validation in those browsers that don’t support Web Forms? The answer is that you don’t retire your pre-existing JavaScript validation just yet, but you leave it as a fallback after doing some feature detection. To detect whether (say) input type=email is supported, you make a new input type=email with JavaScript but don’t add it to the page. Then, you interrogate your new element to find out what its type attribute is. If it’s reported back as “email”, then the browser supports the new feature, so let it do its work and don’t bring in any JavaScript validation. If it’s reported back as “text”, it’s fallen back to the default, indicating that it’s not supported, so your code should branch to your old validation routines. Alternatively, use the small (7K) Modernizr library which will do this work for you and give you JavaScript booleans like Modernizr.inputtypes[email] set to true or false.
So what does this buy you? Well, first and foremost, you’re future-proofing your code for that time when all browsers support these hugely useful additions to forms. Secondly, you buy a usability and accessibility win. Although it’s tempting to style the stuffing out of your form fields (which can, incidentally, lead to madness), whatever your branding people say, it’s better to leave forms as close to the browser defaults as possible. A browser’s slider and date pickers will be the same across different sites, making it much more comprehensible to users. And, by using native controls rather than faking sliders and date pickers with JavaScript, your forms are much more likely to be accessible to users of assistive technology.
HTML5 DOCTYPE
You can use the new DOCTYPE !doctype html now and – hey presto – you’re writing HTML5, as it’s pretty much a superset of HTML4. There are some useful advantages to doing this. The first is that the HTML5 validator (I use http://html5.validator.nu) also validates ARIA information, whereas the HTML4 validator doesn’t, as ARIA is a new spec developed after HTML4. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it doesn’t validate your ARIA attributes, but it doesn’t automatically report them as an error.)
Another advantage is that HTML5 allows tabindex as a global attribute (that is, on any element). Although originally designed as an accessibility bolt-on, I ordinarily advise you don’t use it; a well-structured page should provide a logical tab order through links and form fields already.
However, tabindex="-1" is a legal value in HTML5 as it allows for the element to be programmatically focussable by JavaScript. It’s also very useful for correcting a bug in Internet Explorer when used with a keyboard; in-page links go nowhere if the destination doesn’t have a proprietary property called hasLayout set or a tabindex of -1.
So, whether it is the tool of Satan or yule of Santa, HTML5 is just around the corner. Some you can use now, and by the end of 2010 I predict you’ll be able to use a whole lot more as new browser versions are released. |
2009 |
Bruce Lawson |
brucelawson |
2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/html5-tool-of-satan-or-yule-of-santa/ |
code |
| 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 makes HTTP requests for any assets that it needs.
This is where HTTP/2 Server Push comes in. The idea behind HTTP/2 Server Push is that when the browser requests a web page from the server, the server already knows about all the assets that are needed for the web page and “pushes” it to browser. This happens when the first HTTP request for the web page takes place and it eliminates an extra round trip, making your site faster.
Using the same example above, let’s “push” the JavaScript and CSS files instead of waiting for the browser to request them. The image below gives you an idea of what this might look like.
Whoa, that looks different - let’s break it down a little. Firstly, you can see that the JavaScript and CSS files appear earlier in the waterfall chart. You might also notice that the loading times for the files are extremely quick. The browser doesn’t need to make an extra HTTP request to the server, instead it receives the critical files it needs all at once. Much better!
There are a number of different approaches when it comes to implementing HTTP/2 Server Push. Adoption is growing and many commercial CDNs such as Akamai and Cloudflare already offer support for Server Push. You can even roll your own implementation depending on your environment. I’ve also previously blogged about building a basic HTTP/2 Server Push example using Node.js. In this post, I’m not going to dive into how to implement HTTP/2 Server Push as that is an entire post in itself! However, I do recommend reading this article to find out more about the inner workings.
HTTP/2 Server Push is awesome, but it isn’t a magic bullet. It is fantastic for improving the load time of a web page when it first loads for a user, but it isn’t that great when they request the same web page again. The reason for this is that HTTP/2 Server Push is not cache “aware”. This means that the server isn’t aware about the state of your client. If you’ve visited a web page before, the server isn’t aware of this and will push the resource again anyway, regardless of whether or not you need it. HTTP/2 Server Push effectively tells the browser that it knows better and that the browser should receive the resources whether it needs them or not. In theory browsers can cancel HTTP/2 Server Push requests if they’re already got something in cache but unfortunately no browsers currently support it. The other issue is that the server will have already started to send some of the resource to the browser by the time the cancellation occurs.
HTTP/2 Server Push & Service Workers
So where do Service Workers fit in? Believe it or not, when combined together HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers can be the perfect web performance partnership. If you’ve not heard of Service Workers before, they are worker scripts that run in the background of your website. Simply put, they act as middleman between the client and the browser and enable you to intercept any network requests that come and go from the browser. They are packed with useful features such as caching, push notifications, and background sync. Best of all, they are written in JavaScript, making it easy for web developers to understand.
Using Service Workers, you can easily cache assets on a user’s device. This means when a browser makes an HTTP request for an asset, the Service Worker is able to intercept the request and first check if the asset already exists in cache on the users device. If it does, then it can simply return and serve them directly from the device instead of ever hitting the server.
Let’s stop for a second and analyse what that means. Using HTTP/2 Server Push, you are able to push critical assets to the browser before the browser requests them. Then, using Service Workers you are able to cache these resources so that the browser never needs to make a request to the server again. That means a super fast first load and an even faster second load!
Let’s put this into action. The following HTML code is a basic web page that retrieves a few images and two JavaScript files.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>HTTP2 Push Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HTTP2 Push</h1>
<img src="./images/beer-1.png" width="200" height="200" />
<img src="./images/beer-2.png" width="200" height="200" />
<br>
<br>
<img src="./images/beer-3.png" width="200" height="200" />
<img src="./images/beer-4.png" width="200" height="200" />
<!-- Scripts -->
<script async src="./js/promise.min.js"></script>
<script async src="./js/fetch.js"></script>
<script>
// Register the service worker
if ('serviceWorker' in navigator) {
navigator.serviceWorker.register('./service-worker.js').then(function(registration) {
// Registration was successful
console.log('ServiceWorker registration successful with scope: ', registration.scope);
}).catch(function(err) {
// registration failed :(
console.log('ServiceWorker registration failed: ', err);
});
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
In the HTML code above, I am registering a Service Worker file named service-worker.js. In order to start caching assets, I am going to use the Service Worker toolbox . It is a lightweight helper library to help you get started creating your own Service Workers. Using this library, we can actually cache the base web page with the path /push.
The Service Worker Toolbox comes with a built-in routing system which is based on the same routing as Express. With just a few lines of code, you can start building powerful caching patterns.
I’ve add the following code to the service-worker.js file.
(global => {
'use strict';
// Load the sw-toolbox library.
importScripts('/js/sw-toolbox/sw-toolbox.js');
// The route for any requests
toolbox.router.get('/push', global.toolbox.fastest);
toolbox.router.get('/images/(.*)', global.toolbox.fastest);
toolbox.router.get('/js/(.*)', global.toolbox.fastest);
// Ensure that our service worker takes control of the page as soon as possible.
global.addEventListener('install', event => event.waitUntil(global.skipWaiting()));
global.addEventListener('activate', event => event.waitUntil(global.clients.claim()));
})(self);
Let’s break this code down further. Around line 4, I am importing the Service Worker toolbox. Next, I am specifying a route that will listen to any requests that match the URL /push. Because I am also interested in caching the images and JavaScript for that page, I’ve told the toolbox to listen to these routes too.
The best thing about the code above is that if any of the assets exist in cache, we will instantly return the cached version instead of waiting for it to download. If the asset doesn’t exist in cache, the code above will add it into cache so that we can retrieve it when it’s needed again.
You may also notice the code global.toolbox.fastest - this is important because gives you the compromise of fulfilling from the cache immediately, while firing off an additional HTTP request updating the cache for the next visit.
But what does this mean when combined with HTTP/2 Server Push? Well, it means that on the first load of the web page, you are able to “push” everything to the user at once before the browser has even requested it. The Service Worker activates and starts caching the assets on the users device. The next time a user visits the page, the Service Worker will intercept the request and serve the asset directly from cache. Amazing!
Using this technique, the waterfall chart for a repeat visit should look like the image below.
If you look closely at the image above, you’ll notice that the web page returns almost instantly without ever making an HTTP request over the network. Using the Service Worker library, we cached the base page for the route /push, which allowed us to retrieve this directly from cache.
Whether used on their own or combined together, the best thing about these two features is that they are the perfect progressive enhancement. If your user’s browser doesn’t support them, they will simply fall back to HTTP/1.1 without Service Workers. Your users may not experience as fast a load time as they would with these two techniques, but it would be no different from their normal experience. HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers are really the perfect partners when it comes to web performance.
Summary
When used correctly, HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers can have a positive impact on your site’s load times. Together they mean super fast first load times and even faster repeat views to a web page. Whilst this technique is really effective, it’s worth noting that HTTP/2 push is not a magic bullet. Think about the situations where it might make sense to use it and don’t just simply “push” everything; it could actually lead to having slower page load times. If you’d like to learn more about the rules of thumb for HTTP/2 Server Push, I recommend reading this article for more information.
All of the code in this example is available on my Github repo - if you have any questions, please submit an issue and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
If you’d like to learn more about this technique and others relating to HTTP/2, I highly recommend watching Sam Saccone’s talk at this years Chrome Developer Summit.
I’d also like to say a massive thank you to Robin Osborne, Andy Davies and Jeffrey Posnick for helping me review this article before putting it live! |
2016 |
Dean Hume |
deanhume |
2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/http2-server-push-and-service-workers/ |
code |
| 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 our stowaway can go to town.
<p>This is the results of our Ajax call.</p>
<img src="../images/loaded.gif" alt="" onload="alert('Now that I have your attention...');" />
Please be neat
So we’ve just jammed some meaningless cruft into our DOM. If our script does anything with images this addition could have some unexpected side effects. (Remember The Fly?) So in order to save that poor, unsuspecting element whose innerHTML we just swapped out from sharing Jeff Goldblum’s terrible fate we should tidy up after ourselves. And by using the removeChild method we do just that.
<p>This is the results of our Ajax call.</p>
<img src="../images/loaded.gif" alt=""
onload="alert('Now that I have your attention...');this.parentNode.removeChild(this);" /> |
2005 |
Shaun Inman |
shauninman |
2005-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/have-your-dom-and-script-it-too/ |
code |
| 179 |
Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms |
Forms are usually seen as that obnoxious thing we have to markup and style. I respectfully disagree: forms (on a par with tables) are the most exciting thing we have to work with.
Here we’re going to take a look at how to style a beautiful HTML5 form using some advanced CSS and latest CSS3 techniques. I promise you will want to style your own forms after you’ve read this article.
Here’s what we’ll be creating:
The form. (Icons from Chalkwork Payments)
Meaningful markup
We’re going to style a simple payment form. There are three main sections on this form:
The person’s details
The address details
The credit card details
We are also going to use some of HTML5’s new input types and attributes to create more meaningful fields and use less unnecessary classes and ids:
email, for the email field
tel, for the telephone field
number, for the credit card number and security code
required, for required fields
placeholder, for the hints within some of the fields
autofocus, to put focus on the first input field when the page loads
There are a million more new input types and form attributes on HTML5, and you should definitely take a look at what’s new on the W3C website. Hopefully this will give you a good idea of how much more fun form markup can be.
A good foundation
Each section of the form will be contained within its own fieldset. In the case of the radio buttons for choosing the card type, we will enclose those options in another nested fieldset.
We will also be using an ordered list to group each label / input pair. This will provide us with a (kind of) semantic styling hook and it will also make the form easier to read when viewing with no CSS applied:
The unstyled form
So here’s the markup we are going to be working with:
<form id=payment>
<fieldset>
<legend>Your details</legend>
<ol>
<li>
<label for=name>Name</label>
<input id=name name=name type=text placeholder="First and last name" required autofocus>
</li>
<li>
<label for=email>Email</label>
<input id=email name=email type=email placeholder="example@domain.com" required>
</li>
<li>
<label for=phone>Phone</label>
<input id=phone name=phone type=tel placeholder="Eg. +447500000000" required>
</li>
</ol>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Delivery address</legend>
<ol>
<li>
<label for=address>Address</label>
<textarea id=address name=address rows=5 required></textarea>
</li>
<li>
<label for=postcode>Post code</label>
<input id=postcode name=postcode type=text required>
</li>
<li>
<label for=country>Country</label>
<input id=country name=country type=text required>
</li>
</ol>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Card details</legend>
<ol>
<li>
<fieldset>
<legend>Card type</legend>
<ol>
<li>
<input id=visa name=cardtype type=radio>
<label for=visa>VISA</label>
</li>
<li>
<input id=amex name=cardtype type=radio>
<label for=amex>AmEx</label>
</li>
<li>
<input id=mastercard name=cardtype type=radio>
<label for=mastercard>Mastercard</label>
</li>
</ol>
</fieldset>
</li>
<li>
<label for=cardnumber>Card number</label>
<input id=cardnumber name=cardnumber type=number required>
</li>
<li>
<label for=secure>Security code</label>
<input id=secure name=secure type=number required>
</li>
<li>
<label for=namecard>Name on card</label>
<input id=namecard name=namecard type=text placeholder="Exact name as on the card" required>
</li>
</ol>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<button type=submit>Buy it!</button>
</fieldset>
</form>
Making things look nice
First things first, so let’s start by adding some defaults to our form by resetting the margins and paddings of the elements and adding a default font to the page:
html, body, h1, form, fieldset, legend, ol, li {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
body {
background: #ffffff;
color: #111111;
font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
padding: 20px;
}
Next we are going to style the form element that is wrapping our fields:
form#payment {
background: #9cbc2c;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
border-radius: 5px;
padding: 20px;
width: 400px;
}
We will also remove the border from the fieldset and apply some bottom margin to it. Using the :last-of-type pseudo-class, we remove the bottom margin of the last fieldset — there is no need for it:
form#payment fieldset {
border: none;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
form#payment fieldset:last-of-type {
margin-bottom: 0;
}
Next we’ll make the legends big and bold, and we will also apply a light-green text-shadow, to add that little extra special detail:
form#payment legend {
color: #384313;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
padding-bottom: 10px;
text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #c0d576;
}
Our legends are looking great, but how about adding a clear indication of how many steps our form has? Instead of adding that manually to every legend, we can use automatically generated counters.
To add a counter to an element, we have to use either the :before or :after pseudo-elements to add content via CSS. We will follow these steps:
create a counter using the counter-reset property on the form element
call the counter with the content property (using the same name we’ve created before)
with the counter-incremet property, indicate that for each element that matches our selector, that counter will be increased by 1
form#payment > fieldset > legend:before {
content: "Step " counter(fieldsets) ": ";
counter-increment: fieldsets;
}
Finally, we need to change the style of the legend that is part of the radio buttons group, to make it look like a label:
form#payment fieldset fieldset legend {
color: #111111;
font-size: 13px;
font-weight: normal;
padding-bottom: 0;
}
Styling the lists
For our list elements, we’ll just add some nice rounded corners and semi-transparent border and background. Because we are using RGBa colors, we should provide a fallback for browsers that don’t support them (that comes before the RBGa color). For the nested lists, we will remove these properties because they would be overlapping:
form#payment ol li {
background: #b9cf6a;
background: rgba(255,255,255,.3);
border-color: #e3ebc3;
border-color: rgba(255,255,255,.6);
border-style: solid;
border-width: 2px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
border-radius: 5px;
line-height: 30px;
list-style: none;
padding: 5px 10px;
margin-bottom: 2px;
}
form#payment ol ol li {
background: none;
border: none;
float: left;
}
Form controls
Now we only need to style our labels, inputs and the button element.
All our labels will look the same, with the exception of the one for the radio elements. We will float them to the left and give them a width.
For the credit card type labels, we will add an icon as the background, and override some of the properties that aren’t necessary. We will be using the attribute selector to specify the background image for each label — in this case, we use the for attribute of each label.
To add an extra user-friendly detail, we’ll add a cursor: pointer to the radio button labels on the :hover state, so the user knows that he can simply click them to select that option.
form#payment label {
float: left;
font-size: 13px;
width: 110px;
}
form#payment fieldset fieldset label {
background:none no-repeat left 50%;
line-height: 20px;
padding: 0 0 0 30px;
width: auto;
}
form#payment label[for=visa] {
background-image: url(visa.gif);
}
form#payment label[for=amex] {
background-image: url(amex.gif);
}
form#payment label[for=mastercard] {
background-image: url(mastercard.gif);
}
form#payment fieldset fieldset label:hover {
cursor: pointer;
}
Almost there! Now onto the input elements. Here we want to match all inputs, except for the radio ones, and the textarea. For that we will use the negation pseudo-class (:not()). With it we can target all input elements except for the ones with type of radio.
We will also make sure to add some :focus styles and add the appropriate styling for the radio inputs:
form#payment input:not([type=radio]),
form#payment textarea {
background: #ffffff;
border: none;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
font: italic 13px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
outline: none;
padding: 5px;
width: 200px;
}
form#payment input:not([type=submit]):focus,
form#payment textarea:focus {
background: #eaeaea;
}
form#payment input[type=radio] {
float: left;
margin-right: 5px;
}
And finally we come to our submit button. To it, we will just add some nice typography and text-shadow, align it to the center of the form and give it some background colors for its different states:
form#payment button {
background: #384313;
border: none;
-moz-border-radius: 20px;
-webkit-border-radius: 20px;
-khtml-border-radius: 20px;
border-radius: 20px;
color: #ffffff;
display: block;
font: 18px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
letter-spacing: 1px;
margin: auto;
padding: 7px 25px;
text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #000000;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
form#payment button:hover {
background: #1e2506;
cursor: pointer;
}
And that’s it! See the completed form.
This form will not look the same on every browser. Internet Explorer and Opera don’t support border-radius (at least not for now); the new input types are rendered as just normal inputs on some browsers; and some of the most advanced CSS, like the counter, :last-of-type or text-shadow are not supported on some browsers. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them right now, and simplify your development process. My gift to you! |
2009 |
Inayaili de León Persson |
inayailideleon |
2009-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/have-a-field-day-with-html5-forms/ |
code |
| 56 |
Helping VIPs Care About Performance |
Making a site feel super fast is the easy part of performance work. Getting people around you to care about site speed is a much bigger challenge. How do we keep the site fast beyond the initial performance work? Keeping very important people like your upper management or clients invested in performance work is critical to keeping a site fast and empowering other designers and developers to contribute.
The work to get others to care is so meaty that I dedicated a whole chapter to the topic in my book Designing for Performance. When I speak at conferences, the majority of questions during Q&A are on this topic. When I speak to developers and designers who care about performance, getting other people at one’s organization or agency to care becomes the most pressing question.
My primary response to folks who raise this issue is the question: “What metric(s) do your VIPs care about?” This is often met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. But it’s also our biggest clue to what we need to do to help empower others to care about performance and work on it. Every organization and executive is different. This means that three major things vary: the primary metrics VIPs care about; the language they use about measuring success; and how change is enacted. By clueing in to these nuances within your organization, you can get a huge leg up on crafting a successful pitch about performance work.
Let’s start with the metric that we should measure. Sure, (most) everybody cares about money - but is that really the metric that your VIPs are looking at each day to measure the success or efficacy of your site? More likely, dollars are the end game, but the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) people focus on might be:
rate of new accounts created/signups
cost of acquiring or retaining a customer
visitor return rate
visitor bounce rate
favoriting or another interaction rate
These are just a few examples, but they illustrate how wide-ranging the options are that people care about. I find that developers and designers haven’t necessarily investigated this when trying to get others to care about performance. We often reach for the obvious – money! – but if we don’t use the same kind of language our VIPs are using, we might not get too far. You need to know this before you can make the case for performance work.
To find out these metrics or KPIs, start reading through the emails your VIPs are sending within your company. What does it say on company wikis? Are there major dashboards internally that people are looking at where you could find some good metrics? Listen intently in team meetings or thoroughly read annual reports to see what these metrics could be.
The second key here is to pick up on language you can effectively copy and paste as you make the case for performance work. You need to be able to reflect back the metrics that people already find important in a way they’ll be able to hear. Once you know your key metrics, it’s time to figure out how to communicate with your VIPs about performance using language that will resonate with them.
Let’s start with visit traffic as an example metric that a very important person cares about. Start to dig up research that other people and companies have done that correlates performance and your KPI. For example, cite studies:
“When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70–80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.” (source).
Read through websites like WPOStats, which collects the spectrum of studies on the impact of performance optimization on user experience and business metrics. Tweet and see if others have done similar research that correlates performance and your site’s main KPI.
Once you have collected some research that touches on the same kind of language your VIPs use about the success of your site, it’s time to present it. You can start with something simple, like a qualitative description of the work you’re actively doing to improve the site that translates to improved metrics that your VIPs care about. It can be helpful to append a performance budget to any proposal so you can compare the budget to your site’s reality and how it might positively impact those KPIs folks care about.
Words and graphs are often only half the battle when it comes to getting others to care about performance. Often, videos appeal to folks’ emotions in a way that is missed when glancing through charts and graphs. On A List Apart I recently detailed how to create videos of how fast your site loads. Let’s say that your VIPs care about how your site loads on mobile devices; it’s time to show them how your site loads on mobile networks.
Open video
You can use these videos to make a number of different statements to your VIPs, depending on what they care about:
Look at how slow our site loads versus our competitor!
Look at how slow our site loads for users in another country!
Look at how slow our site loads on mobile networks!
Again, you really need to know which metrics your VIPs care about and tune into the language they’re using. If they don’t care about the overall user experience of your site on mobile devices, then showing them how slow your site loads on 3G isn’t going to work. This will be your sales pitch; you need to practice and iterate on the language and highlights that will land best with your audience.
To make your sales pitch as solid as possible, gut-check your ideas on how to present it with other co-workers to get their feedback. Read up on how to construct effective arguments and deliver them; do some research and see what others have done at your company when pitching to VIPs. Are slides effective? Memos or emails? Hallway conversations? Sometimes the best way to change people’s minds is by mentioning it in informal chats over coffee. Emulate the other leaders in your organization who are successful at this work.
Every organization and very important person is different. Learn what metrics folks truly care about, study the language that they use, and apply what you’ve learned in a way that’ll land with those individuals. It may take time to craft your pitch for performance work over time, but it’s important work to do. If you’re able to figure out how to mirror back the language and metrics VIPs care about, and connect the dots to performance for them, you will have a huge leg up on keeping your site fast in the long run. |
2015 |
Lara Hogan |
larahogan |
2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/helping-vips-care-about-performance/ |
business |
| 121 |
Hide And Seek in The Head |
If you want your JavaScript-enhanced pages to remain accessible and understandable to scripted and noscript users alike, you have to think before you code. Which functionalities are required (ie. should work without JavaScript)? Which ones are merely nice-to-have (ie. can be scripted)? You should only start creating the site when you’ve taken these decisions.
Special HTML elements
Once you have a clear idea of what will work with and without JavaScript, you’ll likely find that you need a few HTML elements for the noscript version only.
Take this example: A form has a nifty bit of Ajax that automatically and silently sends a request once the user enters something in a form field. However, in order to preserve accessibility, the user should also be able to submit the form normally. So the form should have a submit button in noscript browsers, but not when the browser supports sufficient JavaScript.
Since the button is meant for noscript browsers, it must be hard-coded in the HTML:
<input type="submit" value="Submit form" id="noScriptButton" />
When JavaScript is supported, it should be removed:
var checkJS = [check JavaScript support];
window.onload = function () {
if (!checkJS) return;
document.getElementById('noScriptButton').style.display = 'none';
}
Problem: the load event
Although this will likely work fine in your testing environment, it’s not completely correct. What if a user with a modern, JavaScript-capable browser visits your page, but has to wait for a huge graphic to load? The load event fires only after all assets, including images, have been loaded. So this user will first see a submit button, but then all of a sudden it’s removed. That’s potentially confusing.
Fortunately there’s a simple solution: play a bit of hide and seek in the <head>:
var checkJS = [check JavaScript support];
if (checkJS) {
document.write('<style>#noScriptButton{display: none}</style>');
}
First, check if the browser supports enough JavaScript. If it does, document.write an extra <style> element that hides the button.
The difference with the previous technique is that the document.write command is outside any function, and is therefore executed while the JavaScript is being parsed. Thus, the #noScriptButton{display: none} rule is written into the document before the actual HTML is received.
That’s exactly what we want. If the rule is already present at the moment the HTML for the submit button is received and parsed, the button is hidden immediately. Even if the user (and the load event) have to wait for a huge image, the button is already hidden, and both scripted and noscript users see the interface they need, without any potentially confusing flashes of useless content.
In general, if you want to hide content that’s not relevant to scripted users, give the hide command in CSS, and make sure it’s given before the HTML element is loaded and parsed.
Alternative
Some people won’t like to use document.write. They could also add an empty <link /> element to the <head> and give it an href attribute once the browser’s JavaScript capabilities have been evaluated. The <link /> element is made to refer to a style sheet that contains the crucial #noScriptButton{display: none}, and everything works fine.
Important note: The script needs access to the <link />, and the only way to ensure that access is to include the empty <link /> element before your <script> tag. |
2006 |
Peter-Paul Koch |
ppk |
2006-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/hide-and-seek-in-the-head/ |
code |
| 10 |
Home Kanban for Domestic Bliss |
My wife is an architect. I’m a leader of big technical teams these days, but for many years after I was a dev I was a project/program manager. Our friends and family used to watch Grand Designs and think that we would make the ideal team — she could design, I could manage the project of building or converting whatever dream home we wanted.
Then we bought a house.
A Victorian terrace in the north-east of England that needed, well, a fair bit of work. The big decisions were actually pretty easy: yes, we should knock through a double doorway from the dining room to the lounge; yes, we should strip out everything from the utility room and redo it; yes, we should roll back the hideous carpet in the bedrooms upstairs and see if we could restore the original wood flooring.
Those could be managed like a project.
What couldn’t be was all the other stuff. Incremental improvements are harder to schedule, and in a house that’s over a hundred years old you never know what you’re going to find when you clear away some tiles, or pull up the carpets, or even just spring-clean the kitchen (“Erm, hon? The paint seems to be coming off. Actually, so does the plaster…”). A bit like going in to fix bugs in code or upgrade a machine — sometimes you end up quite far down the rabbit hole.
And so, as we tried to fit in those improvements in our evenings and weekends, we found ourselves disagreeing. Arguing, even. We were both trying to do the right thing (make the house better) but since we were fitting it in where we could, we often didn’t get to talk and agree in detail what was needed (exactly how to make the house better). And it’s really frustrating when you stay up late doing something, just to find that your other half didn’t mean that they meant this instead, and so your effort was wasted.
Then I saw this tweet from my friend and colleague Jamie Arnold, who was using the same kanban board approach at home as we had instituted at the UK Government Digital Service to manage our portfolio.
Mrs Arnold embraces Kanban wall at home. Disagreements about work in progress and priority significantly reduced.. ;) pic.twitter.com/407brMCH— Jamie Arnold (@itsallgonewrong) October 27, 2012
And despite Jamie’s questionable taste in fancy dress outfits (look closely at that board), he is a proper genius when it comes to processes and particularly agile ones. So I followed his example and instituted a home kanban board.
What is this kanban of which you speak?
Kanban boards are an artefact from lean manufacturing — basically a visualisation of a production process. They are used to show you where your bottlenecks are, or where one part of the process is producing components faster than another part of the process can cope. Identifying the bottlenecks leads you to set work in progress (WIP) limits, so that you get an overall more efficient system.
Increasingly kanban is used as an agile software development approach, too, especially where support work (like fixing bugs) needs to be balanced with incremental enhancement (like adding new features).
I’m a big advocate of kanban when you have a system that needs to be maintained and improved by the same team at the same time. Rather than the sprint-based approach of scrum (where the next sprint’s stories or features to be delivered are agreed up front), kanban lets individuals deal with incidents or problems that need investigation and bug fixing when urgent and important. Then, when someone has capacity, they can just go to the board and pull down the next feature to develop or test.
So, how did we use it?
One of the key tenets of kanban is that you visualise your workflow, so we put together a whiteboard with columns: Icebox; To Do Next; In Process; Done; and also a section called Blocked. Then, for each thing that needed to happen in the house, we put it on a Post-it note and initially chucked them all in the Icebox — a collection with no priority assigned yet.
Each week we looked at the Icebox and pulled out a set of things that we felt should be done next. This was pulled into the To Do Next column, and then each time either of us had some time, we could just pull a new thing over into the In Process column. We agreed to review at the end of each week and move things to Done together, and to talk about whether this kanban approach was working for us or not.
We quickly learned for ourselves why kanban has WIP limits as a key tenet — it’s tempting to pull everything into the To Do Next column, but that’s unrealistic. And trying to do more than one or two things each at a given time isn’t terribly productive owing to the cost of task switching. So we tend to limit our To Do Next to about seven items, and our In Process to about four (a max of two each, basically).
We use the Blocked column when something can’t be completed — perhaps we can’t fix something because we discovered we don’t have the required tools or supplies, or if we’re waiting for a call back from a plumber. But it’s nice to put it to one side, knowing that it won’t be forgotten.
What helped the most?
It wasn’t so much the visualisation that helped us to see what we needed to do, but the conversation that happened when we were agreeing priorities, moving them to In Process and then on to Done made the biggest difference. Getting clear on the order of importance really is invaluable — as is getting clear on what Done really means!
The Blocked column is also great, as it helps us keep track of things we need to do outside the house to make sure we can make progress. We also found it really helpful to examine the process itself and figure out whether it was working for us. For instance, one thing we realised is it’s worth tracking some regular tasks that need time invested in them (like taking recycling that isn’t picked up to the recycling centre) and these used to cycle around and around. So they were moved to Done as part of our weekly review, but then immediately put back in the Icebox to float back to the top again at a relevant time.
But the best thing of all? That moment where we get to mark something as done! It’s immensely satisfying to review at the end of the week and have a physical marker of the progress you’ve made.
All in all, a home kanban board turned out to be a very effective way to pull tasks through stages rather than always trying to plan them out in advance, and definitely made collaboration on our home tasks significantly smoother. Give it a try! |
2013 |
Meri Williams |
meriwilliams |
2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/home-kanban-for-domestic-bliss/ |
process |
| 159 |
How Media Studies Can Massage Your Message |
A young web designer once told his teacher ‘just get to the meat already.’ He was frustrated with what he called the ‘history lessons and name-dropping’ aspects of his formal college course. He just wanted to learn how to build Web sites, not examine the reasons why.
Technique and theory are both integrated and necessary portions of a strong education. The student’s perspective has direct value, but also holds a distinct sorrow: Knowing the how without the why creates a serious problem. Without these surrounding insights we cannot tap into the influence of the history and evolved knowledge that came before. We cannot properly analyze, criticize, evaluate and innovate beyond the scope of technique.
History holds the key to transcending former mistakes. Philosophy encourages us to look at different points of view. Studying media and social history empowers us as Web workers by bringing together myriad aspects of humanity in direct relation to the environment of society and technology. Having an understanding of media, communities, communication arts as well as logic, language and computer savvy are all core skills of the best of web designers in today’s medium.
Controlling the Message
‘The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.’ – Frank Zappa
Media is meant to express an idea. The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests that not only is media interesting because it’s about the expression of ideas, but that the media itself actually shapes the way a given idea is perceived. This is what McLuhan meant when he uttered those famous words: ‘The medium is the message.’
If instead of actually serving a steak to a vegetarian friend, what might a painting of the steak mean instead? Or a sculpture of a cow? Depending upon the form of media in question, the message is altered.
Figure 1
Must we know the history of cows to appreciate the steak on our plate? Perhaps not, but if we begin to examine how that meat came to be on the plate, the social, cultural and ideological associations of that cow, we begin to understand the complexity of both medium and message. A piece of steak on my plate makes me happy. A vegetarian friend from India might disagree and even find that that serving her a steak was very insensitive.
Takeaway: Getting the message right involves understanding that message in order to direct it to your audience accordingly.
