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| 74 | 74 | Should We Be Reactive? | Evolution Looking at the evolution of the web and the devices we use should help remind us that the times we’re adjusting to are just another step on a journey. These times seem to be telling us that we need to embrace flexibility. Imagine an HTML file containing nothing but text. It’s viewable on any web-capable device and reasonably readable: the notion of the universality of the web was very much a founding principle. Right from the beginning, browser vendors understood that we’d want text to reflow (why wouldn’t we?), so I consider the first websites to have been fluid. As we attempted to exert more control through our designs in the early days of the web, debates about whether we should produce fixed or fluid sites raged. We could create fluid designs using tables, but what we didn’t have then was a wide range of web capable devices or the ability to control this fluidity. The biggest changes occurred when stats showed enough people using a different screen resolution we could cater for. To me, the techniques of responsive web design provide the control we were missing. Combining new approaches to layout and images with media queries empowered us to learn how to embrace the inherent flexibility of the web in ways to suit our work and the devices used by our audience. Perhaps another kind of flexibility might be found in how we use context to affect how we present our content; to consider how we might use the information we can access from people, browsers and devices to provide web experiences – effectively creating sites that react to initial or changing circumstances in the relationship between people and our content. Embracing flexibility So what is context? Put simply, you could think of it as a secondary piece of information that helps clarify the meaning of the first. It helps set a scene or describe circumstances. I think that Cennydd Bowles has summed it up really well through talks he’s given recently, in which he’s arrived at the acronym DETAILS (Device, Environment, Time, Activity, Individ… | 2012 | Dan Donald | dandonald | 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/should-we-be-reactive/ | design |
| 127 | 127 | Showing Good Form | Earlier this year, I forget exactly when (it’s been a good year), I was building a client site that needed widgets which look like this (designed, incidentally, by my erstwhile writing partner, Cameron Adams): Building this was a challenge not just in CSS, but in choosing the proper markup – how should such a widget be constructed? Mmm … markup It seemed to me there were two key issues to deal with: The function of the interface is to input information, so semantically this is a form, therefore we have to find a way of building it using form elements: fieldset, legend, label and input We can’t use a table for layout, even though that would clearly be the easiest solution! Abusing tables for layout is never good – physical layout is not what table semantics mean. But even if this data can be described as a table, we shouldn’t mix forms markup with non-forms markup, because of the behavioral impact this can have on a screen reader: To take a prominent example, the screen reader JAWS has a mode specifically for interacting with forms (cunningly known as “forms mode”). When running in this mode its output only includes relevant elements – legends, labels and form controls themselves. Any other kind of markup – like text in a previous table cell, a paragraph or list in between – is simply ignored. The user in this situation would have to switch continually in and out of forms mode to hear all the content. (For more about this issue and some test examples, there’s a thread at accessify forum which wanders in that direction.) One further issue for screen reader users is implied by the design: the input fields are associated together in rows and columns, and a sighted user can visually scan across and down to make those associations; but a blind user can’t do that. For such a user the row and column header data will need to be there at every axis; in other words, the layout should be more like this: And constructed with appropriate semantic markup to convey those relationships. By this point the selectio… | 2006 | James Edwards | jamesedwards | 2006-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/showing-good-form/ | ux |
| 104 | 104 | Sitewide Search On A Shoe String | One of the questions I got a lot when I was building web sites for smaller businesses was if I could create a search engine for their site. Visitors should be able to search only this site and find things without the maintainer having to put “related articles” or “featured content” links on every page by hand. Back when this was all fields this wasn’t easy as you either had to write your own scraping tool, use ht://dig or a paid service from providers like Yahoo, Altavista or later on Google. In the former case you had to swallow the bitter pill of computing and indexing all your content and storing it in a database for quick access and in the latter it hurt your wallet. Times have moved on and nowadays you can have the same functionality for free using Yahoo’s “Build your own search service” – BOSS. The cool thing about BOSS is that it allows for a massive amount of hits a day and you can mash up the returned data in any format you want. Another good feature of it is that it comes with JSON-P as an output format which makes it possible to use it without any server-side component! Starting with a working HTML form In order to add a search to your site, you start with a simple HTML form which you can use without JavaScript. Most search engines will allow you to filter results by domain. In this case we will search “bbc.co.uk”. If you use Yahoo as your standard search, this could be: <form id="customsearch" action="http://search.yahoo.com/search"> <div> <label for="p">Search this site:</label> <input type="text" name="p" id="term"> <input type="hidden" name="vs" id="site" value="bbc.co.uk"> <input type="submit" value="go"> </div> </form> The Google equivalent is: <form id="customsearch" action="http://www.google.co.uk/search"> <div> <label for="p">Search this site:</label> <input type="text" name="as_q" id="term"> <input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" id="site" value="bbc.co.uk"> <input type="submit" value="go"> </div> </form> In any case make sure to use the ID term for the searc… | 2008 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2008-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/sitewide-search-on-a-shoestring/ | code |
| 301 | 301 | Stretching Time | Time is valuable. It’s a precious commodity that, if we’re not too careful, can slip effortlessly through our fingers. When we think about the resources at our disposal we’re often guilty of forgetting the most valuable resource we have to hand: time. We are all given an allocation of time from the time bank. 86,400 seconds a day to be precise, not a second more, not a second less. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or we’re poor, no one can buy more time (and no one can save it). We are all, in this regard, equals. We all have the same opportunity to spend our time and use it to maximum effect. As such, we need to use our time wisely. I believe we can ‘stretch’ time, ensuring we make the most of every second and maximising the opportunities that time affords us. Through a combination of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can open our eyes to all of the opportunities in the world around us, whilst ensuring that we deliver our best work precisely when it’s required. A win win, I’m sure you’ll agree. Structured Procrastination I’m a terrible procrastinator. I used to think that was a curse – “Why didn’t I just get started earlier?” – over time, however, I’ve started to see procrastination as a valuable tool if it is used in a structured manner. Don Norman refers to procrastination as ‘late binding’ (a term I’ve happily hijacked). As he argues, in Why Procrastination Is Good, late binding (delay, or procrastination) offers many benefits: Delaying decisions until the time for action is beneficial… it provides the maximum amount of time to think, plan, and determine alternatives. We live in a world that is constantly changing and evolving, as such the best time to execute is often ‘just in time’. By delaying decisions until the last possible moment we can arrive at solutions that address the current reality more effectively, resulting in better outcomes. Procrastination isn’t just useful from a project management perspective, however. It can also be useful for allowing your mind the space to wande… | 2016 | Christopher Murphy | christophermurphy | 2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/stretching-time/ | process |
| 284 | 284 | Subliminal User Experience | The term ‘user experience’ is often used vaguely to quantify common elements of the interaction design process: wireframing, sitemapping and so on. UX undoubtedly involves all of these principles to some degree, but there really is a lot more to it than that. Good UX is characterized by providing the user with constant feedback as they step through your interface. It means thinking about and providing fallbacks and error resolutions in even the rarest of scenarios. It’s about omitting clutter to make way for the necessary, and using the most fundamental of design tools to influence a user’s path. It means making no assumptions, designing right down to the most distinct details and going one step further every single time. In many cases, good UX is completely subliminal. There are simple tools and subtleties we can build into our products to enhance the overall experience but, in order to do so, we really have to step beyond where we usually draw the line on what to design. The purpose of this article is not to provide technical how-tos, as the functionality is, in most cases, quite simple and could be implemented in a myriad of ways. Rather, it will present a handful of ideas for enhancing the experience of an interface at a deeper level of design without relying on the container. We’ll cover three elements that should get you thinking in the right mindset: progress activity and post-active states pseudo-class preloading buttons and their (mis)behaviour Progress activity and the post-active state We’ve long established that we can’t control the devices our products are viewed on, which browser they’ll run in or what connection speed will be used to access them. We accept this all as factual, so why is it so often left to the browser to provide feedback to the user when an event is triggered or an error encountered? The browser isn’t part of the interface — it’s merely a container. A simple, visual recognition of your users’ activity may be all it takes to make or break the product. Let’s begin with a… | 2011 | Chris Sealey | chrissealey | 2011-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/subliminal-user-experience/ | ux |
