This code only worked in Internet Explorer and in some versions of Safari, but that was plenty of people to befriend. However, MySpace was prepared for this: they also filtered the word javascript from
Samy discovered that by inserting a line break into his code, MySpace would not filter out the word javascript. The browser would continue to run the code just fine! Samy had now broken past MySpace’s first line of defence and was able to start running code on his profile page. Now he started looking at what he could do with that code.
alert(document.body.innerHTML)
Samy wondered if he could inspect the page’s source to find the details of other MySpace users to befriend. To do this, you would normally use document.body.innerHTML, but MySpace had filtered this too.
alert(eval('document.body.inne' + 'rHTML'))
This isn’t a problem if you build up JavaScript code inside a string and execute it using the eval() function. This trick also worked with XMLHttpRequest.onReadyStateChange, which allowed Samy to send friend requests to the MySpace API and install the JavaScript code on his new friends’ pages.
One final obstacle stood in his way. The same origin policy is a security mechanism that prevents scripts hosted on one domain interacting with sites hosted on another domain.
if (location.hostname == 'profile.myspace.com') {
document.location = 'http://www.myspace.com'
+ location.pathname + location.search
}
Samy discovered that only the http://www.myspace.com domain would accept his API requests, and requests from http://profile.myspace.com were being blocked by the browser’s same-origin policy. By redirecting the browser to http://www.myspace.com, he discovered that he could load profile pages and successfully make requests to MySpace’s API. Samy installed this code on his profile page, and he waited.
Over the course of the next day, over a million people unwittingly installed Samy’s code into their MySpace profile pages and invited their friends. The load of friend requests on MySpace was so large that the site buckled and shut down. It took them two hours to remove Samy’s code and patch the security holes he exploited. Samy was raided by the United States secret service and sentenced to do 90 days of community service.
This is the power of installing a little bit of JavaScript on someone else’s website. It is called cross site scripting, and its effects can be devastating. It is suspected that cross-site scripting was to blame for the 2018 British Airways breach that leaked the credit card details of 380,000 people.
So how can you help protect yourself from cross-site scripting?
Always sanitise user input when it comes in, using a library such as sanitize-html. Open source tools like this benefit from hundreds of hours of work from dozens of experienced contributors. Don’t be tempted to roll your own protection. MySpace was prepared, but they were not prepared enough. It makes no sense to turn this kind of help down.
You can also use an auto-escaping templating language to make sure nobody else’s HTML can get into your pages. Both Angular and React will do this for you, and they are extremely convenient to use.
You should also implement a content security policy to restrict the domains that content like scripts and stylesheets can be loaded from. Loading content from sites not under your control is a significant security risk, and you should use a CSP to lock this down to only the sources you trust. CSP can also block the use of the eval() function.
For content not under your control, consider setting up sub-resource integrity protection. This allows you to add hashes to stylesheets and scripts you include on your website. Hashes are like fingerprints for digital files; if the content changes, so does the fingerprint. Adding hashes will allow your browser to keep your site safe if the content changes without you knowing.
npm audit: Protecting yourself from code you don’t own
JavaScript and npm run the modern web. Together, they make it easy to take advantage of the world’s largest public registry of open source software. How do you protect yourself from code written by someone you’ve never met? Enter npm audit.
npm audit reviews the security of your website’s dependency tree. You can start using it by upgrading to the latest version of npm:
npm install npm -g
npm audit
When you run npm audit, npm submits a description of your dependencies to the Registry, which returns a report of known vulnerabilities for the packages you have installed.
If your website has a known cross-site scripting vulnerability, npm audit will tell you about it. What’s more, if the vulnerability has been patched, running npm audit fix will automatically install the patched package for you!
Securing your site like it’s 2019
The truth is that since the early days of the web, the stakes of a security breach have become much, much higher. The web is so much more than fandom and mailing DVDs - online banking is now mainstream, social media and dating websites store intimate information about our personal lives, and we are even inviting the internet into our homes.
However, we have powerful new allies helping us stay safe. There are more resources than ever before to teach us how to write secure code. Tools like Angular and React are designed with security features baked-in from the start. We have a new generation of security tools like npm audit to watch over our dependencies.
As we roll over into 2019, let’s take the opportunity to reflect on the security of the code we write and be grateful for the everything we’ve learned in the last twenty years.",2018,Katie Fenn,katiefenn,2018-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/securing-your-site-like-its-1999/,code
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 Braille displays. So, if you have anything on your webpage that’s not text, you must add some text that gives your user the same information. You probably know how to do this already; for example:
for images in webpages, put some alternative text in an alt attribute to tell your user what the image conveys to the user;
for photos in tweets, add a description to make the images accessible;
for Instagram posts, write a caption that conveys the photo’s information.
The alternative text should allow the user to get the same information as someone who can see the image. For websites that have too many images for someone to add alternative text to, consider how machine learning and Dynamically Generated Alt Text might—might—be appropriate.
You can probably think of a few exceptions where providing text to describe an image might not make sense. Remember I described these guidelines as “practical”? They cover all those exceptions:
User interface controls such as buttons and text inputs must have names or labels to tell your user what they do.
If your webpage has video or audio (more about these later on!), you must—at least—have text to tell the user what they are.
Maybe your webpage has a test where your user has to answer a question about an image or some audio, and alternative text would give away the answer. In that case, just describe the test in text so your users know what it is.
If your webpage features a work of art, tell your user the experience it evokes.
If you have to include a Captcha on your webpage—and please avoid Captchas if at all possible, because some users cannot get past them—you must include text to tell your user what it is, and make sure that it doesn’t rely on only one sense, such as vision.
If you’ve included something just as decoration, you must make sure that your user’s assistive technology can ignore it. Again, you probably know how to do this. For example, you could use CSS instead of HTML to include decorative images, or you could add an empty alt attribute to the img element. (Please avoid that recent trend where developers add empty alt attributes to all images in a webpage just to make the HTML validate. You’re better than that.)
(Notice that the guidelines allow you to choose how to conform to them, with whatever technology you choose. To make your website conform to a guideline, you can either choose one of the techniques for WCAG 2.0 for that guideline or come up with your own. Choosing a tried-and-tested technique usually saves time!)
1.2.1 If your website includes a podcast episode, speech, lecture, or any other recorded audio without video, you must include a transcription or some other text to give your user the same information. In a lot of cases, you might find this easier than you expect: professional transcription services can prove relatively inexpensive and fast, and sometimes a speaker or lecturer can provide the speech or lecture notes that they read out word-for-word. Just make sure that all your users can get the same information and the same results, whether they can hear the audio or not. For example, David Smith and Marco Arment always publish episode transcripts for their Under the Radar podcast.
Similarly, if your website includes recorded video without audio—such as an animation or a promotional video—you must either use text to detail what happens in the video or include an audio version. Again, this might work out easier then you perhaps fear: for example, you could check to see whether the animation started life as a list of instructions, or whether the promotional video conveys the same information as the “About Us” webpage. You want to make sure that all your users can get the same information and the same results, whether they can see that video or not.