A Separate Piece
If we revisit the student who only wants technique, while he might become extremely adept at the rendering of an idea, without an understanding of the medium, how is he to have greater control over how that idea is perceived? Ultimately, his creativity is limited and his perspective narrowed, and the teacher has done her student a disservice without challenging him, particularly in a scholastic environment, to think in liberal, creative and ultimately innovative terms.
For many years, web pundits including myself have promoted the idea of separation as a core concept within creating effective front-end media for the Web. By this, we’ve meant literal separation of the technologies and documents: Markup for content; CSS for presentation; DOM Scripting for behavior. While the message of separation was an important part of understanding and teaching best practices for manageable, scalable sites, that separation is really just a separation of pieces, not of entire disciplines.
For in fact, the medium of the Web is an integrated one. That means each part of the desired message must be supported by the media silos within a given site. The visual designer must study the color, space, shape and placement of visual objects (including type) into a meaningful expression. The underlying markup is ideally written as semantically as possible, promote the meaning of the content it describes. Any interaction and functionality must make the process of the medium support, not take away from, the meaning of the site or Web application.
Examination: The Glass Bead Game
Figure 2
Figure 2 shows two screenshots of CoreWave’s historic ‘Glass Bead Game.’ Fashioned after Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name, the game was an exploration of how ideas are connected to other ideas via multiple forms of media. It was created for the Web in 1996 using server-side randomization with .htmlx files in order to allow players to see how random associations are in fact not random at all.
Takeaway: We can use the medium itself to explore creative ideas, to link us from one idea to the next, and to help us better express those ideas to our audiences.
Computers and Human Interaction
Since our medium involves computers and human interaction, it does us well to look to foundations of computers and reason. Not long ago I was chatting with Jared Spool on IM about this and that, and he asked me ‘So how do you feel about that?’ This caused me no end of laughter and I instantly quipped back ‘It’s okay by me ELIZA.’ We both enjoyed the joke, but then I tried to share it with another dare I say younger colleague, and the reference was lost.
Raise your hand if you got the reference! Some of you will, but many people who come to the Web medium do not get the benefit of such historical references because we are not formally educated in them. Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA program, which emulates a Rogerian Therapist, in 1966. It was an early study of computers and natural human language. I was a little over 2 years old, how about you?
Conversation with Eliza
There are fortunately a number of ELIZA emulators on the Web. I found one at http://www.chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html that actually contains the source code (in Java) that makes up the ELIZA script.
Figure 3 shows a screen shot of the interaction. ELIZA first welcomes me, says ‘Hello, How do you do. Please state your problem’ and we continue in a short loop of conversation, the computer using cues from my answers to create new questions and leading fragments of conversation.
Figure 3
Albeit a very limited demonstration of how humans could interact with a computer in 1966, it’s amusing to play with now and compare it to something as richly interactive as the Microsoft Surface (Figure 4). Here, we see clear Lucite blocks that display projected video. Each side of the block has a different view of the video, so not only does one have to match up the images as they are moving, but do so in the proper directionality.
Figure 4
Takeway: the better we know our environment, the more we can alter it to emulate, expand and even supersede our message.
Leveraging Holiday Cheer
Since most of us at least have a few days off for the holidays now that Christmas is upon us, now’s a perfect time to reflect on ones’ environment and examine the messages within it. Convince your spouse to find you a few audio books for stocking stuffers. Find interactive games to play with your kids and observe them, and yourself, during the interaction. Pour a nice egg-nog and sit down with a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage.’ Leverage that holiday cheer and here’s to a prosperous, interactive new year. |
2007 |
Molly Holzschlag |
mollyholzschlag |
2007-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/how-media-studies-can-massage-your-message/ |
ux |
| 55 |
How Tabs Should Work |
Tabs in browsers (not browser tabs) are one of the oldest custom UI elements in a browser that I can think of. They’ve been done to death. But, sadly, most of the time I come across them, the tabs have been badly, or rather partially, implemented.
So this post is my definition of how a tabbing system should work, and one approach of implementing that.
But… tabs are easy, right?
I’ve been writing code for tabbing systems in JavaScript for coming up on a decade, and at one point I was pretty proud of how small I could make the JavaScript for the tabbing system:
var tabs = $('.tab').click(function () {
tabs.hide().filter(this.hash).show();
}).map(function () {
return $(this.hash)[0];
});
$('.tab:first').click();
Simple, right? Nearly fits in a tweet (ignoring the whole jQuery library…). Still, it’s riddled with problems that make it a far from perfect solution.
Requirements: what makes the perfect tab?
All content is navigable and available without JavaScript (crawler-compatible and low JS-compatible).
ARIA roles.
The tabs are anchor links that:
are clickable
have block layout
have their href pointing to the id of the panel element
use the correct cursor (i.e. cursor: pointer).
Since tabs are clickable, the user can open in a new tab/window and the page correctly loads with the correct tab open.
Right-clicking (and Shift-clicking) doesn’t cause the tab to be selected.
Native browser Back/Forward button correctly changes the state of the selected tab (think about it working exactly as if there were no JavaScript in place).
The first three points are all to do with the semantics of the markup and how the markup has been styled. I think it’s easy to do a good job by thinking of tabs as links, and not as some part of an application. Links are navigable, and they should work the same way other links on the page work.
The last three points are JavaScript problems. Let’s investigate that.
The shitmus test
Like a litmus test, here’s a couple of quick ways you can tell if a tabbing system is poorly implemented:
Change tab, then use the Back button (or keyboard shortcut) and it breaks
The tab isn’t a link, so you can’t open it in a new tab
These two basic things are, to me, the bare minimum that a tabbing system should have.
Why is this important?
The people who push their so-called native apps on users can’t have more reasons why the web sucks. If something as basic as a tab doesn’t work, obviously there’s more ammo to push a closed native app or platform on your users.
If you’re going to be a web developer, one of your responsibilities is to maintain established interactivity paradigms. This doesn’t mean don’t innovate. But it does mean: stop fucking up my scrolling experience with your poorly executed scroll effects. </rant> :breath:
URI fragment, absolute URL or query string?
A URI fragment (AKA the # hash bit) would be using mysite.com/config#content to show the content panel. A fully addressable URL would be mysite.com/config/content. Using a query string (by way of filtering the page): mysite.com/config?tab=content.
This decision really depends on the context of your tabbing system. For something like GitHub’s tabs to view a pull request, it makes sense that the full URL changes.
For our problem though, I want to solve the issue when the page doesn’t do a full URL update; that is, your regular run-of-the-mill tabbing system.
I used to be from the school of using the hash to show the correct tab, but I’ve recently been exploring whether the query string can be used. The biggest reason is that multiple hashes don’t work, and comma-separated hash fragments don’t make any sense to control multiple tabs (since it doesn’t actually link to anything).
For this article, I’ll keep focused on using a single tabbing system and a hash on the URL to control the tabs.
Markup
I’m going to assume subcontent, so my markup would look like this (yes, this is a cat demo…):
<ul class="tabs">
<li><a class="tab" href="#dizzy">Dizzy</a></li>
<li><a class="tab" href="#ninja">Ninja</a></li>
<li><a class="tab" href="#missy">Missy</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="dizzy">
<!-- panel content -->
</div>
<div id="ninja">
<!-- panel content -->
</div>
<div id="missy">
<!-- panel content -->
</div>
It’s important to note that in the markup the link used for an individual tab references its panel content using the hash, pointing to the id on the panel. This will allow our content to connect up without JavaScript and give us a bunch of features for free, which we’ll see once we’re on to writing the code.
URL-driven tabbing systems
Instead of making the code responsive to the user’s input, we’re going to exclusively use the browser URL and the hashchange event on the window to drive this tabbing system. This way we get Back button support for free.
With that in mind, let’s start building up our code. I’ll assume we have the jQuery library, but I’ve also provided the full code working without a library (vanilla, if you will), but it depends on relatively new (polyfillable) tech like classList and dataset (which generally have IE10 and all other browser support).
Note that I’ll start with the simplest solution, and I’ll refactor the code as I go along, like in places where I keep calling jQuery selectors.
function show(id) {
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
$('.tab').removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
$('.panel').hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', function () {
show(location.hash);
});
// initialise by showing the first panel
show('#dizzy');
This works pretty well for such little code. Notice that we don’t have any click handlers for the user and the Back button works right out of the box.
However, there’s a number of problems we need to fix:
The initialised tab is hard-coded to the first panel, rather than what’s on the URL.
If there’s no hash on the URL, all the panels are hidden (and thus broken).
If you scroll to the bottom of the example, you’ll find a “top” link; clicking that will break our tabbing system.
I’ve purposely made the page long, so that when you click on a tab, you’ll see the page scrolls to the top of the tab. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying.
From our criteria at the start of this post, we’ve already solved items 4 and 5. Not a terrible start. Let’s solve items 1 through 3 next.
Using the URL to initialise correctly and protect from breakage
Instead of arbitrarily picking the first panel from our collection, the code should read the current location.hash and use that if it’s available.
The problem is: what if the hash on the URL isn’t actually for a tab?
The solution here is that we need to cache a list of known panel IDs. In fact, well-written DOM scripting won’t continuously search the DOM for nodes. That is, when the show function kept calling $('.tab').each(...) it was wasteful. The result of $('.tab') should be cached.
So now the code will collect all the tabs, then find the related panels from those tabs, and we’ll use that list to double the values we give the show function (during initialisation, for instance).
// collect all the tabs
var tabs = $('.tab');
// get an array of the panel ids (from the anchor hash)
var targets = tabs.map(function () {
return this.hash;
}).get();
// use those ids to get a jQuery collection of panels
var panels = $(targets.join(','));
function show(id) {
// if no value was given, let's take the first panel
if (!id) {
id = targets[0];
}
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
tabs.removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
panels.hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', function () {
var hash = location.hash;
if (targets.indexOf(hash) !== -1) {
show(hash);
}
});
// initialise
show(targets.indexOf(location.hash) !== -1 ? location.hash : '');
The core of working out which tab to initialise with is solved in that last line: is there a location.hash? Is it in our list of valid targets (panels)? If so, select that tab.
The second breakage we saw in the original demo was that clicking the “top” link would break our tabs. This was due to the hashchange event firing and the code didn’t validate the hash that was passed. Now this happens, the panels don’t break.
So far we’ve got a tabbing system that:
Works without JavaScript.
Supports right-click and Shift-click (and doesn’t select in these cases).
Loads the correct panel if you start with a hash.
Supports native browser navigation.
Supports the keyboard.
The only annoying problem we have now is that the page jumps when a tab is selected. That’s due to the browser following the default behaviour of an internal link on the page. To solve this, things are going to get a little hairy, but it’s all for a good cause.
Removing the jump to tab
You’d be forgiven for thinking you just need to hook a click handler and return false. It’s what I started with. Only that’s not the solution. If we add the click handler, it breaks all the right-click and Shift-click support.
There may be another way to solve this, but what follows is the way I found – and it works. It’s just a bit… hairy, as I said.
We’re going to strip the id attribute off the target panel when the user tries to navigate to it, and then put it back on once the show code starts to run. This change will mean the browser has nowhere to navigate to for that moment, and won’t jump the page.
The change involves the following:
Add a click handle that removes the id from the target panel, and cache this in a target variable that we’ll use later in hashchange (see point 4).
In the same click handler, set the location.hash to the current link’s hash. This is important because it forces a hashchange event regardless of whether the URL actually changed, which prevents the tabs breaking (try it yourself by removing this line).
For each panel, put a backup copy of the id attribute in a data property (I’ve called it old-id).
When the hashchange event fires, if we have a target value, let’s put the id back on the panel.
These changes result in this final code:
/*global $*/
// a temp value to cache *what* we're about to show
var target = null;
// collect all the tabs
var tabs = $('.tab').on('click', function () {
target = $(this.hash).removeAttr('id');
// if the URL isn't going to change, then hashchange
// event doesn't fire, so we trigger the update manually
if (location.hash === this.hash) {
// but this has to happen after the DOM update has
// completed, so we wrap it in a setTimeout 0
setTimeout(update, 0);
}
});
// get an array of the panel ids (from the anchor hash)
var targets = tabs.map(function () {
return this.hash;
}).get();
// use those ids to get a jQuery collection of panels
var panels = $(targets.join(',')).each(function () {
// keep a copy of what the original el.id was
$(this).data('old-id', this.id);
});
function update() {
if (target) {
target.attr('id', target.data('old-id'));
target = null;
}
var hash = window.location.hash;
if (targets.indexOf(hash) !== -1) {
show(hash);
}
}
function show(id) {
// if no value was given, let's take the first panel
if (!id) {
id = targets[0];
}
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
tabs.removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
panels.hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', update);
// initialise
if (targets.indexOf(window.location.hash) !== -1) {
update();
} else {
show();
}
This version now meets all the criteria I mentioned in my original list, except for the ARIA roles and accessibility. Getting this support is actually very cheap to add.
ARIA roles
This article on ARIA tabs made it very easy to get the tabbing system working as I wanted.
The tasks were simple:
Add aria-role set to tab for the tabs, and tabpanel for the panels.
Set aria-controls on the tabs to point to their related panel (by id).
I use JavaScript to add tabindex=0 to all the tab elements.
When I add the selected class to the tab, I also set aria-selected to true and, inversely, when I remove the selected class I set aria-selected to false.
When I hide the panels I add aria-hidden=true, and when I show the specific panel I set aria-hidden=false.
And that’s it. Very small changes to get full sign-off that the tabbing system is bulletproof and accessible.
Check out the final version (and the non-jQuery version as promised).
In conclusion
There’s a lot of tab implementations out there, but there’s an equal amount that break the browsing paradigm and the simple linkability of content. Clearly there’s a special hell for those tab systems that don’t even use links, but I think it’s clear that even in something that’s relatively simple, it’s the small details that make or break the user experience.
Obviously there are corners I’ve not explored, like when there’s more than one set of tabs on a page, and equally whether you should deliver the initial markup with the correct tab selected. I think the answer lies in using query strings in combination with hashes on the URL, but maybe that’s for another year! |
2015 |
Remy Sharp |
remysharp |
2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/how-tabs-should-work/ |
code |
| 114 |
How To Create Rockband'ism |
There are mysteries happening in the world of business these days. We want something else by now. The business of business has to become more than business. We want to be able to identify ourselves with the brands we purchase and we want them to do good things. We want to feel cool because we buy stuff, and we don’t just want a shopping experience – we want an engagement with a company we can relate to.
Let me get back to “feeling cool” – if we want to feel cool, we might get the companies we buy from to support that. That’s why I am on a mission to make companies into rockbands.
Now when I say rockbands – I don’t mean the puke-y, drunky, nasty stuff that some people would highlight is also a part of rockbands. Therefore I have created my own word “rockband’ism”. This word is the definition of a childhood dream version of being in a rockband – the feeling of being more respected and loved and cool, than a cockroach or a suit on the floor of a company.
Rockband’ism
Rockband’ism is what we aspire to, to feel cool and happy.
So basically what I am arguing is that companies should look upon themselves as rockbands. Because the world has changed, so business needs to change as well.
I have listed a couple of things you could do today to become a rockband, as a person or as a company.
1 – Give your support to companies that make a difference to their surroundings – if you are buying electronics look up what the electronic producers are doing of good in the world (check out the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics).
2 – Implement good karma in your everyday life (and do well by doing good). What you give out you get back at some point in some shape – this can also be implemented for business.
3 – WWRD? – “what would a rockband do”? or if you are into Kenny Rogers – what would he do in any given situation? This will also show yourself where your business or personal integrity lies because you actually act as a person or a rockband you admire.
4 – Start leading instead of managing – If we can measure stuff why should we manage it? Leadership is key here instead of management. When you lead you tell people how to reach the stars, when you manage you keep them on the ground.
5 – Respect and confide in, that people are the best at what they do. If they aren’t, they won’t be around for long. If they are and you keep on buggin’ them, they won’t be around for long either.
6 – Don’t be arrogant – Because audiences can’t stand it – talk to people as a person not as a company.
7 – Focus on your return on involvement – know that you get a return on, what you involve yourself in. No matter if it’s bingo, communities, talks, ornithology or un-conferences.
8 – Find out where you can make a difference and do it. Don’t leave it up to everybody else to save the world.
9 – Find out what you can do to become an authentic, trustworthy and remarkable company. Maybe you could even think about this a lot and make these thoughts into an actionplan.
10 – Last but not least – if you’re not happy – do something else, become another type of rockband, maybe a soloist of a sort, or an orchestra.
No more business as usual
This really isn’t time for more business as usual, our environment (digital, natural, work or any other kind of environment) is changing. You are going to have to change too.
This article actually sprang from a talk I did at the Shift08 conference in Lisbon in October. In addition to this article for 24 ways I have turned the talk into an eBook that you can get on Toothless Tiger Press for free.
May you all have a sustainable and great Christmas full of great moments with your loved ones. December is a month for gratitude, enjoyment and love. |
2008 |
Henriette Weber |
henrietteweber |
2008-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2008/how-to-create-rockbandism/ |
business |
| 69 |
How to Do a UX Review |
A UX review is where an expert goes through a website looking for usability and experience problems and makes recommendations on how to fix them.
I’ve completed a number of UX reviews over my twelve years working as a user experience consultant and I thought I’d share my approach.
I’ll be talking about reviewing websites here; you can adapt the approach for web apps, or mobile or desktop apps.
Why conduct a review
Typically, a client asks for a review to be undertaken by a trusted and, ideally, detached third party who either works for an agency or is a freelancer. Often they may ask a new member of the UX team to complete one, or even set it as a task for a job interview. This indicates the client is looking for an objective view, seen from the outside as a user would see the website.
I always suggest conducting some user research rather than a review. Users know their goals and watching them make (what you might think of as) mistakes on the website is invaluable. Conducting research with six users can give you six hours’ worth of review material from six viewpoints. In short, user research can identify more problems and show how common those problems might be.
There are three reasons, though, why a review might better suit client needs than user research:
Quick results: user research and analysis takes at least three weeks.
Limited budget: the £6–10,000 cost to run user research is about twice the cost of a UX review.
Users are hard to reach: in the business-to-business world, reaching users is difficult, especially if your users hold senior positions in their organisations. Working with consumers is much easier as there are often more of them.
There is some debate about the benefits of user research over UX review. In my experience you learn far more from research, but opinions differ.
Be objective
The number one mistake many UX reviewers make is reporting back the issues they identify as their opinion. This can cause credibility problems because you have to keep justifying why your opinion is correct.
I’ve had the most success when giving bad news in a UX review and then finally getting things fixed when I have been as objective as possible, offering evidence for why something may be a problem.
To be objective we need two sources of data: numbers from analytics to appeal to reason; and stories from users in the form of personas to speak to emotions. Highlighting issues with dispassionate numerical data helps show the extent of the problem. Making the problems more human using personas can make the problem feel more real.
Numbers from analytics
The majority of clients I work with use Google Analytics, but if you use a different analytics package the same concepts apply. I use analytics to find two sets of things.
1. Landing pages and search terms
Landing pages are the pages users see first when they visit a website – more often than not via a Google search. Landing pages reveal user goals. If a user landed on a page called ‘Yellow shoes’ their goal may well be to find out about or buy some yellow shoes.
It would be great to see all the search terms bringing people to the website but in 2011 Google stopped providing search term data to (rightly!) protect users’ privacy. You can get some search term data from Google Webmaster tools, but we must rely on landing pages as a clue to our users’ goals.
The thing to look for is high-traffic landing pages with a high bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate (over 50%) isn’t good; above 70% is bad.
To get a list of high-traffic landing pages with a high bounce rate install this bespoke report.
Google Analytics showing landing pages ordered by popularity and the bounce rate for each.
This is the list of pages with high demand and that have real problems as the bounce rate is high. This is the main focus of the UX review.
2. User flows
We have the beginnings of the user journey: search terms and initial landing pages. Now we can tap into the really useful bit of Google Analytics. Called behaviour flows, they show the most common order of pages visited.
Behaviour flows from Google Analytics, showing the routes users took through the website.
Here we can see the second and third (and so on) pages users visited. Importantly, we can also see the drop-outs at each step.
If your client has it set up, you can also set goal pages (for example, a post-checkout contact us and thank you page). You can then see a similar view that tracks back from the goal pages. If your client doesn’t have this, suggest they set up goal tracking. It’s easy to do.
We now have the remainder of the user journey.
A user journey
Expect the work in analytics to take up to a day.
We may well identify more than one user journey, starting from different landing pages and going to different second- and third-level pages. That’s a good thing and shows we have different user types. Talking of user types, we need to define who our users are.
Personas
We have some user journeys and now we need to understand more about our users’ motivations and goals.
I have a love-hate relationship with personas, but used properly these portraits of users can help bring a human touch to our UX review.
I suggest using a very cut-down view of a persona. My old friends Steve Cable and Richard Caddick at cxpartners have a great free template for personas from their book Communicating the User Experience.
The first thing to do is find a picture that represents that persona. Don’t use crappy stock photography – it’s sometimes hard to relate to perfect-looking people) – use authentic-looking people. Here’s a good collection of persona photos.
An example persona.
The personas have three basic attributes:
Goals: we can complete these drawing on the analytics data we have (see example).
Musts: things we have to do to meet the persona’s needs.
Must nots: a list of things we really shouldn’t do.
Completing points 2 and 3 can often be done during the writing of the report.
Let’s take an example. We know that the search term ‘yellow shoes’ takes the user to the landing page for yellow shoes. We also know this page has a high bounce rate, meaning it doesn’t provide a good experience.
With our expert hat on we can review the page. We will find two types of problem:
Usability issues: ineffective button placement or incorrect wording, links not looking like links, and so on.
Experience issues: for example, if a product is out of stock we have to contact the business to ask them to restock.
That link is very small and hard to see.
We could identify that the contact button isn’t easy to find (a usability issue) but that’s not the real problem here. That the user has to ask the business to restock the item is a bad user experience. We add this to our personas’ must nots. The big experience problems with the site form the musts and must nots for our personas.
We now have a story around our user journey that highlights what is going wrong.
If we’ve identified a number of user journeys, multiple landing pages and differing second and third pages visited, we can create more personas to match. A good rule of thumb is no more than three personas. Any more and they lose impact, watering down your results.
Expect persona creation to take up to a day to complete.
Let’s start the review
We take the user journeys and we follow them step by step, working through the website looking for the reasons why users drop out at each step. Using Keynote or PowerPoint, I structure the final report around the user journey with separate sections for each step.
For each step we’ll find both usability and experience problems. Split the results into those two groups.
Usability problems are fairly easy to fix as they’re often quick design changes. As you go along, note the usability problems in one place: we’ll call this ‘quick wins’. Simple quick fixes are a reassuring thing for a client to see and mean they can get started on stuff right away. You can mark the severity of usability issues. Use a scale from 1 to 3 (if you use 1 to 5 everything ends up being a 3!) where 1 is minor and 3 is serious.
Review the website on the device you’d expect your persona to use. Are they using the site on a smartphone? Review it on a smartphone.
I allow one page or slide per problem, which allows me to explain what is going wrong. For a usability problem I’ll often make a quick wireframe or sketch to explain how to address it.
A UX review slide displaying all the elements to be addressed. These slides may be viewed from across the room on a screen so zoom into areas of discussion.
(Quick tip: if you use Google Chrome, try Awesome Screenshot to capture screens.)
When it comes to the more severe experience problems – things like an online shop not offering next day delivery, or a business that needs to promise to get back to new customers within a few hours – these will take more than a tweak to the UI to fix.
Call these something different. I use the terms like business challenges and customer experience issues as they show that it will take changes to the organisation and its processes to address them. It’s often beyond the remit of a humble UX consultant to recommend how to fix organisational issues, so don’t try.
Again, create a page within your document to collect all of the business challenges together.
Expect the review to take between one and three days to complete.
The final report should follow this structure:
The approach
Overview of usability quick wins
Overview of experience issues
Overview of Google Analytics findings
The user journeys
The personas
Detailed page-by-page review (broken down by steps on the user journey)
There are two academic theories to help with the review.
Heuristic evaluation is a set of criteria to organise the issues you find. They’re great for categorising the usability issues you identify but in practice they can be quite cumbersome to apply.
I prefer the more scientific and much simpler cognitive walkthrough that is focused on goals and actions.
A workshop to go through the findings
The most important part of the UX review process is to talk through the issues with your client and their team.
A document can only communicate a certain amount. Conversations about the findings will help the team understand the severity of the issues you’ve uncovered and give them a chance to discuss what to do about them.
Expect the workshop to last around three hours.
When presenting the report, explain the method you used to conduct the review, the data sources, personas and the reasoning behind the issues you found. Start by going through the usability issues. Often these won’t be contentious and you can build trust and improve your credibility by making simple, easy to implement changes.
The most valuable part of the workshop is conversation around each issue, especially the experience problems. The workshop should include time to talk through each experience issue and how the team will address it.
I collect actions on index cards throughout the workshop and make a note of who will take what action with each problem.
Index cards showing the problem and who is responsible.
When talking through the issues, the person who designed the site is probably in the room – they may well feel threatened. So be nice.
When I talk through the report I try to have strong ideas, weakly held.
At the end of the workshop you’ll have talked through each of the issues and identified who is responsible for addressing them. To close the workshop I hand out the cards to the relevant people, giving them a physical reminder of the next steps they have to take.
That’s my process for conducting a review. I’d love to hear any tips you have in the comments. |
2015 |
Joe Leech |
joeleech |
2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2015/how-to-do-a-ux-review/ |
ux |
| 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 best tools that I’ve missed, and I’d love to know how we programmers can do things better.
With that, on to the tools…
1. Use Bootstrap
If you’re not already using Bootstrap, start now. I really think that Bootstrap is one of the most significant technical achievements of the last few years: it democratizes the whole process of web design.
Essentially, Bootstrap is a a grid system, with a bunch of common elements. So you can lay your site out how you want, drop in simple elements like forms and tables, and get a good-looking, consistent result, without spending hours fiddling with CSS. You just need HTML.
Another massive upside is that it makes it easy to make any site responsive, so you don’t have to worry about writing media queries. Go, get Bootstrap and check out the examples. To keep your site lightweight, you can customize your download to include only the elements you want.
If you have more time, then Mark Otto’s article on why and how Bootstrap was created at Twitter is well worth a read.
2. Pimp Bootstrap
Using Bootstrap is already a significant advance on not using Bootstrap, and massively reduces the tedium of front-end development. But you also run the risk of creating Yet Another Bootstrap Site, or Hack Day Design, as it’s known.
If you’re really pressed for time, you could buy a theme from Wrap Bootstrap. These are usually created by professional designers, and will give a polish that we can’t achieve ourselves. Your site won’t be unique, but it will look good quickly.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make Bootstrap not look too much like Bootstrap – using fonts, CSS effects, background images, colour schemes and so on. Most of the rest of this article covers different ways to achieve this.
We are going to customize this Bootstrap example page.
This already has some custom CSS in the <head>. We’ll pull it all out, and create a new CSS file, custom.css. Then we add a reference to it in the header. Now we’re ready to start customizing things.
3. Fonts
Web fonts are one of the quickest ways to make your site look distinctive, modern, and less Bootstrappy, so we’ll start there.
First, we can add some sweet fonts, from Google Web Fonts. The intimidating bit is choosing fonts that look nice together. Luckily, there are plenty of suggestions around the web: we’re going to use one of DesignShack’s suggested free Google Fonts pairings. Our fonts are Corben (for headings) and Nobile (for body copy).
Then we add these files to our <head>.
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Corben:bold" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nobile" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
…and this to custom.css:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: 'Corben', Georgia, Times, serif;
}
p, div {
font-family: 'Nobile', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}
Now our example looks like this. It’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s immediately better:
I also recommend the web font services Fontdeck, or Typekit – these have a wider selection of fonts, and are worth the investment if you regularly need to make sites look good. For more font combinations, Just My Type suggests appealing pairings from Typekit. Finally, you can experiment with type pairing ideas at Type Connection. For the design background on pairing fonts, Typekit’s post is worth a read.
4. Textures
An instant way to make a site look classy is to use textures. You know the grey, stripy, indefinably elegant background on 24ways.org? That.
If only there was a superb resource listing attractive, free, ready-to-use textures… Oh wait, there’s Atle Mo’s Subtle Patterns.
We’re going to use Cream Dust, for an effect that can only be described as subtle. We download the file to a new /img/ directory, then add this to the CSS file:
body {
background: url(/img/cream_dust.png) repeat 0 0;
}
Bang:
For some design background on patterns, I recommend reading through Smashing Magazine’s guidelines on textures. (TL;DR version: use textures to enhance beauty, and clarify the information architecture of your site; but don’t overdo it, or inadvertently obscure your text.)
Still more to do, though. Onwards.
5. Icons
Last year’s 24 ways taught us to use icon fonts for our site icons.
This is great for the time-pressed coder, because icon fonts don’t just cut down on HTTP requests – they’re a lot quicker to set up than image-based icons, too.
Bootstrap ships with an extensive, free for commercial use icon set in the shape of Font Awesome. Its icons are safe for screen readers, and can even be made to work in IE7 if needed (we’re not going to bother here).
To start using these icons, just download Font Awesome, and add the /fonts/ directory to your site and the font-awesome.css file into your /css/ directory. Then add a reference to the CSS file in your header:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/font-awesome.css">
Finally, we’ll add a truck icon to the main action button, as follows. Why a truck? Why not?
<a class="btn btn-large btn-success" href="#"><i class="icon-truck"></i> Sign up today</a>
We’ll also tweak our CSS file to stop the icon nudging up against the button text:
.jumbotron .btn i {
margin-right: 8px;
}
And this is how it looks:
Not the most exciting change ever, but it livens up the page a bit. The licence is CC-BY-3.0, so we also include a mention of Font Awesome and its URL in the source code.
If you’d like something a little more distinctive, Shifticons lets you pay a few cents for individual icons, with the bonus that you only have to serve the icons you actually use, which is more efficient. Its icons are also friendly to screen readers, but won’t work in IE7.
6. CSS3
The next thing you could do is add some CSS3 goodness. It can really help the key elements of the site stand out.
If you are pressed for time, just adding box-shadow and text-shadow to emphasize headings and standouts can be useful:
h1 {
text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #ccc;
}
.div-that-you want-to-stand-out {
box-shadow: 0 0 1em 1em #ccc;
}
We have a little more time though, so we’re going to do something more subtle. We’ll add a radial gradient behind the main heading, using an online gradient editor.
The output is hefty, but you can see it in the CSS. Note that we also need to add the following to our HTML, for IE9 support:
<!--[if gte IE 9]>
<style type="text/css">
.gradient {
filter: none;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
And the effect – I don’t know what a designer would think, but I like the way it makes the heading pop.
For a crash course in useful modern CSS effects, I highly recommend CodeSchool’s online course in Functional HTM5 and CSS3. It costs money ($25 a month to subscribe), but it’s worth it for the time you’ll save. As a bonus, you also get access to some excellent JavaScript, Ruby and GitHub courses.
(Incidentally, if you find yourself fighting with basic float and display attributes in CSS – and there’s no shame in it, CSS layout is not intuitive – I recommend the CSS Cross-Country course at CodeSchool.)
7. Add a twist
We could leave it there, but we’re going to add a background image, and give the site some personality.
This is the area of design that I think many programmers find most intimidating. How do we create the graphics and photographs that a designer would use? The answer is iStockPhoto and its competitors – online image libraries where you can find and pay for images. They won’t be unique, but for our purposes, that’s fine.
We’re going to use a Christmassy image. For a twist, we’re going to use Backstretch to make it responsive.
We must pay for the image, then download it to our /img/ directory. Then, we set it as our <body>’s background-image, by including a JavaScript file with just the following line:
$.backstretch("/img/winter.jpg");
We also reset the subtle pattern to become the background for our container image. It would look much better transparent, so we can use this technique in GIMP to make it see-through:
.container-narrow {
background: url(/img/cream_dust_transparent.png) repeat 0 0;
}
We also fiddle with the padding on body and .container-narrow a bit, and this is the result:
(Aside: If this were a real site, I’d want to buy images in multiple sizes and ensure that Backstretch chose the most appropriately sized image for our screen, perhaps using responsive images.)
How to find the effects that make a site interesting? I keep a set of bookmarks for interesting JavaScript and CSS effects I might want to use someday, from realistic shadows to animating grids. The JavaScript Weekly newsletter is a great source of ideas.