| 261 | 261 | Surviving—and Thriving—as a Remote Worker | Remote work is hot right now. Many people even say that remote work is the future. Why should a company limit itself to hiring from a specific geographic location when there’s an entire world of talent out there? I’ve been working remotely, full-time, for five and a half years. I’ve reached the point where I can’t even fathom working in an office. The idea of having to wake up at a specific time and commute into an office, work for eight hours, and then commute home, feels weirdly anachronistic. I’ve grown attached to my current level of freedom and flexibility. However, it took me a lot of trial and error to reach success as a remote worker — and sometimes even now, I slip up. Working remotely requires a great amount of discipline, independence, and communication. It can feel isolating, especially if you lean towards the more extroverted side of the social spectrum. Remote working isn’t for everyone, but most people, with enough effort, can make it work — or even thrive. Here’s what I’ve learned in over five years of working remotely. Experiment with your environment As a remote worker, you have almost unprecedented control of your environment. You can often control the specific desk and chair you use, how you accessorize your home office space — whether that’s a dedicated office, a corner of your bedroom, or your kitchen table. (Ideally, not your couch… but I’ve been there.) Hate fluorescent lights? Change your lightbulbs. Cover your work area in potted plants. Put up blackout curtains and work in the dark like a vampire. Whatever makes you feel most comfortable and productive, and doesn’t completely destroy your eyesight. Working remotely doesn’t always mean working from home. If you don’t have a specific reason you need to work from home (like specialized equipment), try working from other environments (which is especially helpful it you have roommates, or children). Cafes are the quintessential remote worker hotspot, but don’t just limit yourself to your favorite local haunt. More cities worldwide are embrac… | 2018 | Mel Choyce | melchoyce | 2018-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/thriving-as-a-remote-worker/ | process |
| 328 | 328 | Swooshy Curly Quotes Without Images | The problem Take a quote and render it within blockquote tags, applying big, funky and stylish curly quotes both at the beginning and the end without using any images – at all. The traditional way Feint background images under the text, or an image in the markup housed in a little float. Often designers only use the opening curly quote as it’s just too difficult to float a closing one. Why is the traditional way bad? Well, for a start there are no actual curly quotes in the text (unless you’re doing some nifty image replacement). Thus with CSS disabled you’ll only have default blockquote styling to fall back on. Secondly, images don’t resize, so scaling text will have no affect on your graphic curlies. The solution Use really big text. Then it can be resized by the browser, resized using CSS, and even be restyled with a new font style if you fancy it. It’ll also make sense when CSS is unavailable. The problem Creating “Drop Caps” with CSS has been around for a while (Big Dan Cederholm discusses a neat solution in that first book of his), but drop caps are normal characters – the A to Z or 1 to 10 – and these can all be pulled into a set space and do not serve up a ton of whitespace, unlike punctuation characters. Curly quotes aren’t like traditional characters. Like full stops, commas and hashes they float within the character space and leave lots of dead white space, making it bloody difficult to manipulate them with CSS. Styles generally fit around text, so cutting into that character is tricky indeed. Also, all that extra white space is going to push into the quote text and make it look pretty uneven. This grab highlights the actual character space: See how this is emphasized when we add a normal alphabetical character within the span. This is what we’re dealing with here: Then, there’s size. Call in a curly quote at less than 300% font-size and it ain’t gonna look very big. The white space it creates will be big enough, but the curlies will be way too small. We need more like 700% (as in this … | 2005 | Simon Collison | simoncollison | 2005-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images/ | business |
| 300 | 300 | Taking Device Orientation for a Spin | When The Police sang “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” they weren’t talking about using a smartphone to view a panoramic image on Facebook, but they could have been. For years, technology has driven relentlessly towards devices we can carry around in our pockets, and now that we’re there, we’re expected to take the thing out of our pocket and wave it around in front of our faces like a psychotic donkey in search of its own dangly carrot. But if you can’t beat them, join them. A brave new world A couple of years back all sorts of specs for new HTML5 APIs sprang up much to our collective glee. Emboldened, we ran a few tests and found they basically didn’t work in anything and went off disheartened into the corner for a bit of a sob. Turns out, while we were all busy boohooing, those browser boffins have actually being doing some work, and lo and behold, some of these APIs are even half usable. Mostly literally half usable—we’re still talking about browsers, after all. Now, of course they’re all a bit JavaScripty and are going to involve complex methods and maths and science and probably about a thousand dependancies from Github that will fall out of fashion while we’re still trying to locate the documentation, right? Well, no! So what if we actually wanted to use one of these APIs, say to impress our friends with our ability to make them wave their phones in front of their faces (because no one enjoys looking hapless more than the easily-technologically-impressed), how could we do something like that? Let’s find out. The Device Orientation API The phone-wavy API is more formally known as the DeviceOrientation Event Specification. It does a bunch of stuff that basically doesn’t work, but also gives us three values that represent orientation of a device (a phone, a tablet, probably not a desktop computer) around its x, y and z axes. You might think of it as pitch, roll and yaw if you like to spend your weekends wearing goggles and a leather hat. The main way we access these values is through an event listener, which can … | 2016 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/ | code |
| 267 | 267 | Taming Complexity | I’m going to step into my UX trousers for this one. I wouldn’t usually wear them in public, but it’s Christmas, so there’s nothing wrong with looking silly. Anyway, to business. Wherever I roam, I hear the familiar call for simplicity and the denouncement of complexity. I read often that the simpler something is, the more usable it will be. We understand that simple is hard to achieve, but we push for it nonetheless, convinced it will make what we build easier to use. Simple is better, right? Well, I’ll try to explore that. Much of what follows will not be revelatory to some but, like all good lessons, I think this serves as a welcome reminder that as we live in a complex world it’s OK to sometimes reflect that complexity in the products we build. Myths and legends Less is more, we’ve been told, ever since master of poetic verse Robert Browning used the phrase in 1855. Well, I’ve conducted some research, and it appears he knew nothing of web design. Neither did modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a later pedlar of this worthy yet contradictory notion. Broad is narrow. Tall is short. Eggs are chips. See: anyone can come up with this stuff. To paraphrase Einstein, simple doesn’t have to be simpler. In other words, simple doesn’t dictate that we remove the complexity. Complex doesn’t have to be confusing; it can be beautiful and elegant. On the web, complex can be necessary and powerful. A website that simplifies the lives of its users by offering them everything they need in one site or screen is powerful. For some, the greater the density of information, the more useful the site. In our decision-making process, principles such as Occam’s razor’s_razor (in a nutshell: simple is better than complex) are useful, but simple is for the user to determine through their initial impression and subsequent engagement. What appears simple to me or you might appear very complex to someone else, based on their own mental model or needs. We can aim to deliver simple, but they’ll be the judge. As a designer, deve… | 2011 | Simon Collison | simoncollison | 2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/ | ux |