1.2.2 If your website includes recorded videos with audio, you must add captions to those videos for users who can’t hear the audio. Professional transcription services can provide you with time-stamped text in caption formats that YouTube supports, such as .srt and .sbv. You can upload those to YouTube, so captions appear on your videos there. YouTube can auto-generate captions, but the quality varies from impressively accurate to comically inaccurate. If you have a text version of what the people in the video said—such as the speech that a politician read or the bedtime story that an actor read—you can create a transcript file in .txt format, without timestamps. YouTube then creates captions for your video by synchronising that text to the audio in the video. If you host your own videos, you can ask a professional transcription service to give you .vtt files that you can add to a video element’s track element—or you can handcraft your own. (A quick aside: if your website has more videos than you can caption in a reasonable amount of time, prioritise the most popular videos, the most important videos, and the videos most relevant to people with disabilities. Then make sure your users know how to ask you to caption other videos as they encounter them.)
1.2.3 If your website has recorded videos that have audio, you must add an “audio description” narration to the video to describe important visual details, or add text to the webpage to detail what happens in the video for users who cannot see the videos. (I like to add audio files from videos to my Huffduffer account so that I can listen to them while commuting.) Maybe your home page has a video where someone says, “I’d like to explain our new TPS reports” while “Bill Lumbergh, division Vice President of Initech” appears on the bottom of the screen. In that case, you should add an audio description to the video that announces “Bill Lumbergh, division Vice President of Initech”, just before Bill starts speaking. As always, you can make life easier for yourself by considering all of your users, before the event: in this example, you could ask the speaker to begin by saying, “I’m Bill Lumbergh, division Vice President of Initech, and I’d like to explain our new TPS reports”—so you won’t need to spend time adding an audio description afterwards.
1.2.4 If your website has live videos that have some audio, you should get a stenographer to provide real-time captions that you can include with the video. I’ll be honest: this can prove tricky nowadays. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 predate YouTube Live, Instagram live Stories, Periscope, and other such services. If your organisation creates a lot of live videos, you might not have enough resources to provide real-time captions for each one. In that case, if you know the contents of the audio beforehand, publish the contents during the live video—or failing that, publish a transcription as soon as possible.
1.2.5 Remember what I said about the recorded videos that have audio? If you can choose to either add an audio description or add text to the webpage to detail what happens in the video, you should go with the audio description.
1.2.6 If your website has recorded videos that include audio information, you could provide a sign language version of the audio information; some people understand sign language better than written language. (You don’t need to caption a video of a sign language version of audio information.)
1.2.7 If your website has recorded videos that have audio, and you need to add an audio description, but the audio doesn’t have enough pauses for you to add an “audio description” narration, you could provide a separate version of that video where you have added pauses to fit the audio description into.
1.2.8 Let’s go back to the recorded videos that have audio once more! You could add text to the webpage to detail what happens in the video, so that people who can neither read captions nor hear dialogue and audio description can use braille displays to understand your video.
1.2.9 If your website has live audio, you could get a stenographer to provide real-time captions. Again, if you know the contents of the audio beforehand, publish the contents during the live audio or publish a transcription as soon as possible.
(Congratulations on making it this far! I know that seems like a lot to remember, but keep in mind that we’ve covered a complex area: helping your users to understand multimedia information that they can’t see and/or hear. Grab a mince pie to celebrate, and let’s keep going.)
1.3.1 You must mark up your website’s content so that your user’s browser, and any assistive technology they use, can understand the hierarchy of the information and how each piece of information relates to the rest. Once again, you probably know how to do this: use the most appropriate HTML element for each piece of information. Mark up headings, lists, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, and links with the most appropriate HTML element. If you’re looking for something to do to keep you busy this Christmas, scroll through the list of the elements of HTML. Do you notice any elements that you didn’t know, or that you’ve never used? Do you notice any elements that you could use on your current projects, to mark up the content more accurately? Also, revise HTML table advanced features and accessibility, how to structure an HTML form, and how to use the native form widgets—you might be surprised at how much you can do with just HTML! Once you’ve mastered those, you can make your website much more usable for your all of your users.
1.3.2 If your webpage includes information that your user has to read in a certain order, you must make sure that their browser and assistive technology can present the information in that order. Don’t rely on CSS or whitespace to create that order visually. Check that the order of the information makes sense when CSS and whitespace aren’t formatting it. Also, try using the Tab key to move the focus through the links and form widgets on your webpage. Does the focus go where you expect it to? Keep this in mind when using order in CSS Grid or Flexbox.
1.3.3 You must not presume that your users can identify sensory characteristics of things on your webpage. Some users can’t tell what you’ve positioned where on the screen. For example, instead of asking your users to “Choose one of the options on the left”, you could ask them to “Choose one of our new products” and link to that section of the webpage.
1.4.1 You must not rely on colour as the only way to convey something to your users. Some of your users can’t see, and some of your users can’t distinguish between colours. For example, if your webpage uses green to highlight the products that your shop has in stock, you could add some text to identify those products, or you could group them under a sub-heading.
1.4.2 If your webpage automatically plays a sound for more than 3 seconds, you must make sure your users can stop the sound or change its volume. Don’t rely on your user turning down the volume on their computer; some users need to hear the screen reader on their computer, and some users just want to keep listening to whatever they were listening before your webpage interrupted them!
1.4.3 You should make sure that your text contrasts enough with its background, so that your users can read it. Bookmark Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio calculator now. You can enter the text colour and background colour as named colours, or as RGB, RGBa, HSL, or HSLa values. You should make sure that:
normal text that set at 24px or larger has a ratio of at least 3:1;
bold text that set at 18.75px or larger has a ratio of at least 3:1;
all other text has a ratio of at least 4½:1.
You don’t have to do this for disabled form controls, decorative stuff, or logos—but you could!
1.4.4 You should make sure your users can resize the text on your website up to 200% without using their assistive technology—and still access all your content and functionality. You don’t have to do this for subtitles or images of text.
1.4.5 You should avoid using images of text and just use text instead. In 1998, Jeffrey Veen’s first Hot Design Tip said, “Text is text. Graphics are graphics. Don’t confuse them.” Now that you can apply powerful CSS text-styling properties, use CSS Grid to precisely position text, and choose from thousands of web fonts (Jeffrey co-founded Typekit to help with this), you pretty much never need to use images of text. The guidelines say you can use images of text if you let your users specify the font, size, colour, and background of the text in the image of text—but I’ve never seen that on a real website. Also, this doesn’t apply to logos.
1.4.6 Let’s go back to colour contrast for a second. You could make your text contrast even more with its background, so that even more of your users can read it. To do that, use Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio calculator to make sure that:
normal text that is 24px or larger has a ratio of at least 4½:1;
bold text that 18.75px or larger has a ratio of at least 4½:1;
all other text has a ratio of at least 7:1.
1.4.7 If your website has recorded speech, you could make sure there are no background sounds, or that your users can turn off any background sounds. If that’s not possible, you could make sure that any background sounds that last longer than a couple of seconds are at least four times quieter than the speech. This doesn’t apply to audio Captchas, audio logos, singing, or rapping. (Yes, these guidelines mention rapping!)
1.4.8 You could make sure that your users can reformat blocks of text on your website so they can read them better. To do this, make sure that your users can:
specify the colours of the text and the background, and
make the blocks of text less than 80-characters wide, and
align text to the left (or right for right-to-left languages), and
set the line height to 150%, and
set the vertical distance between paragraphs to 1½ times the line height of the text, and
resize the text (without using their assistive technology) up to 200% and still not have to scroll horizontally to read it.
By the way, when you specify a colour for text, always specify a colour for its background too. Don’t rely on default background colours!
1.4.9 Let’s return to images of text for a second. You could make sure that you use them only for decoration and logos.
Can users operate the controls and links on your website?
The second guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “How the **** does this thing work?”