8. Colour schemes
We’re just about getting there – though we’re probably past half an hour now – but that button and that menu still both look awfully Bootstrappy.
Real sites, with real designers, have a colour palette, carefully chosen to harmonize and match the brand profile. For our purposes, we’re just going to borrow some colours from the image. We use Gimp’s colour picker tool to identify the hex values of the blue of the snow. Then we can use Color Scheme Designer to find contrasting, but complementary, colours.
Finally, we use those colours for our central button. There are lots of tools to help us do this, such as Bootstrap Buttons. The new HTML is quite long, so I won’t paste it all here, but you can find it in the CSS file.
We also reset the colour of the pills in the navigation menu, which is a bit easier:
.nav-pills > .active > a, .nav-pills > .active > a:hover {
background-color: #FF9473;
}
I’m not sure if the result is great to be honest, but at least we’ve lost those Bootstrap-blue buttons:
Another way to do it, if you didn’t have an image to match, would be to borrow an attractive colour scheme. Colourlovers is a community where people create and share ready-made colour palettes.
The key thing is to find a palette with an open licence, so you can legitimately use it. Unfortunately, you can’t search for palettes by licence type, but many do have open licences. Here’s a popular palette with a CC-BY-SA licence that allows reuse with attribution.
As above, you can use the hex values from the palette in your custom CSS, and bask in the newly colourful results.
9. Read on
With the above techniques, you can make a site that is starting to look slightly more professional, pretty quickly.
If you have the time to invest, it’s well worth learning some design principles, if only so that design seems less intimidating and more like fun. As part of my design learning, I read a few introductory design books aimed at coders. The best I found was David Kadavy’s Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty, which explains the basic principles behind choosing colours, fonts, typefaces and layout.
In the introduction to his book, David writes:
No group stands to gain more from design literacy than hackers do… The one subject that is exceedingly frustrating for hackers to try to learn is design. Hackers know that in order to compete against corporate behemoths with just a few lines of code, they need to have good, clear design, but the resources with which to learn design are simply hard to find.
Well said. If you have half a day to invest, rather than half an hour, I recommend getting hold of David’s book.
And the journey is over. Perhaps that took slightly more than half an hour, but with practice, using the above techniques can become second nature. What useful tools have I missed? Designers, how would you improve on the above? I would love to know, so please give me your views in the comments. |
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 |
| 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 build a Chrome extension that replaces the new tab page, and explore ways to program randomness into your work to create something truly delightful.
What you’ll need
Adobe Illustrator (or a similar illustration program to export PNG)
Some images of your friends
A text editor
Note: This can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Most of the application is pre-built so you can focus on kicking back and getting in touch with your creative side. If you want to dive in deeper, you’ll find ways to do it.
Getting started
Download a local copy of the boilerplate for today’s tutorial here, and open it in a text editor. Inside, you’ll find a simple web app that you can run in Chrome.
Open index.html in Chrome. You should see a grey page that says “Noname”.
Open template.pdf in Adobe Illustrator or a similar program that can export PNG. The file contains an artboard measuring 800px x 800px, with a dotted blue outline of a face. This is your template.
Note: We’re using Google Chrome to build and preview this application because the end-result is a Chrome extension. This means that the application isn’t totally cross-browser compatible, but that’s okay.
Step 1: Gather your friends
The first thing to do is choose who your muses are. Since the holidays are upon us, I’d suggest finding inspiration in your family.
Create your artwork
For each person, find an image where their face is pointed as forward as possible. Place the image onto the Artwork layer of the Illustrator file, and line up their face with the template. Then, rename the artboard something descriptive like face_bob. Here’s my crew:
As you can see, my use of the word “family” extends to cats. There’s no judgement here.
Notice that some of my photos don’t completely fill the artboard–that’s fine. The images will be clipped into ovals when they’re rendered in the application.
Now, export your images by following these steps:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your faces.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your images to config.js
Open scripts/config.js. This is where you configure your extension.
Add key value pairs to the faces object. The key should be the person’s name, and the value should be the filepath to the image.
faces: {
leslie: 'images/face_leslie.png',
kyle: 'images/face_kyle.png',
beep: 'images/face_beep.png'
}
The application will choose one of these options at random each time you open a new tab. This pattern is used for everything in the config file. You give the application groups of choices, and it chooses one at random each time it loads. The only thing that’s special about the faces object is that person’s name will also be displayed when their face is chosen.
Now, when you refresh the project in Chrome, you should see one of your friends along with their name, like this:
Congrats, you’re off and running!
Step 2: Add adjectives
Now that you’ve loaded your friends into the application, it’s time to call them names. This step definitely yields the most laughs for the least amount of effort.
Add a list of adjectives into the prefixes array in config.js. To get the words flowing, I took inspiration from ways I might describe some of my relatives during a holiday gathering…
prefixes: [
'Loving',
'Drunk',
'Chatty',
'Merry',
'Creepy',
'Introspective',
'Cheerful',
'Awkward',
'Unrelatable',
'Hungry',
...
]
When you refresh Chrome, you should see one of these words prefixed before your friend’s name. Voila!
Step 3: Choose your color palette
Real talk: I’m bad at choosing color palettes, so I have a trick up my sleeve that I want to share with you. If you’ve been blessed with the gift of color aptitude, skip ahead.
How to choose colors
To create a color palette, I start by going to a Coolors.co, and I hit the spacebar until I find a palette that I like. We need a wide gamut of hues for our palette, so lock down colors you like and keep hitting the spacebar until you find a nice, full range. You can use as many or as few colors as you like.
Copy these colors into your swatches in Adobe Illustrator. They’ll be the base for any illustrations you create later.
Now you need a set of background colors. Here’s my trick to making these consistent with your illustration palette without completely blending in. Use the “Adjust Palette” tool in Coolors to dial up the brightness a few notches, and the saturation down just a tad to remove any neon effect. These will be your background colors.
Add your background colors to config.js
Copy your hex codes into the bgColors array in config.js.
bgColors: [
'#FFDD77',
'#FF8E72',
'#ED5E84',
'#4CE0B3',
'#9893DA',
...
]
Now when you go back to Chrome and refresh the page, you’ll see your new palette!
Step 4: Accessorize
This is the fun part. We’re going to illustrate objects, accessories, lizards—whatever you want—and layer them on top of your friends.
Your objects will be categorized into groups, and one option from each group will be randomly chosen each time you load the page. Think of a group like “hats” or “glasses”. This will allow combinations of accessories to show at once, without showing two of the same type on the same person.
Create a group of accessories
To get started, open up Illustrator and create a new artboard out of the template. Think of a group of objects that you can riff on. I found hats to be a good place to start. If you don’t feel like illustrating, you can use cut-out images instead.
Next, follow the same steps as you did when you exported the faces. Here they are again:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your hats.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your accessories to config.js
In config.js, add a new key to the customProps object that describes the group of accessories that you just created. Its value should be an array of the filepaths to your images. This is my hats array:
customProps: {
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
]
}
Refresh Chrome and behold, accessories!
Create as many more accessories as you want
Repeat the steps above to create as many groups of accessories as you want. I went on to make glasses and hairstyles, so my final illustrator file looks like this:
The last step is adding your new groups to the config object. List your groups in the order that you want them to be stacked in the DOM. My final output will be hair, then hats, then glasses:
customProps: {
hair: [
'images/hair_bowl.png',
'images/hair_bob.png'
],
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
],
glasses: [
'images/glasses_aviators.png',
'images/glasses_monacle.png'
]
}
And, there you have it! Randomly generated friends with random accessories.
Feel free to go much crazier than I did. I considered adding a whole group of animals in celebration of the new season of Planet Earth, or even adding Sir David Attenborough himself, or doing a bit of role reversal and featuring the animals with little safari hats! But I digress…
Step 5: Publish it
It’s time to put this in your new tabs! You have two options:
Publish it as a Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store.
Host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension.
Today, we’re going to cover Option #1 because I want to show you how to make the simplest Chrome extension possible. However, I recommend Option #2 if you want to keep your project private. Every Chrome extension that you publish is made publicly available, so unless your friends want their faces published to an extension that anyone can use, I’d suggest sticking to Option #2.
How to make a simple Chrome extension to replace the new tab page
All you need to do to make your project into a Chrome extension is add a manifest.json file to the root of your project with the following contents. There are plenty of other properties that you can add to your manifest file, but these are the only ones that are required for a new tab replacement:
{
"manifest_version": 2,
"name": "Your extension name",
"version": "1.0",
"chrome_url_overrides" : {
"newtab": "index.html"
}
}
To test your extension, you’ll need to run it in Developer Mode. Here’s how to do that:
Go to the Extensions page in Chrome by navigating to chrome://extensions/.
Tick the checkbox in the upper-right corner labelled “Developer Mode”.
Click “Load unpacked extension…” and select this project.
If everything is running smoothly, you should see your project when you open a new tab. If there are any errors, they should appear in a yellow box on the Extensions page.
Voila! Like I said, this is a very light example of a Chrome extension, but Google has tons of great documentation on how to take things further. Check it out and see what inspires you.
Share the love
Now that you know how to make a new tab extension, go forth and create! But wield your power responsibly. New tabs are opened so often that they’ve become a part of everyday life–just consider how many tabs you opened today. Some people prefer to-do lists in their tabs, and others prefer cats.
At the end of the day, let’s make something that makes us happy. Cheers! |
2016 |
Leslie Zacharkow |
lesliezacharkow |
2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension/ |
code |
| 248 |
How to Use Audio on the Web |
I know what you’re thinking. I never never want to hear sound anywhere near a browser, ever ever, wow! 🙉
You’re having flashbacks, flashbacks to the days of yore, when we had a <bgsound> element and yup did everyone think that was the most rad thing since <blink>. I mean put those two together with a <marquee>, only use CSS colour names, make sure your borders were all set to ridge and you’ve got yourself the neatest website since 1998.
The sound played when the website loaded and you could play a MIDI file as well! Everyone could hear that wicked digital track you chose. Oh, surfing was gnarly back then.
Yes it is 2018, the end of in fact, soon to be 2019. We are certainly living in the future. Hoverboards self driving cars, holodecks VR headsets, rocket boots drone racing, sound on websites get real, Ruth.
We can’t help but be jaded, even though the <bgsound> element is depreciated, and the autoplay policy appeared this year. Although still in it’s infancy, the policy “controls when video and audio is allowed to autoplay”, which should reduce the somewhat obtrusive playing of sound when a website or app loads in the future.
But then of course comes the question, having lived in a muted present for so long, where and why would you use audio?
✨ Showcase Time ✨
There are some incredible uses of audio on websites today. This is my personal favourite futurelibrary.no, a site from Norway chronicling books that have been published from a forest of trees planted precisely for the books themselves. The sound effects are lovely, adding to the overall experience.
futurelibrary.no
Another site that executes this well is pottermore.com. The Hogwarts WebGL simulation uses both sound effects and ambient background music and gives a great experience. The button hovers are particularly good.
pottermore.com
Eighty-six and a half years is a beautiful narrative site, documenting the musings of an eighty-six and a half year old man. The background music playing on this site is not offensive, it adds to the experience.
Eighty-six and a half years
Sound can be powerful and in some cases useful. Last year I wrote about using them to help validate forms. Audiochart is a library which “allows the user to explore charts on web pages using sound and the keyboard”. Ben Byford recorded voice descriptions of the pages on his website for playback should you need or want it. There is a whole area of accessibility to be explored here.
Then there’s education. Fancy beginning with some piano in the new year? flowkey.com is a website which allows you to play along and learn at the same time. Need to brush up on your music theory? lightnote.co takes you through lessons to do just that, all audio enhanced. Electronic music more your thing? Ableton has your back with learningmusic.ableton.com, a site which takes you through the process of composing electronic music. A website, all made possible through the powers with have with the Web Audio API today.
lightnote.co
learningmusic.ableton.com
Considerations
Yes, tis the season, let’s be more thoughtful about our audios. There are some user experience patterns to begin with. 86andahalfyears.com tells the user they are about to ‘enter’ the site and headphones are recommended. This is a good approach because it a) deals with the autoplay policy (audio needs to be instigated by a user gesture) and b) by stating headphones are recommended you are setting the users expectations, they will expect sound, and if in a public setting can enlist the use of a common electronic device to cause less embarrassment.
Eighty-six and a half years
Allowing mute and/or volume control clearly within the user interface is a good idea. It won’t draw the user out of the experience, it’ll give more control to the user about what audio they want to hear (they may not want to turn down the volume of their entire device), and it’s less thought to reach for a very visible volume than to fumble with device settings.
Indicating that sound is playing is also something to consider. Browsers do this by adding icons to tabs, but this isn’t always the first place to look for everyone.
To The Future
So let’s go!
We see amazing demos built with Web Audio, and I’m sure, like me, they make you think, oh wow I wish I could do that / had thought of that / knew the first thing about audio to begin to even conceive that.
But audio doesn’t actually need to be all bells and whistles (hey, it’s Christmas). Starting, stopping and adjusting simple panning and volume might be all you need to get started to introduce some good sound design in your web design.
Isn’t it great then that there’s a tutorial just for that! Head on over to the MDN Web Audio API docs where the Using the Web Audio API article takes you through playing and pausing sounds, volume control and simple panning (moving the sound from left to right on stereo speakers).
This year I believe we have all experienced the web as a shopping mall more than ever. It’s shining store fronts, flashing adverts, fast food, loud noises.
Let’s use 2019 to create more forests to explore, oceans to dive and mountains to climb. |
2018 |
Ruth John |
ruthjohn |
2018-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/how-to-use-audio-on-the-web/ |
design |
| 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 printed by readers on their home printers?
EPUB is a more fluid format that is supported by the Apple iPad, iPhone, and now on the desktop with OS X Mavericks. It’s also supported by Google Play for Android devices. While EPUB is supported on other devices, you’re likely to choose EPUB because you’re targeting your book at the Apple audience. The EPUB format is HTML-based with support for some CSS and even video and interactive elements. You can create very rich and exciting experiences using the EPUB format that just aren’t possible with PDF or MOBI. However, if you decide to support multiple file formats, you’ll likely find — as I did — that a consistent experience between all formats is easier to build and maintain, and therefore the extra benefits of interactivity go out the window.
MOBI is a format originally developed for the Mobipocket Reader but more popularly supported by the Amazon Kindle. If you’re looking to attract the Kindle audience or publish to Amazon via the Kindle Direct Publishing platform then the HTML-based MOBI format is the format you’ll want to go with.
Distribution will probably factor in heavily with what format you decide to go with. Many people I know who self-publish go with PDF only due to its ubiquity.
If you want to garner a wider audience by distributing via Amazon or the iBookstore then you’ll need to think about supporting all three formats (as I did).
What tools should I use?
I spent a lot of time figuring out the right toolset and finally got something that suits me just right.
In the past, when working with a publisher, I was given a Microsoft Word template that was passed back and forth between myself, the editor, and tech reviewer. This template has been the bane of any book writer that I’ve spoken to. Not every publisher is like that, though. Some publishers, like O’Reilly, use DocBook, an XML-based format that can be converted into PDF, EPUB, and MOBI.
Publishers already have a style guide and whether it’s DocBook or a Word template, they have the tools already in place to easily convert your work into multiple formats.
Self-publishing means that you’ll likely have to do a lot of tweaking to get things looking and working the way you want them to. I tried DocBook and the open source export tools didn’t create HTML to my liking. Fixing even the most mundane things required fiddling with XSL transformations for hours on end. Not the way I like to spend my time. I can only imagine the hoops I would’ve had to go through to get a PDF to look half-decent.
Tools like Pages or Scrivener offer up the ability to publish to multiple formats, too, but none offered me the control over the output that I truly desired. Have a mentioned that I’m a control freak?
I ended up writing my book using a technology that I already knew quite well: HTML. By writing in HTML, I already had something that I could post on my website, use for the EPUB and use for the MOBI format. All without having to change a thing. (That’s right: the same HTML that is used on SMACSS.com is used in the EPUB and is used in the MOBI.)
What about PDF? I could open up the HTML in a web browser, choose Save as PDF and be done with it but let’s face it: the filename and date attached to every single page doesn’t exactly scream professional. Web browsers actually do a surprisingly poor job with supporting the CSS paged media spec.
I had resorted to copying and pasting the content into Pages and saving as PDF from there. It wasn’t elegant but it worked. However, any changes to my HTML source required redoing those changes in Pages, as well.
Then I met my Prince Charming: Prince XML. It’s pricey but it works incredibly well. It takes HTML and CSS (that very format I’ve been using for all of my other file formats) and will generate a PDF via a command line interface. Prince supports CSS paged media including headers, footers, page counts, and alternating page styles.
From one format, HTML, I can now easily publish to PDF, MOBI, and EPUB, and even my website. I use the PDF version to send to the printer along with cover art to be bound and ready to ship around the world. It’s amazing how versatile HTML (and CSS) is.
To learn more about writing books with HTML and CSS, I recommend reading Building Books with CSS3 over at A List Apart.
Creating an EPUB
Let’s take a step back. Prince gets us from HTML to PDF but how do we make an EPUB out of the HTML?
An EPUB file is essentially a ZIP file with a renamed extension. There are some core files that you need to start with:
Root
META-INF
container.xml
mimetype
content.opf
toc.ncx
After that, you can start adding your content to the project. Be sure to update the toc.ncx (Table of Contents) and content.opf (the ebook manifest) with any changes you make to your project.
You can learn more about the file formats with the EPUB Format Construction Guide.
Once all your files are in place, you’ll need to create the EPUB file by running two commands (on OS X, at least):
zip -X0 your-ebook.epub mimetype
zip -Xur9D your-ebook.epub *
The mimetype needs to be the first file inside the ZIP file and therefore gets added first. Then, the rest of the files are added.
I’ve added a function to my .bash_profile to make this even easier:
function epub()
{
zip -q0X $@ mimetype; zip -qXr9D $@ *
}
Then, within the folder from which I want to create an ebook, I just run epub your-ebook.epub from the Terminal command line and the EPUB file should be ready to go.
Creating the MOBI
We have our EPUB and we have our PDF. The last step is the MOBI file. For this, I call upon Calibre. Calibre can be used as a reader and as a library but I use it exclusively to export my EPUB files to MOBI.
Calibre includes a command line utility to convert from EPUB to MOBI. (To install the command line tools, go to Preferences > Advanced > Miscellaneous and click Install Command Line Tools.)
ebook-convert your-ebook.epub your-ebook.mobi
Spread the joy
Now that you have all of your different file formats, you need to get them into the hands of people who want to (ho-ho-hopefully) buy your book!
There are a number of marketplaces such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, iBookstore, Google Play, and NOOK Press.
Some publishers, like PragProg and O’Reilly will also add self-published books to their roster if they feel it’s a good fit for their audience.
With any distribution, you’ll have to give up a percentage of your sales—from 30% to 70% of each sale, so consider your options wisely.
Of course, you can always open your own online store and reap as much of the revenue as possible, assuming you can get the traffic to your site. Handling your own distribution allows you to create a deeper one-on-one connection with your customers, something that is impossible with other distribution channels since you don’t get customer information through other services—even though you are giving them a huge chunk of your sales!
Go forth and prosper
There’s a lot of thought and time that goes into writing a book and just as much thought and time can go into creating, publishing, and marketing your book once you’re done.
In the end, self-publishing can be a very rewarding process and well worth the time that goes into it. |
2013 |
Jonathan Snook |
jonathansnook |
2013-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/how-to-write-a-book/ |
content |
| 189 |
Ignorance Is Bliss |
This is a true story.
Meet Mike
Mike’s a smart guy. He knows a great browser when he sees one. He uses Firefox on his Windows PC at work and Safari on his Mac at home. Mike asked us to design a Web site for his business. So we did.
We wanted to make the best Web site for Mike that we could, so we used all of the CSS tools that are available today. That meant using RGBa colour to layer elements, border-radius to add subtle rounded corners and (possibly most experimental of all new CSS), generated gradients.
The home page Mike sees in Safari on his Mac
Mike loves what he sees.
Meet Sam
Sam works with Mike. She uses Internet Explorer 7 because it came on the Windows laptop that the company bought her when she joined.
The home page Sam sees in Internet Explorer 7 on her PC
Sam loves the new Web site too.
How could both of them be happy when they experienced the Web site differently?
The new WYSIWYG
When I first presented my designs to Mike and Sam, I showed them a Web page made with HTML and CSS in their respective browsers and not a picture of a Web page. By showing neither a static image of my design, I set none of the false expectations that, by definition, a static Photoshop or Fireworks visual would have established.
Mike saw rounded corners and subtle shadows in Firefox and Safari. Sam saw something equally as nice, just a little different, in Internet Explorer. Both were very happy because they saw something that they liked.
Neither knew, or needed to know, about the subtle differences between browsers. Their users don’t need to know either.
That’s because in the real world, people using the Web don’t find a Web site that they like, then open up another browser to check that it looks they same. They simply buy what they came to buy, read what what they came to read, do what they came to do, then get on with their lives in blissful ignorance of what they might be seeing in another browser.
Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.
Epilogue
Sam has a new iPhone that Mike bought for her as a reward for achieving her sales targets. She loves her iPhone and was surprised at just how fast and good-looking the company Web site appears on that. So she asked,
“Andy, I didn’t know you optimised our site for mobile. I don’t remember seeing an invoice for that.”
I smiled.
“That one was on the house.” |
2009 |
Andy Clarke |
andyclarke |
2009-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/ignorance-is-bliss/ |
business |
| 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 out what input element each of these label elements is related to
Then apply a hint about formatting required for input (gleaned from the original, now-hidden label text) – add it to the form input as default text
Finally, add in a behaviour that clears or selects the default text (as you choose)
So, here’s the theory put into practice – a date of birth, grouped using a fieldset, and with the behaviours added in using DOM, and here’s the JavaScript that does the heavy lifting.
But why not just use display:none? As demonstrated at Juicy Studio, display:none seems to work quite well for hiding label elements. So why use a sledge hammer to crack a nut? In all honesty, this is something of an experiment, but consider the following:
Using the DOM, you can add extra levels of help, potentially across a whole form – or even range of forms – without necessarily increasing your markup (it goes beyond simply hiding labels)
Screen readers today may identify a label that is set not to display, but they may not in the future – this might provide a way around
By expanding this technique above, it might be possible to visually change the parent container that groups these items – in this case, a fieldset and legend, which are notoriously difficult to style consistently across different browsers – while still retaining the underlying semantic/logical structure
Well, it’s an idea to think about at least. How is it for you? How else might you use DOM scripting to improve the accessiblity or usability of your forms? |
2005 |
Ian Lloyd |
ianlloyd |
2005-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/improving-form-accessibility-with-dom-scripting/ |
code |
| 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 ourselves:
I felt that without a book that clearly defined progressive enhancement in a very approachable and succinct fashion, the web was at risk. I was seeing Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of universal availability slip away…
—Aaron Gustafson
Sometimes, there’s a knowledge gap to be filled by an author with the requisite excitement and need to communicate. Jon Hicks took his “pet subject” and was “enthused enough to want to spend all that time writing”, particularly because:
…there was a gap in the market for it. No one had done it before, and it’s still on its own out there, with no competition. It felt like I was able to contribute something.
Cennydd Bowles felt a professional itch at a particular point in his career, understanding that
[a]s a designer becomes more senior, they start looking for ways to scale the effects of their work. For some, that leads into management. For others, into writing.
Often, though, it’s also simply a personal challenge and ambition to explore a subject at length and create something substantial. Anna Debenham describes a motivation shared by several authors:
To be able to point to something more tangible than an article and be able to say “I did that.”
That sense of a book’s significance, its heft and gravity even, stems partly from the cultural esteem which honours books and their authors. Books have a long history as sources of wisdom, truth and power. Even with more books being published each year than ever before, writing one is still commonly considered a laudable achievement, including in our field.
Challenges of writing a book
Received wisdom has it that writing online should be brief and chunky and approachable: get to the point; divide it all up; subheadings and lists are our friends; write like you’re talking; no one has time to read. Much of such advice is true. Followed well, it lends our writing punch and pith, vigour and vim. The web is nimble, the web keeps up, and it suits what we write about developing for it. It’s perfect for delivering our observations, queries and investigations into all the various aspects of the work, professional and personal.
Yet even for digital natives like web authors, books printed and electronic retain an attractive glister.
Ideas can be developed more fully, their consequences explored to greater depth and extended with more varied examples, and the whole conveyed with more eloquence, more style. Why shouldn’t authors delay their conclusions if the intervening text is apposite, rich with value and helps to flesh out the skeleton of an argument? Conclusions might or might not be reached, of course, but a writer is at greater liberty in a book to digress in tangential and interesting ways.
Writing a book involves committing time, energy, thought and money. As Brian Suda found, it can be tough “getting the ideas out of my head into a cohesive blob of text.” Some authors end up talking to themselves…
It helps me to keep a real person in mind, someone who I’m talking to as I write. Sometimes I have the same conversations over and over in my head.
—Andrew Clarke
…while others are thinking ahead, concerned with how their book will be received:
Would anyone want to read it? Would they care? Would it be respected by my peers?
—Joe Leech
Challenges that arose time and again included “starting” and “getting words on the page” as well as “knowing when to stop” or “letting go”. Personal organization problems and those caused by publishers were also widely mentioned. Time loomed large. Making time, finding time. Giving up “sleep and some sanity” and realizing “it will take you far, far, far longer than you naively assumed”. Importantly, writing time is time away from gainful employment: Aaron Gustafson found the hardest thing about writing a book to be “the loss of income while I was writing.”
Perils and pleasures of editing
Editing, be it structural, technical or copy editing, is founded on reciprocity. Without openness and a shared belief that the book is worthwhile, work can founder in acrimony and mistrust. Editors are a book’s first and most critical (in every sense) readers. Effective and perceptive editing makes a book as good as it can be, finding the book within the draft like sculpture reveals the statue in the stone.
A good editor calls you out on poor assumptions and challenges you to really clarify your thinking. Whilst it can be difficult during the process to have your thinking challenged, it’s always been worth it — for me personally — in the long run. A good editor also reins you in when you’ve perhaps wandered off track or taken a little too long to make a point.
—Christopher Murphy
Andy Croll found editing “all positive” and Aaron Gustafson loves “working with a strong editor […] I want someone to tell it to me straight.” But it can be a rollercoaster, “both terrifying and the real moment of elation”. Mixed emotions during the editing process are common:
It was very uncomfortable! I knew it was making the work stronger, but it was awkward having my inconsistencies and waffle picked apart.
—Jon Hicks
It can be distressing to have written work looked over by a professional, particularly for first-time book authors whose expertise lies elsewhere:
I was a little nervous because I don’t consider myself a skilled writer — I never dreamed of becoming an author. I’m a designer, after all.
—Geri Coady
Communication is key, particularly when it comes to checking or changing the author’s words.
I like a good banter between me and the tech editor — if we can have a proper argument in Word comments, that’s great.
—Rachel Andrew
But if handled poorly, small battles can break out. Rachel Andrew again:
However, having had plenty of times where the technical editor has done nothing more than give a cursory glance, I started to leave little issues in for them to spot. If they picked them up I knew they were actually testing the code and I could be sure the work was being properly tech edited. If they didn’t spot them, I’d find someone myself to read through and check it!
A major concern for writers is that their voices will be altered, filtered, mangled or otherwise obscured by the editing process. Good copy editing must remain unnoticed while enhancing the author’s voice in print. Donna Spencer appreciated the way her editor “tidied up my work and made it a million times better, but left it sounding exactly like me.” Similarly, Andrew Travers “was incredibly impressed at how well my editor tightened up my own writing without it feeling like another’s voice” and Val Head sums up the consensus that:
the editor was able to help me express what I was trying to say in a better way […] I want to have editors for everything now.
At the keyboard, keep your friends close, but your editors closer.
Publishing and publishers
Conditions ought to militate against the allure of writing a book about web design and development. More books are published each year than ever before, so readerships elude new authors and readers can struggle to find authors to trust in their fields of interest. New spaces for more expansive online writing about working on and with the web are opening up (sites like Contents Magazine and STET), and seminal online web development texts are emerging. Publishing online is simple, far-reaching and immediate.
Much more so than articles and blog posts, books take time to research, write and read; add the complexity of commissioning, editing, designing, proofreading, printing, marketing and distribution processes, and it can take many months, even years to publish. The ceaseless headlong momentum of the web can leave articles more than a few weeks old whimpering in its wake, but updating them at least is straightforward; printed books about web development can depreciate as rapidly as the technology and techniques they describe, while retaining the “terrifying permanence that print bestows: your opinions will follow you forever”.
So much moves on, and becomes out of date. Companies featured get bought by larger companies and die, techniques improve and solutions featured become terribly out of date. Unlike a website, which could be updated continuously, a book represents the thinking ‘at that time’.
—Jon Hicks
Publishers work hard to mitigate these issues, promoting new books and new authors, bringing authors and readers together under a trusted banner. When a publisher packages up and releases a writer’s words, it confers a seal of approval and “badge of quality”, very important to new authors.
Publishers have other benefits to offer, from expert knowledge:
My publisher was extraordinarily supportive (and patient). Her expertise in my chosen subject was both a pressure (I didn’t want to let her down) and a reassurance (if she liked it, I knew it was going to be fine).
—Andrew Travers
…to systems and support mechanisms set up specifically to encourage writers and publish books:
Working as a team means you’re bringing in everyone’s expertise.
—Chui Chui Tan
As a writer, the best part about writing for a publisher was the writing infrastructure offered.
—Christopher Murphy
There can be drawbacks, however, and the occasional horror story:
We were just one small package on a huge conveyor belt. The publisher’s process ruled all.
—Cennydd Bowles
It’s only looking back I realise how poorly some publishers treat writers — especially when the work is so poorly remunerated.My worst experience was when a publisher decided, after I had completed the book, that they wanted to push a different take on the subject than the brief I had been given. Instead of talking to me, they rewrote chunks of my words, turning my advice into something that I would never have encouraged. Ultimately, I refused to let the book go out under my name alone, and I also didn’t really promote the book as I would have had to point out the things I did not agree with that had been inserted!
—Rachel Andrew
Self-publishing is now a realistic option for web authors, and can offers “complete control over the end product” as well as the possibility of earning more than a “pathetic author revenue percentage”. There can be substantial barriers, of course, as self-publishing authors must face for themselves the risks and challenges conventional publishers usually bear. Ideally, creating a book is a collaboration between author and publisher. Geri Coady found that “working with my publisher felt more like working with a partner or co-worker, rather than working for a boss.”
Wise words
So, after meeting the personal costs of writing and publishing a web book — fear, uncertainty, doubt, typing (so much typing) — and then smelling the roses of success, what’s left for an author to say? Some words, perhaps, to people thinking of writing a book.
Donna Spencer identifies a stumbling block common to many writers with an insight into the writing process:
Having talked to a lot of potential authors, I think most have the problem that they haven’t actually figured out the ‘answer’ to their premise yet. They feel like they are stuck in the writing, but they are actually stuck in the thinking.
For some no-nonsense, straightforward advice to cut through any anxiety or inadequacy, Rachel Andrew encourages authors to “treat it like any other work. There is no mystery to writing, you just have to write. Schedule the time, sit down, write words.” Tim Brown notes the importance of the editing process to refine a book and help authors reach their readers:
Hire good editors. Editors are amazing thinkers who can vastly improve the quality and clarity of a piece of writing.
We are too much beholden to the practical demands and challenges of technology, so Aaron Gustafson suggests a writer should “favor philosophies over techniques and your book will have a longer shelf life.”
Most intimations of renown and recognition are nipped in the bud by Joe Leech’s warning: “Don’t expect fame and fortune.” Although Cennydd Bowles’ bitter experience can be discouraging:
The sacrifices required are immense. You probably won’t make it.
…he would do things differently for a future book:
I would approach the book with […] far more concern about conveying the damn joy of what I do for a living.
The pleasure of writing, not just having written is captured by James Chudley when he recalls:
How much I enjoy writing and also how much I enjoy the discipline or having a side project like this. It’s a really good supplement to working life.
And Jon Hicks has words that any author will find comforting:
It will be fine. Everything will be fine. Just get on with it!