| 132 | 132 | Tasty Text Trimmer | In most cases, when designing a user interface it’s best to make a decision about how data is best displayed and stick with it. Failing to make a decision ultimately leads to too many user options, which in turn can be taxing on the poor old user. Under some circumstances, however, it’s good to give the user freedom in customising their workspace. One good example of this is the ‘Article Length’ tool in Apple’s Safari RSS reader. Sliding a slider left of right dynamically changes the length of each article shown. It’s that kind of awesomey magic stuff that’s enough to keep you from sleeping. Let’s build one. The Setup Let’s take a page that has lots of long text items, a bit like a news page or like Safari’s RSS items view. If we were to attach a class name to each element we wanted to resize, that would give us something to hook onto from the JavaScript. Example 1: The basic page. As you can see, I’ve wrapped my items in a DIV and added a class name of chunk to them. It’s these chunks that we’ll be finding with the JavaScript. Speaking of which … Our Core Functions There are two main tasks that need performing in our script. The first is to find the chunks we’re going to be resizing and store their original contents away somewhere safe. We’ll need this so that if we trim the text down we’ll know what it was if the user decides they want it back again. We’ll call this loadChunks. var loadChunks = function(){ var everything = document.getElementsByTagName('*'); var i, l; chunks = []; for (i=0, l=everything.length; i<l; i++){ if (everything[i].className.indexOf(chunkClass) > -1){ chunks.push({ ref: everything[i], original: everything[i].innerHTML }); } } }; The variable chunks is stored outside of this function so that we can access it from our next core function, which is doTrim. var doTrim = function(interval) { if (!chunks) loadChunks(); var i, l; for (i=0, l=chunks.length; i<l; i++){ var a = chunks[i].original.split(' '); a = a.slice(0, interval); chunks[i].ref.inner… | 2006 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2006-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/tasty-text-trimmer/ | code |
| 65 | 65 | The Accessibility Mindset | Accessibility is often characterized as additional work, hard to learn and only affecting a small number of people. Those myths have no logical foundation and often stem from outdated information or misconceptions. Indeed, it is an additional skill set to acquire, quite like learning new JavaScript frameworks, CSS layout techniques or new HTML elements. But it isn’t particularly harder to learn than those other skills. A World Health Organization (WHO) report on disabilities states that, [i]ncluding children, over a billion people (or about 15% of the world’s population) were estimated to be living with disability. Being disabled is not as unusual as one might think. Due to chronic health conditions and older people having a higher risk of disability, we are also currently paving the cowpath to an internet that we can still use in the future. Accessibility has a very close relationship with usability, and advancements in accessibility often yield improvements in the usability of a website. Websites are also more adaptable to users’ needs when they are built in an accessible fashion. Beyond the bare minimum In the time of table layouts, web developers could create code that passed validation rules but didn’t adhere to the underlying semantic HTML model. We later developed best practices, like using lists for navigation, and with HTML5 we started to wrap those lists in nav elements. Working with accessibility standards is similar. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 can inform your decision to make websites accessible and can be used to test that you met the success criteria. What it can’t do is measure how well you met them. W3C developed a long list of techniques that can be used to make your website accessible, but you might find yourself in a situation where you need to adapt those techniques to be the most usable solution for your particular problem. The checkbox below is implemented in an accessible way: The input element has an id and the label associated with the checkbox refers to the in… | 2015 | Eric Eggert | ericeggert | 2015-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/the-accessibility-mindset/ | code |
| 260 | 260 | The Art of Mathematics: A Mandala Maker Tutorial | In front-end development, there’s often a great deal of focus on tools that aim to make our work more efficient. But what if you’re new to web development? When you’re just starting out, the amount of new material can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have a solid background in Computer Science. But the truth is, once you’ve learned a little bit of JavaScript, you can already make some pretty impressive things. A couple of years back, when I was learning to code, I started working on a side project. I wanted to make something colorful and fun to share with my friends. This is what my app looks like these days: Mandala Maker user interface The coolest part about it is the fact that it’s a tool: anyone can use it to create something original and brand new. In this tutorial, we’ll build a smaller version of this app – a symmetrical drawing tool in ES5, JavaScript and HTML5. The tutorial app will have eight reflections, a color picker and a Clear button. Once we’re done, you’re on your own and can tweak it as you please. Be creative! Preparations: a blank canvas The first thing you’ll need for this project is a designated drawing space. We’ll use the HTML5 canvas element and give it a width and a height of 600px (you can set the dimensions to anything else if you like). Files Create 3 files: index.html, styles.css, main.js. Don’t forget to include your JS and CSS files in your HTML. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"> <script src="main.js"></script> </head> <body onload="init()"> <canvas width="600" height="600"> <p>Your browser doesn't support canvas.</p> </canvas> </body> </html> I’ll ask you to update your HTML file at a later point, but the CSS file we’ll start with will stay the same throughout the project. This is the full CSS we are going to use: body { background-color: #ccc; text-align: center; } canvas { touch-action: none; background-color: #fff; } button { font-size: 110%;… | 2018 | Hagar Shilo | hagarshilo | 2018-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/the-art-of-mathematics/ | code |
| 144 | 144 | The Mobile Web, Simplified | A note from the editors: although eye-opening in 2006, this article is no longer relevant to today’s mobile web. Considering a foray into mobile web development? Following are four things you need to know before making the leap. 1. 4 billion mobile subscribers expected by 2010 Fancy that. Coupled with the UN prediction of 6.8 billion humans by 2010, 4 billion mobile subscribers (source) is an astounding 59% of the planet. Just how many of those subscribers will have data plans and web-enabled phones is still in question, but inevitably this all means one thing for you and me: A ton of potential eyes to view our web content on a mobile device. 2. Context is king Your content is of little value to users if it ignores the context in which it is viewed. Consider how you access data on your mobile device. You might be holding a bottle of water or gripping a handle on the subway/tube. You’re probably seeking specific data such as directions or show times, rather than the plethora of data at your disposal via a desktop PC. The mobile web, a phrase often used to indicate “accessing the web on a mobile device”, is very much a context-, content-, and component-specific environment. Expressed in terms of your potential target audience, access to web content on a mobile device is largely influenced by surrounding circumstances and conditions, information relevant to being mobile, and the feature set of the device being used. Ask yourself, What is relevant to my users and the tasks, problems, and needs they may encounter while being mobile? Answer that question and you’ll be off to a great start. 3. WAP 2.0 is an XHTML environment In a nutshell, here are a few fundamental tenets of mobile internet technology: Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the protocol for enabling mobile access to internet content. Wireless Markup Language (WML) was the language of choice for WAP 1.0. Nearly all devices sold today are WAP 2.0 devices. With the in… | 2006 | Cameron Moll | cameronmoll | 2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/the-mobile-web-simplified/ | ux |
| 22 | 22 | The Responsive Hover Paradigm | CSS transitions and animations provide web designers with a whole slew of tools to spruce up our designs. Move over ActionScript tweens! The techniques we can now implement with CSS are reminiscent of Flash-based adventures from the pages of web history. Pairing CSS enhancements with our :hover pseudo-class allows us to add interesting events to our websites. We have a ton of power at our fingertips. However, with this power, we each have to ask ourselves: just because I can do something, should I? Why bother? We hear a lot of mantras in the web community. Some proclaim the importance of content; some encourage methods like mobile first to support content; and others warn of the overhead and speed impact of decorative flourishes and visual images. I agree, one hundred percent. At the same time, I believe that content can reign king and still provide a beautiful design with compelling interactions and acceptable performance impacts. Maybe, just maybe, we can even have a little bit of fun when crafting these systems! Yes, a site with pure HTML content and no CSS will load very fast on your mobile phone, but it leaves a lot to be desired. If you went to your local library and every book looked the same, how would you know which one to borrow? Imagine if every book was printed on the same paper stock with the same cover page in the same type size set at a legible point value… how would you know if you were going to purchase a cookbook about wild game or a young adult story about teens fighting to the death? For certain audiences, seeing a site with hip, lively hovers sure beats a stale website concept. I’ve worked on many higher education sites, and setting the interactive options is often a very important factor in engaging potential students, alumni, and donors. The same can go for e-commerce sites: enticing your audience with surprise and delight factors can be the difference between a successful and a lost sale. Knowing your content and audience can help you decide if an intriguing experience is appropria… | 2013 | Jenn Lukas | jennlukas | 2013-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/the-responsive-hover-paradigm/ | |
