Archive: December, 2016

If you don’t like reading in a web browser, you might like to know that Resilient Web Design is now available in more formats.

Jiminy Panoz created a lovely EPUB version. I tried it out in Apple’s iBooks app and it looks great. I tried to submit it to the iBooks store too, but that process threw up a few too many roadblocks.

Oliver Williams has created a MOBI version. That’s means you can read it on a Kindle. I plugged my old Kindle into my computer, dragged that file onto its disc image, and it worked a treat.

And there’s always the PDF versions; one in portrait and another in landscape format. Those were generated straight from the print styles.

Oh, and there’s the podcast. I’ve only released two chapters so far. The Christmas break and an untimely cold have slowed down the release schedule a little bit.

I’d love to make a physical, print-on-demand version of Resilient Web Design available—maybe through Lulu—but my InDesign skills are non-existent.

If you think the book should be available in any other formats, and you fancy having a crack at it, please feel free to use the source files.

When I was marking up Resilient Web Design I wanted to make sure that people could link to individual sections within a chapter. So I added IDs to all the headings. There’s no UI to expose that though—like the hover pattern that some sites use to show that something is linkable—so unless you know the IDs are there, there’s no way of getting at them other than “view source.”

But if you’re reading a passage in Resilient Web Design and you highlight some text, you’ll notice that the URL updates to include that text after a hash symbol. If that updated URL gets shared, then anyone following it should be sent straight to that string of text within the page. That’s fragmentions in action:

Fragmentions find the first matching word or phrase in a document and focus its closest surrounding element. The match is determined by the case-sensitive string following the # (or ## double-hash)

It’s a similar idea to Eric and Simon’s proposal to use CSS selectors as fragment identifiers, but using plain text instead. You can find out more about the genesis of fragmentions from Kevin. I’m using Jonathon Neal’s script with some handy updates from Matthew.

I’m using the fragmention support to power the index of the book. It relies on JavaScript to work though, so Matthew has come to the rescue again and created a version of the site with IDs for each item linked from the index (I must get around to merging that).

The fragmention functionality is ticking along nicely with one problem…

I’ve tweaked the typography of Resilient Web Design to within an inch of its life, including a crude but effective technique to avoid widowed words at the end of a paragraph. The last two words of every paragraph are separated by a UTF-8 no-break space character instead of a regular space.

That solves the widowed words problem, but it confuses the fragmention script. Any selected text that includes the last two words of a paragraph fails to match. I’ve tried tweaking the script, but I’m stumped. If you fancy having a go, please have at it.

Update: And fixed! Thanks to Lee.

I really wanted to make sure that the print styles for Resilient Web Design were pretty good—or at least as good as they could be given the everlasting lack of support for many print properties in browsers.

Here’s the first thing I added:

@media print {
  @page {
    margin: 1in 0.5in 0.5in;
    orphans: 4;
    widows: 3;
  }
}

That sets the margins of printed pages in inches (I could’ve used centimetres but the numbers were nice and round in inches). The orphans: 4 declaration says that if there’s less than 4 lines on a page, shunt the text onto the next page. And widows: 3 declares that there shouldn’t be less than 3 lines left alone on a page (instead more lines will be carried over from the previous page).

I always get widows and orphans confused so I remind myself that orphans are left alone at the start; widows are left alone at the end.

I try to make sure that some elements don’t get their content split up over page breaks:

@media print {
  p, li, pre, figure, blockquote {
    page-break-inside: avoid;
  }
}

I don’t want headings appearing at the end of a page with no content after them:

@media print {
  h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 {
    page-break-after: avoid;
  }
}

But sections should always start with a fresh page:

@media print {
  section {
    page-break-before: always;
  }
}

There are a few other little tweaks to hide some content from printing, but that’s pretty much it. Using print preview in browsers showed some pretty decent formatting. In fact, I used the “Save as PDF” option to create the PDF versions of the book. The portrait version comes from Chrome’s preview. The landscape version comes from Firefox, which offers more options under “Layout”.

For some more print style suggestions, have a look at the article I totally forgot about print style sheets. There’s also tips and tricks for print style sheets on Smashing Magazine. That includes a clever little trick for generating QR codes that only appear when a document is printed. I’ve used that technique for some page types over on The Session.

Andrew Travers wrote about designing design principles at Co-op Digital. I’m somewhat obsessed with design principles—hence my collection—so I’m also obsessed with figuring out what makes for “good” design principles.

One of my favourite design principles (yes, I have favourites) is from the HTML Design Principles. It’s the priority of constituencies:

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.