As the web expands effortlessly and ceaselessly to make room for all our words, yet it can also discourage the accumulation of any particular theme in one space, dividing rich seams and scattering knowledge across the web’s surface and into its deepest reaches. How many words become weightless and insubstantial, signals lost in the constant white noise of indistinguishable voices, unloved, unlinked? The web forgets constantly, despite the (somewhat empty) promise of digital preservation: articles and data are sacrificed to expediency, profit and apathy; online attention, acknowledgement and interest wax and wane in days, hours even.
Books can encourage deeper engagement in readers, and foster faith in an author, particularly if released under the imprint of a recognized publisher within the field. And books are changing. Although still not widely adopted, EPUB3 is the new standard in ebooks, bringing with it new possibilities for interaction and connection: readers with the text; readers with readers; and readers with authors. EPUB3 is built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript — sound familiar? In the past, we took what we could from the printed page to make the web; now books are rubbing up against what we’ve made.
So: a book.
Ever thought you could write one? Should write one? Would?
I’d like to thank all the authors who wrote their books and answered my questions.
Rachel Andrew · CSS3 Layout Modules, The CSS3 Anthology and more
Cennydd Bowles · Undercover User Experience Design, with James Box
Tim Brown · Combining Typefaces
James Chudley · Usability of Web Photos
Andrew Clarke · Hardboiled Web Design
Geri Coady · Colour Accessibility
Andy Croll · HTML Email
Anna Debenham · Front-end Style Guides
Aaron Gustafson · Adaptive Web Design
Val Head · CSS Animations
Jon Hicks · The Icon Handbook
Joe Leech · Psychology for Designers
Christopher Murphy · The Craft of Words, with Niklas Persson
Donna Spencer · Information Architecture, Card Sorting and How to Write Great Copy for the Web
Brian Suda · Designing with Data
Chui Chui Tan · International User Research
Andrew Travers · Interviewing for Research |
2013 |
Owen Gregory |
owengregory |
2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/web-books/ |
content |
| 169 |
Incite A Riot |
Given its relatively limited scope, HTML can be remarkably expressive. With a bit of lateral thinking, we can mark up content such as tag clouds and progress meters, even when we don’t have explicit HTML elements for those patterns.
Suppose we want to mark up a short conversation:
Alice: I think Eve is watching.
Bob: This isn’t a cryptography tutorial …we’re in the wrong example!
A note in the the HTML 4.01 spec says it’s okay to use a definition list:
Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.
That would give us:
<dl>
<dt>Alice</dt>: <dd>I think Eve is watching.</dd>
<dt>Bob</dt>: <dd>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</dd>
</dl>
This usage of a definition list is proof that writing W3C specifications and smoking crack are not mutually exclusive activities. “I think Eve is watching” is not a definition of “Alice.” If you (ab)use a definition list in this way, Norm will hunt you down.
The conversation problem was revisited in HTML5. What if dt and dd didn’t always mean “definition title” and “definition description”? A new element was forged: dialog. Now the the “d” in dt and dd doesn’t stand for “definition”, it stands for “dialog” (or “dialogue” if you can spell):
<dialog>
<dt>Alice</dt>: <dd>I think Eve is watching.</dd>
<dt>Bob</dt>: <dd>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</dd>
</dialog>
Problem solved …except that dialog is no longer in the HTML5 spec. Hixie further expanded the meaning of dt and dd so that they could be used inside details (which makes sense—it starts with a “d”) and figure (…um). At the same time as the content model of details and figure were being updated, the completely-unrelated dialog element was dropped.
Back to the drawing board, or in this case, the HTML 4.01 specification. The spec defines the cite element thusly:
Contains a citation or a reference to other sources.
Perfect! There’s even an example showing how this can applied when attributing quotes to people:
As <CITE>Harry S. Truman</CITE> said,
<Q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</Q>
For longer quotes, the blockquote element might be more appropriate. In a conversation, where the order matters, I think an ordered list would make a good containing element for this pattern:
<ol>
<li><cite>Alice</cite>: <q>I think Eve is watching.</q></li>
<li><cite>Bob</cite>: <q>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</q></li>
</ol>
Problem solved …except that the cite element has been redefined in the HTML5 spec:
The cite element represents the title of a work … A person’s name is not the title of a work … and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people’s names.
HTML5 is supposed to be backwards compatible with previous versions of HTML, yet here we have a semantic pattern already defined in HTML 4.01 that is now non-conforming in HTML5. The entire justification for the change boils down to this line of reasoning:
Given that: titles of works are often italicised and
given that: people’s names are not often italicised and
given that: most browsers italicise the contents of the cite element,
therefore: the cite element should not be used to mark up people’s names.
In other words, the default browser styling is now dictating semantic meaning. The tail is wagging the dog.
Not to worry, the HTML5 spec tells us how we can mark up names in conversations without using the cite element:
In some cases, the b element might be appropriate for names
I believe the colloquial response to this is a combination of the letters W, T and F, followed by a question mark.
The non-normative note continues:
In other cases, if an element is really needed, the span element can be used.
This is not a joke. We are seriously being told to use semantically meaningless elements to mark up content that is semantically meaningful.
We don’t have to take it.
Firstly, any conformance checker—that’s the new politically correct term for “validator”—cannot possibly check every instance of the cite element to see if it’s really the title of a work and not the name of a person. So we can disobey the specification without fear of invalidating our documents.
Secondly, Hixie has repeatedly stated that browser makers have a powerful voice in deciding what goes into the HTML5 spec; if a browser maker refuses to implement a feature, then that feature should come out of the spec because otherwise, the spec is fiction. Well, one of the design principles of HTML5 is the Priority of Constituencies:
In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.
That places us—authors—above browser makers. If we resolutely refuse to implement part of the HTML5 spec, then the spec becomes fiction.
Join me in a campaign of civil disobedience against the unnecessarily restrictive, backwards-incompatible change to the cite element. Start using HTML5 but start using it sensibly. Let’s ensure that bad advice remains fictitious.
Tantek has set up a page on the WHATWG wiki to document usage of the cite element for conversations. Please contribute to it. |
2009 |
Jeremy Keith |
jeremykeith |
2009-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2009/incite-a-riot/ |
code |
| 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.
Make sure you test what you create. There is a lot of underlying complexity to form controls which may not be immediately apparent if they’re judged solely by their visual presentation in a single browser, or with limited AT testing.
Visually resetting and restyling form controls
Over the course of 2018, I worked on a project where I tested and reported on the accessibility impact of styling various form controls. In conducting my research, I reviewed many of the form controls available in HTML, testing to see how malleable they were to direct styling from standardized CSS selectors.
As I expected, controls such as the various text fields could be restyled rather easily. However, other controls like radio buttons and checkboxes, or sub-elements of special text fields like date, search, and number spinners were resistant to standard-based styling. These particular controls and their sub-elements required specific pseudo-elements to reset and allow for restyling of some of their default presentation.
See the Pen form control styling comparisons by Scott (@scottohara) on CodePen.
https://codepen.io/scottohara/pen/gZOrZm/
Over the years, the ability to directly style form controls has been something many people have clamored for. However, one should realize the benefits of being able to restyle some of these controls may involve more effort than originally anticipated.
If you want to restyle a control from the ground up, then you must also recreate any :active, :focus, and :hover states for the control—all those things that were previously taken care of by browsers. Not only that, but anything you restyle should also work with Windows High Contrast mode, styling for dark mode, and other OS-level settings that browser respect without you even realizing.
You ever try playing with the accessibility settings of your display on macOS, or similar Windows setting?
It is also worth mentioning that any browser prefixed pseudo-elements are not standardized CSS selectors. As MDN mentions at the top of their pages documenting these pseudo-elements:
Non-standard
This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.
While this may be a deterrent for some, it’s my opinion the risks are often only skin-deep. By which I mean if a non-standard selector does change, the control may look a bit quirky, but likely won’t cease to function. A bug report which requires a CSS selector change can be an easy JIRA ticket to close, after all.
Can’t make it? Fake it.
Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is still neck-and-neck with other browsers in vying for the number 2 spot in desktop browser share. Due to IE not recognizing vendor-prefixed appearance properties, some essential controls like checkboxes won’t render as intended.
Additionally, some controls like select boxes, file uploads, and sub-elements of date fields (calendar popups) cannot be modified by just relying on styling their HTML selectors alone. This means that unless your company designs and develops with a progressive enhancement, or graceful degradation mindset, you’ll need to take a different approach in styling.
Getting clever with markup and CSS
The following CodePen demonstrates how we can create a custom checkbox markup pattern. By mindfully utilizing CSS sibling selectors and positioning of the native control, we can create custom visual styling while also retaining the functionality and accessibility expectations of a native checkbox.
See the Pen Accessible Styled Native Checkbox by Scott (@scottohara) on CodePen.
https://codepen.io/scottohara/pen/RqEayN/
Customizing checkboxes by visually hiding the input and styling well-placed markup with sibling selectors may seem old hat to some. However, many variations of these patterns do not take into account how their method of visually hiding the checkboxes can create discovery issues for certain screen reader navigation methods. For instance, if someone is using a mobile device and exploring by touch, how will they be able to drag their finger over an input that has been reduced to a single pixel, or positioned off screen?
As we move away from the simplicity of declaring a single HTML element and using clever CSS and markup patterns to create restyled form controls, we increase the need for additional testing to ensure no expected behaviors are lost. In other words, what should work in theory may not work in practice when you introduce the various different ways people may engage with a form control. It’s worth remembering: what might be typical interactions for ourselves may be problematic if not impossible for others.
Limitations to cleverness
Creative coding will allow us to apply more consistent custom styles to some of the more problematic form controls. There will be a varied amount of custom markup, CSS, and sometimes JavaScript that will be needed to preserve the control’s inherent usability and accessibility for each control we take this approach to.
However, this method of restyling still doesn’t solve for the lack of feature parity across different browsers. Nor is it a means to account for controls which don’t have a native HTML element equivalent, such as a switch or multi-thumb range slider? Maybe there’s a control that calls for a visual design or proposed user experience that would require too much fighting with a native control’s behavior to be worth the level of effort to implement. Here’s where we need to take another approach.
Using ARIA when appropriate
Sometimes we have no other option than to roll up our sleeves and start building custom form controls from scratch. Fair warning though: just because we’re not leveraging a native HTML control as our foundation, it doesn’t mean we have carte blanche to throw semantics out the window. Enter Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA).
ARIA is a set of attributes that can modify existing elements, or extend HTML to include roles, properties and states that aren’t native to the language. While divs and spans have no meaningful semantic information for us to leverage, with help from the ARIA specification and ARIA Authoring Practices we can incorporate these elements to help create the UI that we need while still following the first rule of Using ARIA:
If you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.
By using these documents as guidelines, and testing our custom controls with people of various abilities, we can do our best to make sure a custom control performs as expected for as many people as possible.
Exceptions to the rule
One example of a control that allows for an exception to the first rule of Using ARIA would be a switch control.
Switches and checkboxes are similar components, in that they have both on/checked and off/unchecked states. However, checkboxes are often expected within the context of forms, or used to filter search queries on e-commerce sites. Switches are typically used to instantly enable or deactivate a particular setting at a component or app-based level, as this is their behavior in the native mobile apps in which they were popularized.
While a switch control could be created by visually restyling a checkbox, this does not automatically mean that the underlying semantics and functionality will match the visual representation of the control. For example, the following CodePen restyles checkboxes to look like a switch control, but the semantics of the checkboxes remain which communicate a different way of interacting with the control than what you might expect from a native switch control.
See the Pen Switch Boxes - custom styled checkboxes posing as switches by Scott (@scottohara) on CodePen.
https://codepen.io/scottohara/pen/XyvoeE/
By adding a role="switch" to these checkboxes, we can repurpose the inherent checked/unchecked states of the native control, it’s inherent ability to be focused by Tab key, and Space key to toggle state.
But while this is a valid approach to take in building a switch, how does this actually match up to reality?
Does it pass the test(s)?
Whether deconstructing form controls to fully restyle them, or leveraging them and other HTML elements as a base to expand on, or create, a non-native form control, building it is just the start. We must test that what we’ve restyled or rebuilt works the way people expect it to, if not better.
What we must do here is run a gamut of comparative tests to document the functionality and usability of native form controls. For example:
Is the control implemented in all supported browsers?
If not: where are the gaps? Will it be necessary to implement a custom solution for the situations that degrade to a standard text field?
If so: is each browser’s implementation a good user experience? Is there room for improvement that can be tested against the native baseline?
Test with multiple input devices.
Where the control is implemented, what is the quality of the user experience when using different input devices, such as mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, speech recognition or switch device, to name a few.
You’ll find some HTML5 controls (like date pickers and number spinners) have additional UI elements that may not be announced to AT, or even allow keyboard accessibility. Often these controls can be adjusted by other means, such as text entry, or using arrow keys to increase or decrease values. If restyling or recreating a custom version of a control like these, it may make sense to maintain these native experiences as well.
How well does the control take to custom styles?
If a control can be styled enough to not need to be rebuilt from scratch, that’s great! But make sure that there are no adverse affects on the accessibility of it. For instance, range sliders can be restyled and maintain their functionality and accessibility. However, elements like progress bars can be negatively affected by direct styling.
Always test with different browser and AT pairings to ensure nothing is lost when controls are restyled.
Do specifications match reality?
If recreating controls to get around native limitations, such as the inability to style the options of a select element, or requiring a Switch control which is not native to HTML, do your solutions match user expectations?
For instance, selects have unique picker interfaces on touch devices. And switches have varied levels of support for different browser and screen reader pairings. Test with real people, and check your analytics. If these experiences don’t match people’s expectations, then maybe another solution is in order?
Wrapping up
While styling form controls is definitely easier than it’s ever been, that doesn’t mean that it’s at all simple, nor will it likely ever be. The level of difficulty you’re going to face is going to depend entirely on what it is you’re hoping to style, add-on to, or recreate. And even if you build your custom control exactly to specification, you’ll still be reliant on browsers and assistive technologies being able to fully understand the component they’ve been presented.
Forms and their controls are an incredibly important part of what we need the Internet for. Paying bills, scheduling appointments, ordering groceries, renewing your license or even ordering gifts for the holidays. These are all important tasks that people should be able to complete with as little effort as possible. Especially since for some, completing these tasks online might be their only option.
2018 didn’t end up being the year we got full customization of form controls sorted out. But that’s OK. If we can continue to mindfully work with what we have, and instead challenge ourselves to follow inclusive design principles, well thought out Form Design Patterns, and solve problems with an accessibility first approach, we may come to realize that we can get along just fine without fully branded drop downs.
And hey. There’s always next year, right? |
2018 |
Scott O'Hara |
scottohara |
2018-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/inclusive-considerations-when-restyling-form-controls/ |
code |
| 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 operating systems. Then pick any suitable fonts from the Office and Creative Suite lists.
For example, you may decide your headings should be in the increasingly ubiquitous Clarendon. This is a serif type face. At OS-level the most similar is arguably Georgia. Adobe CS2 comes with Century Old Style which has a similar feel. Century Schoolbook is similar too, and is installed with all versions of Office. Based on this your font stack becomes:
font-family: 'Clarendon Std', 'Century Old Style Std', 'Century Schoolbook', Georgia, serif
Note the ‘Std’ suffix indicating a ‘standard’ OpenType file, which will normally be your best bet for more esoteric fonts.
I’m not suggesting the process of choosing suitable fonts is an easy one. Firstly there are nearly two hundred fonts in the matrix, so learning what each font looks like is tricky and potentially time consuming (if you haven’t got all the fonts installed on a machine to hand you’ll be doing a lot of Googling for previews). And it’s not just as simple as choosing fonts that look similar or have related typographic backgrounds, they need to have similar metrics as well, This is especially true in terms of x-height which gives an indication of how big or small a font looks.
Over to You
The main point of all this is that there are potentially more fonts to consider than is generally accepted, so branch out a little (carefully and tastefully) and bring a little variety to sites out there. If you come up with any novel font stacks based on this approach, please do blog them (tagged as per the footer) and at some point they could all be combined in one place for everyone to consider.
Appendix
What about Linux?
The only operating systems in the matrix are those from Microsoft and Apple. For completeness, Linux operating systems should be included too, although these are many and varied and very much in a minority, so I omitted them for time being. For the record, some Linux distributions come packaged with Microsoft’s core fonts. Others use the Vera family, and others use the Liberation family which comprises fonts metrically identical to Times New Roman and Arial.
Sources
The sources of font information for the matrix are as follows:
Windows XP SP2
Windows Vista
Office 2003
Office 2007
Mac OSX Tiger
Mac OSX Leopard (scroll down two thirds)
Office 2004 (Mac) by inspecting my Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Fonts folder
Office 2008 (Mac) is expected to be as Office 2004 with the addition of the Vista ClearType fonts
Creative Suite 2 (see pdf link in first comment)
Creative Suite 3 |
2007 |
Richard Rutter |
richardrutter |
2007-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix/ |
design |
| 91 |
Infinite Canvas: Moving Beyond the Page |
Remember Web 2.0? I do. In fact, that phrase neatly bifurcates my life on the internet. Pre-2.0, I was occupied by chatting on AOL and eventually by learning HTML so I could build sites on Geocities. Around 2002, however, I saw a WYSIWYG demo in Dreamweaver. The instructor was dragging boxes and images around a canvas. With a few clicks he was able to build a dynamic, single-page interface. Coming from the world of tables and inline HTML styles, I was stunned.
As I entered college the next year, the web was blossoming: broadband, Wi-Fi, mobile (proud PDA owner, right here), CSS, Ajax, Bloglines, Gmail and, soon, Google Maps. I was a technology fanatic and a hobbyist web developer. For me, the web had long been informational. It was now rapidly becoming something else, something more: sophisticated, presentational, actionable.
In 2003 we watched as the internet changed. The predominant theme of those early Web 2.0 years was the withering of Internet Explorer 6 and the triumph of web standards. Upon cresting that mountain, we looked around and collectively breathed the rarefied air of pristine HMTL and CSS, uncontaminated by toxic hacks and forks – only to immediately begin hurtling down the other side at what is, frankly, terrifying speed.
Ten years later, we are still riding that rocket. Our days (and nights) are spent cramming for exams on CSS3 and RWD and Sass and RESS. We are the proud, frazzled owners of tiny pocket computers that annihilate the best laptops we could have imagined, and the architects of websites that are no longer restricted to big screens nor even segregated by device. We dragoon our sites into working any time, anywhere. At this point, we can hardly ask the spec developers to slow down to allow us to catch our breath, nor should we. It is, without a doubt, a most wonderful time to be a web developer.
But despite the newfound luxury of rounded corners, gradients, embeddable fonts, low-level graphics APIs, and, glory be, shadows, the canyon between HTML and native appears to be as wide as ever. The improvements in HTML and CSS have, for the most part, been conveniences rather than fundamental shifts. What I’d like to do now, if you’ll allow me, is outline just a few of the remaining gaps that continue to separate web sites and applications from their native companions.
What I’d like for Christmas
There is one irritant which is the grandfather of them all, the one from which all others flow and have their being, and it is, simply, the page refresh. That’s right, the foundational principle of the web is our single greatest foe. To paraphrase a patron saint of designers everywhere, if you see a page refresh, we blew it.
The page refresh brings with it, of course, many noble and lovely benefits: addressability, for one; and pagination, for another. (See also caching, resource loading, and probably half a dozen others.) Still, those concerns can be answered (and arguably answered more compellingly) by replacing the weary page with the young and hearty document. Flash may be dead, but it has many lessons yet to bequeath.
Preparing a single document when the site loads allows us to engage the visitor in a smooth and engrossing experience. We have long known this, of course. Twitter was not the first to attempt, via JavaScript, to envelop the user in a single-page application, nor the first to abandon it. Our shared task is to move those technologies down the stack, to make them more primitive, so that the next Twitter can be built with the most basic combination of HTML and CSS rather than relying on complicated, slow, and unreliable scripted solutions.
So, let’s take a look at what we can do, right now, that we might have a better idea of where our current tools fall short.
A print magazine in HTML clothing
Like many others, I suspect, one of my earliest experiences with publishing was laying out newsletters and newspapers on a computer for print. If you’ve ever used InDesign or Quark or even Microsoft Publisher, you’ll remember reflowing content from page to page. The advent of the internet signaled, in many ways, the abandonment of that model. Articles were no longer constrained by the physical limitations of paper. In shedding our chains, however, it is arguable that we’ve lost something useful. We had a self-contained and complete package, a closed loop. It was a thing that could be handled and finished, and doing so provided a sense of accomplishment that our modern, infinitely scrolling, ever-fractal web of content has stolen.
For our purposes today, we will treat 24 ways as the online equivalent of that newspaper or magazine. A single year’s worth of articles could easily be considered an issue. Right now, navigating between articles means clicking on the article you’d like to view and being taken to that specific address via a page reload. If Drew wanted to, it wouldn’t be difficult to update the page in place (via JavaScript) and change the address (again via JavaScript with the History API) to reflect the new content found at the new location. But what if Drew wanted to do that without JavaScript? And what if he wanted the site to not merely load the content but actually whisk you along the page in a compelling and delightful way, à la the Mag+ demo we all saw a few years ago when the iPad was first introduced? Uh, no.
We’re all familiar with websites that have attempted to go beyond the page by weaving many chunks of content together into a large document and for good reason. There is tremendous appeal in opening and exploring the canvas beyond the edges of our screens.
In one rather straightforward example from last year, Mozilla contacted Full Stop to build a website promoting Aza Raskin’s proposal for a set of Creative Commons-style privacy icons. Like a lot of the sites we build (including our own), the amount of information we were presenting was minimal. In these instances, we encourage our clients to consider including everything on a single page. The result was a horizontally driven site that was, if not whimsical, at least clever and attractive to the intended audience. An experience that is taken for granted when using device-native technology is utterly, maddeningly impossible to replicate on the web without jumping through JavaScript hoops.
In another, more complex example, we again had the pleasure of working with Aza earlier this year, this time on a redesign of the Massive Health website. Our assignment was to design and build a site that communicated Massive’s commitment to modern personal health. The site had to be visually and interactively stunning while maintaining a usable and clear interface for the casual visitor. Our solution was to extend the infinite company logo into a ribbon that carried the visitor through the site narrative. It also meant we’d be asking the browser to accommodate something it was never designed to handle: a non-linear design. (Be sure to play around. There’s a lot going on under the hood. We were also this close to a ZUI, if WebKit didn’t freak out when pages were scaled beyond 10×.) Despite the apparent and deliberate design simplicity, the techniques necessary to implement it are anything but. From updating the URL to moving the visitor from section to section, we’re firmly in JavaScript territory. And that’s a shame.
What can we do?
We might not be able to specify these layouts in HTML and CSS just yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a few new tricks while we wait. Let’s see how close we can come to recreating the privacy icons design, the Massive design, or the Mag+ design without resorting to JavaScript.
A horizontally paginated site
The first thing we’re going to need is the concept of a page within our HTML document. Using plain old HTML and CSS, we can stack a series of <div>s sideways (with a little assist from our new friend, the viewport-width unit, not that he was strictly necessary). All we need to know is how many pages we have. (And, boy, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know that without having to predetermine it or use JavaScript?)
.window {
overflow: hidden;
width: 100%;
}
.pages {
width: 200vw;
}
.page {
float: left;
overflow: hidden;
width: 100vw;
}
If you look carefully, you’ll see that the conceit we’ll use in the rest of the demos is in place. Despite the document containing multiple pages, only one is visible at any given time. This allows us to keep the user focused on the task (or content) at hand.
By the way, you’ll need to use a modern, WebKit-based browser for these demos. I recommend downloading the WebKit nightly builds, Chrome Canary, or being comfortable with setting flags in Chrome.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions
Ah, here’s the rub. We have functional navigation, but precious few cues for the user. It’s not much good shoving the visitor around various parts of the document if they don’t get the pleasant whooshing experience of the journey. You might be thinking, what about that new CSS selector, target-something…? Well, my friend, you’re on the right track. Let’s test it. We’re going to need to use a bit of sleight of hand. While we’d like to simply offset the containing element by the number of pages we’re moving (like we did on Massive), CSS alone can’t give us that information, and that means we’re going to need to fake it by expanding and collapsing pages as you navigate. Here are the bits we’re going to need:
.page {
-webkit-transition: width 1s; // Naturally you're going to want to include all the relevant prefixes here
float: left;
left: 0;
overflow: hidden;
position: relative;
width: 100vw;
}
.page:not(:target) {
width: 0;
}
Ah, but we’re not fooling anyone with that trick. As soon as you move beyond a single page, the visitor’s disbelief comes tumbling down when the linear page transitions are unaffected by the distance the pages are allegedly traveling. And you may have already noticed an even more fatal flaw: I secretly linked you to the first page rather than the unadorned URL. If you visit the same page with no URL fragment, you get a blank screen. Sure, we could force a redirect with some server-side trickery, but that feels like cheating. Perhaps if we had the CSS4 subject selector we could apply styles to the parent based on the child being targeted by the URL. We might also need a few more abilities, like determining the total number of pages and having relative sibling selectors (e.g. nth-sibling), but we’d sure be a lot closer.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating
Well, what other cards can we play? How about the checkbox hack? Sure, it’s a garish trick, but it might be the best we can do today. Check it out.
label {
cursor: pointer;
}
input {
display: none;
}
input:not(:checked) + .page {
max-height: 100vh;
width: 0;
}
Finally, we can see the first page thanks to the state we are able to set on the appropriate radio button. Of course, now we don’t have URLs, so maybe this isn’t a winning plan after all. While our HTML and CSS toolkit may feel primitive at the moment, we certainly don’t want to sacrifice the addressability of the web. If there’s one bedrock principle, that’s it.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating and a gorgeous homepage
Gorgeous may not be the right word, but our little magazine is finally shaping up. Thanks to the CSS regions spec, we’ve got an exciting new power, the ability to begin an article in one place and bend it to our will. (Remember, your everyday browser isn’t going to work for these demos. Try the WebKit nightly build to see what we’re talking about.) As with the rest of the examples, we’re clearly abusing these features. Off-canvas layouts (you can thank Luke Wroblewski for the name) are simply not considered to be normal patterns… yet.
Here’s a quick look at what’s going on:
.excerpt-container {
float: left;
padding: 2em;
position: relative;
width: 100%;
}
.excerpt {
height: 16em;
}
.excerpt_name_article-1,
.page-1 .article-flow-region {
-webkit-flow-from: article-1;
}
.article-content_for_article-1 {
-webkit-flow-into: article-1;
}
The regions pattern is comprised of at least three components: a beginning; an ending; and a source. Using CSS, we’re able to define specific elements that should be available for the content to flow through. If magazine-style layouts are something you’re interested in learning more about (and you should be), be sure to check out the great work Adobe has been doing.
Looking forward, and backward
As designers, builders, and consumers of the web, we share a desire to see the usability and enjoyability of websites continue to rise. We are incredibly lucky to be working in a time when a three-month-old website can be laughably outdated. Our goal ought to be to improve upon both the weaknesses and the strengths of the web platform. We seek not only smoother transitions and larger canvases, but fine-grained addressability. Our URLs should point directly and unambiguously to specific content elements, be they pages, sections, paragraphs or words. Moreover, off-screen design patterns are essential to accommodating and empowering the multitude of devices we use to access the web. We should express the desire that interpage links take advantage of the CSS transitions which have been put to such good effect in every other aspect of our designs. Transitions aren’t just nice to have, they’re table stakes in the highly competitive world of native applications.
The tools and technologies we have right now allow us to create smart, beautiful, useful webpages. With a little help, we can begin removing the seams and sutures that bind the web to an earlier, less sophisticated generation. |
2012 |
Nathan Peretic |
nathanperetic |
2012-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2012/infinite-canvas-moving-beyond-the-page/ |
code |
| 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 people wouldn’t skip it based on false hatred.— Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) November 27, 2016
We can also use clever word choice to build euphemisms, to name sensitive or intimate concepts without conjuring their full details. This trick gifts us with language like “the beast with two backs” (thanks, Shakespeare!) and “surfing the crimson wave” (thanks, Cher Horowitz!).
But when we grapple with more serious concepts—war, death, human rights—this habit of declawing our language gets dangerous. Using more discrete wording serves to nullify the concepts themselves, euphemizing them out of sight and out of mind.
The result? Politicians never lie, they just “misspeak.” Nobody’s racist, but plenty of people are “economically anxious.” Nazis have rebranded as “alt-right.”
I’m not an asshole, I’m just alt-nice.— Andi Zeisler (@andizeisler) November 22, 2016
The problem with euphemisms like these is that they quickly infect everyday language. We use the words we hear around us. The more often we see “alt-right” instead of “Nazi,” the more likely we are to use that phrase ourselves—normalizing the term as well as the terrible ideas behind it.
Patterns from sentences
That process of normalization gets a boost from the media, our main vector of information about the world outside ourselves. Headlines control how we interpret the news that follows—even if the story contradicts it in the end. We hear the framing more clearly than the content itself, coloring our interpretation of the news over time.
Even worse, headlines are often written to encourage clicks, not to convey critical information. When headline-writing is driven by sensationalism, it’s much, much easier to build a pattern of misinformation. Take this CBS News headline: “Donald Trump: ‘Millions’ voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.” The headline makes no indication that this an objectively false statement; instead, this word choice subtly suggestions that millions did, in fact, illegally vote for Hillary Clinton.
Headlines like this are what make lying a worthwhile political strategy. https://t.co/DRjGeYVKmW— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) November 27, 2016
This is a deeply dangerous choice of words when headlines are the primary way that news is conveyed—especially on social media, where it’s much faster to share than to actually read the article. In fact, according to a study from the Media Insight Project, “roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week.”
If a powerful person asserts X there are 2 responsible ways to cover:1. “X is true”2. “Person incorrectly thinks X”Never “Person says X”— Helen Rosner (@hels) November 27, 2016
Even if we do, in fact, read the whole article, there’s no guarantee that we’re thinking critically about it. A study conducted by Stanford found that “82 percent of students could not distinguish between a sponsored post and an actual news article on the same website. Nearly 70 percent of middle schoolers thought they had no reason to distrust a sponsored finance article written by the CEO of a bank, and many students evaluate the trustworthiness of tweets based on their level of detail and the size of attached photos.”
Friends: our information literacy is not very good. Luckily, we—workers of the web—are in a position to improve it.
Sentences into design
Consider the presentation of those all-important headlines in social media cards, as on Facebook. The display is a combination of both the card’s design and the article’s source code, and looks something like this:
A large image, a large headline; perhaps a brief description; and, at the bottom, in pale gray, a source and an author’s name.
Those choices convey certain values: specifically, they suggest that the headline and the picture are the entire point. The source is so deemphasized that it’s easy to see how fake news gains a foothold: daily exposure to this kind of hierarchy has taught us that sources aren’t important.
And that’s the message from the best-case scenario. Not every article shows every piece of data. Take this headline from the BBC: “Wisconsin receives request for vote recount.”
With no image, no description, and no author, there’s little opportunity to signal trust or provide nuance. There’s also no date—ever—which presents potentially misleading complications, especially in the context of “breaking news.”
And lest you think dates don’t matter in the light-speed era of social media, take the headline, “Maryland sidesteps electoral college.” Shared into my feed two days after the US presidential election, that’s some serious news with major historical implications. But since there’s no date on this card, there’s no way for readers to know that the “Tuesday” it refers to was in 2007. Again, a design choice has made misinformation far too contagious.
More recently, I posted my personal reaction to the death of Fidel Castro via a series of twenty tweets. Wanting to share my thoughts with friends and family who don’t use Twitter, I then posted the first tweet to Facebook. The card it generated was less than ideal:
The information hierarchy created by this approach prioritizes the name of the Twitter user (not even the handle), along with the avatar. Not only does that create an awkward “headline” (at least when you include a full stop in your name), but it also minimizes the content of the tweet itself—which was the whole point.
The arbitrary elevation of some pieces of content over others—like huge headlines juxtaposed with minimized sources—teaches readers that these values are inherent to the content itself: that the headline is the news, that the source is irrelevant. We train readers to stop looking for the information we don’t put in front of them.
These aren’t life-or-death scenarios; they are just cases where design decisions noticeably dictate the perception of information. Not every design decision makes so obvious an impact, but the impact is there. Every single action adds to the pattern.
Design with intention
We can’t necessarily teach people to read critically or vet their sources or stop believing conspiracy theories (or start believing facts). Our reach is limited to our roles: we make websites and products for companies and colleges and startups.