| 251 | 251 | The System, the Search, and the Food Bank | Imagine a warehouse, half the length of a football field, with a looped conveyer belt down the center. On the belt are plastic bins filled with assortments of shelf-stable food—one may have two bags of potato chips, seventeen pudding cups, and a box of tissues; the next, a dozen cans of beets. The conveyer belt is ringed with large, empty cardboard boxes, each labeled with categories like “Bottled Water” or “Cereal” or “Candy.” Such was the scene at my local food bank a few Saturdays ago, when some friends and I volunteered for a shift sorting donated food items. Our job was to fill the labeled cardboard boxes with the correct items nabbed from the swiftly moving, randomly stocked plastic bins. I could scarcely believe my good fortune of assignments. You want me to sort things? Into categories? For several hours? And you say there’s an element of time pressure? Listen, is there some sort of permanent position I could be conscripted into. Look, I can’t quite explain it: I just know that I love sorting, organizing, and classifying things—groceries at a food bank, but also my bookshelves, my kitchen cabinets, my craft supplies, my dishwasher arrangement, yes I am a delight to live with, why do you ask? The opportunity to create meaning from nothing is at the core of my excitement, which is why I’ve tried to build a career out of organizing digital content, and why I brought a frankly frightening level of enthusiasm to the food bank. “I can’t believe they’re letting me do this,” I whispered in awe to my conveyer belt neighbor as I snapped up a bag of popcorn for the Snacks box with the kind of ferocity usually associated with birds of prey. The jumble of donated items coming into the center need to be sorted in order for the food bank to be able to quantify, package, and distribute the food to those who need it (I sense a metaphor coming on). It’s not just a nice-to-have that we spent our morning separating cookies from carrots—it’s a crucial step in the process. Organization makes the difference between chaos and … | 2018 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2018-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/the-system-the-search-and-the-food-bank/ | content |
| 186 | 186 | The Web Is Your CMS | It is amazing what you can do these days with the services offered on the web. Flickr stores terabytes of photos for us and converts them automatically to all kind of sizes, finds people in them and even allows us to edit them online. YouTube does almost the same complete job with videos, LinkedIn allows us to maintain our CV, Delicious our bookmarks and so on. We don’t have to do these tasks ourselves any more, as all of these systems also come with ways to use the data in the form of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short. APIs give us raw data when we send requests telling the system what we want to get back. The problem is that every API has a different idea of what is a simple way of accessing this data and in which format to give it back. Making it easier to access APIs What we need is a way to abstract the pains of different data formats and authentication formats away from the developer — and this is the purpose of the Yahoo Query Language, or YQL for short. Libraries like jQuery and YUI make it easy and reliable to use JavaScript in browsers (yes, even IE6) and YQL allows us to access web services and even the data embedded in web documents in a simple fashion – SQL style. Select * from the web and filter it the way I want YQL is a web service that takes a few inputs itself: A query that tells it what to get, update or access An output format – XML, JSON, JSON-P or JSON-P-X A callback function (if you defined JSON-P or JSON-P-X) You can try it out yourself – check out this link to get back Flickr photos for the search term ‘santa’*%20from%20flickr.photos.search%20where%20text%3D%22santa%22&format=xml in XML format. The YQL query for this is select * from flickr.photos.search where text="santa" The easiest way to take your first steps with YQL is to look at the console. There you get sample queries, access to all the data sources available to you and you can easily put together complex queries. In this article, however, let’s use PHP to put together a web page that pulls i… | 2009 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2009-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/the-web-is-your-cms/ | code |
| 252 | 252 | Turn Jekyll up to Eleventy | Sometimes it pays not to over complicate things. While many of the sites we use on a daily basis require relational databases to manage their content and dynamic pages to respond to user input, for smaller, simpler sites, serving pre-rendered static HTML is usually a much cheaper — and more secure — option. The JAMstack (JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup) is a popular marketing term for this way of building websites, but in some ways it’s a return to how things were in the early days of the web, before developers started tinkering with CGI scripts or Personal HomePage. Indeed, my website has always served pre-rendered HTML; first with the aid of Movable Type and more recently using Jekyll, which Anna wrote about in 2013. By combining three approachable languages — Markdown for content, YAML for data and Liquid for templating — the ergonomics of Jekyll found broad appeal, influencing the design of the many static site generators that followed. But Jekyll is not without its faults. Aside from notoriously slow build times, it’s also built using Ruby. While this is an elegant programming language, it is yet another ecosystem to understand and manage, and often alongside one we already use: JavaScript. For all my time using Jekyll, I would think to myself “this, but in Node”. Thankfully, one of Santa’s elves (Zach Leatherman) granted my Atwoodian wish and placed such a static site generator under my tree. Introducing Eleventy Eleventy is a more flexible alternative Jekyll. Besides being written in Node, it’s less strict about how to organise files and, in addition to Liquid, supports other templating languages like EJS, Pug, Handlebars and Nunjucks. Best of all, its build times are significantly faster (with future optimisations promising further gains). As content is saved using the familiar combination of YAML front matter and Markdown, transitioning from Jekyll to Eleventy may seem like a reasonable idea. Yet as I’ve discovered, there are a few gotchas. If you’ve been considering making the switch, he… | 2018 | Paul Lloyd | paulrobertlloyd | 2018-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/turn-jekyll-up-to-eleventy/ | content |
| 16 | 16 | URL Rewriting for the Fearful | I think it was Marilyn Monroe who said, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, please just fix these rewrite rules, I’m getting an internal server error.” Even the blonde bombshell hated configuring URL rewrites on her website, and I think most of us know where she was coming from. The majority of website projects I work on require some amount of URL rewriting, and I find it mildly enjoyable — I quite like a good rewrite rule. I suspect you may not share my glee, so in this article we’re going to go back to basics to try to make the whole rigmarole more understandable. When we think about URL rewriting, usually that means adding some rules to an .htaccess file for an Apache web server. As that’s the most common case, that’s what I’ll be sticking to here. If you work with a different server, there’s often documentation specifically for translating from Apache’s mod_rewrite rules. I even found an automatic converter for nginx. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive guide to every URL rewriting problem you might ever have. That would take us until Christmas. If you consider yourself a trial-and-error dabbler in the HTTP 500-infested waters of URL rewriting, then hopefully this will provide a little bit more of a basis to help you figure out what you’re doing. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at the white screen of death after screwing up your .htaccess file, don’t worry. As Michael Jackson once insipidly whined, you are not alone. The basics Rewrite rules form part of the Apache web server’s configuration for a website, and can be placed in a number of different locations as part of your virtual host configuration. By far the simplest and most portable option is to use an .htaccess file in your website root. Provided your server has mod_rewrite available, all you need to do to kick things off in your .htaccess file is: RewriteEngine on The general formula for a rewrite rule is: RewriteRule URL/to/match URL/to/use/if/it/matches [options] When we talk about URL rewriting, we’re normally talking about one o… | 2013 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/ | code |
