Tags: veen

When I started making websites in the 1990s, I had plenty of help. The biggest help came from the ability to view source on any web page—the web was a teacher of itself. I also got plenty of help from people who generously shared their knowledge and experience. There was Jeffrey’s Ask Dr. Web, Steve Champeon’s WebDesign-L mailing list, and Jeff Veen’s articles on Webmonkey. Years later, I was able to meet those people. That was a real privilege.

I’ve known Jeff for over a decade now. He’s gone from Adaptive Path to Google to TypeKit to Adobe to True Ventures, and it’s always fascinating to catch up with him and get his perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

He started up a podcast called Presentable about a year ago. It’s worth having a dig through the archives to have a listen to his chats with people like Andy, Jason, Anna, and Jessica. I was honoured when Jeff asked me to be on the show.

We ended up having a really good chat. It’s out now as Episode 25: The Tenuous Resilience of the Open Web. I really enjoyed having a good ol’ natter, and I hope you might enjoy listening to it.

‘Sfunny, but I feel like a few unplanned themes came up a few times. We ended up talking about art, but also about the scientific aspects of design. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the title of Jeff’s classic book, The Art and Science of Web Design.

We also talked about my most recent book, Resilient Web Design, and that’s when I noticed another theme. When discussing the web-first nature of publishing the book, I described the web version as the canonical version and all the other formats as copies that were generated from that. That sounds a lot like how I describe the indie web—something else we discussed—where you have the canonical instance on your own site but share copies on social networks: Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—POSSE.

We also talked about technologies, and it’s entirely possible that we sound like two old codgers on the front porch haranguing those damn kids on the lawn. You can be the judge of that. The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure. If you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed doing it, then I enjoyed it twice as much as you.

Brad has done a great job in documenting navigation patterns for responsive designs. More recently I came across Erick Arbé’s similar collection of patterns for responsive navigation. And, of course, at the Responsive Day Out, David gave a presentation on the subject.

As I mentioned in the chat after David’s talk, choosing a pattern doesn’t need to be an either/or decision. You can start with a simple solution and progressively enhance to a more complex navigation pattern.

Take the footer-anchor pattern, for example. I really, really like this pattern. It doesn’t require any JavaScript whatsoever; just a simple hyperlink from the top of the page that links to the fragment identifier of the navigation at the bottom of the page. It works on just about every device.

But you don’t have to stop there. Now that you’ve got a simple solution that works everywhere, you can enhance it for more capable browsers.

Take a look at this example that applies the off-canvas pattern for browsers capable of handling the JavaScript and CSS required.

You can see the two patterns in action by looking at the source in JS Bin. If you toggle the “Auto-run JS” checkbox, you can see both behaviours. Without JavaScript you get the footer-anchor pattern. With JavaScript (and a capable browser) you get the off-canvas pattern.

I haven’t applied any media queries in this instance, but it would be pretty straightforward to apply absolute positioning or the display: table hack to display the navigation by default at wider screen sizes. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (bonus points: apply the off-canvas from the right of the viewport rather than the left).

Feel free to peruse the somewhat simplistic code. I’m doing a bit of feature detection—or cutting the mustard—to test for querySelector and addEventListener. If a browser passes the test, a class is applied to the document root and some JavaScript is executed on page load to toggle the off-canvas behaviour.

On a recent project, I found myself implementing a number of different navigation patterns: off-canvas, overlay, and progressive disclosure. But each one began as an instance of the simple footer-anchor pattern.

Progressive enhancement, baby. Still not dead, still important.