But we have more reach there than we might realize. Every decision we make influences how information is presented in the world. Every presentation adds to the pattern. No matter how innocuous our organization, how lowly our title, how small our user base—every single one of us contributes, a little bit, to the way information is perceived.
Are we changing it for the better?
While it’s always been crucial to act ethically in the building of the web, our cultural climate now requires dedicated, individual conscientiousness. It’s not enough to think ourselves neutral, to dismiss our work as meaningless or apolitical. Everything is political. Every action, and every inaction, has an impact.
As Chappell Ellison put it much more eloquently than I can:
Every single action and decision a designer commits is a political act. The question is, are you a conscious actor?— Chappell Ellison🤔 (@ChappellTracker) November 28, 2016
As shapers of information, we have a responsibility: to create clarity, to further understanding, to advance truth. Every single one of us must choose to treat information—and the society it builds—with integrity. |
2016 |
Lisa Maria Martin |
lisamariamartin |
2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/information-literacy-is-a-design-problem/ |
content |
| 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 personality.
The old Simply Accessible website and colour palette.
After an audit to round up every colour used throughout the site, we dug in deep and played around with some ideas to bring some new life to this palette.
Choose effective colours
Whether you’re starting from scratch or evolving an existing brand, the first step to having an effective and legible palette begins with your colour choices. While we aren’t going to cover colour message and meaning in this article, it’s important to understand how to choose colours that can be used to create strong contrast—one of the most important ways to create hierarchy, focus, and legibility in your design.
There are a few methods of creating effective contrast.
Light and dark colours
The contrast that exists between light and dark colours is the most important attribute when creating effective contrast.
Try not to use colours that have a similar lightness next to each other in a design.
The red and green colours on the left share a similar lightness and don’t provide enough contrast on their own without making some adjustments. Removing colour and showing the relationship in greyscale reveals that the version on the right is much more effective.
It’s important to remember that red and green colour pairs cause difficulty for the majority of colour-blind people, so they should be avoided wherever possible, especially when placed next to each other.
Complementary contrast
Effective contrast can also be achieved by choosing complementary colours (other than red and green), that are opposite each other on a colour wheel.
These colour pairs generally work better than choosing adjacent hues on the wheel.
Cool and warm contrast
Contrast also exists between cool and warm colours on the colour wheel.
Imagine a colour wheel divided into cool colours like blues, purples, and greens, and compare them to warm colours like reds, oranges and yellows.
Choosing a dark shade of a cool colour, paired with a light tint of a warm colour will provide better contrast than two warm colours or two cool colours.
Develop colour concepts
After much experimentation, we settled on a simple, two-colour palette of blue and orange, a cool-warm contrast colour scheme. We added swatches for call-to-action messaging in green, error messaging in red, and body copy and form fields in black and grey. Shades and tints of blue and orange were added to illustrations and other design elements for extra detail and interest.
First stab at a new palette.
We introduced the new palette for the first time on an internal project to test the waters before going full steam ahead with the website. It gave us plenty of time to get a feel for the new design before sharing it with the public.
Putting the test palette into practice with an internal report
It’s important to be open to changes in your palette as it might need to evolve throughout the design process. Don’t tell your client up front that this palette is set in stone. If you need to tweak the colour of a button later because of legibility issues, the last thing you want is your client pushing back because it’s different from what you promised.
As it happened, we did tweak the colours after the test run, and we even adjusted the logo—what looked great printed on paper looked a little too light on screens.
Consider how colours might be used
Don’t worry if you haven’t had the opportunity to test your palette in advance. As long as you have some well-considered options, you’ll be ready to think about how the colour might be used on the site or app.
Obviously, in such early stages it’s unlikely that you’re going to know every element or feature that will appear on the site at launch time, or even which design elements could be introduced to the site later down the road. There are, of course, plenty of safe places to start.
For Simply Accessible, I quickly mocked up these examples in Illustrator to get a handle on the elements of a website where contrast and legibility matter the most: text colours and background colours. While it’s less important to consider the contrast of decorative elements that don’t convey essential information, it’s important for a reader to be able to discern elements like button shapes and empty form fields.
A basic list of possible colour combinations that I had in mind for the Simply Accessible website
Run initial tests
Once these elements were laid out, I manually plugged in the HTML colour code of each foreground colour and background colour on Lea Verou’s Contrast Checker. I added the results from each colour pair test to my document so we could see at a glance which colours needed adjustment or which colours wouldn’t work at all.
Note: Read more about colour accessibility and contrast requirements
As you can see, a few problems were revealed in this test. To meet the minimum AA compliance, we needed to slightly darken the green, blue, and orange background colours for text—an easy fix. A more complicated problem was apparent with the button colours. I had envisioned some buttons appearing over a blue background, but the contrast ratios were well under 3:1. Although there isn’t a guide in WCAG for contrast requirements of two non-text elements, the ISO and ANSI standard for visible contrast is 3:1, which is what we decided to aim for.
We also checked our colour combinations in Color Oracle, an app that simulates the most extreme forms of colour blindness. It confirmed that coloured buttons over blue backgrounds was simply not going to work. The contrast was much too low, especially for the more common deuteranopia and protanopia-type deficiencies.
How our proposed colour pairs could look to people with three types of colour blindness
Make adjustments if necessary
As a solution, we opted to change all buttons to white when used over dark coloured backgrounds. In addition to increasing contrast, it also gave more consistency to the button design across the site instead of introducing a lot of unnecessary colour variants.
Putting more work into getting compliant contrast ratios at this stage will make the rest of implementation and testing a breeze. When you’ve got those ratios looking good, it’s time to move on to implementation.
Implement colours in style guide and prototype
Once I was happy with my contrast checks, I created a basic style guide and added all the colour values from my colour exploration files, introduced more tints and shades, and added patterned backgrounds. I created examples of every panel style we were planning to use on the site, with sample text, links, and buttons—all with working hover states. Not only does this make it easier for the developer, it allows you to check in the browser for any further contrast issues.
Run a final contrast check
During the final stages of testing and before launch, it’s a good idea to do one more check for colour accessibility to ensure nothing’s been lost in translation from design to code. Unless you’ve introduced massive changes to the design in the prototype, it should be fairly easy to fix any issues that arise, particularly if you’ve stayed on top of updating any revisions in the style guide.
One of the more well-known evaluation tools, WAVE, is web-based and will work in any browser, but I love using Chrome’s Accessibility Tools. Not only are they built right in to the Inspector, but they’ll work if your site is password-protected or private, too.
Chrome’s Accessibility Tools audit feature shows that there are no immediate issues with colour contrast in our prototype
The human touch
Finally, nothing beats a good round of user testing. Even evaluation tools have their flaws. Although they’re great at catching contrast errors for text and backgrounds, they aren’t going to be able to find errors in non-text elements, infographics, or objects placed next to each other where discernible contrast is important.
Our final palette, compared with our initial ideas, was quite different, but we’re proud to say it’s not just compliant, but shows Simply Accessible’s true personality. Who knows, it may not be final at all—there are so many opportunities down the road to explore and expand it further.
Accessibility should never be an afterthought in a project. It’s not as simple as adding alt text to images, or running your site through a compliance checker at the last minute and assuming that a pass means everything is okay. Considering how colour will be used during every stage of your project will help avoid massive problems before launch, or worse, launching with serious issues.
If you find yourself working on a personal project over the Christmas break, try integrating these checks into your workflow and make colour accessibility a part of your New Year’s resolutions. |
2014 |
Geri Coady |
gericoady |
2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/ |
design |
| 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 software Etcher5.
Next up you have to configure the wifi details on the SD card. If you plug the card into your computer you should see a drive called BOOT. There’s a text file on there called wpa_supplicant.conf. Open it up in your favourite text editor and replace mywifi and mypassword with your wifi details6.
network={
ssid="mywifi"
psk="mypassword"
}
Save the file, eject the card from your computer and plug it into the Raspberry Pi.
If you have a base board or holder for the Raspberry Pi, attach it now. Then connect the wifi USB dongle7 and power supply, but don’t plug it in yet!
Wiring!
Time to wire everything up!
First of all, push the Logic Level Converter into the middle of the breadboard:
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter may be labelled differently from the one in the diagram but the pins are usually exactly the same internally. I would just make sure the pins marked HV (High Voltage) are on the bottom and LV (Low Voltage) are on the top.
Raspberry Pi pins only output 3.3v but the lights need 5v. That’s why we need the logic level converter in there to boost up the signal.
Connect the first two wires between the Raspberry Pi pins and the breadboard:
Note that the pins on the Raspberry Pi are male, so you need a female to male jumper wire to connect between them and the breadboard. The colours don’t have to match but it’s easier to follow (and check) if you use the same ones as in the diagram.
Then the next two:
This is what you should have so far:
Lights
Now to connect the lights! My ones have a connector with three holes in it that I can push jumper wires into, and hopefully yours will too! So I used the male-to-male jumper wires to connect them to the breadboard.
Make sure that you connect the right end of the lights, mine has a male connector at the wrong end so it’s impossible to do this, but double check.
Also make sure that the holes in the light connector are the same as mine. To do this, follow the wires from the connector to the first light and look at the circuit board inside. You should just about be able to make out the connections labelled + (sometimes 5V, V+ or VCC), GND (or ‘-’ or G) and DI (sometimes DIN for data in).
You can just about make out the +, DI and GND on this picture. Note that on the other side of the board there is a DO for data out - that’s what takes the data along to the chip in the next light. Make sure that you’re plugging into the data-in and not the data-out!
That’s it! Everything’s plugged in and ready to go! But before you plug power into your Pi, double check all your wires and make sure they’re exactly right! You could damage your Raspberry Pi if it is not wired correctly. So triple check!
The Moment of Truth!
Plug in the Raspberry Pi and wait around a minute or two for it to boot up. If all is well, the lights should strobe rainbow colours for one second - that’s your confirmation that it’s connected to my WebSocket server and ready to receive messages from the upside-down!
However, if the first light in the string is pulsing red, it means that you’re not connected to the internet. So check the Troubleshooting section of the support document. If it’s pulsing green then you’re connected to the internet but can’t connect to my server. It must have gone down. Sorry! The code will keep trying so leave it running and maybe it’ll come back up.
Rig up the lights!
Fix the lights up on the wall however you want, pins, nails, tape. I’ve used cable clips. Just be careful! I’m using a 50 light string so I’ve programmed it to use the lights at the end for the letters. That way I have just under half the string to extend down to the floor where I can keep the Raspberry Pi.
Check the photo here to see how the lights line up, note that there are spare unused lights in-between each row:
Now visit lights.seb.ly and you’ll see this :
If you’re the only one online you’ll have direct connection to the lights and any letter you click on will light up both in the browser and in real life. If there are other people there, you’ll need to click the button to join the queue and wait your turn.
How it works - the geeky details!
Electronics:
The pins on the Raspberry Pi are known as GPIO pins, general-purpose input/output. You can connect a wide variety of electronic components to them, LED lights, buttons, switches, and sensors. You can turn the power to the pins on and off using Node.js (or Python, if you prefer).
Addressable LEDs or “Neopixels”
We’re only using one GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi (the other connections are 5V, 3.3V and ground) and that single pin is controlling all of the lights in the string. The code turns the pin on and off really fast in strictly timed morse-code-like dots and dashes to transmit binary data. The chips attached to each LED decode the binary and adjust the output to the LED accordingly. That chip then sends the data on to the next light in the string.
The chips on each light are the WS2811, part of the WS281x family that come in a multitude of different form factors and are often packaged with tiny LEDs in a single component. They are commonly referred to as Neopixels8 and I used them on my Laser Light Synths project.
Neopixels with the chip and the LED all in one - it’s the white square shaped component and the darker square inside is the chip. These are only 5mm wide!
A Laser Light Synth! Covered with around 800 super bright neopixels!
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter is a really cheap and easy way to change the level from 3.3v to 5v and back again. You must be careful that you do not connect 5v into a GPIO pin or you will most likely damage the Raspberry Pi processor chip.
Power
Neopixels can often draw a lot of current so you need to be careful how you power them. I’ve measured the current draw from the string to be less than 800mA so you should be fine wired directly to the 5V output. But if you use more lights or have them all on really bright at once, you’ll need to use a separate 5V power supply. If you want to learn more, check out Adafruit’s Neopixel Uberguide.
Node.js
There are two Node.js apps running here, one on the Raspberry Pi and one on my server. You can see the code on my GitHub at github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights for the Raspberry Pi and github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights-server for the server. And they’re hosted on npm as stranger-lights and stranger-lights-server.
The server side code sets up a standard web server to deliver the HTML for the web interface. It also sets up a WebSocket server that allows for real-time communication between the browser and the server. This server code also manages the queue and who is in control of the lights at any given time.
WebSockets
I’m using the excellent Socket.io library to manage the WebSocket connection. Both the browser and the Raspberry Pi Node.js app connects to my WebSocket server.
When you click on a letter in the browser, a message is sent to the server, which forwards it to the connected Raspberry Pi clients and also all the web browsers9.
The Raspberry Pi code
The Node.js app runs automatically on startup, and I made this happen by adding this to the /etc/rc.local file:
node /home/pi/strangerthings/client.js > /dev/null &
Anything in the rc.local file gets executed when the Pi boots up and this line of code runs the Node.js app and routes its output to nowhere (ie /dev/null). The & means that it runs it in the background and doesn’t hold up the boot process.
Working with the Raspberry Pi headless
You might know that when a computer has no screen or keyboard, you would refer to it as “running headless”. So just like most web servers, you need to configure it over the network with ssh10. If you’re on a mac you can find your Pi on the network through the name raspberrypi.local11, otherwise you’ll need to find its IP address. There’s more on the guide to Remote Access instructions on the Raspberry Pi website. And if you’re very new to the terminal, I highly recommend this great online Linux command line tutorial.
Improvements
This is quite an early experiment and I’m sure I’ll discover lots of optimisations over the next few weeks, especially if the server gets a proper hammering today! But there are a few things you can do. Obviously I’ve just rigged up my lights with Post-it notes. It’d be a lot nicer to get a paint brush and try to recreate the Winona-in-a-manic-state text style.
Where next?
Finding quality resources about Node.js for electronics on the Pi can be somewhat hit and miss, but this is getting better all the time. Alternatively I am thinking about running some online courses, please let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in, or sign up to my mailing list at st4i.com.
There are many many more resources for the Raspberry Pi with Python (gpiozero is a good place to start), so if that language works for you, you’ll be spoilt for choice!
Also take a look at Arduino - it’s an incredibly popular platform for electronics and the internet is literally bursting with resources.
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into the world of JavaScript electronics on the Raspberry Pi! If you get this working at home please let me know! Tweet me at @seb_ly.
Not a particularly original idea, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it quite like this before, ie using WebSockets, and Node.js on a Raspberry Pi. Other examples: Internet of Stranger Things, Strangerlights.com, and loads of examples on Instructables ↩︎
Video guide to soldering pins on to a Pi Zero and further soldering advice from Adafruit ↩︎
Slower cards will work but performance may suffer ↩︎
Or £5,000 in UK money. Sorry, Brexit joke :) ↩︎
You will need a card reader on your computer - most micro SD cards come with an adaptor that fits standard SD slots. ↩︎
SSID and password should be all that you need but you can see all the config options on this wpa supplicant guide ↩︎
Raspberry Pi Zero will require the OTG to USB adaptor to attach the wifi dongle ↩︎
Thanks to Adafruit who invented the term neopixels so we don’t have to refer to them as WS281x any more! ↩︎
So you can see other people sending messages in the browser ↩︎
ssh is short for Secure Shell and is a way to connect to a remote computer and type in it just like you would in the terminal. ↩︎
You can change this default hostname using raspi-config ↩︎ |
2016 |
Seb Lee-Delisle |
sebleedelisle |
2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2016/internet-of-stranger-things/ |
code |
| 126 |
Intricate Fluid Layouts in Three Easy Steps |
The Year of the Script may have drawn attention away from CSS but building fluid, multi-column, cross-browser CSS layouts can still be as unpleasant as a lump of coal. Read on for a worry-free approach in three quick steps.
The layout system I developed, YUI Grids CSS, has three components. They can be used together as we’ll see, or independently.
The Three Easy Steps
Choose fluid or fixed layout, and choose the width (in percents or pixels) of the page.
Choose the size, orientation, and source-order of the main and secondary blocks of content.
Choose the number of columns and how they distribute (for example 50%-50% or 25%-75%), using stackable and nestable grid structures.
The Setup
There are two prerequisites: We need to normalize the size of an em and opt into the browser rendering engine’s Strict Mode.
Ems are a superior unit of measure for our case because they represent the current font size and grow as the user increases their font size setting. This flexibility—the container growing with the user’s wishes—means larger text doesn’t get crammed into an unresponsive container. We’ll use YUI Fonts CSS to set the base size because it provides consistent-yet-adaptive font-sizes while preserving user control.
The second prerequisite is to opt into Strict Mode (more info on rendering modes) by declaring a Doctype complete with URI. You can choose XHTML or HTML, and Transitional or Strict. I prefer HTML 4.01 Strict, which looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Including the CSS
A single small CSS file powers a nearly-infinite number of layouts thanks to a recursive system and the interplay between the three distinct components. You could prune to a particular layout’s specific needs, but why bother when the complete file weighs scarcely 1.8kb uncompressed? Compressed, YUI Fonts and YUI Grids combine for a miniscule 0.9kb over the wire.
You could save an HTTP request by concatenating the two CSS files, or by adding their contents to your own CSS, but I’ll keep them separate for now:
<link href="fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="grids.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
Example: The Setup
Now we’re ready to build some layouts.
Step 1: Choose Fluid or Fixed Layout
Choose between preset widths of 750px, 950px, and 100% by giving a document-wrapping div an ID of doc, doc2, or doc3. These options cover most use cases, but it’s easy to define a custom fixed width.
The fluid 100% grid (doc3) is what I’ve been using almost exclusively since it was introduced in the last YUI released.
<body>
<div id="doc3"></div>
</body>
All pages are centered within the viewport, and grow with font size. The 100% width page (doc3) preserves 10px of breathing room via left and right margins. If you prefer your content flush to the viewport, just add doc3 {margin:auto} to your CSS.
Regardless of what you choose in the other two steps, you can always toggle between these widths and behaviors by simply swapping the ID value. It’s really that simple.
Example: 100% fluid layout
Step 2: Choose a Template Preset
This is perhaps the most frequently omitted step (they’re all optional), but I use it nearly every time. In a source-order-independent way (good for accessibility and SEO), “Template Presets” provide commonly used template widths compatible with ad-unit dimension standards defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry association.
Choose between the six Template Presets (.yui-t1 through .yui-t6) by setting the class value on the document-wrapping div established in Step 1. Most frequently I use yui-t3, which puts the narrow secondary block on the left and makes it 300px wide.
<body>
<div id="doc3" class="yui-t3"></div>
</body>
The Template Presets control two “blocks” of content, which are defined by two divs, each with yui-b (“b” for “block”) class values. Template Presets describe the width and orientation of the secondary block; the main block will take up the rest of the space.
<body>
<div id="doc3" class="yui-t3">
<div class="yui-b"></div>
<div class="yui-b"></div>
</div>
</body>
Use a wrapping div with an ID of yui-main to structurally indicate which block is the main block. This wrapper—not the source order—identifies the main block.
<body>
<div id="doc3" class="yui-t3">
<div id="yui-main">
<div class="yui-b"></div>
</div>
<div class="yui-b"></div>
</div>
</body>
Example: Main and secondary blocks sized and oriented with .yui-t3 Template Preset
Again, regardless of what values you choose in the other steps, you can always toggle between these Template Presets by toggling the class value of your document-wrapping div. It’s really that simple.
Step 3: Nest and Stack Grid Structures.
The bulk of the power of the system is in this third step. The key is that columns are built by parents telling children how to behave. By default, two children each consume half of their parent’s area. Put two units inside a grid structure, and they will sit side-by-side, and they will each take up half the space. Nest this structure and two columns become four. Stack them for rows of columns.
An Even Number of Columns
The default behavior creates two evenly-distributed columns. It’s easy. Define one parent grid with .yui-g (“g” for grid) and two child units with .yui-u (“u” for unit). The code looks like this:
<div class="yui-g">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
Be sure to indicate the “first“ unit because the :first-child pseudo-class selector isn’t supported across all A-grade browsers. It’s unfortunate we need to add this, but luckily it’s not out of place in the markup layer since it is structural information.
Example: Two evenly-distributed columns in the main content block
An Odd Number of Columns
The default system does not work for an odd number of columns without using the included “Special Grids” classes. To create three evenly distributed columns, use the “yui-gb“ Special Grid:
<div class="yui-gb">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
Example: Three evenly distributed columns in the main content block
Uneven Column Distribution
Special Grids are also used for unevenly distributed column widths. For example, .yui-ge tells the first unit (column) to take up 75% of the parent’s space and the other unit to take just 25%.
<div class="yui-ge">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
Example: Two columns in the main content block split 75%-25%
Putting It All Together
Start with a full-width fluid page (div#doc3). Make the secondary block 180px wide on the right (div.yui-t4). Create three rows of columns: Three evenly distributed columns in the first row (div.yui-gb), two uneven columns (66%-33%) in the second row (div.yui-gc), and two evenly distributed columns in the thrid row.
<body>
<!-- choose fluid page and Template Preset -->
<div id="doc3" class="yui-t4">
<!-- main content block -->
<div id="yui-main">
<div class="yui-b">
<!-- stacked grid structure, Special Grid "b" -->
<div class="yui-gb">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
<!-- stacked grid structure, Special Grid "c" -->
<div class="yui-gc">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
<!-- stacked grid structure -->
<div class="yui-g">
<div class="yui-u first"></div>
<div class="yui-u"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<!-- secondary content block -->
<div class="yui-b"></div>
</div>
</body>
Example: A complex layout.
Wasn’t that easy? Now that you know the three “levers” of YUI Grids CSS, you’ll be creating headache-free fluid layouts faster than you can say “Peace on Earth”. |
2006 |
Nate Koechley |
natekoechley |
2006-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/intricate-fluid-layouts/ |
code |
| 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('utils/style-switcher.php');
// style sheet path[, media, title, bool(set as alternate)]
$styleSheet = new AlternateStyles();
$styleSheet->add('css/global.css','screen,projection'); // [Global Styles]
$styleSheet->add('css/preferred.css','screen,projection','Wog Standard'); // [Preferred Styles]
$styleSheet->add('css/alternate.css','screen,projection','Tiny Fonts',true); // [Alternate Styles]
$styleSheet->add('css/alternate2.css','screen,projection','Big O Fonts',true); // // [Alternate Styles]
$styleSheet->getPreferredStyles();
?>
The way this works is REALLY EASY. Pay attention closely.
Notice in the first line we’ve included our style-switcher.php file.
Next we instantiate a PHP class called AlternateStyles() which will allow us to configure our style sheets.
So for kicks, let’s just call our object $styleSheet
As part of the AlternateStyles object, there lies a public method called add. So naturally with our $styleSheet object, we can call it to (da – da-da-da!) Add Style Sheets!
How the add() method works
The add method takes in a possible four arguments, only one is required. However, you’ll want to add some… since the whole point is working with alternate style sheets.
$path can simply be a uri, absolute, or relative path to your style sheet. $media adds a media attribute to your style sheets. $title gives a name to your style sheets (via title attribute).$alternate (which shows boolean) simply tells us that these are the alternate style sheets.
add() Tips
For all global style sheets (meaning the ones that will always be seen and will not be swapped out), simply use the add method as shown next to // [Global Styles].
To add preferred styles, do the same, but add a ‘title’.
To add the alternate styles, do the same as what we’ve done to add preferred styles, but add the extra boolean and set it to true.
Note following when adding style sheets
Multiple global style sheets are allowed
You can only have one preferred style sheet (That’s a browser rule)
Feel free to add as many alternate style sheets as you like
Moving on
Simply add the following snippet to the <head> of your web document:
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/common.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/alternateStyles.js"></script>
<?php
$styleSheet->drop();
?>
Nothing much to explain here. Just use your copy & paste powers.
How to Switch Styles
Whether you knew it or not, this baby already has the built in ‘ubobtrusive’ functionality that lets you switch styles by the drop of any link with a class name of ‘altCss‘. Just drop them where ever you like in your document as follows:
<a class="altCss" href="index.php?css=Bog_Standard">Bog Standard</a>
<a class="altCss" href="index.php?css=Really_Small_Fonts">Small Fonts</a>
<a class="altCss" href="index.php?css=Large_Fonts">Large Fonts</a>
Take special note where the file is linking to. Yep. Just linking right back to the page we’re on. The only extra parameters we pass in is a variable called ‘css’ – and within that we append the names of our style sheets.
Also take very special note on the names of the style sheets have an under_score to take place of any spaces we might have.
Go ahead… play around and change the style sheet on the example page. Try disabling JavaScript and refreshing your browser. Still works!
Cool eh?
Well, I put this together in one night so it’s still a work in progress and very beta. If you’d like to hear more about it and its future development, be sure stop on by my site where I’ll definitely be maintaining it.
Download the beta anyway
Well this wouldn’t be fun if there was nothing to download. So we’re hooking you up so you don’t go home (or logoff) unhappy
Download U.D.A.S.S.S | V0.8
Merry Christmas!
Thanks for listening and I hope U.D.A.S.S.S. has been well worth your time and will bring many years of Ajaxy Style Switchin’ Fun!
Many Blessings, Merry Christmas and have a great new year! |
2005 |
Dustin Diaz |
dustindiaz |
2005-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/introducing-udasss/ |
code |
| 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 (based on the Broken Windows theory), which really made an impression on me, and which I have since then referred back to several times.
You can listen to it yourself, as it’s available from Archive.org. Though since Matt’s session uses many visual examples, you’ll have to rely on your imagination for some of the examples he runs through during it. Also, I think it looses audio for a few seconds every once in a while.
Anyway, one of the things Matt talked a lot about, was how our eyes are wired to react to movement. The world doesn’t flickr. It doesn’t disappear or suddenly change and force us to look for the change. Things move smoothly in the real world. They do not pop up.
How it Works
Once the necessary files have been included, you trigger an effect by pointing it at the ID of an element. Simple as that.
Implementing the Effects
So now you know why I believe these effects have a place in your site, and that’s half the battle. Because you see, actually getting these effects up and running, is deceptively simple.
First, go and download the latest version of the library (as of this writing, it’s version 1.5 rc5). Unzip itand open it up.
Now we’re going to bypass the instructions in the readme file. Script.aculo.us can do a bunch of quite advanced things, but all we really want from it is its effects. And by sidestepping the rest of the features, we can shave off roughly 80KB of unnecessary javascript, which is well worth it if you ask me.
As with Drew’s article on Easy Ajax with Prototype, script.aculo.us also uses the Prototype framework by Sam Stephenson. But contrary to Drew’s article, you don’t have to download Prototype, as a version comes bundled with script.aculo.us (though feel free to upgrade to the latest version if you so please).
So in the unzipped folder, containing the script.aculo.us files and folder, go into ‘lib’ and grab the ‘prototype.js’ file. Move it to whereever you want to store the javascript files. Then fetch the ‘effects.js’ file from the ‘src’ folder and put it in the same place.
To make things even easier for you to get this up and running, I have prepared a small javascript snippet which does some checking to see what you’re trying to do. The script.aculo.us effects are all either ‘turn this off’ or ‘turn this on’. What this snippet does, is check to see what state the target currently has (is it on or off?) and then use the necessary effect.
You can either skip to the end and download the example code, or copy and paste this code into a file manually (I’ll refer to that file as combo.js):
Effect.OpenUp = function(element) {
element = $(element);
new Effect.BlindDown(element, arguments[1] || {});
}
Effect.CloseDown = function(element) {
element = $(element);
new Effect.BlindUp(element, arguments[1] || {});
}
Effect.Combo = function(element) {
element = $(element);
if(element.style.display == 'none') {
new Effect.OpenUp(element, arguments[1] || {});
}else {
new Effect.CloseDown(element, arguments[1] || {});
}
}
Currently, this code uses the BlindUp and BlindDown code, which I personally like, but there’s nothing wrong with you changing the effect-type into one of the other effects available.
Now, include the three files in the header of your code, like so:
<script src="prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="effects.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="combo.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Now insert the element you want to use the effect on, like so:
<div id="content" style="display: none;">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</div>
The above element will start out invisible, and when triggered will be revealed. If you want it to start visible, simply remove the style parameter.
And now for the trigger
<a href="javascript:Effect.Combo('content');">Click Here</a>
And that, is pretty much it. Clicking the link should unfold the DIV targeted by the effect, in this case ‘content’.
Effect Options
Now, it gets a bit long-haired though. The documentation for script.aculo.us is next to non-existing, and because of that you’ll have to do some digging yourself to appreciate the full potentialof these effects.
First of all, what kind of effects are available? Well you can go to the demo page and check them out, or you can open the ‘effects.js’ file and have a look around, something I recommend doing regardlessly, to gain an overview of what exactly you’re dealing with.
If you dissect it for long enough, you can even distill some of the options available for the various effects. In the case of the BlindUp and BlindDown effect, which we’re using in our example (as triggered from combo.js), one of the things that would be interesting to play with would be the duration of the effect. If it’s too long, it will feel slow and unresponsive. Too fast and it will be imperceptible.
You set the options like so:
<a href="javascript:Effect.Combo('content', {duration: .2});">Click Here</a>
The change from the previous link being the inclusion of , {duration: .2}. In this case, I have lowered the duration to 0.2 second, to really make it feel snappy.
You can also go all-out and turn on all the bells and whistles of the Blind effect like so (slowed down to a duration of three seconds so you can see what’s going on):
<a href="javascript:Effect.Combo('content', {duration: 3, scaleX: true, scaleContent: true});">Click Here</a>
Conclusion
And that’s pretty much it. The rest is a matter of getting to know the rest of the effects and their options as well as finding out just when and where to use them. Remember the ancient Chinese saying: Less is more.
Download Example
I have prepared a very basic example, which you can download and use as a reference point. |
2005 |
Michael Heilemann |
michaelheilemann |
2005-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2005/introduction-to-scriptaculous-effects/ |
code |
| 45 |
Is Agile Harder for Agencies? |
I once sat in a pitch meeting and watched a new business exec tell a potential client that his agency followed an agile workflow process at all times. The potential client nodded wisely, and they both agreed that agile was indeed the way to go.
The meeting progressed and they signed off on a contract for a massive project, to be delivered in a standard waterfall fashion, with all manner of phases and key deliverables.
Of course both of them left the meeting perfectly happy, because neither of them knew nor cared what an agile workflow process might be.
That was about five years ago. As 2015 heaves into view I think it’s fair to say that attitudes have changed. Perhaps the same number of people claim to do Agile™ now as in 2010, but I think more of them are telling the truth.
As a developer in an agency that works primarily with larger organisations, this year I have started to see a shift from agencies pushing agile methodologies with their clients, to clients requesting and even demanding agile practices from their agencies. Only a couple of years ago this would have been unusual behaviour.
So what’s the problem?
We should be happy then, no? Those of us in agencies will get to spend more time delivering great products, and less time arguing over out-of-date functional specs or battling through an adversarial change management procedure because somebody had a good idea during development rather than planning. We get to be a little bit more like our brothers and sisters in vaunted teams like the Government Digital Service, which is using agile approaches to great effect on projects that have a real benefit to their users.
Almost. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that adhering to an agile framework such as scrum is more difficult within an agency/client structure than it is for an in-house development team.
This is no surprise. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by a group of software developers for their own use. Many of the underlying principles of a framework like Scrum assume the existence of an in-house team, working on a highly technical project, and working for the business that employs them. The agency/client model must to some extent be retrofitted into agile frameworks. It can be done though, and there are plenty of agencies out there doing it well.
This article isn’t meant to be another introduction to agile techniques – there are too many of those online already. This article is for people just dipping their toes into this way of working. I’ve laid out a few of the key reasons why adopting a more fully agile approach seems difficult, at least initially, for those of us working in agencies.
1. Agile asks more of your clients
When a team adopts Scrum everyone has to get used to a number of unfamiliar roles and rituals. Few team members have a steeper learning curve than the person designated as the product owner.