| 49 | 49 | Universal React | One of the libraries to receive a huge amount of focus in 2015 has been ReactJS, a library created by Facebook for building user interfaces and web applications. More generally we’ve seen an even greater rise in the number of applications built primarily on the client side with most of the logic implemented in JavaScript. One of the main issues with building an app in this way is that you immediately forgo any customers who might browse with JavaScript turned off, and you can also miss out on any robots that might visit your site to crawl it (such as Google’s search bots). Additionally, we gain a performance improvement by being able to render from the server rather than having to wait for all the JavaScript to be loaded and executed. The good news is that this problem has been recognised and it is possible to build a fully featured client-side application that can be rendered on the server. The way in which these apps work is as follows: The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page. In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page. The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control. If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again. This means you can still provide a very quick and snappy experience for JavaScript users without having to abandon your non-JS users. We achieve this by writing JavaScript that can be executed on the server or on the client (you might have heard this referred to as isomorphic) and using a JavaScript framework that’s clever enough handle server- or client-side execution. Currently, ReactJS is leading the way here, although Ember and Angular are both working on solutions to this problem. It’s worth noting that this tutorial assumes some familiarity with React in general, its syntax and concepts. If you’d like a refresher, th… | 2015 | Jack Franklin | jackfranklin | 2015-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/universal-react/ | code |
| 96 | 96 | Unwrapping the Wii U Browser | The Wii U was released on 18 November 2012 in the US, and 30 November in the UK. It’s the first eighth generation home console, the first mainstream second-screen device, and it has some really impressive browser specs. Consoles are not just for games now: they’re marketed as complete entertainment solutions. Internet connectivity and browser functionality have gone from a nice-to-have feature in game consoles to a selling point. In Nintendo’s case, they see it as a challenge to design an experience that’s better than browsing on a desktop. Let’s make a browser that users can use on a daily basis, something that can really handle everything we’ve come to expect from a browser and do it more naturally. Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com With 11% of people using console browsers to visit websites, it’s important to consider these devices right from the start of projects. Browsing the web on a TV or handheld console is a very different experience to browsing on a desktop or a mobile phone, and has many usability implications. Console browser testing When I’m testing a console browser, one of the first things I do is run Niels Leenheer’s HTML5 test and Lea Verou’s CSS3 test. I use these benchmarks as a rough comparison of the standards each browser supports. In October, IE9 came out for the Xbox 360, scoring 120/500 in the HTML5 test and 32% in the CSS3 test. The PS Vita also had an update to its browser in recent weeks, jumping from 58/500 to 243/500 in the HTML5 test, and 32% to 55% in the CSS3 test. Manufacturers have been stepping up their game, trying to make their browsing experiences better. To give you an idea of how the Wii U currently compares to other devices, here are the test results of the other TV consoles I’ve tested. I’ve written more in-depth notes on TV and portable console browsers separately. Year of releaseHTML5 scoreCSS3 scoreNotes Wii U2012258/50048%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit). Wii200689/500Wouldn’t runRuns an Opera browser. PS3200668/50038%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit). X… | 2012 | Anna Debenham | annadebenham | 2012-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/unwrapping-the-wii-u-browser/ | ux |
| 71 | 71 | Upping Your Web Security Game | When I started working in web security fifteen years ago, web development looked very different. The few non-static web applications were built using a waterfall process and shipped quarterly at best, making it possible to add security audits before every release; applications were deployed exclusively on in-house servers, allowing Info Sec to inspect their configuration and setup; and the few third-party components used came from a small set of well-known and trusted providers. And yet, even with these favourable conditions, security teams were quickly overwhelmed and called for developers to build security in. If the web security game was hard to win before, it’s doomed to fail now. In today’s web development, every other page is an application, accepting inputs and private data from users; software is built continuously, designed to eliminate manual gates, including security gates; infrastructure is code, with servers spawned with little effort and even less security scrutiny; and most of the code in a typical application is third-party code, pulled in through open source repositories with rarely a glance at who provided them. Security teams, when they exist at all, cannot solve this problem. They are vastly outnumbered by developers, and cannot keep up with the application’s pace of change. For us to have a shot at making the web secure, we must bring security into the core. We need to give it no less attention than that we give browser compatibility, mobile design or web page load times. More broadly, we should see security as an aspect of quality, expecting both ourselves and our peers to address it, and taking pride when we do it well. Where To Start? Embracing security isn’t something you do overnight. A good place to start is by reviewing things you’re already doing – and trying to make them more secure. Here are three concrete steps you can take to get going. HTTPS Threats begin when your system interacts with the outside world, which often means HTTP. As is, HTTP is painfully insecure, allowing attacke… | 2015 | Guy Podjarny | guypodjarny | 2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/upping-your-web-security-game/ | code |
| 107 | 107 | Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network | Do you remember, years ago, when hosting was expensive, domain names were the province of the rich, and you hosted your web pages on Geocities? It seems odd to me now that there was a time when each and every geek didn’t have his own top-level domain and super hosting setup. But as the parts became more and more affordable a man could become an outcast if he didn’t have his own slightly surreal-sounding TLD. And so it will be in the future when people realise with surprise there was a time before affordable content delivery networks. A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system of servers spread around the world, serving files from the nearest physical location. Instead of waiting for a file to find its way from a server farm in Silicon Valley 8,000 kilometres away, I can receive it from London, Dublin, or Paris, cutting down the time I wait. The big names — Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et al — use CDNs for their sites, but they’ve always been far too expensive for us mere mortals. Until now. There’s a service out there ready for you to use as your very own CDN. You have the company’s blessing, you won’t need to write a line of code, and — best of all — it’s free. The name? Google App Engine. In this article you’ll find out how to set up a CDN on Google App Engine. You’ll get the development software running on your own computer, tell App Engine what files to serve, upload them to a web site, and give everyone round the world access to them. Creating your first Google App Engine project Before we do anything else, you’ll need to download the Google App Engine software development kit (SDK). You’ll need Python 2.5 too — you won’t be writing any Python code but the App Engine SDK will need it to run on your computer. If you don’t have Python, App Engine will install it for you (if you use Mac OS X 10.5 or a Linux-based OS you’ll have Python; if you use Windows you won’t). Done that? Excellent, because that’s the hardest step. The rest is plain sailing. You’ll need to choose a unique ‘application id’ — nothing … | 2008 | Matt Riggott | mattriggott | 2008-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn/ | process |
| 207 | 207 | Want to Break Out of Comparison Syndrome? Do a Media Detox | “Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt I grew up in an environment of perpetual creativity and inventiveness. My father Dennis built and flew experimental aircraft as a hobby. During my entire childhood, there was an airplane fuselage in the garage instead of a car. My mother Deloria was a self-taught master artisan who could quickly acquire any skills that it took to work with fabric and weaving. She could sew any garment she desired, and was able to weave intricate wall hangings just by looking at a black and white photos in magazines. My older sister Diane blossomed into a consummate fine artist who drew portraits with uncanny likeness, painted murals, and studied art and architecture. In addition, she loved good food and had a genius for cooking and baking, which converged in her creating remarkable art pieces out of cake that were incredibly delicious to boot. Yes. This was the household in which I grew up. While there were countless positives to being surrounded by people who were compelled to create, there was also a downside to it. I incessantly compared myself to my parents and older sister and always found myself lacking. It wasn’t a fair comparison, but tell that to a sensitive kid who wanted to fit in to her family by being creative as well. From my early years throughout my teens, I convinced myself that I would never understand how to build an airplane or at least be as proficient with tools as my father, the aeronautical engineer. Even though my sister was six years older than I was, I lamented that I would never be as good a visual artist as she was. And I marveled at my mother’s seemingly magical ability to make and tailor clothes and was certain that I would never attain her level of mastery. This habit of comparing myself to others grew over the years, continuing to subtly and effectively undermine my sense of self. I had almost reached an uneasy truce with my comparison habit when social media happened. As an early adopter of Twitter, I loved staying connected to people I met a… | 2017 | Denise Jacobs | denisejacobs | 2017-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/do-a-media-detox/ | process |