The emphasis my own. It demonstrates how the design principle can be put to use (“in case of conflict”). Andrew also describes uses for the design principles they’re putting together:

What we’re building towards is a set of principles, few enough to be memorable, short enough to be repeatable, relevant enough to be usable. When we’re running a design crit, it’s these principles that we want to lean on. When a sole designer in an agile delivery team is talking about a design approach, it’s these principles that back her up.

Those sound like good use cases to me. Those are situations when design principles can help people reach agreement on priorities, without it having to be about ego or who shouts loudest.

I think it was from Cennydd that I heard about a really good test of a design principle: is it reversible? In other words, could you imagine the exact opposite of the design principle being perfectly valid in a different organisation or on a different project? If not, then the principle may be too weak to be effective. (Cennydd points out that he heard this from Jared who has written a lot about evaluating design principles.)

“Make it easy to use” would be an example of a weak design principle. It’s hard to imagine a situation where “make it hard to use” would be a reasonable guiding principle.

Frankly, there are plenty of “bad” examples in my collection of design principles. Many of them wouldn’t pass the reversibility test. Just recently though, I spotted some that would pass the test with flying colours. They weren’t even labelled as design principles—they’re the tips that Heydon includes at the end of his excellent 24 Ways article on inclusive design:

• Involve code early
• Respect conventions
• Don’t be exact
• Enforce simplicity

I could easily imagine endeavours where the complete opposite of those tips would be valued. Personally, I think they’re really great design princples.

I should add them to the list.

I’m a sucker for classic old-style serif typefaces: Caslon, Baskerville, Bembo, Garamond …I love ‘em. That’s probably why I’ve always found the typesetting in Edward Tufte’s books so appealing—he always uses a combination of Bembo for body copy and Gill Sans for headings.

Earlier this year I stumbled on a screen version of Bembo used for Tufte’s digital releases called ET Book. Best of all, it’s open source:

ET Book is a Bembo-like font for the computer designed by Dmitry Krasny, Bonnie Scranton, and Edward Tufte. It is free and open-source.

When I was styling Resilient Web Design, I knew that the choice of typeface would be one of the most important decisions I would make. Remembering that open source ET Book font, I plugged it in to see how it looked. I liked what I saw. I found it particularly appealing when it’s full black on full white at a nice big size (with lower contrast or sizes, it starts to get a bit fuzzy).

I love, love, love the old-style numerals of ET Book. But I was disappointed to see that ligatures didn’t seem to be coming through (even when I had enabled them in CSS). I mentioned this to Rich and of course he couldn’t resist doing a bit of typographic sleuthing. It turns out that the ligature glyphs are there in the source files but the files needed a little tweaking to enable them. Because the files are open source, Rich was able to tweak away to his heart’s content. I then took the tweaked open type files and ran them through Font Squirrel to generate WOFF and WOFF2 files. I’ve put them on Github.

For this book, I decided that the measure would be the priority. I settled on a measure of around 55 to 60 characters—about 10 or 11 words per line. I used a max-width of 27em combined with Mike’s brilliant fluid type technique to maintain a consistent measure.

It looks great on small-screen devices and tablets. On large screens, the font size starts to get really, really big. Personally, I like that. Lots of other people like it too. But some people really don’t like it. I should probably add a font-resizing widget for those who find the font size too shocking on luxuriously large screens. In the meantime, their only recourse is to fork the CSS to make their own version of the book with more familiar font sizes.

The visceral reaction a few people have expressed to the font size reminds me of the flak Jeffrey received when he redesigned his personal site a few years back:

Many people who’ve visited this site since the redesign have commented on the big type. It’s hard to miss. After all, words are practically the only feature I haven’t removed. Some of the people say they love it. Others are undecided. Many are still processing. A few say they hate it and suggest I’ve lost my mind.

I wonder how the people who complained then are feeling now, a few years on, in a world with Medium in it? Jeffrey’s redesign doesn’t look so extreme any more.

Resilient Web Design will be on the web for a very, very, very long time. I’m curious to see if its type size will still look shockingly large in years to come.

I wrote a thing. The thing is a book. But the book is not published on paper. This book is on the web. It’s a web book. Or “wook” if you prefer …please don’t prefer. Here it is:

Resilient Web Design.

It’s yours for free.

Much of the subject matter will be familiar if you’ve seen my conference talks from the past couple of years, particularly Enhance! and Resilience. But the book ended up taking some twists and turns that surprised me. It turned out to be a bit of a history book: the history of design, the history of the web.