The product owner carries a lot of weight on their shoulders. They have to uphold the overall vision for the project. They are also meant to be the primary author of the project’s user stories (short atomic descriptions of project features which are testable and relate to a real business need). They should own this list of stories (called a backlog) and should be able to prioritise the order in which the stories are developed, to ensure that the project is delivering real value to the business early and often.
When a burst of work is completed (bursts of work in Scrum are called sprints), the product owner leads a review or show-and-tell session with the wider project stakeholders. The product owner needs to understand the work that has been completed, and must champion it to the business. Finally, and most importantly, the product owner is responsible for managing the feedback and requests from stakeholders in such a way that they don’t derail the project team’s agreed workload for any given sprint, without upsetting or offending any of the stakeholders – some of whom may outrank the product owner.
If you follow that spec, this is a job for a superhuman in any organisational context. And within the agency/client structure this superhuman needs to be client-side for the process to be at its most effective.
So your client, who in the past might have briefed a project to an agency team and then had the work presented back to them every few weeks, is now asked to be involved with the team on a daily basis; to fight on behalf of the team when new or difficult requests come in from senior figures within their organisation; and to present the agency’s work to their own colleagues after each sprint. It’s a big change if all that gets dropped into someone’s lap without warning.
There are several ways agencies can mitigate this issue. The ScrumAlliance suggests some alternative ways to structure the product owner role. The approach I have taken in the past is simply to start slow, and gradually move more of the product owner role over to the client side as and when they feel comfortable with it. If you’re working together long-term on a project, and you both see tangible improvements in the quality of the work after adopting an agile process, then your client is more likely to be open to further changes as the partnership progresses.
2. My client wants fixed costs, fixed deadlines and a fixed scope
I know. Mine too. Of course they do – it is the way that agencies and clients have agreed to work in digital and other creative service industries for a very long time. On both sides of the fence we’re used to thinking about projects in this way.
Of the three, fixing scope is the one that agile purists would rail hardest against. The more time we spend working on digital projects, the less sense it makes. James Archer, CEO of UI/UX design agency Forty puts it like this:
For me, the Agile approach is really about acknowledging that disturbing truth that every project manager knows, but has trouble admitting. The truth that the project plan is wrong. Scope creep. Change orders. Shifting priorities. New directions. We act shocked and appalled when those things happen during our carefully planned project, even though they happen on every project ever.
Successful relationships require trust and honesty, and we shouldn’t be afraid of discussing this aspect of project management. If you do move away from a fixed scope of work, then the other two items (costs and timings) can be fixed – more or less. If you can get your clients to buy into this from a standing start then you are doing well. In fact you probably deserve a promotion. For most of us this is a continual discussion.
Anyway, as soon as you’ve made headway on the argument that it makes little or no sense to try and fix the scope of a digital project, you usually run into a related concern, which we’ll look at next.
3. Fear of uncontrolled costs
We all know that a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. At this time of year perhaps we should reiterate to everyone that digital products and services also need support and love once we have taken the decision to bring them into the world.
More organisations are realising that their investment in digital platforms should be viewed as an operational expenditure rather than a capital expenditure. But from time to time we will find ourselves working on projects for people who have a finite amount of money to invest in a product at a given point in time. When agencies start talking about these projects as rolling investments those responsible can understandably worry about their costs running out of control.
There’s another factor at play here. Agile, on the whole, prefers to derive a cost for services from the hours a team spends working on a project. In other industries this is referred to as charging for time and materials, and there seems to be an ingrained distrust in this approach among people in general. See, for example, the Citizens Advice Bureau’s “Top tips for employing a builder”:
“Bear in mind that if you pay a daily rate, this makes it easier for a builder to string the work out and get more money so agree what you will do if the job takes longer than expected.”
It’s hard not to feel stung if you are in the builder’s shoes here, as we are when we’re talking about our role as an agency. But if you’ve ever haggled with a builder over time and materials, and also moaned about your clients misunderstanding agile methods, take a moment to reflect on the similarities from your client’s point of view.
Again, there are some things we can do to mitigate this issue. Some agencies put in place a service level agreement around their team’s velocity (an agile-related term related to how much work a team delivers in any given sprint) and this can help.
As the industry moves further towards a long-term approach to investment in digital I hope this fear will subside. But that shift in approach leads to the final concern I want to address.
4. Agency structures need shaking up
If you work for a company that has spent many years developing a business model around the waterfall process, you may have to break through many layers of entrenched thinking in order to establish new practices and effect organisational change.
There are consultancies that exist specifically to help agencies through their own agile transformation. One of these companies, AgencyAgile, provides a helpful list of common pitfalls. They emphasise the need to look at your whole agency’s structure, rather than simply encouraging project teams to adopt new workflows.
Even awesomely run Agile projects can have a limited impact on the overall organization.
If you’re serious about changing the way your company approaches projects then try talking to people who sit outside the usual project delivery team. Speak to the finance department if you have one, and try to convince your senior management team if they’re not already on board. And definitely speak to your new business people, who go out there and win the projects you get to work on.
It’s these people who need to understand the potential business benefits of working in a new way, and also which of their existing habits and behaviours they might need to change to accommodate a new approach.
Otherwise you’ll find yourself with a team of designers, developers and project managers who are ready and waiting to deliver work in an iterative and collaborative way, but by the time they get hold of the project a cost has already been agreed, a deadline has been imposed, and a functional requirements document has been painstakingly put together. Nobody wins in this situation.
Conclusion
So where should we go from here? I certainly don’t have hard and fast answers – I’m not sure that they exist in a one-size-fits-all approach for agencies.
There are plenty of smart people thinking about this problem. It’s a hot topic right now. Earlier in the year a London-based meetup was established called Agile for Agencies. If you’re in the capital and want to discuss these issues with your peers it’s a great opportunity to do so.
I’ve mentioned James Archer and Forty already. Both James and Paul Boag have written in the last twelve months on this subject. They both come out on the side of the argument that suggests you adopt agile principles, but don’t have to worry about the rituals if they don’t fit in with your practices.
Personally, I think the rituals and the discipline mandated by an agile framework like Scrum can provide a great deal of value to your team, even it if is hard to implement within an agency culture that has traditionally structured its work and its services in another way.
In whatever way you figure out the details, when your teams collaborate with your clients rather than work for them at arm’s length, and when everyone prioritises frequent delivery, reflection and iteration over exhaustive scoping and planning, I believe you’ll see a tangible difference in the quality of the work that you create. |
2014 |
Charlie Perrins |
charlieperrins |
2014-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/is-agile-harder-for-agencies/ |
process |
| 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 boys and men, despite the fact that pastels are usually thought of as more feminine.
These associations are getting stronger and stronger as more and more marketers use them to define products as “for girls” and “for boys”, setting expectations from an incredibly young age — children as young as four understand gender stereotypes. It should be obvious that using these highly gender-associated colours sends an incredibly strong message to your visitors about who you think your target audience is. If you want to appeal to both men and women, then avoid pinks and pale blues.
But men and women also have different colour preferences. Men tend to prefer intense primary colours and deeper colours (shades), and tolerate greys better, whilst women prefer pastels (tints). When choosing colours, consider not just the hue itself, but also tint, tone and shade.
Slightly counterintuitively, everyone likes blue, but no one seems to particularly like brown or orange.
A picture is worth a thousand words, or none
Stock photos are the quickest and easiest way to add a little humanity to your website, directly illustrating the kind of people you believe are in your audience. But the wrong photo can put a woman off before she’s even read your text.
A website about a retirement home will, for example, obviously include photos of older people, and a baby clothes retailer will obviously show photos of babies. But, in the latter case, should they also show only photographs of mothers with their children, or should they include fathers too? It’s true that women take on the majority of childcare responsibilities, but that’s a cultural holdover from a previous era, rather than some rule of law. We are seeing increasing number of stay at home dads as well as single dads, so showing only photographs of women both enforces the stereotype that only women can care, as well as marginalising male carers.
Equally, featuring prominent photographs of women on sites about male-dominated topics such as science, technology or engineering help women feel welcomed and appreciated in those fields. Photos really do speak volumes, so make sure that you also represent other marginalised groups, especially ethnic groups. If people do not see themselves represented on your site, they are not going to engage with it as much as they might.
Another form of picture that we often ignore is the icon. When you do use icons, make sure that they are gender neutral. For example, avoid using a icon of a man to denote engineers, or of a woman to denote nurses. Avoid overly masculine or feminine metaphors, such as a hammer to denote DIY or a flower to denote gardens. Not only are these gendered, they’re also trite and unappealing, so come up with more exciting and novel metaphors.
Use gender-neutral language
Last, but not least, be very careful in your use of gender in language.
Pronouns are an obvious pitfall. A lot of web content is written in the second person, using the cleary gender neutral ‘you’, but if you have to write in the third person, which uses ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘it’, and ‘they’, then be very careful which pronouns you use. The singular ‘they’ is becoming more widely acceptable, and is a useful gender-neutral option. If you must use generic ‘he’ and ‘she’, (as opposed to talking about a specific person), then vary the order that they come in, so don’t always put the male pronoun first.
When you are talking about people, make sure that you use the same level of formality for both men and women. The tendency is to refer to men by their surname and women by their first name so, for example, when people are talking about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, they often talk about “Ada and Babbage”, rather than “Lovelace and Babbage” or “Ada and Charles”. As a rule, it’s best to use people’s surnames in formal and semi-formal writing, and their first names only in very informal writing.
It’s also very important to make sure that you respect people’s honorifics, especially academic titles such as Dr or Professor, and that you use titles consistently. Studies show that women and people of colour are the most likely to have their honorifics dropped, which is not only disrespectful, it gives readers the idea that women and people of colour are less qualified than white men.
If you mention job titles, avoid old-fashioned gendered titles such as ‘chairman’, and instead look for a neutral version, like ‘chair’ or ‘chairperson’. Where neutral terms have strong gender associations, such as nurse or engineer, take special care that the surrounding text, especially pronouns, is diverse and/or neutral. Do not assume engineers are male and nurses female.
More subtle intimations of gender can be found in the descriptors people use. Military metaphors and phrases, out-sized claims, competitive words, and superlatives are masculine, such as ‘ground-breaking’, ‘best’, ‘genius’, ‘world-beating’, or ‘killer’. Excessive unnecessary factual detail is also very masculine.
Women tend to relate to more cooperative, non-competitive, future-focused, and warmer language, paired with more general information. Women’s language includes word like ’global’, ‘responsive’, ‘support’, ‘include’, ‘engage’ and ‘imagine’. Focus more on the kind of relationship you can build with your customers, how you can help make their lives easier, and less on your company or product’s status.
Smash the patriarchy, one assumption at a time
We’re all brought up in a cultural stew that prioritises men’s needs, feelings and assumptions over women’s. This is the patriarchy, and it’s been around for thousands of years. But given women’s purchasing power, adhering to the patriarchy’s norms is unlikely to be good for your business. If you want to tap into the female market, pay attention to the details of your design and content, and make sure that you’re not inadvertently putting women off. A gender neutral website that designs away gender stereotypes will attract both men and women, expanding your market and helping your business flourish. |
2017 |
Suw Charman-Anderson |
suwcharmananderson |
2017-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/is-your-website-accidentally-sexist/ |
content |
| 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 due to the way something has been scripted, like the over-generous code in my pattern library.
Others, though, are added intentionally. A few months ago, a hacker, disguised as a helpful elf, offered to take over the maintenance of a popular npm package that had been unmaintained for a couple of years. The owner had moved onto other projects, and was keen to see it continue to be maintained by someone else, so transferred ownership. Fast-forward 3 months, it was discovered that the individual had quietly added a malicious package to the codebase, and the obfuscated code in it had been unwittingly installed onto thousands of apps. The code added was designed to harvest Bitcoin if it was run alongside another application. It was only spotted due to a developer’s curiosity.
Another tactic to get developers to unwittingly install malicious packages into their codebase is “typosquatting” – back in August last year, npm reported that a user had been publishing packages with very similar names to popular packages (for example, crossenv instead of cross-env).
This is a big wakeup call for open source maintainers. Techniques like this are likely to be used more as the maintenance of open source libraries becomes an increasing burden to their owners. After all, starting a new project often has a greater reward than maintaining an existing one, but remember, an open source library is for life, not just for Christmas.
Santa’s on his sleigh
If you use open source libraries, chances are that these libraries also use open source libraries. Your app may only have a handful of dependencies, but tucked in the back of that sleigh may be a whole extra sack of dependencies known as deep dependencies (ones that you didn’t directly install, but are dependencies of that dependency), and these can contain vulnerabilities too.
Let’s look at the npm package santa as an example. santa has 8 direct dependencies listed on npm. That seems pretty manageable. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – have a look at the full dependency tree which contains 109 dependencies – more dependencies than there are Christmas puns in this article. Only one of these direct dependencies has a vulnerability (at the time of writing), but there are actually 13 other known vulnerabilities in santa, which have been introduced through its deeper dependencies.
Fixing vulnerabilities – the ultimate christmas gift
If you’re a maintainer of open source libraries, taking good care of them is the ultimate gift you can give. Keep your dependencies up to date, use a security tool to monitor and alert you when new vulnerabilities are found in your code, and fix or patch them promptly. This will help keep the whole open source ecosystem healthy.
When you find out about a new vulnerability, you have some options:
Fix the vulnerability via an upgrade
You can often fix a vulnerability by upgrading the library to the latest version. Make sure you’re using software that monitors your dependencies for new security issues and lets you know when a fix is ready, otherwise you may be unwittingly using a vulnerable version.
Patch the vulnerable code
Sometimes, a fix for a vulnerable library isn’t possible. This is often the case when a library is no longer being maintained, or the version of the library being used might be so out of date that upgrading it would cause a breaking change. Patches are bits of code that will fix that particular issue, but won’t change anything else.
Switch to a different library
If the library you’re using has no fix or patch, you may be better of switching it out for another one, particularly if it looks like it’s being unmaintained.
Responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities
Knowing how to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities is something I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about before I joined a security company. But it’s so important! On discovering a new vulnerability, a developer has a few options:
A malicious developer will exploit that vulnerability for their own gain.
A reckless (or inexperienced) developer will disclose that vulnerability to the world without following a responsible disclosure process. This opens the door to an unethical developer exploiting the vulnerability. At Snyk, we monitor social media for mentions of newly found vulnerabilities so we can add them to our database and share fixes before they get exploited.
An ethical and aware developer will follow what’s known as a “responsible disclosure process”. They will contact the maintainer of the code privately, allowing reasonable time for them to release a fix for the issue and to give others who use that vulnerable code a chance to fix it too.
It’s important to understand this process if you’re a maintainer or contributor of code. It can be daunting when a report comes in, but understanding and following the right steps will help reduce the risk to the people who use that code.
So what does responsible disclosure look like? I’ll take Node.js’s security disclosure policy as an example. They ask that all security issues that are found in Node.js are reported there. (There’s a separate process for bug found in third-party npm packages). Once you’ve reported a vulnerability, they promise to acknowledge it within 24 hours, and to give a more detailed response within 48 hours. If they find that the issue is indeed a security bug, they’ll give you regular updates about the progress they’re making towards fixing it. As part of this, they’ll figure out which versions are affected, and prepare fixes for them. They’ll assign the vulnerability a CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) ID and decide on an embargo date for public disclosure. On the date of the embargo, they announce the vulnerability in their Node.js security mailing list and deploy fixes to nodejs.org.
Tim Kadlec published an in-depth article about responsible disclosures if you’re interested in knowing more. It has some interesting horror stories of what happened when the disclosure process was not followed.
Encourage responsible disclosure
Add a SECURITY.md file to your project so someone who wants to message you about a vulnerability can do so without having to hunt around for contact details. Last year, Snyk published a State of Open Source Security report that found 79.5% of maintainers do not have a public disclosure policy. Those that did were considerably more likely to get notified privately about a vulnerability – 73% of maintainers who had one had been notified, vs 21% of maintainers who hadn’t published one one.
Stats from the State of Open Source Security 2017
Bug bounties
Some companies run bug bounties to encourage the responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. By offering a reward for finding and safely disclosing a vulnerability, it also reduces the enticement of exploiting a vulnerability over reporting it and getting a quick cash reward. Hackerone is a community of ethical hackers who pentest apps that have signed up for the scheme and get paid when they find a new vulnerability. Wordpress is one such participant, and you can see the long list of vulnerabilities that have been disclosed as part of that program.
If you don’t have such a bounty, be prepared to get the odd vulnerability extortion email. Scott Helme, who founded securityheaders.com and report-uri.com, wrote a post about some of the requests he gets for a report about a critical vulnerability in exchange for money.
On one hand, I want to be as responsible as possible and if my users are at risk then I need to know and patch this issue to protect them. On the other hand this is such irresponsible and unethical behaviour that interacting with this person seems out of the question.
A gift worth giving
It’s time to brush the dust off those old gifts that we shared and forgot about. Practice good hygiene and run them through your favourite security tool – I’m just a little biased towards Snyk, but as Katie mentioned, there’s also npm audit if you use Node.js, and most source code managers like GitHub and GitLab have basic vulnerability alert capabilities.
Stats from the State of Open Source Security 2017
Most importantly, patch or upgrade away those vulnerabilities away, and if you want to share that Christmas spirit, open fixes for your favourite open source projects, too. |
2018 |
Anna Debenham |
annadebenham |
2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-xssmas/ |
code |
| 241 |
Jank-Free Image Loads |
There are a few fundamental problems with embedding images in pages of hypertext; perhaps chief among them is this: text is very light and loads rather fast; images are much heavier and arrive much later. Consequently, millions (billions?) of times a day, a hapless Web surfer will start reading some text on a page, and then —
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is
a link to the video instead.
— oops! — an image pops in above it, pushing said text down the page, and our poor reader loses their place.
By default, partially-loaded pages have the user experience of a slippery fish, or spilled jar of jumping beans. For the rest of this article, I shall call that jarring, no-good jumpiness by its name: jank. And I’ll chart a path into a jank-free future – one in which it’s easy and natural to author <img> elements that load like this:
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is
a link to the video instead.
Jank is a very old problem, and there is a very old solution to it: the width and height attributes on <img>. The idea is: if we stick an image’s dimensions right into the HTML, browsers can know those dimensions before the image loads, and reserve some space on the layout for it so that nothing gets bumped down the page when the image finally arrives.
width
Specifies the intended width of the image in pixels. When given together with the height, this allows user agents to reserve screen space for the image before the image data has arrived over the network.
—The HTML 3.2 Specification, published on January 14 1997
Unfortunately for us, when width and height were first spec’d and implemented, layouts were largely fixed and images were usually only intended to render at their fixed, actual dimensions. When image sizing gets fluid, width and height get weird:
See the Pen fluid width + fixed height = distortion by Eric Portis (@eeeps) on CodePen.
width and height are too rigid for the responsive world. What we need, and have needed for a very long time, is a way to specify fixed aspect ratios, to pair with our fluid widths.
I have good news, bad news, and great news.
The good news is, there are ways to do this, now, that work in every browser. Responsible sites, and responsible developers, go through the effort to do them.
The bad news is that these techniques are all terrible, cumbersome hacks. They’re difficult to remember, difficult to understand, and they can interact with other pieces of CSS in unexpected ways.
So, the great news: there are two on-the-horizon web platform features that are trying to make no-jank, fixed-aspect-ratio, fluid-width images a natural part of the web platform.
aspect-ratio in CSS
The first proposed feature? An aspect-ratio property in CSS!
This would allow us to write CSS like this:
img {
width: 100%;
}
.thumb {
aspect-ratio: 1/1;
}
.hero {
aspect-ratio: 16/9;
}
This’ll work wonders when we need to set aspect ratios for whole classes of images, which are all sized to fit within pre-defined layout slots, like the .thumb and .hero images, above.
Alas, the harder problem, in my experience, is not images with known-ahead-of-time aspect ratios. It’s images – possibly user generated images – that can have any aspect ratio. The really tricky problem is unknown-when-you’re-writing-your-CSS aspect ratios that can vary per-image. Using aspect-ratio to reserve space for images like this requires inline styles:
<img src="image.jpg" style="aspect-ratio: 5/4" />
And inline styles give me the heebie-jeebies! As a web developer of a certain age, I have a tiny man in a blue beanie permanently embedded deep within my hindbrain, who cries out in agony whenever I author a style="" attribute. And you know what? The old man has a point! By sticking super-high-specificity inline styles in my content, I’m cutting off my, (or anyone else’s) ability to change those aspect ratios, for whatever reason, later.
How might we specify aspect ratios at a lower level? How might we give browsers information about an image’s dimensions, without giving them explicit instructions about how to style it?
I’ll tell you: we could give browsers the intrinsic aspect ratio of the image in our HTML, rather than specifying an extrinsic aspect ratio!
A brief note on intrinsic and extrinsic sizing
What do I mean by “intrinsic” and “extrinsic?”
The intrinsic size of an image is, put simply, how big it’d be if you plopped it onto a page and applied no CSS to it whatsoever. An 800×600 image has an intrinsic width of 800px.
The extrinsic size of an image, then, is how large it ends up after CSS has been applied. Stick a width: 300px rule on that same 800×600 image, and its intrinsic size (accessible via the Image.naturalWidth property, in JavaScript) doesn’t change: its intrinsic size is still 800px. But this image now has an extrinsic size (accessible via Image.clientWidth) of 300px.
It surprised me to learn this year that height and width are interpreted as presentational hints and that they end up setting extrinsic dimensions (albeit ones that, unlike inline styles, have absolutely no specificity).
CSS aspect-ratio lets us avoid setting extrinsic heights and widths – and instead lets us give images (or anything else) an extrinsic aspect ratio, so that as soon as we set one dimension (possibly to a fluid width, like 100%!), the other dimension is set automatically in relation to it.
The last tool I’m going to talk about gets us out of the extrinsic sizing game all together — which, I think, is only appropriate for a feature that we’re going to be using in HTML.
intrinsicsize in HTML
The proposed intrinsicsize attribute will let you do this:
<img src="image.jpg" intrinsicsize="800x600" />
That tells the browser, “hey, this image.jpg that I’m using here – I know you haven’t loaded it yet but I’m just going to let you know right away that it’s going to have an intrinsic size of 800×600.” This gives the browser enough information to reserve space on the layout for the image, and ensures that any and all extrinsic sizing instructions, specified in our CSS, will layer cleanly on top of this, the image’s intrinsic size.
You may ask (I did!): wait, what if my <img> references multiple resources, which all have different intrinsic sizes? Well, if you’re using srcset, intrinsicsize is a bit of a misnomer – what the attribute will do then, is specify an intrinsic aspect ratio:
<img
srcset="300x200.jpg 300w,
600x400.jpg 600w,
900x600.jpg 900w,
1200x800.jpg 1200w"
sizes="75vw"
intrinsicsize="3x2" />
In the future (and behind the “Experimental Web Platform Features” flag right now, in Chrome 71+), asking this image for its .naturalWidth would not return 3 – it will return whatever 75vw is, given the current viewport width. And Image.naturalHeight will return that width, divided by the intrinsic aspect ratio: 3/2.
Can’t wait
I seem to have gotten myself into the weeds a bit. Sizing on the web is complicated!
Don’t let all of these details bury the big takeaway here: sometime soon (🤞 2019‽ 🤞), we’ll be able to toss our terrible aspect-ratio hacks into the dustbin of history, get in the habit of setting aspect-ratios in CSS and/or intrinsicsizes in HTML, and surf a less-frustrating, more-performant, less-janky web. I can’t wait! |
2018 |
Eric Portis |
ericportis |
2018-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2018/jank-free-image-loads/ |
code |
| 153 |
JavaScript Internationalisation |
or: Why Rudolph Is More Than Just a Shiny Nose
Dunder sat, glumly staring at the computer screen.
“What’s up, Dunder?” asked Rudolph, entering the stable and shaking off the snow from his antlers.
“Well,” Dunder replied, “I’ve just finished coding the new reindeer intranet Santa Claus asked me to do. You know how he likes to appear to be at the cutting edge, talking incessantly about Web 2.0, AJAX, rounded corners; he even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.
“I’ve managed to keep him happy, whilst also keeping it usable, accessible, and gleaming — and I’m still on the back row of the sleigh! But anyway, given the elves will be the ones using the site, and they come from all over the world, the site is in multiple languages. Which is great, except when it comes to the preview JavaScript I’ve written for the reindeer order form. Here, have a look…”
As he said that, he brought up the textileRef:8234272265470b85d91702:linkStartMarker:“order
form in French”:/examples/javascript-internationalisation/initial.fr.html on the screen. (Same in English).
“Looks good,” said Rudolph.
“But if I add some items,” said Dunder, “the preview appears in English, as it’s hard-coded in the JavaScript. I don’t want separate code for each language, as that’s just silly — I thought about just having if statements, but that doesn’t scale at all…”
“And there’s more, you aren’t displaying large numbers in French properly, either,” added Rudolph, who had been playing and looking at part of the source code:
function update_text() {
var hay = getValue('hay');
var carrots = getValue('carrots');
var bells = getValue('bells');
var total = 50 * bells + 30 * hay + 10 * carrots;
var out = 'You are ordering '
+ pretty_num(hay) + ' bushel' + pluralise(hay) + ' of hay, '
+ pretty_num(carrots) + ' carrot' + pluralise(carrots)
+ ', and ' + pretty_num(bells) + ' shiny bell' + pluralise(bells)
+ ', at a total cost of <strong>' + pretty_num(total)
+ '</strong> gold pieces. Thank you.';
document.getElementById('preview').innerHTML = out;
}
function pretty_num(n) {
n += '';
var o = '';
for (i=n.length; i>3; i-=3) {
o = ',' + n.slice(i-3, i) + o;
}
o = n.slice(0, i) + o;
return o;
}
function pluralise(n) {
if (n!=1) return 's';
return '';
}
“Oh, botheration!” cried Dunder. “This is just so complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” said Rudolph, “you just have to think about things in a slightly different way from what you’re used to. As we’re only a simple example, we won’t be able to cover all possibilities, but for starters, we need some way of providing different information to the script dependent on the language. We’ll create a global i18n object, say, and fill it with the correct language information. The first variable we’ll need will be a thousands separator, and then we can change the pretty_num function to use that instead:
function pretty_num(n) {
n += '';
var o = '';
for (i=n.length; i>3; i-=3) {
o = i18n.thousands_sep + n.slice(i-3, i) + o;
}
o = n.slice(0, i) + o;
return o;
}
“The i18n object will also contain our translations, which we will access through a function called _() — that’s just an underscore. Other languages have a function of the same name doing the same thing. It’s very simple:
function _(s) {
if (typeof(i18n)!='undefined' && i18n[s]) {
return i18n[s];
}
return s;
}
“So if a translation is available and provided, we’ll use that; otherwise we’ll default to the string provided — which is helpful if the translation begins to lag behind the site’s text at all, as at least something will be output.”
“Got it,” said Dunder. “ _('Hello Dunder') will print the translation of that string, if one exists, ‘Hello Dunder’ if not.”
“Exactly. Moving on, your plural function breaks even in English if we have a word where the plural doesn’t add an s — like ‘children’.”
“You’re right,” said Dunder. “How did I miss that?”
“No harm done. Better to provide both singular and plural words to the function and let it decide which to use, performing any translation as well:
function pluralise(s, p, n) {
if (n != 1) return _(p);
return _(s);
}
“We’d have to provide different functions for different languages as we employed more elves and got more complicated — for example, in Polish, the word ‘file’ pluralises like this: 1 plik, 2-4 pliki, 5-21 plików, 22-24 pliki, 25-31 plików, and so on.” (More information on plural forms)
“Gosh!”
“Next, as different languages have different word orders, we must stop using concatenation to construct sentences, as it would be impossible for other languages to fit in; we have to keep coherent strings together. Let’s rewrite your update function, and then go through it:
function update_text() {
var hay = getValue('hay');
var carrots = getValue('carrots');
var bells = getValue('bells');
var total = 50 * bells + 30 * hay + 10 * carrots;
hay = sprintf(pluralise('%s bushel of hay', '%s bushels of hay', hay), pretty_num(hay));
carrots = sprintf(pluralise('%s carrot', '%s carrots', carrots), pretty_num(carrots));
bells = sprintf(pluralise('%s shiny bell', '%s shiny bells', bells), pretty_num(bells));
var list = sprintf(_('%s, %s, and %s'), hay, carrots, bells);
var out = sprintf(_('You are ordering %s, at a total cost of <strong>%s</strong> gold pieces.'),
list, pretty_num(total));
out += ' ';
out += _('Thank you.');
document.getElementById('preview').innerHTML = out;
}
“ sprintf is a function in many other languages that, given a format string and some variables, slots the variables into place within the string. JavaScript doesn’t have such a function, so we’ll write our own. Again, keep it simple for now, only integers and strings; I’m sure more complete ones can be found on the internet.
function sprintf(s) {
var bits = s.split('%');
var out = bits[0];
var re = /^([ds])(.*)$/;
for (var i=1; i<bits.length; i++) {
p = re.exec(bits[i]);
if (!p || arguments[i]==null) continue;
if (p[1] == 'd') {
out += parseInt(arguments[i], 10);
} else if (p[1] == 's') {
out += arguments[i];
}
out += p[2];
}
return out;
}
“Lastly, we need to create one file for each language, containing our i18n object, and then include that from the relevant HTML. Here’s what a blank translation file would look like for your order form:
var i18n = {
thousands_sep: ',',
"%s bushel of hay": '',
"%s bushels of hay": '',
"%s carrot": '',
"%s carrots": '',
"%s shiny bell": '',
"%s shiny bells": '',
"%s, %s, and %s": '',
"You are ordering %s, at a total cost of <strong>%s</strong> gold pieces.": '',
"Thank you.": ''
};
“If you implement this across the intranet, you’ll want to investigate the xgettext program, which can automatically extract all strings that need translating from all sorts of code files into a standard .po file (I think Python mode works best for JavaScript). You can then use a different program to take the translated .po file and automatically create the language-specific JavaScript files for us.” (e.g. German .po file for PledgeBank, mySociety’s .po-.js script, example output)
With a flourish, Rudolph finished editing. “And there we go, localised JavaScript in English, French, or German, all using the same main code.”
“Thanks so much, Rudolph!” said Dunder.
“I’m not just a pretty nose!” Rudolph quipped. “Oh, and one last thing — please comment liberally explaining the context of strings you use. Your translator will thank you, probably at the same time as they point out the four hundred places you’ve done something in code that only works in your language and no-one else’s…”
Thanks to Tim Morley and Edmund Grimley Evans for the French and German translations respectively. |
2007 |
Matthew Somerville |
matthewsomerville |
2007-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/javascript-internationalisation/ |
code |
| 37 |
JavaScript Modules the ES6 Way |
JavaScript admittedly has plenty of flaws, but one of the largest and most prominent is the lack of a module system: a way to split up your application into a series of smaller files that can depend on each other to function correctly.
This is something nearly all other languages come with out of the box, whether it be Ruby’s require, Python’s import, or any other language you’re familiar with. Even CSS has @import! JavaScript has nothing of that sort, and this has caused problems for application developers as they go from working with small websites to full client-side applications. Let’s be clear: it doesn’t mean the new module system in the upcoming version of JavaScript won’t be useful to you if you’re building smaller websites rather than the next Instagram.
Thankfully, the lack of a module system will soon be a problem of the past. The next version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 6, will bring with it a full-featured module and dependency management solution for JavaScript. The bad news is that it won’t be landing in browsers for a while yet – but the good news is that the specification for the module system and how it will look has been finalised. The even better news is that there are tools available to get it all working in browsers today without too much hassle. In this post I’d like to give you the gift of JS modules and show you the syntax, and how to use them in browsers today. It’s much simpler than you might think.
What is ES6?
ECMAScript is a scripting language that is standardised by a company called Ecma International. JavaScript is an implementation of ECMAScript. ECMAScript 6 is simply the next version of the ECMAScript standard and, hence, the next version of JavaScript. The spec aims to be fully comfirmed and complete by the end of 2014, with a target initial release date of June 2015. It’s impossible to know when we will have full feature support across the most popular browsers, but already some ES6 features are landing in the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox. You shouldn’t expect to be able to use the new features across browsers without some form of additional tooling or library for a while yet.