| 292 | 292 | Watch Your Language! | I’m bilingual. My first language is French. I learned English in my early 20s. Learning a new language later in life meant that I was able to observe my thought processes changing over time. It made me realize that some concepts can’t be expressed in some languages, while other languages express these concepts with ease. It also helped me understand the way we label languages. English: business. French: romance. Here’s an example of how words, or the absence thereof, can affect the way we think: In French we love everything. There’s no straightforward way to say we like something, so we just end up loving everything. I love my sisters, I love broccoli, I love programming, I love my partner, I love doing laundry (this is a lie), I love my mom (this is not a lie). I love, I love, I love. It’s no wonder French is considered romantic. When I first learned English I used the word love rather than like because I hadn’t grasped the difference. Needless to say, I’ve scared away plenty of first dates! Learning another language made me realize the limitations of my native language and revealed concepts I didn’t know existed. Without the nuances a given language provides, we fail to express what we really think. The absence of words in our vocabulary gets in the way of effectively communicating and considering ideas. When I lived in Montréal, most people in my circle spoke both French and English. I could switch between them when I could more easily express an idea in one language or the other. I liked (or should I say loved?) those conversations. They were meaningful. They were efficient. I’m quadrilingual. I code in Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python. In the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to write code in these languages at a massive scale. In learning Ruby, much like learning English, I discovered the strengths and limitations of not only the languages I knew but the language I was learning. It taught me to choose the right tool for the job. When I started working at Shopify, making a change to a view inv… | 2016 | Annie-Claude Côté | annieclaudecote | 2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/watch-your-language/ | code |
| 245 | 245 | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update | Happy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2018! The United Nations chose “Empowering persons with disabilities and ensuring inclusiveness and equality” as this year’s theme. We’ve seen great examples of that in 2018; for example, Paul Robert Lloyd has detailed how he improved the accessibility of this very website. On social media, US Congressmember-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started using the Clipomatic app to add live captions to her Instagram live stories, conforming to success criterion 1.2.4, “Captions (Live)” of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (figure 1) …and British Vogue Contributing Editor Sinéad Burke has used the split-screen feature of Instagram live stories to invite an interpreter to provide live Sign Language interpretation, going above and beyond success criterion 1.2.6, “Sign Language (Prerecorded)” of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (figure 2). Figure 1: Screenshot of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story with live captionsFigure 2: Screenshot of Sinéad Burke’s Instagram story with Sign Language Interpretation That theme chimes with this year’s publication of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. In last year’s “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them”, I mentioned the scale of the project to produce this update during 2018: “the editors have to update the guidelines to cover all the new ways that people interact with new technologies, while keeping the guidelines backwards-compatible”. The WCAG working group have added 17 success criteria to the 61 that they released way back in 2008—for context, that was 1½ years before Apple released their first iPad! These new criteria make it easier than ever for us web geeks to produce work that is more accessible to people using mobile devices and touchscreens, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities. Once again, let’s rip off all the legalese and ambiguous terminology like wrapping pap… | 2018 | Alan Dalton | alandalton | 2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/wcag-for-people-who-havent-read-the-update/ | ux |
| 193 | 193 | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven't Read Them | I’ve been a huge fan of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published them, nine years ago. I’ve found them practical and future-proof, and I’ve found that they can save a huge amount of time for designers and developers. You can apply them to anything that you can open in a browser. My favourite part is when I use the guidelines to make a website accessible, and then attend user-testing and see someone with a disability easily using that website. Today, the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities, seems like a good time to re-read Laura Kalbag’s explanation of why we should bother with accessibility. That should motivate you to devour this article. If you haven’t read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, you might find them a bit off-putting at first. The editors needed to create a single standard that countries around the world could refer to in legislation, and so some of the language in the guidelines reads like legalese. The editors also needed to future-proof the guidelines, and so some terminology—such as “time-based media” and “programmatically determined”—can sound ambiguous. The guidelines can seem lengthy, too: printing the guidelines, the Understanding WCAG 2.0 document, and the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 document would take 1,200 printed pages. This festive season, let’s rip off that legalese and ambiguous terminology like wrapping paper, and see—in a single article—what gifts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 editors have bestowed upon us. Can your users perceive the information on your website? The first guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking “What the **** is this thing here supposed to be?” 1.1.1 Text is the most accessible format for information. Screen readers—such as the “VoiceOver” setting on your iPhone or the “TalkBack” app on your Android phone—understand text better than any other format. The same applies for other assistive technology, such as translation apps and Braill… | 2017 | Alan Dalton | alandalton | 2017-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/wcag-for-people-who-havent-read-them/ | code |
| 67 | 67 | What I Learned about Product Design This Year | 2015 was a humbling year for me. In September of 2014, I joined a tiny but established startup called SproutVideo as their third employee and first designer. The role interests me because it affords the opportunity to see how design can grow a solid product with a loyal user-base into something even better. The work I do now could also have a real impact on the brand and user experience of our product for years to come, which is a thrilling prospect in an industry where much of what I do feels small and temporary. I got in on the ground floor of something special: a small, dedicated, useful company that cares deeply about making video hosting effortless and rewarding for our users. I had (and still have) grand ideas for what thoughtful design can do for a product, and the smaller-scale product design work I’ve done or helped manage over the past few years gave me enough eager confidence to dive in head first. Readers who have experience redesigning complex existing products probably have a knowing smirk on their face right now. As I said, it’s been humbling. A year of focused product design, especially on the scale we are trying to achieve with our small team at SproutVideo, has taught me more than any projects in recent memory. I’d like to share a few of those lessons. Product design is very different from marketing design The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love. Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures… | 2015 | Meagan Fisher | meaganfisher | 2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/ | design |
| 41 | 41 | What Is Vagrant and Why Should I Care? | If you run a web server, a database server and your scripting language(s) of choice on your main machine and you have not yet switched to using virtualisation in your workflow then this essay may be of some value to you. I know you exist because I bump into you daily: freelancers coming in to work on our projects; internet friends complaining about reinstalling a development environment because of an operating system upgrade; fellow agency owners who struggle to brief external help when getting a particular project up and running; or even hardcore back-end developers who “don’t do ops” and prefer to run their development stack of choice locally. There are many perfectly reasonable arguments as to why you may not have already made the switch, from being simply too busy, all the way through to a distrust of the new. I’ll admit that there are many new technologies or workflows that I hear of daily and instantly disregard because I have tool overload, that feeling I get when I hear about a new shiny thing and think “Well, what I do now works – I’ll leave it for others to play with.” If that’s you when it comes to Vagrant then I hope you’ll hear me out. The business case is compelling enough for you to make that switch; as a bonus it’s also really easy to get going. In this article we’ll start off by going through the high level, the tools available and how it all fits together. Then we’ll touch on the justification for making the switch, providing a few use cases that might resonate with you. Finally, I’ll provide a very simple example that you can follow to get yourself up and running. What? You already know what virtualisation is. You use the ability to run an operating system within another operating system every day. Whether that’s Parallels or VMware on your laptop or similar server-based tools that drive the ‘cloud’, squeezing lots of machines on to physical hardware and making it really easy to copy servers and even clusters of servers from one place to another. It’s an amazing technology which has change… | 2014 | Darren Beale | darrenbeale | 2014-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-is-vagrant-and-why-should-i-care/ | process |