2.1.1 You must make sure that you users can carry out all of your website’s activities with just their keyboard, without time limits for pressing keys. (This doesn’t apply to drawing or anything else that requires a pointing device such as a mouse.) Again, if you use the most appropriate HTML element for each piece of information and for each form element, this should prove easy.
2.1.2 You must make sure that when the user uses the keyboard to focus on some part of your website, they can then move the focus to some other part of your webpage without needing to use a mouse or touch the screen. If your website needs them to do something complex before they can move the focus elsewhere, explain that to your user. These “keyboard traps” have become rare, but beware of forms that move focus from one text box to another as soon as they receive the correct number of characters.
2.1.3 Let’s revisit making sure that you users can carry out all of your website’s activities with just their keyboard, without time limits for pressing keys. You could make sure that your user can do absolutely everything on your website with just the keyboard.
2.2.1 Sometimes people need more time than you might expect to complete a task on your website. If any part of your website imposes a time limit on a task, you must do at least one of these:
let your users turn off the time limit before they encounter it; or
let your users increase the time limit to at least 10 times the default time limit before they encounter it; or
warn your users before the time limit expires and give them at least 20 seconds to extend it, and let them extend it at least 10 times.
Remember: these guidelines are practical. They allow you to enforce time limits for real-time events such as auctions and ticket sales, where increasing or extending time limits wouldn’t make sense. Also, the guidelines allow you to enforce a maximum time limit of 20 hours. The editors chose 20 hours because people need to go to sleep at some stage. See? Practical!
2.2.2 In my experience, this criterion remains the least well-known—even though some users can only use websites that conform to it. If your website presents content alongside other content that can distract users by automatically moving, blinking, scrolling, or updating, you must make sure that your users can:
pause, stop, or hide the other content if it’s not essential and lasts more than 5 seconds; and
pause, stop, hide, or control the frequency of the other content if it automatically updates.
It’s OK if your users miss live information such as stock price updates or football scores; you can’t do anything about that! Also, this doesn’t apply to animations such as progress bars that you put on a website to let all users know that the webpage isn’t frozen.
(If this one sounds complex, just add a pause button to anything that might distract your users.)
2.2.3 Let’s go back to time limits on tasks on your website. You could make your website even easier to use by removing all time limits except those on real-time events such as auctions and ticket sales. That would mean your user wouldn’t need to interact with a timer at all.
2.2.4 You could let your users turn off all interruptions—server updates, promotions, and so on—apart from any emergency information.
2.2.5 This is possibly my favourite of these criteria! After your website logs your user out, you could make sure that when they log in again, they can continue from where they were without having lost any information. Do that, and you’ll be on everyone’s Nice List this Christmas.
2.3.1 You must make sure that nothing flashes more than three times a second on your website, unless you can make sure that the flashes remain below the acceptable general flash and red flash thresholds…
2.3.2 …or you could just make sure that nothing flashes more than three times per second on your website. This is usually an easier goal.
2.4.1 You must make sure that your users can jump past any blocks of content, such as navigation menus, that are repeated throughout your website. You know the drill here: using HTML’s sectioning elements such as header, nav, main, aside, and footer allows users with assistive technology to go straight to the content they need, and adding “Skip Navigation” links allows everyone to get to your main content faster.
2.4.2 You must add a proper title to describe each webpage’s topic. Your webpage won’t even validate without a title element, so make it a useful one.
2.4.3 If your users can focus on links and native form widgets, you must make sure that they can focus on elements in an order that makes sense.
2.4.4 You must make sure that your users can understand the purpose of a link when they read:
the text of the link; or
the text of the paragraph, list item, table cell, or table header for the cell that contains the link; or
the heading above the link.
You don’t have to do that for games and quizzes.
2.4.5 You should give your users multiple ways to find any webpage within a set of webpages. Add site-wide search and a site map and you’re done!
This doesn’t apply for a webpage that is part of a series of actions (like a shopping cart and checkout flow) or to a webpage that is a result of a series of actions (like a webpage confirming that the user has bought what was in the shopping cart).
2.4.6 You should help your users to understand your content by providing:
headings that describe the topics of you content;
labels that describe the purpose of the native form widgets on the webpage.
2.4.7 You should make sure that users can see which element they have focussed on. Next time you use your website, try hitting the Tab key repeatedly. Does it visually highlight each item as it moves focus to it? If it doesn’t, search your CSS to see whether you’ve applied outline: 0; to all elements—that’s usually the culprit. Use the :focus pseudo-element to define how elements should appear when they have focus.
2.4.8 You could help your user to understand where the current webpage is located within your website. Add “breadcrumb navigation” and/or a site map and you’re done.
2.4.9 You could make links even easier to understand, by making sure that your users can understand the purpose of a link when they read the text of the link. Again, you don’t have to do that for games and quizzes.
2.4.10 You could use headings to organise your content by topic.
Can users understand your content?
The third guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “What the **** does this mean?”
3.1.1 Let’s start this section with the criterion that possibly takes the least time to implement; you must make sure that the user’s browser can identify the main language that your webpage’s content is written in. For a webpage that has mainly English content, use .
3.1.2 You must specify when content in another language appears in your webpage, like so:
I wish you a Joyeux Noël . . You don’t have to do this for proper names, technical terms, or words that you can’t identify a language for. You also don’t have to do it for words from a different language that people consider part of the language around those words; for example,
Come to our Christmas rendezvous! is OK.
3.1.3 You could make sure that your users can find out the meaning of any unusual words or phrases, including idioms like “stocking filler” or “Bah! Humbug!” and jargon such as “VoiceOver” and “TalkBack”. Provide a glossary or link to a dictionary.
3.1.4 You could make sure that your users can find out the meaning of any abbreviation. For example, VoiceOver pronounces “Xmas” as “Smas” instead of “Christmas”. Using the abbr element and linking to a glossary can help. (Interestingly, VoiceOver pronounces “abbr” as “abbreviation”!)
3.1.5 Do your users need to be able to read better than a typically educated nine-year-old, to read your content (apart from proper names and titles)? If so, you could provide a version that doesn’t require that level of reading ability, or you could provide images, videos, or audio to explain your content. (You don’t have to add captions or audio description to those videos.)
3.1.6 You could make sure that your users can access the pronunciation of any word in your content if that word’s meaning depends on its pronunciation. For example, the word “close” could have one of two meanings, depending on pronunciation, in a phrase such as, “Ready for Christmas? Close now!”
3.2.1 Some users need to focus on elements to access information about them. You must make sure that focusing on an element doesn’t trigger any major changes, such as opening a new window, focusing on another element, or submitting a form.
3.2.2 Webpages are easier for users when the controls do what they’re supposed to do. Unless you have warned your users about it, you must make sure that changing the value of a control such as a text box, checkbox, or drop-down list doesn’t trigger any major changes, such as opening a new window, focusing on another element, or submitting a form.
3.2.3 To help your users to find the content they want on each webpage, you should put your navigation elements in the same place on each webpage. (This doesn’t apply when your user has changed their preferences or when they use assistive technology to change how your content appears.)
3.2.4 When a set of webpages includes things that have the same functionality on different webpages, you should name those things consistently. For example, don’t use the word “Search” for the search box on one webpage and “Find” for the search box on another webpage within that set of webpages.
3.2.5 Let’s go back to major changes, such as a new window opening, another element taking focus, or a form being submitted. You could make sure that they only happen when users deliberately make them happen, or when you have warned users about them first. For example, you could give the user a button for updating some content instead of automatically updating that content. Also, if a link will open in a new window, you could add the words “opens in new window” to the link text.