The ES6 module spec
The ES6 module spec was fully confirmed in July 2014, so all the syntax I will show you in this article is not expected to change. I’ll first show you the syntax and the new APIs being added to the language, and then look at how to use them today. There are two parts to the new module system. The first is the syntax for declaring modules and dependencies in your JS files, and the second is a programmatic API for loading in modules manually. The first is what most people are expected to use most of the time, so it’s what I’ll focus on more.
Module syntax
The key thing to understand here is that modules have two key components. First, they have dependencies. These are things that the module you are writing depends on to function correctly. For example, if you were building a carousel module that used jQuery, you would say that jQuery is a dependency of your carousel. You import these dependencies into your module, and we’ll see how to do that in a minute. Second, modules have exports. These are the functions or variables that your module exposes publicly to anything that imports it. Using jQuery as the example again, you could say that jQuery exports the $ function. Modules that depend on and hence import jQuery get access to the $ function, because jQuery exports it.
Another important thing to note is that when I discuss a module, all I really mean is a JavaScript file. There’s no extra syntax to use other than the new ES6 syntax. Once ES6 lands, modules and files will be analogous.
Named exports
Modules can export multiple objects, which can be either plain old variables or JavaScript functions. You denote something to be exported with the export keyword:
export function double(x) {
return x + x;
};
You can also store something in a variable then export it. If you do that, you have to wrap the variable in a set of curly braces.
var double = function(x) {
return x + x;
}
export { double };
A module can then import the double function like so:
import { double } from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
Again, curly braces are required around the variable you would like to import. It’s also important to note that from 'mymodule' will look for a file called mymodule.js in the same directory as the file you are requesting the import from. There is no need to add the .js extension.
The reason for those extra braces is that this syntax lets you export multiple variables:
var double = function(x) {
return x + x;
}
var square = function(x) {
return x * x;
}
export { double, square }
I personally prefer this syntax over the export function …, but only because it makes it much clearer to me what the module exports. Typically I will have my export {…} line at the bottom of the file, which means I can quickly look in one place to determine what the module is exporting.
A file importing both double and square can do so in just the way you’d expect:
import { double, square } from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
square(3); // 9
With this approach you can’t easily import an entire module and all its methods. This is by design – it’s much better and you’re encouraged to import just the functions you need to use.
Default exports
Along with named exports, the system also lets a module have a default export. This is useful when you are working with a large library such as jQuery, Underscore, Backbone and others, and just want to import the entire library. A module can define its default export (it can only ever have one default export) like so:
export default function(x) {
return x + x;
}
And that can be imported:
import double from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
This time you do not use the curly braces around the name of the object you are importing. Also notice how you can name the import whatever you’d like. Default exports are not named, so you can import them as anything you like:
import christmas from 'mymodule';
christmas(2); // 4
The above is entirely valid.
Although it’s not something that is used too often, a module can have both named exports and a default export, if you wish.
One of the design goals of the ES6 modules spec was to favour default exports. There are many reasons behind this, and there is a very detailed discussion on the ES Discuss site about it. That said, if you find yourself preferring named exports, that’s fine, and you shouldn’t change that to meet the preferences of those designing the spec.
Programmatic API
Along with the syntax above, there is also a new API being added to the language so you can programmatically import modules. It’s pretty rare you would use this, but one obvious example is loading a module conditionally based on some variable or property. You could easily import a polyfill, for example, if the user’s browser didn’t support a feature your app relied on. An example of doing this is:
if(someFeatureNotSupported) {
System.import('my-polyfill').then(function(myPolyFill) {
// use the module from here
});
}
System.import will return a promise, which, if you’re not familiar, you can read about in this excellent article on HTMl5 Rocks by Jake Archibald. A promise basically lets you attach callback functions that are run when the asynchronous operation (in this case, System.import), is complete.
This programmatic API opens up a lot of possibilities and will also provide hooks to allow you to register callbacks that will run at certain points in the lifetime of a module. Those hooks and that syntax are slightly less set in stone, but when they are confirmed they will provide really useful functionality. For example, you could write code that would run every module that you import through something like JSHint before importing it. In development that would provide you with an easy way to keep your code quality high without having to run a command line watch task.
How to use it today
It’s all well and good having this new syntax, but right now it won’t work in any browser – and it’s not likely to for a long time. Maybe in next year’s 24 ways there will be an article on how you can use ES6 modules with no extra work in the browser, but for now we’re stuck with a bit of extra work.
ES6 module transpiler
One solution is to use the ES6 module transpiler, a compiler that lets you write your JavaScript using the ES6 module syntax (actually a subset of it – not quite everything is supported, but the main features are) and have it compiled into either CommonJS-style code (CommonJS is the module specification that NodeJS and Browserify use), or into AMD-style code (the spec RequireJS uses). There are also plugins for all the popular build tools, including Grunt and Gulp.
The advantage of using this transpiler is that if you are already using a tool like RequireJS or Browserify, you can drop the transpiler in, start writing in ES6 and not worry about any additional work to make the code work in the browser, because you should already have that set up already. If you don’t have any system in place for handling modules in the browser, using the transpiler doesn’t really make sense. Remember, all this does is convert ES6 module code into CommonJS- or AMD-compliant JavaScript. It doesn’t do anything to help you get that code running in the browser, but if you have that part sorted it’s a really nice addition to your workflow. If you would like a tutorial on how to do this, I wrote a post back in June 2014 on using ES6 with the ES6 module transpiler.
SystemJS
Another solution is SystemJS. It’s the best solution in my opinion, particularly if you are starting a new project from scratch, or want to use ES6 modules on a project where you have no current module system in place. SystemJS is a spec-compliant universal module loader: it loads ES6 modules, AMD modules, CommonJS modules, as well as modules that just add a variable to the global scope (window, in the browser).
To load in ES6 files, SystemJS also depends on two other libraries: the ES6 module loader polyfill; and Traceur. Traceur is best accessed through the bower-traceur package, as the main repository doesn’t have an easy to find downloadable version. The ES6 module load polyfill implements System.import, and lets you load in files using it. Traceur is an ES6-to-ES5 module loader. It takes code written in ES6, the newest version of JavaScript, and transpiles it into ES5, the version of JavaScript widely implemented in browsers. The advantage of this is that you can play with the new features of the language today, even though they are not supported in browsers. The drawback is that you have to run all your files through Traceur every time you save them, but this is easily automated. Additionally, if you use SystemJS, the Traceur compilation is done automatically for you.
All you need to do to get SystemJS running is to add a <script> element to load SystemJS into your webpage. It will then automatically load the ES6 module loader and Traceur files when it needs them. In your HTML you then need to use System.import to load in your module:
<script>
System.import('./app');
</script>
When you load the page, app.js will be asynchronously loaded. Within app.js, you can now use ES6 modules. SystemJS will detect that the file is an ES6 file, automatically load Traceur, and compile the file into ES5 so that it works in the browser. It does all this dynamically in the browser, but there are tools to bundle your application in production, so it doesn’t make a lot of requests on the live site. In development though, it makes for a really nice workflow.
When working with SystemJS and modules in general, the best approach is to have a main module (in our case app.js) that is the main entry point for your application. app.js should then be responsible for loading all your application’s modules. This forces you to keep your application organised by only loading one file initially, and having the rest dealt with by that file.
SystemJS also provides a workflow for bundling your application together into one file.
Conclusion
ES6 modules may be at least six months to a year away (if not more) but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used today. Although there is an overhead to using them now – with the work required to set up SystemJS, the module transpiler, or another solution – that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Using any module system in the browser, whether that be RequireJS, Browserify or another alternative, requires extra tooling and libraries to support it, and I would argue that the effort to set up SystemJS is no greater than that required to configure any other tool. It also comes with the extra benefit that when the syntax is supported in browsers, you get a free upgrade. You’ll be able to remove SystemJS and have everything continue to work, backed by the native browser solution.
If you are starting a new project, I would strongly advocate using ES6 modules. It is a syntax and specification that is not going away at all, and will soon be supported in browsers. Investing time in learning it now will pay off hugely further down the road.
Further reading
If you’d like to delve further into ES6 modules (or ES6 generally) and using them today, I recommend the following resources:
ECMAScript 6 modules: the final syntax by Axel Rauschmayer
Practical Workflows for ES6 Modules by Guy Bedford
ECMAScript 6 resources for the curious JavaScripter by Addy Osmani
Tracking ES6 support by Addy Osmani
ES6 Tools List by Addy Osmani
Using Grunt and the ES6 Module Transpiler by Thomas Boyt
JavaScript Modules and Dependencies with jspm by myself
Using ES6 Modules Today by Guy Bedford |
2014 |
Jack Franklin |
jackfranklin |
2014-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2014/javascript-modules-the-es6-way/ |
code |
| 11 |
JavaScript: Taking Off the Training Wheels |
JavaScript is the third pillar of front-end web development. Of those pillars, it is both the most powerful and the most complex, so it’s understandable that when 24 ways asked, “What one thing do you wish you had more time to learn about?”, a number of you answered “JavaScript!”
This article aims to help you feel happy writing JavaScript, and maybe even without libraries like jQuery. I can’t comprehensively explain JavaScript itself without writing a book, but I hope this serves as a springboard from which you can jump to other great resources.
Why learn JavaScript?
So what’s in it for you? Why take the next step and learn the fundamentals?
Confidence with jQuery
If nothing else, learning JavaScript will improve your jQuery code; you’ll be comfortable writing jQuery from scratch and feel happy bending others’ code to your own purposes. Writing efficient, fast and bug-free jQuery is also made much easier when you have a good appreciation of JavaScript, because you can look at what jQuery is really doing. Understanding how JavaScript works lets you write better jQuery because you know what it’s doing behind the scenes. When you need to leave the beaten track, you can do so with confidence.
In fact, you could say that jQuery’s ultimate goal is not to exist: it was invented at a time when web APIs were very inconsistent and hard to work with. That’s slowly changing as new APIs are introduced, and hopefully there will come a time when jQuery isn’t needed.
An example of one such change is the introduction of the very useful document.querySelectorAll. Like jQuery, it converts a CSS selector into a list of matching elements. Here’s a comparison of some jQuery code and the equivalent without.
$('.counter').each(function (index) {
$(this).text(index + 1);
});
var counters = document.querySelectorAll('.counter');
[].slice.call(counters).forEach(function (elem, index) {
elem.textContent = index + 1;
});
Solving problems no one else has!
When you have to go to the internet to solve a problem, you’re forever stuck reusing code other people wrote to solve a slightly different problem to your own. Learning JavaScript will allow you to solve problems in your own way, and begin to do things nobody else ever has.
Node.js
Node.js is a non-browser environment for running JavaScript, and it can do just about anything! But if that sounds daunting, don’t worry: the Node community is thriving, very friendly and willing to help.
I think Node is incredibly exciting. It enables you, with one language, to build complete websites with complex and feature-filled front- and back-ends. Projects that let users log in or need a database are within your grasp, and Node has a great ecosystem of library authors to help you build incredible things. Exciting!
Here’s an example web server written with Node. http is a module that allows you to create servers and, like jQuery’s $.ajax, make requests. It’s a small amount of code to do something complex and, while working with Node is different from writing front-end code, it’s certainly not out of your reach.
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World');
}).listen(1337);
console.log('Server running at http://localhost:1337/');
Grunt and other website tools
Node has brought in something of a renaissance in tools that run in the command line, like Yeoman and Grunt. Both of these rely heavily on Node, and I’ll talk a little bit about Grunt here.
Grunt is a task runner, and many people use it for compiling Sass or compressing their site’s JavaScript and images. It’s pretty cool. You configure Grunt via the gruntfile.js, so JavaScript skills will come in handy, and since Grunt supports plug-ins built with JavaScript, knowing it unlocks the bucketloads of power Grunt has to offer.
Ways to improve your skills
So you know you want to learn JavaScript, but what are some good ways to learn and improve? I think the answer to that is different for different people, but here are some ideas.
Rebuild a jQuery app
Converting a jQuery project to non-jQuery code is a great way to explore how you modify elements on the page and make requests to the server for data. My advice is to focus on making it work in one modern browser initially, and then go cross-browser if you’re feeling adventurous. There are many resources for directly comparing jQuery and non-jQuery code, like Jeffrey Way’s jQuery to JavaScript article.
Find a mentor
If you think you’d work better on a one-to-one basis then finding yourself a mentor could be a brilliant way to learn. The JavaScript community is very friendly and many people will be more than happy to give you their time. I’d look out for someone who’s active and friendly on Twitter, and does the kind of work you’d like to do. Introduce yourself over Twitter or send them an email. I wouldn’t expect a full tutoring course (although that is another option!) but they’ll be very glad to answer a question and any follow-ups every now and then.
Go to a workshop
Many conferences and local meet-ups run workshops, hosted by experts in a particular field. See if there’s one in your area. Workshops are great because you can ask direct questions, and you’re in an environment where others are learning just like you are — no need to learn alone!
Set yourself challenges
This is one way I like to learn new things. I have a new thing that I’m not very good at, so I pick something that I think is just out of my reach and I try to build it. It’s learning by doing and, even if you fail, it can be enormously valuable.
Where to start?
If you’ve decided learning JavaScript is an important step for you, your next question may well be where to go from here.
I’ve collected some links to resources I know of or use, with some discussion about why you might want to check a particular site out. I hope this serves as a springboard for you to go out and learn as much as you want.
Beginner
If you’re just getting started with JavaScript, I’d recommend heading to one of these places. They cover the basics and, in some cases, a little more advanced stuff. They’re all reputable sources (although, I’ve included something I wrote — you can decide about that one!) and will not lead you astray.
jQuery’s JavaScript 101 is a great first resource for JavaScript that will give you everything you need to work with jQuery like a pro.
Codecademy’s JavaScript Track is a small but useful JavaScript course. If you like learning interactively, this could be one for you.
HTMLDog’s JavaScript Tutorials take you right through from the basics of code to a brief introduction to newer technology like Node and Angular. [Disclaimer: I wrote this stuff, so it comes with a hazard warning!]
The tuts+ jQuery to JavaScript mentioned earlier is great for seeing how jQuery code looks when converted to pure JavaScript.
Getting in-depth
For more comprehensive documentation and help I’d recommend adding these places to your list of go-tos.
MDN: the Mozilla Developer Network is the first place I go for many JavaScript questions. I mostly find myself there via a search, but it’s a great place to just go and browse.
Axel Rauschmayer’s 2ality is a stunning collection of articles that will take you deep into JavaScript. It’s certainly worth looking at.
Addy Osmani’s JavaScript Design Patterns is a comprehensive collection of patterns for writing high quality JavaScript, particularly as you (I hope) start to write bigger and more complex applications.
And finally…
I think the key to learning anything is curiosity and perseverance. If you have a question, go out and search for the answer, even if you have no idea where to start. Keep going and going and eventually you’ll get there. I bet you’ll learn a whole lot along the way. Good luck!
Many thanks to the people who gave me their time when I was working on this article: Tom Oakley, Jack Franklin, Ben Howdle and Laura Kalbag. |
2013 |
Tom Ashworth |
tomashworth |
2013-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/javascript-taking-off-the-training-wheels/ |
code |
| 203 |
Jobs-to-Be-Done in Your UX Toolbox |
Part 1: What is JTBD?
The concept of a “job” in “Jobs-To-Be-Done” is neatly encapsulated by a oft-quoted line from Theodore Levitt:
“People want a quarter-inch hole, not a quarter inch drill”.
Even so, Don Norman pointed out that perhaps Levitt “stopped too soon” at what the real customer goal might be. In the “The Design of Everyday Things”, he wrote:
“Levitt’s example of the drill implying that the goal is really a hole is only partially correct, however. When people go to a store to buy a drill, that is not their real goal. But why would anyone want a quarter-inch hole? Clearly that is an intermediate goal. Perhaps they wanted to hang shelves on the wall. Levitt stopped too soon. Once you realize that they don’t really want the drill, you realize that perhaps they don’t really want the hole, either: they want to install their bookshelves. Why not develop methods that don’t require holes? Or perhaps books that don’t require bookshelves.”
In other words, a “job” in JTBD lingo is a way to express a user need or provide a customer-centric problem frame that’s independent of a solution. As Tony Ulwick says:
“A job is stable, it doesn’t change over time.”
An example of a job is “tiding you over from breakfast to lunch.” You could hire a donut, a flapjack or a banana for that mid-morning snack—whatever does the job. If you can arrive at a clearly identified primary job (and likely some secondary ones too), you can be more creative in how you come up with an effective solution while keeping the customer problem in focus.
The team at Intercom wrote a book on their application of JTBD. In it, Des Traynor cleverly characterised how JTBD provides a different way to think about solutions that compete for the same job:
“Economy travel and business travel are both capable candidates applying for [the job: Get me face-to-face with my colleague in San Francisco], though they’re looking for significantly different salaries. Video conferencing isn’t as capable, but is willing to work for a far smaller salary. I’ve a hiring choice to make.”
So far so good: it’s relatively simple to understand what a job is, once you understand how it’s different from a “task”. Business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen talks about the concept of “hiring” a product to do a “job”, and firing it when something better comes along. If you’re a company that focuses solutions on the customer job, you’re more likely to succeed. You’ll find these concepts often referred to as “Jobs-to-be-Done theory”. But the application of Jobs-to-Be-Done theory is a little more complicated; it comprises several related approaches.
I particularly like Jim Kalbach’s description of how JTBD is a “lens through which to understand value creation”. But it is also more. In my view, it’s a family of frameworks and methods—and perhaps even a philosophy.
Different facets in a family of frameworks
JTBD has its roots in market research and business strategy, and so it comes to the research table from a slightly different place compared to traditional UX or design research—we have our roots in human-computer interaction and ergonomics. I’ve found it helpful to keep in mind is that the application of JTBD theory is an evolving beast, so it’s common to find contradictions across different resources. My own use of it has varied from project to project. In speaking to others who have adopted it in different measures, it seems that we have all applied it in somewhat multifarious ways. As we like to often say in interviews: there are no wrong answers.
Outcome Driven Innovation
Tony Ulwick’s version of the JTBD history began with Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI), and this approach is best outlined in his seminal article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2002. To understand his more current JTBD approach in his new book “Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice”, I actually found it beneficial to read his approach in the original 2002 article for a clearer reference point.
In the earlier article, Ulwick presented a rigorous approach that combines interviews, surveys and an “opportunity” algorithm—a sequence of steps to determine the business opportunity. ODI centres around working with “desired outcome statements” that you unearth through interviews, followed by a means to quantify the gap between importance and satisfaction in a survey to different types of customers.
Since 2008, Ulwick has written about using job maps to make sense of what the customer may be trying to achieve. In a recent article, he describes the aim of the activity is “to discover what the customer is trying to get done at different points in executing a job and what must happen at each juncture in order for the job to be carried out successfully.”
A job map is not strictly a journey map, however tempting it is to see it that way. From a UX perspective, is one of many models we can use—and as our research team at Clearleft have found, how we use model can depend on the nature of the jobs we’ve uncovered in interviews and the characteristics of the problem we’re attempting to solve.
Figure 1. Universal job map
Ulwick’s current methodology is outlined in his new book, where he describes a complete end-to-end process: from customer and competitor research to framing market and product strategy.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done Interview
Back in 2013, I attended a workshop by Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta from the ReWired Group on JTBD at the behest of a then-MailChimp colleague, and I came away excited about their approach to product research. It felt different from anything I’d done before and for the first time in years, I felt that I was genuinely adding something new to my research toolbox.
A key idea is that if you focus on the stories of those who switched to you, and those who switch away from you, you can uncover the core jobs through looking at these opposite ends of engagement.
This framework centres around the JTBD interview method, which harnesses the power of a narrative framework to elicit the real reasons why someone “hired” something to do a job—be it something physical like a new coffee maker, or a digital service, such as a to-do list app. As you interview, you are trying to unearth the context around the key moments on the JTBD timeline (Figure 2). A common approach is to begin from the point the customer might have purchased something, back to the point where the thought of buying this thing first occurred to them.
Figure 2. JTBD Timeline
Figure 3. The Four Forces
The Forces Diagram (Figure 3) is a post-interview analysis tool where you can map out what causes customers to switch to something new and what holds them back.
The JTBD interview is effective at identifying core and secondary jobs, as well as some context around the user need. Because this method is designed to extract the story from the interviewee, it’s a powerful way to facilitate recall. Having done many such interviews, I’ve noticed one interesting side effect: participants often remember more details later on after the conversation has formally ended. It is worth scheduling a follow-up phone call or keep the channels open.
Strengths aside, it’s good to keep in mind that the JTBD interview is still primarily an interview technique, so you are relying on the context from the interviewee’s self-reported perspective. For example, a stronger research methodology combines JTBD interviews with contextual research and quantitative methods.
Job Stories
Alan Klement is credited for coming up with the term “job story” to describe the framing of jobs for product design by the team at Intercom:
“When … I want to … so I can ….”
Figure 4. Anatomy of a Job Story
Unlike a user story that traditionally frames a requirement around personas, job stories frame the user need based on the situation and context. Paul Adams, the VP of Product at Intercom, wrote:
“We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome. […] We can map this Job to the mission and prioritise it appropriately. It ensures that we are constantly thinking about all four layers of design. We can see what components in our system are part of this Job and the necessary relationships and interactions required to facilitate it. We can design from the top down, moving through outcome, system, interactions, before getting to visual design.”
Systems of Progress
Apart from advocating using job stories, Klement believes that a core tenet of applying JTBD revolves around our desire for “self-betterment”—and that focusing on everyone’s desire for self-betterment is core to a successful strategy.
In his book, Klement takes JTBD further to being a tool for change through applying systems thinking. There, he introduces the systems of progress and how it can help focus product strategy approach to be more innovative.
Coincidentally, I applied similar thinking on mapping systemic change when we were looking to improve users’ trust with a local government forum earlier this year. It’s not just about capturing and satisfying the immediate job-to-be-done, it’s about framing the job so that you can a clear vision forward on how you can help your users improve their lives in the ways they want to.
This is really the point where JTBD becomes a philosophy of practice.
Part 2: Mixing It Up
There has been some misunderstanding about how adopting JTBD means ditching personas or some of our existing design tools or research techniques. This couldn’t have been more wrong.
Figure 5: Jim Kalbach’s JTBD model
Jim Kalbach has used Outcome-Driven Innovation for around 10 years. In a 2016 article, he presents a synthesised model of how to think about that has key elements from ODI, Christensen’s theories and the structure of the job story.
More interestingly, Kalbach has also combined the use of mental models with JTBD.
Claire Menke of UDemy has written a comprehensive article about using personas, JTBD and customer journey maps together in order to communicate more complete story from the users’ perspective. Claire highlights an especially interesting point in her article as she described her challenges:
“After much trial and error, I arrived at a foundational research framework to suit every team’s needs — allowing everyone to share the same holistic understanding, but extract the type of information most applicable to their work.”
In other words, the organisational context you are in likely can dictate what works best—after all the goal is to arrive at the best user experience for your audiences. Intercom can afford to go full-on on applying JTBD theory as a dominant approach because they are a start-up, but a large company or organisation with multiple business units may require a mix of tools, outputs and outcomes.
JTBD is an immensely powerful approach on many fronts—you’ll find many different references that lists the ways you can apply JTBD. However, in the context of this discussion, it might also be useful to we examine where it lies in our models of how we think about our UX and product processes.
JTBD in the UX ecosystem
Figure 6. The Elements of User Experience (source)
There are many ways we have tried to explain the UX discipline but I think Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience is a good place to begin.
I sometimes also use little diagram to help me describe the different levels you might work at when you work through the complexity of designing and developing a product. A holistic UX strategy needs to address all the different levels for a comprehensive experience: your individual product UI, product features, product propositions and brand need to have a cohesive definition.
Figure 7. Which level of product focus?
We could, of course, also think about where it fits best within the double diamond.
Again, bearing in mind that JTBD has its roots in business strategy and market research, it is excellent at clarifying user needs, defining high-level specifications and content requirements. It is excellent for validating brand perception and value proposition —all the way down to your feature set. In other words, it can be extremely powerful all the way through to halfway of the second diamond. You could quite readily combine the different JTBD approaches because they have differences as much as overlaps. However, JTBD generally starts getting a little difficult to apply once we get to the details of UI design.
The clue lies in JTBD’s raison d’être: a job statement is solution independent. Hence, once we get to designing solutions, we potentially fall into a existential black hole.
That said, Jim Kalbach has a quick case study on applying JTBD to content design tucked inside the main article on a synthesised JTBD model. Alan Klement has a great example of how you could use UI to resolve job stories. You’ll notice that the available language of “jobs” drops off at around that point.
Job statements and outcome statements provide excellent “mini north-stars” as customer-oriented focal points, but purely satisfying these statements would not necessarily guarantee that you have created a seamless and painless user experience.
Playing well with others
You will find that JTBD plays well with Lean, and other strategy tools like the Value Proposition Canvas. With every new project, there is potential to harness the power of JTBD alongside our established toolbox.
When we need to understand complex contexts where cultural or socioeconomic considerations have to be taken into account, we are better placed with combining JTBD with more anthropological approaches. And while we might be able to evaluate if our product, website or app satisfies the customer jobs through interviews or surveys, without good old-fashioned usability testing we are unlikely to be able to truly validate why the job isn’t being represented as it should. In this case, individual jobs solved on the UI can be set up as hypotheses to be proven right or wrong.
The application of Jobs-to-be-Done is still evolving. I’ve found it to be very powerful and I struggle to remember what my UX professional life was like before I encountered it—it has completely changed my approach to research and design.
The fact JTBD is still evolving as a practice means we need to be watchful of dogma—there’s no right way to get a UX job done after all, it nearly always depends. At the end of the day, isn’t it about having the right tool for the right job? |
2017 |
Steph Troeth |
stephtroeth |
2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/jobs-to-be-done-in-your-ux-toolbox/ |
ux |
| 161 |
Keeping JavaScript Dependencies At Bay |
As we are writing more and more complex JavaScript applications we run into issues that have hitherto (god I love that word) not been an issue. The first decision we have to make is what to do when planning our app: one big massive JS file or a lot of smaller, specialised files separated by task.
Personally, I tend to favour the latter, mainly because it allows you to work on components in parallel with other developers without lots of clashes in your version control. It also means that your application will be more lightweight as you only include components on demand.
Starting with a global object
This is why it is a good plan to start your app with one single object that also becomes the namespace for the whole application, say for example myAwesomeApp:
var myAwesomeApp = {};
You can nest any necessary components into this one and also make sure that you check for dependencies like DOM support right up front.
Adding the components
The other thing to add to this main object is a components object, which defines all the components that are there and their file names.
var myAwesomeApp = {
components :{
formcheck:{
url:'formcheck.js',
loaded:false
},
dynamicnav:{
url:'dynamicnav.js',
loaded:false
},
gallery:{
url:'gallery.js',
loaded:false
},
lightbox:{
url:'lightbox.js',
loaded:false
}
}
};
Technically you can also omit the loaded properties, but it is cleaner this way. The next thing to add is an addComponent function that can load your components on demand by adding new SCRIPT elements to the head of the documents when they are needed.
var myAwesomeApp = {
components :{
formcheck:{
url:'formcheck.js',
loaded:false
},
dynamicnav:{
url:'dynamicnav.js',
loaded:false
},
gallery:{
url:'gallery.js',
loaded:false
},
lightbox:{
url:'lightbox.js',
loaded:false
}
},
addComponent:function(component){
var c = this.components[component];
if(c && c.loaded === false){
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
s.setAttribute('src',c.url);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
}
}
};
This allows you to add new components on the fly when they are not defined:
if(!myAwesomeApp.components.gallery.loaded){
myAwesomeApp.addComponent('gallery');
};
Verifying that components have been loaded
However, this is not safe as the file might not be available. To make the dynamic adding of components safer each of the components should have a callback at the end of them that notifies the main object that they indeed have been loaded:
var myAwesomeApp = {
components :{
formcheck:{
url:'formcheck.js',
loaded:false
},
dynamicnav:{
url:'dynamicnav.js',
loaded:false
},
gallery:{
url:'gallery.js',
loaded:false
},
lightbox:{
url:'lightbox.js',
loaded:false
}
},
addComponent:function(component){
var c = this.components[component];
if(c && c.loaded === false){
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
s.setAttribute('src',c.url);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
}
},
componentAvailable:function(component){
this.components[component].loaded = true;
}
}
For example the gallery.js file should call this notification as a last line:
myAwesomeApp.gallery = function(){
// [... other code ...]
}();
myAwesomeApp.componentAvailable('gallery');
Telling the implementers when components are available
The last thing to add (actually as a courtesy measure for debugging and implementers) is to offer a listener function that gets notified when the component has been loaded:
var myAwesomeApp = {
components :{
formcheck:{
url:'formcheck.js',
loaded:false
},
dynamicnav:{
url:'dynamicnav.js',
loaded:false
},
gallery:{
url:'gallery.js',
loaded:false
},
lightbox:{
url:'lightbox.js',
loaded:false
}
},
addComponent:function(component){
var c = this.components[component];
if(c && c.loaded === false){
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
s.setAttribute('src',c.url);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
}
},
componentAvailable:function(component){
this.components[component].loaded = true;
if(this.listener){
this.listener(component);
};
}
};
This allows you to write a main listener function that acts when certain components have been loaded, for example:
myAwesomeApp.listener = function(component){
if(component === 'gallery'){
showGallery();
}
};
Extending with other components
As the main object is public, other developers can extend the components object with own components and use the listener function to load dependent components. Say you have a bespoke component with data and labels in extra files:
myAwesomeApp.listener = function(component){
if(component === 'bespokecomponent'){
myAwesomeApp.addComponent('bespokelabels');
};
if(component === 'bespokelabels'){
myAwesomeApp.addComponent('bespokedata');
};
if(component === 'bespokedata'){
myAwesomeApp,bespokecomponent.init();
};
};
myAwesomeApp.components.bespokecomponent = {
url:'bespoke.js',
loaded:false
};
myAwesomeApp.components.bespokelabels = {
url:'bespokelabels.js',
loaded:false
};
myAwesomeApp.components.bespokedata = {
url:'bespokedata.js',
loaded:false
};
myAwesomeApp.addComponent('bespokecomponent');
Following this practice you can write pretty complex apps and still have full control over what is available when. You can also extend this to allow for CSS files to be added on demand.
Influences
If you like this idea and wondered if someone already uses it, take a look at the Yahoo! User Interface library, and especially at the YAHOO_config option of the global YAHOO.js object. |
2007 |
Christian Heilmann |
chrisheilmann |
2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay/ |
code |
| 21 |
Keeping Parts of Your Codebase Private on GitHub |
Open source is brilliant, there’s no denying that, and GitHub has been instrumental in open source’s recent success. I’m a keen open-sourcerer myself, and I have a number of projects on GitHub. However, as great as sharing code is, we often want to keep some projects to ourselves. To this end, GitHub created private repositories which act like any other Git repository, only, well, private!
A slightly less common issue, and one I’ve come up against myself, is the desire to only keep certain parts of a codebase private. A great example would be my site, CSS Wizardry; I want the code to be open source so that people can poke through and learn from it, but I want to keep any draft blog posts private until they are ready to go live. Thankfully, there is a very simple solution to this particular problem: using multiple remotes.
Before we begin, it’s worth noting that you can actually build a GitHub Pages site from a private repo. You can keep the entire source private, but still have GitHub build and display a full Pages/Jekyll site. I do this with csswizardry.net. This post will deal with the more specific problem of keeping only certain parts of the codebase (branches) private, and expose parts of it as either an open source project, or a built GitHub Pages site.
N.B. This post requires some basic Git knowledge.
Adding your public remote
Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch and you currently have no repos set up for your project. (If you do already have your public repo set up, skip to the “Adding your private remote” section.)
So, we have a clean slate: nothing has been set up yet, we’re doing all of that now. On GitHub, create two repositories. For the sake of this article we shall call them site.com and private.site.com. Make the site.com repo public, and the private.site.com repo private (you will need a paid GitHub account).