| 29 | 29 | What It Takes to Build a Website | In 1994 we lost Kurt Cobain and got the world wide web as a weird consolation prize. In the years that followed, if you’d asked me if I knew how to build a website I’d have said yes, I know HTML, so I know how to build a website. If you’d then asked me what it takes to build a website, I’d have had to admit that HTML would hardly feature. Among the design nerdery and dev geekery it’s easy to think that the nuts and bolts of building a page just need to be multiplied up and Ta-da! There’s your website. That can certainly be true with weekend projects and hackery for fun. It works for throwing something together on GitHub or experimenting with ideas on your personal site. But what about working professionally on client projects? The web is important, so we need to build it right. It’s 2015 – your job involves people paying you money for building websites. What does it take to build a website and to do it right? What practices should we adopt to make really great, successful and professional web projects in 2015? I put that question to some friends and 24 ways authors to see what they thought. Getting the tech right Inevitably, it all starts with the technology. We work in a technical medium, after all. From Notepad and WinFTP through to continuous integration and deployment – how do you build sites? Create a stable development environment There’s little more likely to send a web developer into a wild panic and a client into a wild rage than making a new site live and things just not working. That’s why it’s important to have realistic development and staging environments that mimic the live server as closely as possible. Are you in the habit of developing new sites right on the client’s server? Or maybe in a subfolder on your local machine? It’s time to reconsider. Charlie Perrins writes: Don’t work on a live server – this feels like one of those gear-changing moments for a developer’s growth. Build something that works just as well locally on your own machine as it does on a live server, and capture th… | 2014 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-it-takes-to-build-a-website/ | business |
| 299 | 299 | What the Heck Is Inclusive Design? | Naming things is hard. And I don’t just mean CSS class names and JSON properties. Finding the right term for what we do with the time we spend awake and out of bed turns out to be really hard too. I’ve variously gone by “front-end developer”, “user experience designer”, and “accessibility engineer”, all clumsy and incomplete terms for labeling what I do as an… erm… see, there’s the problem again. It’s tempting to give up entirely on trying to find the right words for things, but this risks summarily dispensing with thousands of years spent trying to qualify the world around us. So here we are again. Recently, I’ve been using the term “inclusive design” and calling myself an “inclusive designer” a lot. I’m not sure where I first heard it or who came up with it, but the terminology feels like a good fit for the kind of stuff I care to do when I’m not at a pub or asleep. This article is about what I think “inclusive design” means and why I think you might like it as an idea. Isn’t ‘inclusive design’ just ‘accessibility’ by another name? No, I don’t think so. But that’s not to say the two concepts aren’t related. Note the ‘design’ part in ‘inclusive design’ — that’s not just there by accident. Inclusive design describes a design activity; a way of designing things. This sets it apart from accessibility — or at least our expectations of what ‘accessibility’ entails. Despite every single accessibility expert I know (and I know a lot) recommending that accessibility should be integrated into design process, it is rarely ever done. Instead, it is relegated to an afterthought, limiting its effect. The term ‘accessibility’ therefore lacks the power to connote design process. It’s not that we haven’t tried to salvage the term, but it’s beginning to look like a lost cause. So maybe let’s use a new term, because new things take new names. People get that. The ‘access’ part of accessibility is also problematic. Before we get ahead of ourselves, I don’t mean access is a problem — access is good, and the more accessible somethin… | 2016 | Heydon Pickering | heydonpickering | 2016-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/what-the-heck-is-inclusive-design/ | process |
| 60 | 60 | What’s Ahead for Your Data in 2016? | Who owns your data? Who decides what can you do with it? Where can you store it? What guarantee do you have over your data’s privacy? Where can you publish your work? Can you adapt software to accommodate your disability? Is your tiny agency subject to corporate regulation? Does another country have rights over your intellectual property? If you aren’t the kind of person who is interested in international politics, I hate to break it to you: in 2016 the legal foundations which underpin our work on the web are being revisited in not one but three major international political agreements, and every single one of those questions is up for grabs. These agreements – the draft EU Data Protection Regulation (EUDPR), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – stand poised to have a major impact on your data, your workflows, and your digital rights. While some proposed changes could protect the open web for the future, other provisions would set the internet back several decades. In this article we will review the issues you need to be aware of as a digital professional. While each of these agreements covers dozens of topics ranging from climate change to food safety, we will focus solely on the aspects which pertain to the work we do on the web. The Trans-Pacific Partnership The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement between the US, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru – a bloc comprising 40% of the world’s economy. The agreement is expected to be signed by all parties, and thereby to come into effect, in 2016. This agreement is ostensibly about the bloc and its members working together for their common interests. However, the latest draft text of the TPP, which was formulated entirely in secret, has only been made publicly available on a Medium blog published by the U.S. Trade Representative which features a patriotic banner at the top proclaiming “TPP: Made in America.” The m… | 2015 | Heather Burns | heatherburns | 2015-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/whats-ahead-for-your-data-in-2016/ | business |
| 1 | 1 | Why Bother with Accessibility? | Web accessibility (known in other fields as inclusive design or universal design) is the degree to which a website is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility is most often used to describe how people with disabilities can access the web. How we approach accessibility In the web community, there’s a surprisingly inconsistent approach to accessibility. There are some who are endlessly dedicated to accessible web design, and there are some who believe it so intrinsic to the web that it shouldn’t be considered a separate topic. Still, of those who are familiar with accessibility, there’s an overwhelming number of designers, developers, clients and bosses who just aren’t that bothered. Over the last few months I’ve spoken to a lot of people about accessibility, and I’ve heard the same reasons to ignore it over and over again. Let’s take a look at the most common excuses. Excuse 1: “People with disabilities don’t really use the web” Accessibility will make your site available to more people — the inclusion case In the same way that the accessibility of a building isn’t just about access for wheelchair users, web accessibility isn’t just about blind users and screen readers. We can affect positively the lives of many people by making their access to the web easier. There are four main types of disability that affect use of the web: Visual Blindness, low vision and colour-blindness Auditory Profoundly deaf and hard of hearing Motor The inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control Cognitive Learning difficulties, distractibility, the inability to focus on large amounts of information None of these disabilities are completely black and white Examining deafness, it’s clear from the medical scale that there are many grey areas between full hearing and total deafness: mild moderate moderately severe severe profound totally deaf For eyesight, and brain conditions that affect what users see, there is a huge range of conditions and challenges: astigmatis… | 2013 | Laura Kalbag | laurakalbag | 2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/ | design |
