Article Archives

It’s been about a year, so I redesigned and updated all the support information here. Added Android. Lots more green, but we’re still quite a ways off from using features like validation without fallbacks.…

The :target pseudo selector in CSS is both pretty cool and pretty limited in what it can do. In this article we discuss some things it can be helpful with, its limitations, and some work arounds.

Rapidfire show! No guest, no news, not hot drama, just all question on answer action.…

There are three ways we can go about dealing with responsive <img>s : 1) a new format 2) a new syntax 3) rely on existing hacks.

There are many such roundups. This one is mine.

Speaking of bandwidth media queries, this project by Adam D. Bradley looks promising:

Foresight.js gives webpages the ability to tell if the user’s device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image …

This week Dave and I are joined by Dave’s co-workers and amigo’s Trent Walton and Reagan Ray. We talk about cutting edge front end stuff, client services, topics for a graduate thesis, and more. Brought to you by LessMoney and …

If you feel like you have a decent understanding of JavaScript, what was your “Ah ha!” moment? Or are you still waiting for it?

They don’t exist. But wouldn’t that be nice?

Take for instance the markup being discussed for the
element:

<picture alt="A giant stone face at The Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, Cambodia">

<!-- Alternative if media …

Summer edition!

March 31 : BarCamp Harrisburg (Pennsylvania)
April 7 : MinneBar (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
April 14 : BarCamp Orlando (Florida)
April 26-27 : Front-Trends (Warsaw, Poland)
April 30-May 4 : Future Insights Live (Las Vegas, Nevada)
June 6-7 : Interlink…

In fluid width environments, the text that wraps around floated elements can get awkwardly narrow and trap bits of text orphaned away from the rest of the paragraph. This article explains that problem in more details and offers a few solutions.

This week Dave and I were joined by Jina Bolton. We talked all kinds of shop, touching on SASS usage and the new upcoming website, semantics, learning, workflow, and more. This weeks show brought to you by LessMoney and Hover…

A super hot responsive web design pattern by Jason Weaver. Don’t forget about the ol x-axis while designing for small screens. (via Paul Irish)…

I got to be on The East Wing podcast with Tim Smith.…

In which we interdigitate content in a responsive layout rather than just “push it to the bottom.”

All the popular ones are in there as options, as well as an “other” option in case you use something else (please share in comments). Or, vote “never tried,” “don’t like any of ‘em,” and “no preference” accordingly.

Clever idea by Joel Besada on using instant transition timing with really long transition delays (999999s) to maintain visual states in CSS. …

In this last poll, we asked:

In the next 10 years, will there be a serious alternative to CSS?

Of over 9,000 votes so far, the majority are of the opinion that there will not be:

Of course, it’s …

Good read from Nicolas Gallagher. Among the gems:

Class names cannot be “unsemantic”. Whatever names are being used: they have meaning, they have purpose.

When Twitter Bootstrap first came out, I rewrote the compiled CSS to better reflect how I …

Dave and I talk shop with Doug Neiner, whom I consider one of the smartest people I know. Doug is on the jQuery team and works for a company based around jQuery, so the topic of JavaScript comes up a …

Polyfill hero Scott Jehl has a new one for the theoretical <picture> element. The idea behind this new element is to solve the very real need to serve images of the appropriate size based on the browser window size. I’m …

One bizarre trend emerging in this new RWD era is desktop-browsing web designers resizing their browsers to watch the break-points change the layout. The average user never sits at their desk repetitively shrinking and expanding the browser window like a mad scientist. Yup, we’re all strange.

Just gonna clear up a little thing here that I’ve seen people struggle with a few times. There are two different kinds of conditional comments for Internet Explorer that have slightly different syntaxes: Downlevel Hidden and Downlevel Revealed (microsoft …

Dave and I were joined by Ethan Marcotte and I bet you can guess what we talked about. That’s right ShopTalkers, it’s a full episode of responsive web design goodness, from the basics to the newer challenges developers are facing …

I love Allan and Steve from LessEverything. I was just recently at my third trip to LessConf, which is a really fun web startup oriented conference. The fellas are at it again already, throwing a new conference called LessMoney. From …

Here’s the rub: when you load JavaScript from a third party you should do it asynchronously. You might want to load your own scripts asynchronously too, but for this article let’s focus on third parties.