3.3.1 Users make mistakes when filling in forms. Your website must identify each mistake to your user, and must describe the mistake to your users in text so that the user can fix it. One way to identify mistakes reliably to your users is to set the aria-invalid attribute to true in the element that has a mistake. That makes sure that users with assistive technology will be alerted about the mistake. Of course, you can then use the [aria-invalid=""true""] attribute selector in your CSS to visually highlight any such mistakes. Also, look into how certain attributes of the input element such as required, type, and list can help prevent and highlight mistakes.
3.3.2 You must include labels or instructions (and possibly examples) in your website’s forms, to help your users to avoid making mistakes.
3.3.3 When your user makes a mistake when filling in a form, your webpage should suggest ways to fix that mistake, if possible. This doesn’t apply in scenarios where those suggestions could affect the security of the content.
3.3.4 Whenever your user submits information that:
has legal or financial consequences; or
affects information that they have previously saved in your website; or
is part of a test
…you should make sure that they can:
undo it; or
correct any mistakes, after your webpage checks their information; or
review, confirm, and correct the information before they finally submit it.
3.3.5 You could help prevent your users from making mistakes by providing obvious, specific help, such as examples, animations, spell-checking, or extra instructions.
3.3.6 Whenever your user submits any information, you could make sure that they can:
undo it; or
correct any mistakes, after your webpage checks their information; or
review, confirm, and correct the information before they finally submit it.
Have you made your website robust enough to work on your users’ browsers and assistive technologies?
The fourth and final guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “Why the **** doesn’t this work on my device?”
4.1.1 You must make sure that your website works as well as possible with current and future browsers and assistive technology. Prioritise complying with web standards instead of relying on the capabilities of currently popular devices and browsers. Web developers didn’t expect their users to be unwrapping the Wii U Browser five years ago—who knows what browsers and assistive technologies our users will be unwrapping in five years’ time? Avoid hacks, and use the W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure that your HTML has no errors.
4.1.2 If you develop your own user interface components, you must make their name, role, state, properties, and values available to your user’s browsers and assistive technologies. That should make them almost as accessible as standard HTML elements such as links, buttons, and checkboxes.
“…and a partridge in a pear tree!”
…as that very long Christmas song goes. We’ve covered a lot in this article—because your users have a lot of different levels of ability. Hopefully this has demystified the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 for you. Hopefully you spotted a few situations that could arise for users on your website, and you now know how to tackle them.
To start applying what we’ve covered, you might like to look at Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s personas for Accessible UX. Discuss the personas, get into their heads, and think about which aspects of your website might cause problems for them. See if you can apply what we’ve covered today, to help users like them to do what they need to do on your website.
How to know when your website is perfectly accessible for everyone
LOL! There will never be a time when your website becomes perfectly accessible for everyone. Don’t aim for that. Instead, aim for regularly testing and making your website more accessible.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
The W3C hope to release the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 as a “recommendation” (that’s what the W3C call something that we should start using) by the middle of next year. Ten years may seem like a long time to move from version 2.0 to version 2.1, but consider the scale of the task: 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. Keep an eye out for 2.1!
You’ll go down in history
One last point: I’ve met a surprising number of web designers and developers who do great work to make their websites more accessible without ever telling their users about it. Some of your potential customers have possibly tried and failed to use your website in the past. They probably won’t try again unless you let them know that things have improved. A quick Twitter search for your website’s name alongside phrases like “assistive technology”, “doesn’t work”, or “#fail” can let you find frustrated users—so you can tell them about how you’re making your website more accessible. Start making your websites work better for everyone—and please, let everyone know.",2017,Alan Dalton,alandalton,2017-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/wcag-for-people-who-havent-read-them/,code
194,Design Systems and Hybrids,"The other day on Twitter, I saw a thread started by Dorian Taylor about why design systems are so hot right now. In the thread, he made the case that they’ve been around for ages and some folks were just slow to catch up. It was an interesting thread, and not the first time I’ve seen folks discuss this. “Design systems are so hot right now” was even used recently in this very publication.
And yes it’s true that they’ve been around for ages. Design artefact collectors’ obsession with reprints of old graphic standards manuals of the past are a reminder. Sometimes old things become new again, either through a rediscovery or awakening (wow, that sounds really deep). But I think that’s definitely what happened here.
Some very opinionated answers that come to mind for me are:
The need for them has increased with the needs of software development. With the increasing number of devices (phones, tablets, watches, etc.), scaling design has required the need to double down on systems thinking and processes.
Investments with huge cost-saving returns. The time investment it takes to onboard new people as you staff up large teams (and the time it takes to fix bugs and inconsistencies) could be better spent building up a system that lets you ship at a faster pace. It also gives you more time to focus on the bigger picture instead of what color a button border is.
If you do have to onboard new designers, the design system is a great educational resource to get up to speed quickly on your organization’s design principles, materials/tools, and methods.
“Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.”
— Alex Schleifer, The Way We Build
These are just some of the reasons. But there is another answer, and a personal conclusion that I’ve reached. It relates to the way I work and what I love working on, but I don’t see it talked about much.
Hybrids Have a Home
I’m a hybrid designer. I code in HTML & CSS (with a preference for Sass). But I don’t call myself a frontend developer. I used to back in the day (I was a UI frontend developer at Apple over a decade ago, but all I wrote was HTML & CSS). I identify with designer because that’s my training and interest, but the ideas of what a frontend developer can do has changed quite a ton over the years. Setting things up in build tools and processes are not my skill. And I know a lot of designers who share this experience with me.
There are also hybrid developers who identify as developers, but have excellent design skills. Buddies like my pal Brandon Ferrua who was on my team at Salesforce is a great example of this. And we worked fantastically together.
Sometimes, companies don’t know how to deal with hybrids. I’ve been told to choose a side, and have even been made to join a development team simply because I could code my designs (and then when I couldn’t deliver the same type of code my teammates could, and I felt like I wasn’t able to use my talents in the most effective way).
There are a lot more folks out there I know of who identify as a hybrid, and many have found ourselves working on design systems. Una Kravets recently had a thread discussing this as well. At Clarity, this came up a lot in hallway conversations, breaks, and the after parties. I think that this job is a haven for folks who often find themselves in the middle.
For companies that get it, these people find joy in getting to use a wider variety of skills and being bridges; advocates that can speak to designers and developers, helping bring
unity to an organization. They can wireframe, throw together a prototype, create color systems, architect naming conventions for design tokens. Design systems are their perfect home. I think this has contributed to the uptick in discussions and interest on this subject (in addition to the team- and company-focused reasons).
Keep Design Systems Teams Cross-Functional
Speaking of teams, something some larger companies fall prey to is creating walls and silos where they need not be. If you place all your visual designers in one place, all your coders in another, and so on, you’re not doing yourselves any favors. Meanwhile, your hybrids are caught in the middle not knowing exactly where they belong. Design systems teams should have representatives (whether on a core team, or a virtual/federated team) that bring different skillsets. Design, code, writing, accessibility, product management, and so on. You’ll have a stronger vision on where to take your design system and to make it succeed. Siloing defeats the whole purpose of what design systems are meant for.
Happy holidays, and may the force be with you.
Further Reading
Why Design Systems Fail
Design Systems are for People
Design Systems Handbook",2017,Jina Anne,jina,2017-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/design-systems-and-hybrids/,process
197,Designing for Mobile Performance,"Last year, some colleagues at Google ran a research study titled “The Need for Mobile Speed” to find out what the impact of performance and perception of speed had on the way people use the web on their mobile devices.
