The state of the web is about to get a whole lot better, as the living dead release their stranglehold on the Windows desktop and a new generation of beautifully standards-compliant IE browsers rolls out automatically to tens of millions of computer users.
MSIE auto-updates: a holiday gift to web developers everywhere.
As a designer, I use iconography in nearly every project I work on. Whether it’s just one arrow icon, social media icons or an entire site filled with badges – icons are something I could never live without. I tip my hat to the illustrators who create such invaluable resources for the rest of us to use.
There are endless amounts of free and paid icons all over the web, but finding a set with a large quantity of icons that that are customizable, scalable, and of high quality can be hard to come by.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site.
From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.
Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas.
In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.
As a web designer, you deal with tons and tons of fonts every single day. Without organization and font management software, analyzing and choosing the perfect font for your website design is tedious and will seriously take a toll on your computer and patience. Basic font management software will allow you to organize your fonts, preview and compare them easily. More importantly, it will let you activate only the fonts you need, while leaving the others deactivated. It should also take care of issues like installing and uninstalling fonts, and diagnose and repair any font conflicts.
Print style sheets are useful and sometimes even necessary. Some readers might want to store your information locally as a well-formatted PDF to refer to the information later on, when they don’t have an Internet connection. However, print styles are often forgotten in the age of responsive Web design. The good news is that a print style sheet is actually very easy to craft: you can follow a couple of simple CSS techniques to create a good experience for readers and show them that you’ve gone the extra mile to deliver just a slightly better user experience.
Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.
…or… On “the site must look the same across all browsers”
I think we’re all pretty well convinced that our sites can look different across browsers. Sometimes, though, our team or our clients don’t totally understand that.
Lemme take a stab at convincing them that each browser gets an experience that is customized to that browsers’s capabilities.
The following is a range of CSS tests of the most common browsers’ support for selectors and pseudo selectors. The tests includes basic stuff from the good old days of CSS1 and funky stuff from the future (CSS3).
kimblim.dk: CSS Selectors and Pseudo Selectors and browser support