There are two reasons for …

I joined the gentlemen from the new blog and podcast The Industry for a chat about loads of different web industry related stuff.…

Remember those three fellas from the last ShopTalk Show? Those guys are from the new(ish) podcast The Non-Breaking Space Show. Dave and I join them in this episode to talk about preprocessors, Git, and other stuff.…

I’m headed down to Austin in a few days here for my 2nd SXSW. Hope to see some of you folks there. I’m trying not too have much of a plan, but here’s a few things I’m doing:

There is …

This week Dave and I were joined by Christopher Schmitt, Chris Enns, and Dave McFarland, the fellas behind The Non-Breaking Space Show to do our second Cross-Over show. Brought to you by Hover and LessMoney.…

This year’s CSS Off results are in. The Unmatched Style folks have listed out the top 25 entries and will be emailing everyone their results shortly. Congrats to all who entered. It was quite a load on all the judges …

Michael Buchmiller of BlueHornet walks us through the process of designing a poster for tinted decoder glasses, and then bringing the same idea with a similar interaction to the web with the AnythingZoomer.

Help yourself be better at accessibility by using better hiding techniques that don’t use display: none;. This involves some tricks like using more clever class names, being fancier with how you deal with JavaScript library animations, or avoiding hiding all together.

Brad Frost shows examples and covers the various techniques/pros/cons for handling navigation on small screens.…

The main site sponsor around here, Treehouse, is hiring new teachers for creating new learning videos. It’s not a job for just anybody. You need to know your stuff (PHP & WordPress, Front-End Design, Android, or Business & Marketing), be …

This tutorial, a guest post by young developer Allen Lawson, will show you how to create a notebook themed website using only CSS.

I know it’s weird to go through slides of a presentation outside of the context of a real talk (and pales in comparison to the experience of being there) but nonetheless, there may be bits of goodness you can extract …

Sarah Parmenter with some good honest thoughts about the popular idea of designing in the browser.

I’ve tried, goodness knows I’ve tried, but my designs end up suffering, looking boxy, bland and uninspiring.

Not that I’m that great of a …

This week Dave and I were joined by Zoey Gillenwater and we chat about print stylesheets, CSS formatting, icon fonts, spec mysteries, and much more.…

I’ll be representin’ Wufoo at a bunch of BarCamps again this year. Super fun. We need to figure out exactly what (U.S.) cities we are going to go to this year, so if you are organizing one, hit us up …

What CSS properties might it make sense to apply to every single element on the page? We’ll take a look at some that may (or may not) be a good idea.

Jeffrey Way, Dave and I talk shop about some newly released projects, -webkit-gate, and our weekly staple of Q&A.…

Quick overview of the hot drama regarding vendor prefixes.

I’ve been using SASS for pretty much everything I do recently. Here’s some musings on the journey. From hold-ups, to trip-ups, to turn-offs. From apps and teams to workflows and syntax.

You Gotta Work Locally

The biggest contributor to me …

Interesting question:

css3 speech bubble question: for the “triangle”‘s border color, how can I set it to whatever its parent div’s bgcolor is automagically?

— Jin Yang (@jzy) February 1, 2012

By “css3 speech bubble”, Jin means using a pseudo …

Interesting idea by Felipe G on using a new at-rule, @-vendor-unlock, to tell the browser to use it’s experimental implementation of any particular property, rather than using a vendor prefix on that property. Unfortunately at this point, even if …

Digging Into WordPress (the book) is now updated to v3.3. Includes new chapters specially on what’s new in 3.2 and 3.3, all the rest of the chapters tightened up and refreshed, better internal hyperlinking (in the PDF), and more. It’s …

Dave, Jonathan Longnecker, Nate Croft and I talk shop. Topics include website building apps, where to start designing, when not to design for modern browsers, and more.

Sponsored by LessAccounting. …

What do you think folks? Is a new language going to come along in the next ten years that deals with layout / style / design and unseat CSS? Or at least give it a run for its money?

You …

Star ratings are one of those classic UX patterns that everyone has tinkered with at one time or another. I had an idea get the UX part of it done with very little code and no JavaScript.

The markup uses …