| 205 | 205 | Why Design Systems Fail | Design systems are so hot right now, and for good reason. They promote a modular approach to building a product, and ensure organizational unity and stability via reusable code snippets and utility styles. They make prototyping a breeze, and provide a common language for both designers and developers. A design system is a culmination of several individual components, which can include any or all of the following (and more): Style guide or visual pattern library Design tooling (e.g. Sketch Library) Component library (where the components live in code) Code usage guidelines and documentation Design usage documentation Voice and tone guideline Animation language guideline Design systems are standalone (internal or external) products, and have proven to be very effective means of design-driven development. However, in order for a design system to succeed, everyone needs to get on board. I’d like to go over a few considerations to ensure design system success and what could hinder that success. Organizational Support Put simply, any product, including internal products, needs support. Something as cross-functional as a design system, which spans every vertical project team, needs support from the top and bottom levels of your organization. What I mean by that is that there needs to be top-level support from project managers up through VP’s to see the value of a design system, to provide resources for its implementation, and advocate for its use company-wide. This is especially important in companies where such systems are being put in place on top of existing, crufty codebases, because it may mean there needs to be some time and effort put in the calendar for refactoring work. Support from the bottom-up means that designers and engineers of all levels also need to support this system and feel responsibility for it. A design system is an organization’s product, and everyone should feel confident contributing to it. If your design system supports external clients as well (such as contractors), they too can become val… | 2017 | Una Kravets | unakravets | 2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/why-design-systems-fail/ | process |
| 28 | 28 | Why You Should Design for Open Source | Let’s be honest. Most designers don’t like working for nothing. We rally against spec work and make a stand for contracts and getting paid. That’s totally what you should do as a professional designer in the industry. It’s your job. It’s your hard-working skill. It’s your bread and butter. Get paid. However, I’m going to make a case for why you could also consider designing for open source. First, I should mention that not all open source work is free work. Some companies hire open source contributors to work on their projects full-time, usually because that project is used by said company. There are other companies that encourage open source contribution and even offer 20%-time for these projects (where you can spend one day a week contributing to open source). These are super rad situations to be in. However, whether you’re able to land a gig doing this type of work, or you’ve decided to volunteer your time and energy, designing for open source can be rewarding in many other ways. Portfolio building New designers often find themselves in a catch-22 situation: they don’t have enough work experience showcased in their portfolio, which leads to them not getting much work because their portfolio is bare. These new designers often turn to unsolicited redesigns to fill their portfolio. An unsolicited redesign is a proof of concept in which a designer attempts to redesign a popular website. You can see many of these concepts on sites like Dribbble and Behance and there are even websites dedicated to showcasing these designs, such as Uninvited Designs. There’s even a subreddit for them. There are quite a few negative opinions on unsolicited redesigns, though some people see things from both sides. If you feel like doing one or two of these to fill your portfolio, that’s of course up to you. But here’s a better suggestion. Why not contribute design for an open source project instead? You can easily find many projects in great need of design work, from branding to information design, documentation, and website or ap… | 2014 | Jina Anne | jina | 2014-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/why-you-should-design-for-open-source/ | design |
| 233 | 233 | Wrapping Things Nicely with HTML5 Local Storage | HTML5 is here to turn the web from a web of hacks into a web of applications – and we are well on the way to this goal. The coming year will be totally and utterly awesome if you are excited about web technologies. This year the HTML5 revolution started and there is no stopping it. For the first time all the browser vendors are rallying together to make a technology work. The new browser war is fought over implementation of the HTML5 standard and not over random additions. We live in exciting times. Starting with a bang As with every revolution there is a lot of noise with bangs and explosions, and that’s the stage we’re at right now. HTML5 showcases are often CSS3 showcases, web font playgrounds, or video and canvas examples. This is great, as it gets people excited and it gives the media something to show. There is much more to HTML5, though. Let’s take a look at one of the less sexy, but amazingly useful features of HTML5 (it was in the HTML5 specs, but grew at such an alarming rate that it warranted its own spec): storing information on the client-side. Why store data on the client-side? Storing information in people’s browsers affords us a few options that every application should have: You can retain the state of an application – when the user comes back after closing the browser, everything will be as she left it. That’s how ‘real’ applications work and this is how the web ones should, too. You can cache data – if something doesn’t change then there is no point in loading it over the Internet if local access is so much faster You can store user preferences – without needing to keep that data on your server at all. In the past, storing local data wasn’t much fun. The pain of hacky browser solutions In the past, all we had were cookies. I don’t mean the yummy things you get with your coffee, endorsed by the blue, furry junkie in Sesame Street, but the other, digital ones. Cookies suck – it isn’t fun to have an unencrypted HTTP overhead on every server request for storing four kilobytes of data… | 2010 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/html5-local-storage/ | code |
| 276 | 276 | Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck | Fun fact: more websites are now using jQuery than Flash. jQuery is an amazing tool that’s made JavaScript accessible to developers and designers of all levels of experience. However, as Spiderman taught us, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The unfortunate downside to jQuery is that while it makes it easy to write JavaScript, it makes it easy to write really really f*&#ing bad JavaScript. Scripts that slow down page load, unresponsive user interfaces, and spaghetti code knotted so deep that it should come with a bottle of whiskey for the next sucker developer that has to work on it. This becomes more important for those of us who have yet to move into the magical fairy wonderland where none of our clients or users view our pages in Internet Explorer. The IE JavaScript engine moves at the speed of an advancing glacier compared to more modern browsers, so optimizing our code for performance takes on an even higher level of urgency. Thankfully, there are a few very simple things anyone can add into their jQuery workflow that can clear up a lot of basic problems. When undertaking code reviews, three of the areas where I consistently see the biggest problems are: inefficient selectors; poor event delegation; and clunky DOM manipulation. We’ll tackle all three of these and hopefully you’ll walk away with some new jQuery batarangs to toss around in your next project. Selector optimization Selector speed: fast or slow? Saying that the power behind jQuery comes from its ability to select DOM elements and act on them is like saying that Photoshop is a really good tool for selecting pixels on screen and making them change color – it’s a bit of a gross oversimplification, but the fact remains that jQuery gives us a ton of ways to choose which element or elements in a page we want to work with. However, a surprising number of web developers are unaware that all selectors are not created equal; in fact, it’s incredible just how drastic the performance difference can be between two selectors that, at first g… | 2011 | Scott Kosman | scottkosman | 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/your-jquery-now-with-less-suck/ | code |
| 221 | 221 | “Probably, Maybe, No”: The State of HTML5 Audio | With the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 exceeding levels not seen since 2005’s Ajax era, it’s worth noting that the excitement comes with good reason: the two specifications render many years of feature hacks redundant by replacing them with native features. For fun, consider how many CSS2-based rounded corners hacks you’ve probably glossed over, looking for a magic solution. These days, with CSS3, the magic is border-radius (and perhaps some vendor prefixes) followed by a coffee break. CSS3’s border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and gradients, and HTML5’s <canvas>, <audio> and <video> are some of the most anticipated features we’ll see put to creative (ab)use as adoption of the ‘new shiny’ grows. Developers jumping on the cutting edge are using subsets of these features to little detriment, in most cases. The more popular CSS features are design flourishes that can degrade nicely, but the current audio and video implementations in particular suffer from a number of annoyances. The new shiny: how we got here Sound involves one of the five senses, a key part of daily life for most – and yet it has been strangely absent from HTML and much of the web by default. From a simplistic perspective, it seems odd that HTML did not include support for the full multimedia experience earlier, despite the CD-ROM-based craze of the early 1990s. In truth, standards like HTML can take much longer to bake, but eventually deliver the promise of a lowered barrier to entry, consistent implementations and shiny new features now possible ‘for free’ just about everywhere. <img> was introduced early and naturally to HTML, despite having some opponents at the time. Perhaps <audio> and <video> were avoided, given the added technical complexity of decoding various multi-frame formats, plus the hardware and bandwidth limitations of the era. Perhaps there were quarrels about choosing a standard format or – more simply – maybe these elements just weren’t considered to be applicable to the HTML-based web at the time. In any event, browser plug… | 2010 | Scott Schiller | scottschiller | 2010-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/the-state-of-html5-audio/ | code |
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