On your machine, create the site.com directory, in which your project will live. Do your initial work in there, commit some stuff — whatever you need to do. Now we need to link this local Git repo on your machine with the public repo (remote) on GitHub. We should all be used to this:
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:[user]/site.com.git
Here we are simply telling Git to add a remote called origin which lives at git@github.com:[user]/site.com.git. Simple stuff. Now we need to push our current branch (which will be master, unless you’ve explicitly changed it) to that remote:
$ git push -u origin master
Here we are telling Git to push our master branch to a corresponding master branch on the remote called origin, which we just added. The -u sets upstream tracking, which basically tells Git to always shuttle code on this branch between the local master branch and the master branch on the origin remote. Without upstream tracking, you would have to tell Git where to push code to (and pull it from) every time you ran the push or pull commands. This sets up a permanent bond, if you like.
This is really simple stuff, stuff that you will probably have done a hundred times before as a Git user. Now to set up our private remote.
Adding your private remote
We’ve set up our public, open source repository on GitHub, and linked that to the repository on our machine. All of this code will be publicly viewable on GitHub.com. (Remember, GitHub is just a host of regular Git repositories, which also puts a nice GUI around it all.) We want to add the ability to keep certain parts of the codebase private. What we do now is add another remote repository to the same local repository. We have two repos on GitHub (site.com and private.site.com), but only one repository (and, therefore, one directory) on our machine. Two GitHub repos, and one local one.
In your local repo, check out a new branch. For the sake of this article we shall call the branch dev. This branch might contain work in progress, or draft blog posts, or anything you don’t want to be made publicly viewable on GitHub.com. The contents of this branch will, in a moment, live in our private repository.
$ git checkout -b dev
We have now made a new branch called dev off the branch we were on last (master, unless you renamed it).
Now we need to add our private remote (private.site.com) so that, in a second, we can send this branch to that remote:
$ git remote add private git@github.com:[user]/private.site.com.git
Like before, we are just telling Git to add a new remote to this repo, only this time we’ve called it private and it lives at git@github.com:[user]/private.site.com.git. We now have one local repo on our machine which has two remote repositories associated with it.
Now we need to tell our dev branch to push to our private remote:
$ git push -u private dev
Here, as before, we are pushing some code to a repo. We are saying that we want to push the dev branch to the private remote, and, once again, we’ve set up upstream tracking. This means that, by default, the dev branch will only push and pull to and from the private remote (unless you ever explicitly state otherwise).
Now you have two branches (master and dev respectively) that push to two remotes (origin and private respectively) which are public and private respectively.
Any work we do on the master branch will push and pull to and from our publicly viewable remote, and any code on the dev branch will push and pull from our private, hidden remote.
Adding more branches
So far we’ve only looked at two branches pushing to two remotes, but this workflow can grow as much or as little as you’d like. Of course, you’d never do all your work in only two branches, so you might want to push any number of them to either your public or private remotes. Let’s imagine we want to create a branch to try something out real quickly:
$ git checkout -b test
Now, when we come to push this branch, we can choose which remote we send it to:
$ git push -u private test
This pushes the new test branch to our private remote (again, setting the persistent tracking with -u).
You can have as many or as few remotes or branches as you like.
Combining the two
Let’s say you’ve been working on a new feature in private for a few days, and you’ve kept that on the private remote. You’ve now finalised the addition and want to move it into your public repo. This is just a simple merge. Check out your master branch:
$ git checkout master
Then merge in the branch that contained the feature:
$ git merge dev
Now master contains the commits that were made on dev and, once you’ve pushed master to its remote, those commits will be viewable publicly on GitHub:
$ git push
Note that we can just run $ git push on the master branch as we’d previously set up our upstream tracking (-u).
Multiple machines
So far this has covered working on just one machine; we had two GitHub remotes and one local repository. Let’s say you’ve got yourself a new Mac (yay!) and you want to clone an existing project:
$ git clone git@github.com:[user]/site.com.git
This will not clone any information about the remotes you had set up on the previous machine. Here you have a fresh clone of the public project and you will need to add the private remote to it again, as above.
Done!
If you’d like to see me blitz through all that in one go, check the showterm recording.
The beauty of this is that we can still share our code, but we don’t have to develop quite so openly all of the time. Building a framework with a killer new feature? Keep it in a private branch until it’s ready for merge. Have a blog post in a Jekyll site that you’re not ready to make live? Keep it in a private drafts branch. Working on a new feature for your personal site? Tuck it away until it’s finished. Need a staging area for a Pages-powered site? Make a staging remote with its own custom domain.
All this boils down to, really, is the fact that you can bring multiple remotes together into one local codebase on your machine. What you do with them is entirely up to you! |
2013 |
Harry Roberts |
harryroberts |
2013-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/keeping-parts-of-your-codebase-private-on-github/ |
code |
| 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, filtered, and muted; we choose and control our conversations. New users no longer rely on the established community to answer their questions for them.
And yet, FAQs are still around. They’re a content anti-pattern, replicated from site to site to solve a problem we no longer have.
What we hate when we hate FAQs
As someone who creates and structures online content – always with the goal of making that content as useful as possible to people – FAQs drive me absolutely batty. Almost universally, FAQs represent the opposite of useful. A brief list of their sins:
Double trouble
Duplicated content is practically a given with FAQs. They’re written as though they’ll be accessed in a vacuum – but search results, navigation patterns, and curiosity ensure that users will seek answers throughout the site. Is our goal to split their focus? To make them uncertain of where to look? To divert them to an isolated microcosm of the website? Duplicated content means user confusion (to say nothing of the duplicated workload for maintaining content).
Leaving the job unfinished
Many FAQs fail before they’re even out of the gate, presenting a list of questions that’s incomplete (too short and careless to be helpful) or irrelevant (avoiding users’ real concerns in favor of soundbites). Alternately, if the right questions are there, the answers may be convoluted, jargon-heavy, or otherwise difficult to understand.
Long lists of not-my-question
Getting a single answer often means sifting through a haystack of questions. For each potential question, the user must read, comprehend, assess, move on, rinse, repeat. That’s a lot of legwork for little reward – and a lot of opportunity for mistakes. Users may miss their question, or they may fail to recognize a differently worded version of their question, or they may not notice when their sought-after answer appears somewhere they didn’t expect.
The ventriloquist act
FAQs shift the point of view. While websites speak on behalf of the organization (“our products,” “our services,” “you can call us for assistance,” etc.), FAQs speak as the user – “I can’t find my password” or “How do I sign up?” Both voices are written from the first-person perspective, but speak for different entities, which is disorienting: it breaks the tone and messaging across the website. It’s also presumptuous: why do you get to speak for the user?
These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.)
Instead of sending users to a jumble of maybe-it’s-here-maybe-it’s-not questions, the answers to FAQs should be found naturally throughout a website. They are not separated, not isolated, not other. They are the content.
To present it otherwise is to create a runaround, and users know it. Jay Martel’s parody, “F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s” captures the silliness and frustration of such a system:
Q: Why are you so rude?
A: For that answer, you would have to consult an F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s. But your time might be better served by simply abandoning your search for a magic answer and taking responsibility for your own profound ignorance.
FAQs aren’t magic answers. They don’t resolve a content dilemma or even help users. Yet they keep cropping up, defiant, weedy, impossible to eradicate.
Where are they all coming from?
Blame it on this: writing is hard. When generating content, most of us do whatever it takes to get some words on the screen. And the format of question and answer makes it easy: a reactionary first stab at content development.
After all, the point of website content is to answer users’ questions. So this – to give everyone credit – is a really good move. Content creators who think in terms of questions and answers are actually thinking of their users, particularly first-time users, trying to anticipate their needs and write towards them.
It’s a good start. But it’s scaffolding: writing that helps you get to the writing you’re supposed to be doing. It supports you while you write your way to the heart of your content. And once you get there, you have to look back and take the scaffolding down.
Leaving content in the Q&A format that helped you develop it is missing the point. You’re not there to build scaffolding. You have to see your content in its naked purpose and determine the best method for communicating that purpose – and it usually won’t be what got you there.
The goal (to borrow a lesson from content management systems) is to separate the content from its presentation, to let the meaning of the content inform its display.
This is, of course, a nice theory.
An occasionally necessary evil
I have a lot of clients who adore FAQs. They’ve developed their content over a long period of time. They’ve listened to the questions their users are asking. And they’ve answered them all on a page that I simply cannot get them to part with.
Which means I’ve had to consider that there may be occasions where an FAQ page is appropriate.
As an example: one of my clients is a financial office in a large institution. Because this office manages several third-party systems that serve a range of niche audiences, they had developed FAQs that addressed hyper-specific instances of dysfunction within systems for different users – à la “I’m a financial director and my employee submitted an expense report in such-and-such system and it returned such-and-such error. What do I do?”
Yes, this content could be removed from the question format and rewritten. But I’m not sure it would be an improvement. It won’t necessarily resolve concerns about length and searchability, and the different audiences may complicate the delivery. And since the work of rewriting it didn’t fit into the client workflow (small team, no writers, pressed for time), I didn’t recommend the change.
I’ve had to make peace with not being to torch all the FAQs on the internet. Some content, like troubleshooting information or complex procedures, may be better in that format. It may be the smartest way for a particular client to handle that particular information.
Of course, this has to be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the amount of content, the subject matter, the skill levels of the content creators, the publishing workflow, and the search habits of the users.
If you determine that an FAQ page is the only way to go, ask yourself:
Is there a better label or more specific term for the page (support, troubleshooting, product concerns, etc.)?
Is there way to structure the page, categorize the questions, or otherwise make it easier for users to navigate quickly to the answer they need?
Is a question and answer format absolutely the best way to communicate this information?
Form follows function
Just as a question and answer format isn’t necessarily required to deliver the content, neither is it an inappropriate method in and of itself. Content professionals have developed a knee-jerk reaction: It’s an FAQ page! Quick, burn it! Buuuuurn it!
But there’s no inherent evil in questions and answers. Framing content in an interrogatory construct is no more a deal with the devil than subheads and paragraphs, or narrative arcs, or bullet points.
Yes, FAQs are riddled with communication snafus. They deserve, more often than not, to be tied to a chair and thrown into a lake. But that wouldn’t fix our content problems. FAQs are a shiny and obvious target for our frustration, but they’re not unique in their flaws. In any format, in any display, in any kind of page, weak content can rear its ugly, poorly written head.
It’s not the Q&A that’s to blame, it’s bad content. Content without context will always fail users. That’s the real witch in our midst. |
2013 |
Lisa Maria Martin |
lisamariamartin |
2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/what-to-do-with-faqs/ |
content |
| 129 |
Knockout Type - Thin Is Always In |
OS X has gorgeous native anti-aliasing (although I will admit to missing 10px aliased Geneva — *sigh*). This is especially true for dark text on a light background. However, things can go awry when you start using light text on a dark background. Strokes thicken. Counters constrict. Letterforms fill out like seasonal snackers.
So how do we combat the fat? In Safari and other Webkit-based browsers we can use the CSS ‘text-shadow’ property. While trying to add a touch more contrast to the navigation on haveamint.com I noticed an interesting side-effect on the weight of the type.
The second line in the example image above has the following style applied to it:
This creates an invisible drop-shadow. (Why is it invisible? The shadow is positioned directly behind the type (the first two zeros) and has no spread (the third zero). So the color, black, is completely eclipsed by the type it is supposed to be shadowing.)
Why applying an invisible drop-shadow effectively lightens the weight of the type is unclear. What is clear is that our light-on-dark text is now of a comparable weight to its dark-on-light counterpart.
You can see this trick in effect all over ShaunInman.com and in the navigation on haveamint.com and Subtraction.com. The HTML and CSS source code used to create the example images used in this article can be found here. |
2006 |
Shaun Inman |
shauninman |
2006-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2006/knockout-type/ |
code |
| 199 |
Knowing the Future - Tips for a Happy Launch Day |
You’ve chosen your frameworks and libraries. You’ve learned how to write code which satisfies the buzzword and performance gods. Now you need to serve it to a global audience, and make things easy to preview, to test, to sign-off, and to evolve.
But infrastructure design is difficult and boring for most of us. We just want to get our work out into the wild.
If only we had tools which would let us go, “Oh yeah! It all deploys perfectly every time” and shout, “You need another release? BAM! What’s next?”
A truth that can be hard to admit is that very often, the production environment and its associated deployment processes are poorly defined until late into a project. This can be a problem.
It makes my palms sweaty just thinking about it.
If like me, you have spent time building things for clients, you’ll probably have found yourself working with a variety of technical partners and customers who bring different constraints and opportunities to your projects. Knowing and proving the environments and the deployment processes is often very difficult, but can be a factor which profoundly impacts our ability to deliver what we promised. To say nothing of our ability to sleep at night or leave our fingernails un-chewed.
Let’s look at this a little, and see if we can’t set you up for a good night’s sleep, with dry palms and tidy fingernails.
A familiar problem
You’ve been here too, right? The project development was tough, but you’re pleased with what you are running in your local development environments. Now you need to get the client to see and approve your build, and hopefully indicate with a cheery thumbs up that it can “go live”.
Chances are that we have a staging environment where the client can see the build. But be honest, is this exactly the same as the production environment? It should be, but often it’s not. Often the staging environment is nothing more than a visible server with none of the optimisations, security, load balancing, caching, and other vital bits of machinery that we’ll need (and need to test) in “prod”.
Often the production environment is still being “set up” and you’ll have to wait and see.
In development, “wait and see” is the enemy.
Instead of waiting to see, we need to make the provisioning of, and deployment to our different environments one of the very first jobs of our project. I’ve often needed to be the unpopular voice in the room who makes a big fuss when this is delayed. I’ve described it as being a “critical blocker” during project meetings and suggested that everything should halt until it is fixed.
It is that important.
Clients don’t often like hearing a wary, disruptive voice saying “whoa there Nelly!”, because the development should be able to continue while the production environment gets sorted out, right?
Sure. But if it is not seen as a blocker, it is seen as something that can just happen later. And if it happens later, all the ugly surprises and unknowns surface later too. And later is when we’ll need to be thinking about other things. Not the plumbing. Trust me, it pays to face up to the issue right away rather than press on optimistically. The client will thank you later.
Attitudes and expectations
We should, I think, exhibit these four attitudes towards production deployment:
Make it scripted
Make it automated
Make it real
Make it first
Make it scripted
Let’s face it, we are going to need to deploy more than once over the course of the project. We are not going to get things perfect on our first shot. Nor should we expect to. And if we are going to repeat something, we want to be able to do it identically and predictably every time without needing to rely on our memories.
Developers are great at scripting things which they would otherwise need to repeat. It makes us faster and it also helps us keep track of the steps we need to take.
I’m not crazy enough to try suggest the best technology to script your builds or deployments (holy wars lie down that path). A lot will depend on your languages and your tastes. Some will like Fabric, others will prefer Gulp, you might prefer Make or NPM. It doesn’t really matter as long as you can script the process of building, packaging and deploying your project.
Wait. Won’t we need to know everything about the build from the start in order to do this? Aren’t our dependencies likely to change over time?
Yes. That would be ideal. But it’s ok. Like our code, our deployment script will evolve over the life of a project. So evolve it. Start by scripting what is needed to support the first iteration of the project, and then maintain that script. It will become a valuable “source of truth”, providing a form of documentation of what your project needs for a successful deployment. Another bonus.
Make it automated
If we have a scripted deployment which we can run by executing a single command, then we are in great shape to automate that process by triggering the build and deployment via suitable events.
Again, I prefer not to offer one single suggestion of when this should occur. That will depend on your approach to the project, how your development team is organised, and how your QA team operate. You can tune this to suit.
For one project I worked on, we chose to trigger the build and deployment to our production environment every time we used Git to tag the master branch of our version control repository. There were a few moving parts, and we needed to do some upfront work to get everything working, but that upfront effort was repaid many fold as we deployed time and time again, and exposed some issues with our environment long before we got to “launch day”.
With a scripted and automated process, we can make deployments “cheap”. This is our goal. When there are minimal cognitive or time overheads associated with deploying, we’re likely to do it all the more often and become more confident that it will behave as expected.
Make it real
Alright, we have written scripts to build and deploy our projects. Anyone tagging our repo will trigger things to happen as if by magic, but where are we pushing things to? We need to target a real environment if this is to have any value.
A useful pattern is to have all activity on our develop branch trigger deployments to our staging server. Meanwhile tagging master will deploy a version to the production environment. How we organise this will depend on our git branching approach. (I’ve seen as many ways of approaching Git Flow as I have seen ways of approaching “Agile”).
It’s vital though, that we ensure that we are deploying to, and testing against, our real infrastructure. We want to see real results. That’s the best way to learn real lessons.
Make it first
Building our site to run in an environment not yet fully defined or available to test is like climbing without ropes – it’s possible, but we put ourselves at risk. And the higher we climb the greater the risk. So it is important to do this as early as we possibly can.
Don’t have a certificate for our HTTPS yet? Fine, but let’s still deploy to this evolving production environment and introduce HTTPS as soon as we can.
Before we know it we’ll be proving that this is set up correctly and we’ll not be surprised by mixed security alerts or other nasties further down the line.
Mailchimp perfectly capture the anxiety of sending emails to gazillions of people for a campaign. But we’re lucky. Launching a site doesn’t need to be like performing a mailshot. We can do things to banish that sweaty hand.
Doing preparation work upfront means that by the time we need to launch the site into the wild, we have exercised the deployment mechanics, and tested the production environment so rigorously that this task will be boring.
(It won’t be boring. Launching should always be exciting because the world will finally get to see our beautiful, painstaking work. But nor should it be terrifying. Especially as a result of not knowing for certain if our processes and environments are going to work or burst into flames on the big day.)
What tools exist?
Well this all sounds lovely. But how should we tackle this? Where are the tools for us to use? As it happens, there are many service and tools that we can use to work this way.
Hosting
All of the big players like Amazon, Azure and Google offer tools which can help us here. Google for example, can host multiple deployed versions of your project in parallel and you can manage them via their App Engine console. Each build receives its own URL which you can use to access any deployed version of your site.
Having immutable deployments which stick around in perpetuity (or until you bin them) is a key feature which unlocks the ability to confidently direct your traffic to any version of your site. With that comes the capacity to test any version or feature in its real environment, and then promote a version, or rollback to a previous version whenever you want.
A liberating power to have.
Continuous integration
In order to create all of those different versions, we’ll need somewhere to run our build and deployment scripts. Jenkins has been a popular Continuous Integration (CI) option for some time, and can be configured to perform all sorts of tasks, giving you extensive control over your deployment pipeline.
You need to host Jenkins yourself, but it provides some simple ways to do that.
The landscape for CI is getting richer and richer. With many hosted services like Circle CI providing this kind of automation up in the cloud.
One stop shop
Netlify combines both hosting and continuous integration services. It monitors your git repositories and automatically runs your build in a container on its servers when it finds changes. Each branch and pull request in your git repository will result in an immutable version of your site with its own URL.
Netlify is unlike Google Cloud, AWS or Azure in that it cannot host a dynamic server-side application for you. Instead it specialises in hosting static, or so called JAMstack sites.
Personally, I find that its simplicity makes it an approachable option, and a good place to learn and adopt some of these valuable habits.
Full disclosure: I’m a Netlify employee. But before I was, I was an avid customer, and it was through using Netlify that I first encountered some of these principles in practice.
Conclusion. It’s all about the approach
No matter what tools or services you use (and there are many which can support these practices), the most important thing is to adopt an approach which lets you prove your environments as quickly as possible.
Front-loading this effort will cast light onto the issues that you’ll need to address early and often, leaving no infrastructure surprises to spoil things for you on launch day.
Automating the process will mean that when you do find things that you need to fix or to improve later (and you will), issuing another release will be trivial. It is a lovely feeling when you have confidence that releasing v1.0.0 will be no more stressful v0.0.1. In fact it should actually be less stressful, as you’ll have been down this road many times by then. Fixing the potholes and smoothing the way as you went.
From here, it should be a smooth ride. |
2017 |
Phil Hawksworth |
philhawksworth |
2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/knowing-the-future/ |
process |
| 2 |
Levelling Up |
Hello, 24 ways. I’m Ashley and I sell property insurance. I’m interrupting your Christmas countdown with an article about rental property software and a guy, Pete, who selflessly encouraged me to build my first web app. It doesn’t sound at all festive, or — considering I’ve used both “insurance” and “rental property” — interesting, but do stick with me. There’s eggnog at the end.
I run a property insurance business, Brokers Direct. It’s a small operation, but well established. We’ve been selling landlord insurance on the web for over thirteen years, for twelve of which we have provided our clients with third-party software for managing their rental property portfolios. Free. Of. Charge.
It sounds like a sweet deal for our customers, but it isn’t. At least, not any more. The third-party software is victim to years of neglect by its vendor. Its questionable interface, garish visuals and, ahem, clip art icons have suffered from a lack of updates. While it was never a contender for software of the year, I’ve steadily grown too embarrassed to associate my business with it.
The third-party rental property software we distributed
I wanted to offer my customers a simple, clean and lightweight alternative. In an industry that’s dominated by dated and bloated software, it seemed only logical that I should build my own rental property tool.
The long learning-to-code slog
Learning a programming language is daunting, the source of my frustration stemming from a non-programming background. Generally, tutorials assume a degree of familiarity with programming, whether it be tools, conventions or basic skills. I had none and, at the time, there was nothing on the web really geared towards a novice. I reached the point where I genuinely thought I was just not cut out for coding. Surrendering to my feelings of self-doubt and frustration, I sourced a local Rails developer, Pete, to build it for me.
Pete brought a pack of index cards to our meeting. Index cards that would represent each feature the rental property software would launch with.
“OK,” he began. “We’ll need a user model, tenant model, authentication, tenant and property relationships…” A dozen index cards with a dozen features lined the coffee table in a grid-like format. Logical, comprehensible, achievable. Seeing the app laid out in a digestible manner made it seem surmountable. Maybe I could do this.
“I’ve been trying to learn Rails…”, I piped up.
I don’t know why I said it. I was fully prepared to hire Pete to do the hard work for me. But Pete, unprompted, gathered the index cards and neatly stacked them together, coasting them across the table towards me. “You should build this”.
Pete, a full-time freelance developer at the time, was turning down a paying job in favour of encouraging me to learn to code. Looking back, I didn’t realise how significant this moment was.
That evening, I took Pete’s index cards home to make a start on my app, slowly evolving each of the cards into a working feature. Building the app solo, I turned to Stack Overflow to solve the inevitable coding hurdles I encountered, as well as calling on a supportive Rails community. Whether they provided direct solutions to my programming woes, or simply planted a seed on how to solve a problem, I kept coding. Many months later, and after several more doubtful moments, Lodger was born.
Property overview of my app, Lodger.
If I can do it, so can you
I misspent a lot of time building Twitter and blogging applications (apparently, all Rails tutorials centre around Twitter and blogging). If I could rewind and impart some advice to myself, this is what I’d say.
There’s no magic formula
“I haven’t quite grasped Rails routing. I should tackle another tutorial.”
Making excuses — or procrastination — is something we are all guilty of. I was waiting for a programming book that would magically deposit a grasp of the entire Ruby syntax in my head. I kept buying books thinking each one would be the one where it all clicked. I now have a bookshelf full of Ruby material, all of which I’ve barely read, and none of which got me any closer to launching my web app. Put simply, there’s no magic formula.
Break it down
Whatever it is you want to build, break it down into digestible chunks. Taking Pete’s method as an example, having an index card represent an individual feature helped me tremendously. Tackle one at a time. Even if each feature takes you a month to build, and you have eight features to launch with, after eight months you’ll have your MVP. Remember, if you do nothing each day, it adds up to nothing.
Have a tangible product to build
I have a wonderful habit of writing down personal notes, usually to express my feelings at the time or to log an idea, only to uncover them months or years down the line, long after I forgot I had written them. I made a timely discovery while writing this article, discovering this gem while flicking through a battered Moleskine:
“I don’t seem to be making good progress with learning Rails, but development still excites me. I should maybe stop doing tutorials and work towards building a specific app.”
Having a real product to work on, like I did with Lodger, means you have something tangible to apply the techniques you are learning. I found this prevented me from flitting aimlessly between tutorials and books, which is an easy area to accidentally remain in.
Team up
If possible, team up with a designer and create something together. Designers are great at presenting features in a way you’d never have considered. You will learn a lot from making their designs come to life.
Your homework for the holiday
Despite having a web app under my belt, I am not a programmer. I tinker with code, piecing enough bits of it together to make something functional. And that’s OK! I’m not excusing sloppiness, but if we aimed for perfection every time, we’d never execute any of our ideas.
As the holidays approach and you’ve exhausted yet another viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol (or is that just my guilty pleasure at Christmas?), you may have time on your hands. Time to explore an idea you’ve been sitting on, but — plagued with procrastination and doubt — have yet to bring to life. This holiday, I am here to say to you what Pete said to me.
You should build this.
You don’t need to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. You just have to learn enough to get it done.
PS: I lied about the eggnogg, but try capturing somebody’s attention when you tell them you sell property insurance! |
2013 |
Ashley Baxter |
ashleybaxter |
2013-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/ |
business |
| 195 |
Levelling Up for Junior Developers |
If you are a junior developer starting out in the web industry, things can often seem a little daunting. There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there.
I am lucky enough to lead a team of developers building applications for the web. During a recent One to One meeting with one of our junior developers, he asked me about a learning path and the basic fundamentals that every developer should know. After a bit of digging around, I managed to come up with a (not so exhaustive) list of principles that was shared with him.
In this article, I will share the list with you, and hopefully help you level up from junior developer and become a better developer all round. This list doesn’t focus on an particular programming language, but rather coding concepts as a whole. The idea behind this list is that whether you are a front-end developer, back-end developer, full stack developer or just a curious one, these principles apply to everyone that writes code.
I have tried to be technology agnostic, so that you can use these tips to guide you, whatever your tech stack might be.
Without any further ado and in no particular order, let’s get started.
Refactoring code like a boss
The Boy Scouts have a rule that goes “always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” This rule can be applied to code too and ensures that you leave code cleaner than you found it. As a junior developer, it’s almost certain that you will either create or come across older code that could be improved. The resources below are a guide that will help point you in the right direction.
My favourite book on this subject has to be Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It’s a must read for anyone writing code as it helps you identify bad code and shows you techniques that you can use to improve existing code.
If you find that in your day to day work you deal with a lot of legacy code, Improving Existing Technology through Refactoring is another useful read.
Design Patterns are a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. My friend and colleague Ranj Abass likes to refer to them as a “common language” that helps developers discuss the way that we write code as a pattern. My favourite book on this subject is Head First Design Patterns which goes right back to the basics. Another great read on this topic is Refactoring to Patterns.
Working Effectively With Legacy Code is another one that I found really valuable.
Improving your debugging skills
A solid understanding of how to debug code is a must for any developer. Whether you write code for the web or purely back-end code, the ability to debug will save you time and help you really understand what is going on under the hood.
If you write front-end code for the web, one of my favourite resources to help you understand how to debug code in Chrome can be found on the Chrome Dev Tools website. While some of the tips are specific to Chrome, these techniques apply to any modern browser of your choice.
At Settled, we use Node.js for much of our server side code. Without a doubt, our most trusted IDE has to be Visual Studio Code and the built-in debuggers are amazing. Regardless of whether you use Node.js or not, there are a number of plugins and debuggers that you can use in the IDE. I recommend reading the website of your favourite IDE for more information.
As a side note, it is worth mentioning that Chrome Developer Tools actually has functionality that allows you to debug Node.js code too. This makes it a seamless transition from front-end code to server-side code debugging.
The Debugging Mindset is an informative online article by Devon H. O’Dell and discusses the the psychology of learning strategies that lead to effective problem-solving skills.
A good understanding of relational databases and NoSQL databases
Almost all developers will need to persist data at some point in their career. Even if you don’t write SQL queries in your day to day job, a solid understanding of how they work will help you become a better developer.
If you are a complete newbie when it comes to databases, I recommend checking out Code Academy. They offer a free online course that can help you get your head around how relational databases work. The course is quite basic, but is a useful hands-on approach to learning this topic.
This article provides a great explainer for the difference between the SQL and NoSQL databases, and this Stackoverflow answer goes a little deeper into the subject of the two database types.
If you’d like to learn more about NoSQL queries, I would recommend starting with this article on MongoDB queries. Unfortunately, there isn’t one overall course as most NoSQL databases have their own syntax.
You may also have noticed that I haven’t included other types of databases such as Graph or In-memory; it’s worth focussing on the basics before going any deeper.
Performance on the web
If you build for the web today, it is important to understand how the browser receives and renders the content that you send it. I am pretty passionate about Web Performance, and hope that everyone can learn how to make websites faster and more efficient. It can be fun at the same time!
Steve Souders High Performance Websites is the godfather of web performance books. While it was created a few years ago and many of the techniques might have changed slightly, it is the original book on the subject and set up many of the ground rules that we know about web performance today.
A free online resource on this topic is the Google Developers website. The site is an up to date guide on the best web performance techniques for your site. It is definitely worth a read.
The network plays a key role in delivering data to your users, and it plays a big role in performance on the web. A fantastic book on this topic is Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking. It is also available to read online at hpbn.co.
Understand the end to end architecture of your software project
I find that one of the best ways to improve my knowledge is to learn about the architecture of the software at the company I work at. It gives you a good understanding as to why things are designed the way they are, why certain decisions were made, and gives you an understanding of how you might do things differently with hindsight.
Try and find someone more senior, such as a Technical Lead or Software Architect, at your company and ask them to explain the overall architecture and draw a few high-level diagrams for you. Not to mention that they will be impressed with your willingness to learn.
I recommend reading Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design for more detail on this subject.
Far too often, software projects can be over-engineered and over-architected, it is worth reading Just Enough Software Architecture. The book helps developers understand how the smallest of changes can affect the outcome of your software architecture.
How are things deployed
A big part of creating software is actually shipping it! How is the software at your company released into the wild? Does your company do Continuous Integration? Continuous Deployment?
Even if you answered no to any of these questions, it is worth finding someone with the knowledge in your company to explain these things to you. If it is not already documented, perhaps you could start a wiki to document everything you’re learning about the system - this is a great way to level up and be appreciated and invaluable.
A streamlined deployment process is a beautiful thing, and understanding how they work can help you grow your knowledge as a developer.
Continuous Integration is a practical read on the ins and outs of implementing this deployment technique.
Docker is another great tool to use when it comes to software deployment. It can be tricky at first to wrap your head around, but it is definitely worth learning about this great technology. The documentation on the website will teach and guide you on how to get started using Docker.
Writing Tests
Testing is an essential tool in the developer bag of skills. They help you to make big refactoring changes to your code, and feel a lot more confident knowing that your changes haven’t broken anything. There are so many benefits to testing, which make it so important for developers at every level to become acquainted with it/them.
The book that started it all for me was Roy Osherove’s The Art of Unit Testing. The code in the book is written in C#, but the principles apply to every language. It’s a great, easy-to-understand read.
Another great read is How Google Tests Software and covers exactly what it says on the tin. It covers many different testing techniques such as exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing and really helps you understand how large organisations test their code.
Soft skills
Whilst reading through this article, you’ve probably noticed that a large chunk of it focusses on code and technical ability. Without a doubt, I’d say that it is even more important to be a good teammate. If you look up the definition of soft skills in the dictionary, it is defined as “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people” and I think that it sums this up perfectly. Working on your “soft skills” is something that can truly help you level up in your career. You may be the world’s greatest coder, but if you colleagues can’t get along with you, your coding skills won’t matter!
While you may not learn how to become the perfect co-worker overnight, I really try and live by the motto “don’t be an arsehole”. Think about how you like to be treated and then try and treat your co-workers with the same courtesy and respect. The next time you need to make a decision at work, ask yourself “is this something an arsehole would do”? If you answered yes to that question, you probably shouldn’t do it!
Summary
Levelling up as a junior developer doesn’t have to be scary. Focus on the fundamentals and they should hold you in good stead, regardless of the new things that come along. Software engineering is built on these great principles that have stood the test of time.
Whilst researching for this article, I came across a useful Github repo that is worth mentioning. Things Every Programmer Should Know is packed with useful information. I have to admit, I didn’t know everything on there!
I hope that you have found this list helpful. Some of the topics I have mentioned might not be relevant for you at this stage in your career, but should give a nudge in the right direction. After all, knowledge is power!
If you are a junior developer reading this article, what would you add to it? |
2017 |
Dean Hume |
deanhume |
2017-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 |
https://24ways.org/2017/levelling-up-for-junior-developers/ |
code |