Archive: May 31st, 2018

The Cult of the Complex · An A List Apart Article

I know that Jeffrey and I sound like old men yelling at kids to get off the lawn when we bemoan the fetishisation of complex tools and build processes, but Jeffrey gets to the heart of it here: it’s about appropriateness.

As a designer who used to love creating web experiences in code, I am baffled and numbed by the growing preference for complexity over simplicity. Complexity is good for convincing people they could not possibly do your job. Simplicity is good for everything else.

And not to sound like a broken record, but once again I’m reminded of the rule of least power.

Design Patterns on CodePen

This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.

Know your ARIA: ‘Hidden’ vs ‘None’ | scottohara.me

When to use aria-hidden="true", and when you might need display: none:

aria-hidden by itself is not enough to completely hide an element from all users, if that is the end goal.

When to use role="presentation" (or role="none"):

Where aria-hidden can be used to completely hide content from assistive technology, modifying an element’s role to “none” or “presentation” removes the semantics of the element, but does not hide the content from assistive technologies.

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?

A wonderful—and humorous—deep dive into all things time-related.

Building a calendar sucks. Like there’s really cool shit you can do, since every calendar out there today is basically straight outta 2005, but at the end of the day you’re stuck dealing with all of the edge cases that all your dork friends have warned you about since the dawn of time. (Like literally, the dawn of time is a separate edge case you have to account for as well.)

This also contains a well-deserved shout-out to ISO 8601:

ISO 8601 is one of my favorite standards and/or RFC out there. And yes, you should definitely have a favorite.

I do have a favourite RFC—ask me about it sometime over a beer.