Resilient Web Design is a short book. It’s between sixteen and seventeen megawords long. You could read the whole thing in a couple of hours. Or—because the book has seven chapters—you could take fifteen to twenty minutes out of a day to read one chapter and you’d have read the whole thing done in a week.

If you make websites in any capacity, I hope that this book will resonate with you. Even if you don’t make websites, I still hope there’s an interesting story in there for you.

You can read the whole book on the web, but if you’d rather have a single file to carry around, I’ve made some PDFs as well: one in portrait, one in landscape.

I’ve licensed the book quite liberally. It’s released under a Creative Commons attribution share-alike licence. That means you can re-use the material in any way you want (even commercial usage) as long as you provide some attribution and use the same licence. So if you’d like to release the book in some other format like ePub or anything, go for it.

I’m currently making an audio version of Resilient Web Design. I’ll be releasing it one chapter at a time as a podcast. Here’s the RSS feed if you want to subscribe to it. Or you can subscribe directly from iTunes.

I took my sweet time writing this book. I wrote the first chapter in March 2015. I wrote the last chapter in May 2016. Then I sat on it for a while, figuring out what to do with it. Eventually I decided to just put the whole thing up on the web—it seems fitting.

Whereas the writing took over a year of solid procrastination, making the website went surprisingly quickly. After one weekend of marking up and styling, I had most of it ready to go. Then I spent a while tweaking. The source files are on Github.

I’m pretty happy with the end result. I’ll write a bit more about some of the details over the next while—the typography, the offline functionality, print styles, and stuff like that. In the meantime, I hope you’ll peruse this little book at your leisure…

Resilient Web Design.

If you like it, please spread the word.

I wrote a while back about switching to HTTPS on Apache 2.4.7 on Ubuntu 14.04 on Digital Ocean. In that post, I pointed to an example .conf file.

I’ve been having a few issues with my certificate renewals with Certbot (the artist formerly known as Let’s Encrypt). If I did a dry-run for renewing my certificates…

/etc/certbot-auto renew --dry-run

… I kept getting this message:

Encountered vhost ambiguity but unable to ask for user guidance in non-interactive mode. Currently Certbot needs each vhost to be in its own conf file, and may need vhosts to be explicitly labelled with ServerName or ServerAlias directories. Falling back to default vhost *:443…

It turns out that Certbot doesn’t like HTTP and HTTPS configurations being lumped into one .conf file. Instead it expects to see all the port 80 stuff in a domain.com.conf file, and the port 443 stuff in a domain.com-ssl.conf file.

So I’ve taken that original .conf file and split it up into two.

First I SSH’d into my server and went to the Apache directory where all these .conf files live:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

Then I copied the current (single) file to make the SSL version:

cp yourdomain.com.conf yourdomain.com-ssl.conf

Time to fire up one of those weird text editors to edit that newly-created file:

nano yourdomain.com-ssl.conf

I deleted everything related to port 80—all the stuff between (and including) the VirtualHost *:80 tags:

<VirtualHost *:80>
...
</VirtualHost>

Hit ctrl and o, press enter in response to the prompt, and then hit ctrl and x.

Now I do the opposite for the original file:

nano yourdomain.com.conf

Delete everything related to VirtualHost *:443:

<VirtualHost *:443>
...
</VirtualHost>

Once again, I hit ctrl and o, press enter in response to the prompt, and then hit ctrl and x.

Now I need to tell Apache about the new .conf file:

a2ensite yourdomain.com-ssl.conf

I’m told that’s cool and all, but that I need to restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

service apache2 restart

Now when I test the certificate renewing process…

/etc/certbot-auto renew --dry-run

…everything goes according to plan.

24 Ways is back! That’s how we web nerds know that the Christmas season is here. It kicked off this year with a most excellent bit of hardware hacking from Seb: Internet of Stranger Things.

The site is looking lovely as always. There’s also a component library to to accompany it: Bits, the front-end component library for 24 ways. Nice work, courtesy of Paul. (I particularly like the comment component example).

The component library is built with Fractal, the magnificent tool that Mark has open-sourced. We’ve been using at Clearleft for a while now, but we haven’t had a chance to make any of the component libraries public so it’s really great to be able to point to the 24 Ways example. The code is all on Github too.

There’s a really good buzz around Fractal right now. Lots of people in the design systems Slack channel are talking about it. There’s also a dedicated Fractal Slack channel for people getting into the nitty-gritty of using the tool.

If you’re currently wrestling with the challenges of putting a front-end component library together, be sure to give Fractal a whirl.