That’s not a trivial distinction; when considering performance, how fast something feels is often more important than how fast it actually is. When dealing with sometimes underpowered mobile devices and slow mobile networks, designing experiences that feel fast is exceptionally important.
One of the most startling numbers we found in the study was that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
We wanted to find out more, so following on from this study, we conducted research to define what the crucial elements of speed are. We took into consideration the user experience (UX), overall perception of speed, and how differing contexts the user finds themselves in can alter how fast a user thinks something loaded.
To understand speed and load times first we must understand that user mobile web behaviour is broken down into three buckets;
Intention
Location
State of mind
Let’s look at each of those in turn.
Intention
Users browse sites on a mobile device for many different reasons. To be able to effectively design a performant user experience for them, it’s important to understand what those reasons might be. When asked to describe their reason for visiting a site, approximately 30% of people asked by the study claimed that they were simply browsing without a particular purpose in mind. Looking deeper, we found that this number increased slightly (34%) for retail sites. 30% said they were just there to find out some information for a future task or action, such as booking a flight.
Interestingly, the research shows that users are actually window shopping using their mobile browser. Only 29% actually said they had a specific goal or intent in mind, and this number increases significantly for financial services like banking sites (57%). This goes against a traditionally held view of users wanting to perform simple actions efficiently on their mobile device. Sure, some users are absolutely doing that, but many are just browsing around without a goal in mind, just like they would on a desktop browser.
This gives great insight into the user’s intentions. It tells us that users are actively using sites on their mobile, but a large majority do not intend to do anything instantly. There’s no goal they’re under pressure to achieve. If a site’s performance is lousy or janky, this will only reaffirm to the user to that they can hold off on completing a task, so they might just give up.
However, if a site is quick to load, sophisticated in expressing its value proposition quickly, and enables the user to perform their actions seamlessly, then turning that “browsing user” into a “buying user” becomes all that much easier. When the user has no goal, there’s more opportunity to convert, and you stand a greater chance of doing that if the performance is good enough so they stick around.
Location
Obviously, mobile devices by their nature can be used in many different locations. This is an interesting consideration, because it’s not something we traditionally need to take into account designing experiences for static platforms like desktop computers.
The in the study, we found that 82% of users browse the web on their mobile phone while in their home. In contrast, only 7% do the same while at work. This might come across as a bit of a shock, but when you look at mobile usage – in particular app usage – most of the apps being used are either a social network or some sort of entertainment or media app. Due to the unreliability of network connections, users will often alternate between these two types of apps.
The consequence being that if a site doesn’t work offline, or otherwise compensate for bad network connectivity in some way by providing opportunities to allow users to browse their site, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as to why users mostly view the mobile web from the comfort of their homes where there is a strong WiFi connection. They’re using mobile devices, but they’re not actually mobile themselves.
Another thing to bear in mind is how users alternate between devices, a study by comScore found that 80% of transactions take place on desktop while 69% of the browsing takes place on mobile. Any given user might access from more than one location - they might visit one day from a bus queue on their phone, and then next day from a laptop at home.
State of mind
One more thing we need to take into consideration is the user’s state of mind. Whilst browsing at home, users tend to be more relaxed, and in the research 76% stated they were generally calmer at home. The user’s state of mind can have quite a big impact on how they perceive things. The calmer they are, the quicker a site might appear to load. If the user is anxious and impatiently drumming their fingers on the table, things seem to take longer, and even a small wait can feel like an eternity.
This is quite key. Over 40% of sites take longer than 4 seconds to load for users who are are out and about and using a mobile data connection. Coupled with our perception, and amplified by a potentially less-than-calm state of mind, this can seem like an age.
What does this all mean?
I think we can all agree that users prefer strong, steady connections and comfort when completing transactions. It seems like common sense when we say it out loud. Recreating these feelings and sensations of comfort and predictability under all circumstances therefore becomes paramount. Equally, when asked in the study, users all claimed that speed was the most important factor impacting their mobile web usage. Over 40%, in fact, said it was the most important UX feature of a site, and nobody asked considered it to be of no importance at all.
The meaning of speed
When it comes to performance, speed is measured in two ways – real speed; as measured on a clock, and perceived speed; how responsive an interaction feels. We can, of course, improve how quickly a site loads by simply making files smaller. Even then, the study showed that 32% of users felt a site can feel slow even when it loads in less than 4 seconds. This gets even worse when you look at it by age group, with 50% if young people (18-24 year olds) thinking a site was slower than it actually was. When you add to the mix that users think a site loaded faster when they are sitting compared to when they are standing up, then you are in a world of trouble if your site doesn’t have any clear indicators to let the user know the loading state of you website or app.
So what can we do about this to improve our designs?
How to fix / hack user perception
There are some golden rules of speed, the first thing is hacking response time. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will certainly start to lose your users. However, if that slowness is part of a UX flow such as processing information, the user understands it might take a little time. Under those circumstances, a load time of under 5 seconds is acceptable, but even then, you should take caution. Anything above 8 seconds and you are in very real danger of losing your audience completely.
Load time
User impression
200 ms
Feels instant
1 s
Feels it is performing smoothly
5 s
Part of user flow
8 s
Lose attention
Remove the tap delay
Mobile browsers often use a 300-350ms delay between the triggering of the touchend and click events. This delay was added so the browser could determine if there was going to be a double-tap triggered or not, since double-tap is a common gesture used to zoom into text. This delay can have the side effect of making interactions feel laggy, and therefore giving the user the impression that the site is slow, even if it’s their own browser causing the problem.
Fortunately there’s a way to remove the delay. Add following in the of your page, and the delay no longer takes effect:
You can also use touch-action: manipulation in newer browsers to eliminate click delay. For old browsers, FastClick by FT Labs uses touch events to trigger clicks faster and remove the double-tap gesture.
Make use of Skeleton Screens
A skeleton layout is a wireframe version of your app that displays while content is being loaded. This demonstrates to the user that content is about to be loaded, giving the impression that something is happening more quickly than it really is. Consider also using a preloader UI as well, with a text label informing the user that the app is loading. One example would be to pulsate the wireframe content giving the app the feeling that it is alive and loading. This reassures the user that something is happening and helps prevent resubmissions or refreshes of your app. Razvan Caliman created a Codepen example of how to create this effect in purely CSS.
One thing to consider though, if data doesn’t load then you might need to create a fallback 404 or error page to let the user know what happened.
Example by Owen-Campbell Moore
Responsive Touch Feedback
Carefully designing the process by which items load is one aspect of increasing the perceived speed of your page, but reassuring the user that an action they have taken is in process is another. At Google we use something called a Ripple, which is is animating dot that expands or ripples in order to confirm to the user that their input has been triggered. This happens immediately, expanding outward from the point of touch. This reaffirms to the user that their input has been received and is being acted on, even before the site has had a chance to process or respond to the action. From the user’s point of view, they’ve tapped and the page has responded immediately, so it feels really quick and satisfying.
You can mimic this same behavior using our Material Design Components Web GitHub repo.
Progress bars
These UI elements have existed for a very long time, but research conducted by Chris Harrison and published in New Scientist found that the style of a progress bar can alter the perception of speed drastically. As a matter of fact, progress bars with ripples that animate towards the left appear like they are loading faster by at least 11% percent. So when including them in your site, take into consideration that ripples and progress bars that pulsate faster as they get to the end will make your sites seem quicker.
Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration with Visual Augmentations
Navigation
The speed with which a user can locate navigational items or call to actions adds to their perceived performance of a site. If the user’s next action is quick to spot on the screen, they don’t spend time hunting around the interface with their eyes and fingers. So no matter how quickly your code runs, hiding items behind a nav bar will make a site feel slower than it actually is.
Facebook found that switching to using bottom navigation saw an increase in engagement, satisfaction, revenue, speed, and importantly, perception of speed. If the user sees the navigation items they’re looking for quickly, the interaction feels fast. What’s more, end-to-end task completion is quicker too, as the interface not only feels quicker, but actually measures quicker as well. Similar reactions were found with Spotify and Redbooth.
Luke Wroblewski gave a talk last year in Ireland titled “Obvious Always Wins” which he demonstrated through the work he did with Google+. Luke’s message is that by making the core features of your app obvious to your user, you will see engagement go up. This again seems obvious, right? However, it is important to note that adding bottom navigation doesn’t just mean a black bar at the bottom of your screen like some kind of performance magic bullet. The goal is to make the items clear to the user so they know what they need to be doing, and how you achieve that could be different from one interface to the next. Google keeps experimenting with different navigation styles, but finally settled with the below when they conducted user research and testing.
Conclusion
By utilizing a collection of UI patterns and speed optimisation techniques, you can improve not only the actual speed of a site, but the perception of how quickly a user thinks your site is loading. It is critical to remember that users will not always be using your site in a calm and relaxed manner and that even their age can impact how they will use or not use your site. By improving your site’s stability, you increase the likelihood of positive user engagement and task completion.
You can learn more about techniques to hack user perception and improve user speed by taking a look at an E-Book we published with Awwwards.com called Speed Matters: Design for Mobile Performance.",2017,Mustafa Kurtuldu,mustafakurtuldu,2017-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/designing-for-mobile-performance/,ux
199,Knowing the Future - Tips for a Happy Launch Day,"You’ve chosen your frameworks and libraries. You’ve learned how to write code which satisfies the buzzword and performance gods. Now you need to serve it to a global audience, and make things easy to preview, to test, to sign-off, and to evolve.
But infrastructure design is difficult and boring for most of us. We just want to get our work out into the wild.
If only we had tools which would let us go, “Oh yeah! It all deploys perfectly every time” and shout, “You need another release? BAM! What’s next?”
A truth that can be hard to admit is that very often, the production environment and its associated deployment processes are poorly defined until late into a project. This can be a problem.
It makes my palms sweaty just thinking about it.
If like me, you have spent time building things for clients, you’ll probably have found yourself working with a variety of technical partners and customers who bring different constraints and opportunities to your projects. Knowing and proving the environments and the deployment processes is often very difficult, but can be a factor which profoundly impacts our ability to deliver what we promised. To say nothing of our ability to sleep at night or leave our fingernails un-chewed.
Let’s look at this a little, and see if we can’t set you up for a good night’s sleep, with dry palms and tidy fingernails.
A familiar problem
You’ve been here too, right? The project development was tough, but you’re pleased with what you are running in your local development environments. Now you need to get the client to see and approve your build, and hopefully indicate with a cheery thumbs up that it can “go live”.
Chances are that we have a staging environment where the client can see the build. But be honest, is this exactly the same as the production environment? It should be, but often it’s not. Often the staging environment is nothing more than a visible server with none of the optimisations, security, load balancing, caching, and other vital bits of machinery that we’ll need (and need to test) in “prod”.
Often the production environment is still being “set up” and you’ll have to wait and see.
In development, “wait and see” is the enemy.
Instead of waiting to see, we need to make the provisioning of, and deployment to our different environments one of the very first jobs of our project. I’ve often needed to be the unpopular voice in the room who makes a big fuss when this is delayed. I’ve described it as being a “critical blocker” during project meetings and suggested that everything should halt until it is fixed.
It is that important.
Clients don’t often like hearing a wary, disruptive voice saying “whoa there Nelly!”, because the development should be able to continue while the production environment gets sorted out, right?
Sure. But if it is not seen as a blocker, it is seen as something that can just happen later. And if it happens later, all the ugly surprises and unknowns surface later too. And later is when we’ll need to be thinking about other things. Not the plumbing. Trust me, it pays to face up to the issue right away rather than press on optimistically. The client will thank you later.
Attitudes and expectations
We should, I think, exhibit these four attitudes towards production deployment:
Make it scripted
Make it automated
Make it real
Make it first
Make it scripted
Let’s face it, we are going to need to deploy more than once over the course of the project. We are not going to get things perfect on our first shot. Nor should we expect to. And if we are going to repeat something, we want to be able to do it identically and predictably every time without needing to rely on our memories.
Developers are great at scripting things which they would otherwise need to repeat. It makes us faster and it also helps us keep track of the steps we need to take.
I’m not crazy enough to try suggest the best technology to script your builds or deployments (holy wars lie down that path). A lot will depend on your languages and your tastes. Some will like Fabric, others will prefer Gulp, you might prefer Make or NPM. It doesn’t really matter as long as you can script the process of building, packaging and deploying your project.
Wait. Won’t we need to know everything about the build from the start in order to do this? Aren’t our dependencies likely to change over time?
Yes. That would be ideal. But it’s ok. Like our code, our deployment script will evolve over the life of a project. So evolve it. Start by scripting what is needed to support the first iteration of the project, and then maintain that script. It will become a valuable “source of truth”, providing a form of documentation of what your project needs for a successful deployment. Another bonus.
Make it automated
If we have a scripted deployment which we can run by executing a single command, then we are in great shape to automate that process by triggering the build and deployment via suitable events.
Again, I prefer not to offer one single suggestion of when this should occur. That will depend on your approach to the project, how your development team is organised, and how your QA team operate. You can tune this to suit.
For one project I worked on, we chose to trigger the build and deployment to our production environment every time we used Git to tag the master branch of our version control repository. There were a few moving parts, and we needed to do some upfront work to get everything working, but that upfront effort was repaid many fold as we deployed time and time again, and exposed some issues with our environment long before we got to “launch day”.
With a scripted and automated process, we can make deployments “cheap”. This is our goal. When there are minimal cognitive or time overheads associated with deploying, we’re likely to do it all the more often and become more confident that it will behave as expected.
Make it real
Alright, we have written scripts to build and deploy our projects. Anyone tagging our repo will trigger things to happen as if by magic, but where are we pushing things to? We need to target a real environment if this is to have any value.
A useful pattern is to have all activity on our develop branch trigger deployments to our staging server. Meanwhile tagging master will deploy a version to the production environment. How we organise this will depend on our git branching approach. (I’ve seen as many ways of approaching Git Flow as I have seen ways of approaching “Agile”).
It’s vital though, that we ensure that we are deploying to, and testing against, our real infrastructure. We want to see real results. That’s the best way to learn real lessons.
Make it first
Building our site to run in an environment not yet fully defined or available to test is like climbing without ropes – it’s possible, but we put ourselves at risk. And the higher we climb the greater the risk. So it is important to do this as early as we possibly can.
Don’t have a certificate for our HTTPS yet? Fine, but let’s still deploy to this evolving production environment and introduce HTTPS as soon as we can.
Before we know it we’ll be proving that this is set up correctly and we’ll not be surprised by mixed security alerts or other nasties further down the line.
Mailchimp perfectly capture the anxiety of sending emails to gazillions of people for a campaign. But we’re lucky. Launching a site doesn’t need to be like performing a mailshot. We can do things to banish that sweaty hand.
