A well designed site by the folks who brought us HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr and CSS3 Please shows how to implement specific HTML5 features: with confidence, with a fallback or with polyfills. The site also breaks it all down with a searchable interface and the ability to filter by html, css, js or browser-native API.
Check the site out here.
A surprisingly balanced comparison between Mongo and Couch is posted on the Mongo docs website. While the focus of technical talking points drifts towards Mongo, this is inevitable, as the doc is written from the perspective of Mongo experts. However, the writing is not pre-disposed to favor Mongo as a one size fits all solution, and the author goes out of his way to point out that Couch is more suitable for some situations (such as master-master database solutions where this is a high degree of geographical, often offline distribution). Read the entire doc here.
“End to End User Experience”…the idea that all developers, not just those who develop the UI (and the designers they partner with), need to safeguard the quality of the user experience. I really truly believe that the optimum user experience can only be realized from a technical perspective when the code from server to browser is carefully designed around all of the things that developers can do to enrich the experience of the user. This means excellent performance, a clear and well documented API, clean coding best practices, etc.
The whole team needs to rally around this guiding principle. It’s time for developers to give as much thought to the user experience as their counterparts in the visual design field. Likewise it is time for visual designers to understand that their vision is relevant only to the extent that it can be implemented with care by developers who have their aesthetic trained on the user’s experience of the product.
What do you think?
A blog post from September 2010 by the Twitter engineering team, while published a year ago, describes very well the recent shifts in web app development. It goes into substantial detail regarding their 2010 redesign. As it turns out, the redesign was far more than a re-imagined UI, but in fact relied heavily on shifting the work done by the app mostly to the client.
The paradigm shift is not an uncommon one in the current age, and depends on such strategies as exposing an API and the utilization of a group of JS frameworks to render the site: jQuery, Mustache, LABjs and Modernizr. The article states that JavaScript is central to the 2010 architecture.
The application also manages page state in the client, caching visited pages in the client while subscribing to updates and keeping the pages in sync with the state of the application.
The full article is available here.
Ignition, inspired by HTML5 Boilerplate and Twitter’s Bootstrap is one attempt to apply the sensibility of those projects (implementing baseline templates for HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript) towards Responsive Design. Having a template to base your development and design on, which will allow for a fluid screen layout on desktop/laptop, tablet and mobile, is a welcome idea.
While Ignition is still in the early phases of development, a few key features stand out. Included are the usual CSS reset along with some simple baseline styles. Media queries deliver the appropriate customized styles to different devices. It’s worth pointing out that font sizes are specified in rems for greater control and accuracy. Also of note is Ignition’s implementation of Sass CSS for more flexible CSS development using variables, mixins and selector inheritance. While the eventual goal is to support all browsers, currently Ignition has only been tested on Chrome 13+, Firefox 6 and Safari 5.
Google Codesearch will be shutdown effective January 15, 2012 but there are a number of alternatives for searching the source of publicly available codebases. Alternatives mentioned (but not explicitly endorsed) by the Codesearch team include http://koders.com, http://opensearch.krugle.org, http://grepcode.com and http://www.antepedia.com.
Of these four, Krugle seems to be the most helpful for Front End development code searches, turning up plenty of hits for “webkit”, for example, whereas the others turn up mostly empty-handed.
Mozilla Developer Central has long been a go to source for for technical documentation of web-standards based development. Now this excellent resource for info on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM has been organized with a nice clean UI.
dochub.io is a welcome take on this exhaustive information, made more suitable for browsing and quick lookups, as well as more in depth exploration.
Google has announced that they will be discontinuing their Knol project. Knol was a web publishing platform that was used by members of academia to make their research available in what was considered a more credible context than traditional blogs. While Knol will be ending, researchers still have a migration option.
The prescribed migration path is for authors to export their Knol to WordPress, using the Annotum theme. Features of this theme, specifically developed for scholarly writing, include internationalization, inline references and footnotes, an equation editor and structured XML editing within the TinyMCE editor. This last feature is central to the idea of a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editing experience, and supports a subset of the National Library of Medicine XML specification called Kipling DTD.
Annotum is a free theme requiring WordPress 3.3, and was developed by Crowd Favorite, based in Denver, Colorado, using the Carrington theme engine.
normalize.css is a project available on github that seeks to do for CSS what libraries like jQuery did for JavaScript a few cycles ago. That is, rather than wipe the slate clean like CSS solutions such as Eric Meyer’s Reset, the library, well, “normalizes” rendering of elements across browsers.
It does so for IE6+, FF3+, Chrome 10+ and Safari 4+. It starts out by setting up the display for HTML5 elements for pre-HTML5 browsers, and handles such other inconsistencies as odd text resizing in IE6 and IE7 that occurs when the body font size is set in ems. It even goes so far as to prevent iOS text resizing when the orientation is changed. Even Chrome’s idiosyncrasies are dealt with, such as its odd display of the outline around focused anchors.
It does all this and more, in a brief, well documented stylesheet, which its authors, Nicolas Gallagher and Jonathan Neal, intend to be used as a starting point for projects. They humbly suggest that it not be taken wholesale as a “black box”, but should be considered fully customizable.
An insider from the W3C Working Group responsible for maintaining and extending the CSS spec has taken to offering his viewpoint on the process, and detailing how the group operates “in reality”. He discusses the roles people play within the group, how communication is managed, how decisions are finally made, how modules of the spec are broken out and how the spec itself is created.
Most interesting is the final installment in the series, which highlights sources of inspiration and innovation. Advocates for implementation, design and standards each take the lead at various points throughout the process. This is valuable insight into the fact that innovation can come from any angle, or that “…to pretend that useful innovation can only come from one source is to be blind to the reality of crafting a Web standard.”
link to the series detailing the CSS Working Group