Scott Jehl — one of the creators of Picturefill — wrote a thoughtful piece on the tradeoffs of polyfilling for responsive images.
Category Archives: HTML / XHTML
Why “Click Here” is A Bad Practice
Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.
Preventing Sites From Opening New Tabs/Windows
UPDATE: There’s now a Chrome extension called TheOne which does this, so you don’t need to create your own user script. I wrote earlier about why it’s wrong for websites to force links to open in a new tab or window, but it’ll probably be at least a few years before the majority of […]
My First Shot at Adaptive Images
One of the first problems you run into when trying to build an adaptive layout is that images, unlike blocks of text, have fixed widths. Ideally we want to use small images on small screens and full sized ones on larger screens. The browser can resize the image on the fly, but the two problems […]
A Primer on Responsive Web Design
Ben Callahan from Sparkbox shared some good links on responsive web design recently, one of them being this introduction to the subject from A List Apart. One of the things that struck me from the article was that “[mobile] browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.” Another link to Smashing Magazine was a […]
Don’t Force Links to Open in New Windows
Sven Lennartz has a good post at Smashing Magazine detailing why links shouldn’t be targeted to open in new windows. This is a big pet peeve of mine because it takes control away from the user. Insecure site owners force it on their users, thinking it will keep people on the site longer, but the correct […]
W3Schools Isn’t Official or Accurate
Divya Manian gave a presentation yesterday at WordCamp Seattle about generating proper markup when creating output from plugins, and she mentioned a site called W3Fools.com, which is basically a protest against W3Schools.com. I didn’t realize until I saw W3Fools, but W3Schools isn’t actually ran by the W3C, and it contains a lot of inaccurate information. […]
Body Classes Instead of Conditional Stylesheets
I’m thinking I should create a, ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that?’ category for this. Instead of using conditional stylesheets or CSS hacks to fix Internet Explorer’s obnoxious lack of support for standards, you can conditionally set a class on the html or body tag and target that in your normal stylesheet. This is better for […]
Alternatives to Select/Multiple
Ryan Cramer details some of the problems with select/multiple and a few good alternatives. It’s useful in certain circumstances, but unintuitive and error-prone. Instead, you can create a list of checkboxes inside an element with overflow:auto set, or use a jQuery plugin he developed.
Content Above Anchors Disappear
It turns out there’s a serous problem with the One True Layout method of creating equal height columns. All of the content above an anchor will be shifted up, making it seem like it disappeared. There aren’t any universal or reliable fixes for this, so the Faux Columns method is probably the best choice if […]
Writing Semantic (X)HTML
Jesse Skinner explains why developers should use appropriate semantic tags when marking up a page, rather than just putting everything inside a <div>. Here’s a quick reference list of what I commonly use: <div> – For large page sections, and when there isn’t a specific semantic tag <h1> … <h6>: For section header titles <p> […]