Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
Tags: nav
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Using Hamburger Menus? Try Sausage Links · Bradley Taunt
Another take on the scrolling navigation pattern. However you feel about the implementation details, it’s got to better than the “teenage tidying” method of shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.
How to Section Your HTML | CSS-Tricks
A deep dive with good advice on using—and labelling—sectioning content in HTML: nav, aside, section, and article.
First You Make the Maps
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
NASA’s Visual Universe
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted
These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:
It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?
Refresh – A fresh approach to the browser
Some interesting ideas for evolving the web browser. I’m very interested in the ideas about navigating our browser history—that feels like a very underappreciated goldmine with a direct lineage to the “associative trails” imagined for the memex.
Meet swup
This looks like a handy library for managing page transitions on sites that are not single page apps.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I really think that this handles 80% of the justification for using a single page app architecture.
page-transitions-travelapp
A demo of page transition animations by Sarah—she’s written about how she did it. I really like it as an example of progressive enhancement: you can navigate around the site just fine, but with JavaScript you get the smooth transitions as a bonus.
All of this reminds me of Jake’s proposal for navigation transitions in the browser. I honestly think this would solve 80% of the use-cases for single page apps.
Focusing on Focus Styles | CSS-Tricks
A deep dive into the :focus pseudo-class and why it’s important.
A Tale of Two Rooms: Understanding screen reader navigation | The Paciello Group
A nice analogy to help explain what it’s like to navigate with a screen reader—and how much well-structured markup can help make it easier.
Improving the Accessibility of 24 ways | CSS-Tricks
Paul walks us through the process of making some incremental accessibility improvements to this year’s 24 Ways.
Creating something new will always attract attention and admiration, but there’s an under-celebrated nobility in improving what already exists. While not all changes may be visual, they can have just as much impact.
Creating accessible menus-Part 1
James has been tweaking the accessibility of his site navigation. I’m looking forward to the sequel.
jakearchibald/navigation-transitions
I honestly think if browsers implemented this, 80% of client-rendered Single Page Apps could be done as regular good ol’-fashioned websites.
Having to reimplement navigation for a simple transition is a bit much, often leading developers to use large frameworks where they could otherwise be avoided. This proposal provides a low-level way to create transitions while maintaining regular browser navigation.
How much storage space is my Progressive Web App using? | Dean Hume
You can use navigator.storage.estimate() to get a (vague) idea of how much space is available on a device for your service worker caches.
Progressively Worse Apps
This article makes a good point about client-rendered pages:
Asynchronously loaded page elements shift click targets, resulting in a usability nightmare.
…but this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with progressive web apps.
More fuel for the fire of evidence that far too many people think that progressive web apps and single page apps are one and the same.
Sticky headers
A three-part series by Remy looking at one interface pattern (a sticky header) and how his code evolved and changed:
Using the aria-current attribute – Tink
The aria-current attribute is very handy and easy to implement. Léonie explains it really well here.
CSS Mega Dropdown | CodyHouse
I’m no fan of mega menus, and if a site were being designed from scratch, I’d do everything I could to avoid them, but on some existing projects they’re an unavoidable necessity (the design equivalent of technical debt). In those situations, this looks like a really nice, responsive approach.
The Future of Browser History — Free Code Camp
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It feels like a user’s browser history is an incredibly rich seam of valuable information just waiting to be presented in a more interesting way.