Third Wish

JavaScript Minification Part II

A List Apart — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:00:42 GMT

Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor....(read more)

SVG with a little help from Raphaël

A List Apart — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:00:02 GMT

Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting....(read more)

Supersize that Background, Please!

A List Apart — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:00:50 GMT

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how....(read more)

Prefix or Posthack

A List Apart — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:00:14 GMT

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why....(read more)

Taking Advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 with Modernizr

A List Apart — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:00:33 GMT

Years ago, CSS browser support was patchy and buggy, and only daring web designers used CSS for layouts. Today, CSS layouts are commonplace and every browser supports them. But the same can't be said for CSS3 and HTML5. That's where Faruk Ateş’s Modernizr comes in. This open-source JavaScript library makes it easy to support different levels of experiences, based on the capabilities of each visitor’s browser. Learn how to take advantage of everything in HTML5 and CSS3 that is implemented in some...(read more)

Stop Forking with CSS3

A List Apart — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:00:13 GMT

You may remember when JavaScript was a dark art. It earned that reputation because, in order to do anything with even the teensiest bit of cross-browser consistency, you had to fork your code for various versions of Netscape and IE. Today, thanks to web standards advocacy and diligent JavaScript library authors, our code is relatively fork-free. Alas, in our rush to use some of the features available in CSS3, we’ve fallen off the wagon. Enter Aaron Gustafson’s eCSStender, a JavaScript library that...(read more)

Web Fonts at the Crossing

A List Apart — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:00:27 GMT

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps it all up with a how-to on making web fonts work today....(read more)

Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing

A List Apart — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:00:57 GMT

User research doesn’t have to be expensive and time-consuming. With online applications, you can test your designs, wireframes, and prototypes over the phone and your computer with ease and aplomb. Nate Bolt shows the way....(read more)

Responsive Web Design

A List Apart — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:00:23 GMT

Designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Ethan Marcotte advocates we shift our design thinking to appropriate these constraints: using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, he shows us how to embrace the “ebb and flow of things” with responsive web design....(read more)

Habit Fields

A List Apart — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:00:49 GMT

We have the power to bestow our abilities onto the things around us. By being conscious of our tools, habits, and spaces, and actively conditioning them to help us behave the way we want to behave, maybe we can more efficiently tap into the thousands of hours of creative genius embedded in our everyday objects. Maybe we’ll be able to maximize the capabilities that new technologies afford us without being overwhelmed by the distractions. And, just maybe, we’ll remember what it feels like to be utterly...(read more)

A Brief History of Markup

A List Apart — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:00:07 GMT

Hot off the presses! In his brand new, brief book for people who make websites, HTML5 For Web Designers, Jeremy Keith cuts through the confusion surrounding the web's new markup language and presents what every accessibility- and standards-focused web designer and developer needs to know about it—from semantics to strategy. Not only is HTML5 For Web Designers a great, fast read, it is also our first A Book Apart publication. To celebrate, A List Apart proudly presents all of "Chapter One: A Brief...(read more)

Better JavaScript Minification

A List Apart — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:00:45 GMT

Like CSS, JavaScript works best and hardest when stored in an external file that can be downloaded and cached separately from our site's individual HTML pages. To increase performance, we limit the number of external requests and make our JavaScript as small as possible. JavaScript minification schemes began with JSMin in 2004 and progressed to the YUI Compressor in 2007. Now the inventor of Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI Compressor reveals coding patterns that interfere with compression,...(read more)

Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

A List Apart — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:00:03 GMT

Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade. It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, it lets users formulate the equivalent of...(read more)

Contrast is King

A List Apart — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:00:12 GMT

Being colorblind doesn’t mean not seeing color. It means seeing it differently. If colorblindness challenges the colorblind, it also challenges designers. Some of us think designing sites that are colorblind-friendly means sticking with black and white, or close to it. But the opposite is true. Using contrast effectively not only differentiates our site’s design from others, it’s the essential ingredient that can make our content accessible to every viewer, including the colorblind. By understanding...(read more)

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs

A List Apart — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:59:29 GMT

We take FAQs for granted as part of our sites’ content, but do they really work, or are they a band-aid for poor content? FAQ-hater R. Stephen Gracey explores the history and usability of FAQs. Learn how to collect, track, and analyze real user questions, sales inquiries, and support requests—and use the insights gained thereby to improve your site's content, not just to write a FAQ. Find out when FAQs are an appropriate part of your content strategy, and discover how to ensure that your FAQ is doing...(read more)

Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

A List Apart — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00:37 GMT

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently released the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn't...(read more)

Web Standards for E-books

A List Apart — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00:14 GMT

E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That's great news for publishers and standards-aware web designers. Great news for readers, too. Our favorite genius, Joe Clark, explains the simple why and how....(read more)

Accent Folding for Auto-Complete

A List Apart — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:00:31 GMT

Another generation of technology has passed and Unicode support is almost everywhere. The next step is to write software that is not just “internationalized” but truly multilingual. In this article we will skip through a bit of history and theory, then illustrate a neat hack called accent-folding. Accent-folding has its limitations but it can help make some important yet overlooked user interactions work better....(read more)

Training the Butterflies: Interview with Scott Berkun

A List Apart — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:00:17 GMT

Whether it’s in front of a huge audience or a handful of executives, smooth public speaking is essential to a successful web design career. Yet most of us are more afraid of speaking in public than we are of death. In a lively give-and-take, Liz Danzico interviews Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker, for tips on how to prepare for public speaking, how to perfect your timing, and what to do when bad things happen....(read more)

Words that Zing

A List Apart — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:00:36 GMT

When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the rhetorical concept of kairos can help us craft a context for the opportune moment and hit the mark with appropriately zingy text....(read more)

The Problem with Passwords

A List Apart — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:00:15 GMT

Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, including undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user experience or losing our visitors’ trust....(read more)

Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part II

A List Apart — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:00:43 GMT

In Part II, dig deeper into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. Explore how to incorporate SVG in a cross-browser friendly manner, including using SVGWeb to ensure that the SVG shows in Internet Explorer. And discover the unique characteristic that makes SVG ideal for page backgrounds: scalability....(read more)

Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I

A List Apart — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:00:29 GMT

Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. In Part I of a two-part series, Shelley Powers covers important basics of working with SVG, including browser support and accessibility....(read more)

The Survey, 2009

A List Apart — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:14 GMT

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more....(read more)

Letting Go of John Hancock

A List Apart — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:00:35 GMT

Because clients expect everything to be faster, better, and simpler, web professionals must take an instant, foolproof, paperless, modern approach to how clients approve proposals and sign contracts. Implementing an instantaneous contract agreement helps to get projects off the ground, attract clients on tight timelines, and prevent potential delays. All it takes is a little PHP and some PDF magic....(read more)