Doing preparation work upfront means that by the time we need to launch the site into the wild, we have exercised the deployment mechanics, and tested the production environment so rigorously that this task will be boring.
(It won’t be boring. Launching should always be exciting because the world will finally get to see our beautiful, painstaking work. But nor should it be terrifying. Especially as a result of not knowing for certain if our processes and environments are going to work or burst into flames on the big day.)
What tools exist?
Well this all sounds lovely. But how should we tackle this? Where are the tools for us to use? As it happens, there are many service and tools that we can use to work this way.
Hosting
All of the big players like Amazon, Azure and Google offer tools which can help us here. Google for example, can host multiple deployed versions of your project in parallel and you can manage them via their App Engine console. Each build receives its own URL which you can use to access any deployed version of your site.
Having immutable deployments which stick around in perpetuity (or until you bin them) is a key feature which unlocks the ability to confidently direct your traffic to any version of your site. With that comes the capacity to test any version or feature in its real environment, and then promote a version, or rollback to a previous version whenever you want.
A liberating power to have.
Continuous integration
In order to create all of those different versions, we’ll need somewhere to run our build and deployment scripts. Jenkins has been a popular Continuous Integration (CI) option for some time, and can be configured to perform all sorts of tasks, giving you extensive control over your deployment pipeline.
You need to host Jenkins yourself, but it provides some simple ways to do that.
The landscape for CI is getting richer and richer. With many hosted services like Circle CI providing this kind of automation up in the cloud.
One stop shop
Netlify combines both hosting and continuous integration services. It monitors your git repositories and automatically runs your build in a container on its servers when it finds changes. Each branch and pull request in your git repository will result in an immutable version of your site with its own URL.
Netlify is unlike Google Cloud, AWS or Azure in that it cannot host a dynamic server-side application for you. Instead it specialises in hosting static, or so called JAMstack sites.
Personally, I find that its simplicity makes it an approachable option, and a good place to learn and adopt some of these valuable habits.
Full disclosure: I’m a Netlify employee. But before I was, I was an avid customer, and it was through using Netlify that I first encountered some of these principles in practice.
Conclusion. It’s all about the approach
No matter what tools or services you use (and there are many which can support these practices), the most important thing is to adopt an approach which lets you prove your environments as quickly as possible.
Front-loading this effort will cast light onto the issues that you’ll need to address early and often, leaving no infrastructure surprises to spoil things for you on launch day.
Automating the process will mean that when you do find things that you need to fix or to improve later (and you will), issuing another release will be trivial. It is a lovely feeling when you have confidence that releasing v1.0.0 will be no more stressful v0.0.1. In fact it should actually be less stressful, as you’ll have been down this road many times by then. Fixing the potholes and smoothing the way as you went.
From here, it should be a smooth ride.",2017,Phil Hawksworth,philhawksworth,2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/knowing-the-future/,process
200,Care and Feeding of Burnout,"You’ve been doing too much for too long. And it’s broken you. You’re burned out. You’re done.
Illustration by Kate Holden
Occupational burnout is a long-documented effect of stretching yourself further than the limits of your mental and physical health can carry you. And when it finally catches up with you, it can feel like the end of the world. But things can get better. With focused self care, reworking your priorities and lots of time, you can slog through burnout.
What is burnout? The Tl;dr linkdump tour
In this article, we’ll be looking at what you can do when you’re burned out. We’ll be skipping past a lot of information on what burnout is, what causes it and how it impacts the tech industry. We’re able to skip past this because many technologists have already created valuable content targeted to our industry. The videos and writing below may be helpful for readers who are less familiar with burnout.
A Wikipedia article may be a great starting point for learning about occupational burnout.
Understanding burnout: Brandon West
This conference talk by Brandon West covers a lot of burnout 101, from the perspective of a developer relations/community professional.
April Wensel writes about the need for the tech industry to move from the Valley’s burnout culture to a more sustainable model.
Catching Burnout [as] early [as possible]
One of the most challenging things about burnout is that it develops slowly and gradually. Many impacted don’t notice the water warming around them until it’s been brought to a boil, causing a crisis that can’t be overlooked. Catching burnout and taking steps to deal with it as early as possible can help limit the length and severity of your burnout.
Getting in the habit of checking in with yourself regularly about your stress and energy levels can be an effective habit for assessing burnout and for general wellness. The Mayo Clinic recommends asking yourself the following questions to determine if you might be suffering from burnout.
Have you become cynical or critical at work?
Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive?
Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients?
Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?
Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements?
Do you feel disillusioned about your job?
Are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or to simply not feel?
Have your sleep habits or appetite changed?
Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches or other physical complaints?
According to the Mayo Clinic, answering yes to more than one of these questions can be a sign that you need to take corrective action. We’ll look in more detail about the corrective actions you can take in the rest of this article.
Do less. Now.
To start getting things back on track, you’ll need to start doing less. Less work, less stress, less everything. Many technologists impacted by burnout have written or spoken on taking months or even years off work to give themselves time to recover. This can be a fantastic route back to wellness for those fortunate enough to have the professional and financial security to allow them to take large stretches of time off work. For the much larger group of burned out workers that need to balance earning a paycheck with their wellness, this can be more challenging.
For those of us who need to stay in the cycle of work to fund our daily needs, finding ways to do less can feel like adding another daunting task to the pile. To properly assess where and how you can cut back on your commitments, you’ll need to find a short stretch of time clear of stressors and responsibilities to take stock of what can be scaled back. A long weekend, weekend or even a few hours of time dedicated to looking only at how you can cut back on work and stress can be an effective way to take stock of your responsibilities.
Make a list of stressors and activities to begin to triage. Anything that would damage or seriously disrupt your life if not attended to (doing your taxes, showing up at work, paying rent) should be marked as essential. Grade other activities in your life, marking the ones that aren’t essential and working to temporarily reduce these or remove them from your life. It can feel difficult to let go of things while recovering from burnout. This process can benefit from a second opinion, if you’re working with a coach, therapist or trusted friend to manage your burnout.
Reducing your workload and stressors can let you begin to recover from burnout. You can reintroduce things back into your schedule and life. Reintroduce stressors and activities back into your life slowly, to minimize risk of relapse. Keeping a journal will let you keep tabs on how different activities are impacting your energy levels and state of mind.
Remove toxicity
Toxic people or settings can drain you faster than overwork alone can. While you work to reduce your workload and stress, coworkers, friends, family or bosses who are toxic influences can act as a multiplier for the stressors that remain. Identifying these people and limiting your interactions with them during your recovery can help you get back on track faster and happier. A journal can be an important tool in tracking how interactions with different people impact your wellness and state of mind. If the toxic presence in your life is someone you can avoid or cut out without penalty, burnout is a great reason to finally replace them with healthier relationships.
If you can’t remove them from your life, minimizing the impact toxic people have on your wellness is vital. Work to identify what aspect of the relationship is draining or damaging and create interventions around damaging interactions. While a chronically complaining coworker’s negativity can be stopped short with setting firm conversational boundaries and redirection, a combative boss can be a harder challenge. Seeking allies and advice can make you feel less alone in your battles and provide healthy emotional support.
Ask for help
Trying to find your way back to health and wellness after burning out can be a daunting task. Seeking help from health care professionals, trusted peers or both can give you backup on your journey back to feeling better. With symptoms that can mirror those of depression, burnout can be the precursor to a number of mental and physical ailments. Talk to your doctor immediately if you’re experiencing symptoms of depression or any other health concerns.
