An ever-timely call-to-arms from Eric:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as open and accessible for everyone, no matter where they comes from, what speed their connection is, how capable their browsers are or how good their eyes or hands or both work. I feel proud every day to make that vision reality, and it is the job of web developers to make it a reality.
He’s right. We have tremendous power and privilege, and correspondingly tremendous responsibility.
I wholeheartedly agree with Christian’s diagnosis of the average web page: it’s overweight to the point of obesity. Fortunately Dr. Heilmann has some remedies.
Some great thoughts from Mike Davies about the strengths of the web, prompted by some of the more extreme comments made by James Pearce at Full Frontal last week.
I should point out that James was being deliberately provocative in order to foment thought and discussion and, judging from this blog post, he succeeded.
The Web’s independence from the hardware and software platform people use is a feature. It’s better than cross-platform frameworks which are constantly criticised for not producing exact native-feeling apps on the multitude of platforms they run on. The Web is above that pettiness.
A lovely bit of hypertext.
A good round-up of what web development means today …and what web developers need to do to keep pace.
This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.
This is a great encapsulation of what I’ve been banging on about at conferences for a while now: let’s stop pretending we know the capabilities, network speed or viewport size of a site visitor’s browser.
The video of my talk/rant at the DIBI conference in Newcastle/Gateshead earlier this year, for your viewing pleasure.
A great reminder from Bruce that we need to remember to use cutting-edge web technology responsibly.
- Can I bookmark this information? (stable URIs)
- Can I go from here to there with a click? (hyperlinks)
- Can I save the content locally? (open accessible formats)
A superb post by Dan on the bigger picture of what’s wrong with hashbang URLs. Well written and well reasoned.
Josh explains the pros and cons of embedding background images in your CSS using base 64 encoding.
Tim Bray calmly explains why hash-bang URLs are a very bad idea.
This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
Excellent, excellent analysis of how URLs based on fragment identifier (a la Twitter/Gawker/Lifehawker) expose an unstable tottering edifice that crumbles at the first JavaScript error.
So why use a hash-bang if it’s an artificial URL, and a URL that needs to be reformatted before it points to a proper URL that actually returns content?
Out of all the reasons, the strongest one is “Because it’s cool”. I said strongest not strong.
A one-stop link shop for resources on web standards.
Nicole proposes an interesting way of clearing floats with a combination of display:table-cell and generated content.
Paul gives an excellent and thorough explanation of why systems thinking is important in web design.
All of this year's 24Ways articles are available as an £8 book with all the proceeds going to UNICEF.
This looks like it could be a handy little tool for creating test cases with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Think Vitamin have been their accessibility material available for free.
How awesome is this? A real-world "print'n'paper magazine" for web developers. "An elegant, timeless, collectable magazine for people who love web design and are intrigued by the possibility of the web"
This looks like it could be a very valuable resource indeed: a user-contributed and edited reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others call for the creation and recognition of a new discipline: "What we really want is for people around the world to start calling themselves web scientists."
Jeremy Zawodny rails against the continuing snobbery towards front-end engineers.
Aaron uses image replacement on an image to provide one image for screen and another print. Very clever.