Being open with your trusted friends about burnout can let you access valuable support and help explain why you may need extra care and consideration while you recover. Many suffering from burnout report finding maintaining relationships a challenge. Letting your loved ones know what you’re going through and why you may be less available invites them to be more understanding of cancelled plans or other issues while you’re recovering. Burnout can impact memory and cognitive function. Letting your support network assist in decision making during burnout can help add perspective to counterbalance these deficits.
Talking to your friends and peers about your health and needs can offer valuable support. But those who are pushed to a mental or physical health crisis by burnout should work with healthcare professionals to plan their recovery. Sufferers of mild to moderate burnout can also benefit from planning their return to wellness with an experienced practitioner. Medical or counseling professionals may prescribe medicines, talk therapy, group sessions or other therapeutic intervention.
Go easy on yourself
Recovering from burnout is a process that takes energy, time and compassion for yourself. In the same way that toxic people or workplaces can set you back, negative repetitive thoughts will harm your recovery. Recognizing that burnout’s impact on you is a temporary state that isn’t your fault can help you begin to manage your feelings and expectations for yourself. Sufferers often report feeling stupid, lazy or that they lack the skills to do their job. This is natural, as burnout can severely limit your cognitive function, your energy levels and resilience while dramatically increasing your cognitive load. Working with a counselor may help if you’re finding it difficult to be patient with your progress back to health or are troubled by persistent intrusive thoughts.
Burnout can seriously limit the amount of energy you have. Spend as little of the energy you have left beating yourself up as possible. You’re going to be ok. It’s all going to be ok.
This article doesn’t offer one-size-fits all fixes for burnout or overwork, but aims to provide a framework with points to consider that may help shape your wellness. No article can act as a substitute for professionally administered healthcare or robust self care.",2017,Jessica Rose,jessicarose,2017-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/care-and-feeding-of-burnout/,process
201,Lint the Web Forward With Sonarwhal,"Years ago, when I was in a senior in college, much of my web development courses focused on two things: the basics like HTML and CSS (and boy, do I mean basic), and Adobe Flash. I spent many nights writing ActionScript 3.0 to build interactions for the websites that I would add to my portfolio. A few months after graduating, I built one website in Flash for a client, then never again. Flash was dying, and it became obsolete in my résumé and portfolio.
That was my first lesson in the speed at which things change in technology, and what a daunting realization that was as a new graduate looking to enter the professional world. Now, seven years later, I work on the Microsoft Edge team where I help design and build a tool that would have lessened my early career anxieties: sonarwhal.
Sonarwhal is a linting tool, built by and for the web community. The code is open source and lives under the JS Foundation. It helps web developers and designers like me keep up with the constant change in technology while simultaneously teaching how to code better websites.
Introducing sonarwhal’s mascot Nellie
Good web development is hard. It is more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: developers are expected to have a grasp of accessibility, performance, security, emerging standards, and more, all while refreshing this knowledge every few months as the web evolves. It’s a lot to keep track of.
Web development is hard
Staying up-to-date on all this knowledge is one of the driving forces for developing this scanning tool. Whether you are just starting out, are a student, or you have over a decade of experience, the sonarwhal team wants to help you build better websites for all browsers.
Currently sonarwhal checks for best practices in five categories: Accessibility, Interoperability, Performance, PWAs, and Security. Each check is called a “rule”. You can configure them and even create your own rules if you need to follow some specific guidelines for your project (e.g. validate analytics attributes, title format of pages, etc.).
You can use sonarwhal in two ways:
An online version, that provides a quick and easy way to scan any public website.
A command line tool, if you want more control over the configuration, or want to integrate it into your development flow.
The Online Scanner
The online version offers a streamlined way to scan a website; just enter a URL and you will get a web page of scan results with a permalink that you can share and revisit at any time.
The online version of sonarwal
When my team works on a new rule, we spend the bulk of our time carefully researching each subject, finding sources, and documenting it rather than writing the rule’s code. Not only is it important that we get you the right results, but we also want you to understand why something is failing. Next to each failing rule you’ll find a link to its detailed documentation, explaining why you should care about it, what exactly we are testing, examples that pass and examples that don’t, and useful links to even more in-depth documentation if you are interested in the subject.
We hope that between reading the documentation and continued use of sonarwhal, developers can stay on top of best practices. As devs continue to build sites and identify recurring issues that appear in their results, they will hopefully start to automatically include those missing elements or fix those pieces of code that are producing errors. This also isn’t a one-way communication: the documentation is not only available on the sonarwhal site, but also on GitHub for editing so you can help us make it even better!
A results report
The current configuration for the online scanner is very strict, so it might hurt your feelings (it did when I first tested it on my personal website). But you can configure sonarwhal to any level of strictness as well as customize the command line tool to your needs!
Sonarwhal’s CLI
The CLI gives you full control of sonarwhal: what rules to use, tweaks to them, domains that are out of your control, and so on. You will need the latest node LTS (v8) or Stable (v9) and your favorite package manager, such as npm:
npm install -g sonarwhal
You can now run sonarwhal from anywhere via:
sonarwhal https://example.com
Using the CLI
The configuration is done via a .sonarwhalrc file. When analyzing a site, if no file is available, you will be prompted to answer a series of questions:
What connector do you want to use? Connectors are what sonarwhal uses to access a website and gather all the information about the requests, resources, HTML, etc. Currently it supports jsdom, Microsoft Edge, and Google Chrome.
What formatter? This is how you want to see the results: summary, stylish, etc. Make sure to look at the full list. Some are concise for, perfect for a quick build assessment, while others are more verbose and informative.
Do you want to use the recommended rules configuration? Rules are the things we are validating. Unless you’ve read the documentation and know what you are doing, first timers should probably use the recommended configuration.
What browsers are you targeting? One of the best features of sonarwhal is that rules can adapt their feedback depending on your targeted browsers, suggesting to add or remove things. For example, the rule “Highest Document Mode” will tell you to add the “X-UA-Compatible” header if IE10 or lower is targeted or remove if the opposite is true.
sonarwhal configuration generator questions
Once you answer all these questions the scan will start and you will have a .sonarwhalrc file similar to the following:
{
""connector"": {
""name"": ""jsdom"",
""options"": {
""waitFor"": 1000
}
},
""formatters"": ""stylish"",
""rulesTimeout"": 120000,
""rules"": {
""apple-touch-icons"": ""error"",
""axe"": ""error"",
""content-type"": ""error"",
""disown-opener"": ""error"",
""highest-available-document-mode"": ""error"",
""validate-set-cookie-header"": ""warning"",
// ...
}
}
You should see the scan initiate in the command line and within a few seconds the results should start to appear. Remember, the scan results will look different depending on which formatter you selected so try each one out to see which one you like best.
sonarwhal results on my website and hurting my feelings 💔
Now that you have a list of errors, you can get to work improving the site! Note though, that when you scan your website, it scans all the resources on that page and if you’ve added something like analytics or fonts hosted elsewhere, you are unable to change those files. You can configure the CLI to ignore files from certain domains so that you are only getting results for files you are in control of.
The documentation should give enough guidance on how to fix the errors, but if it’s insufficient, please help us and suggest edits or contribute back to it. This is a community effort and chances are someone else will have the same question as you.
When I scanned both my websites, sonarwhal alerted me to not having an Apple Touch Icon. If I search on the web as opposed to using the sonarwhal documentation, the first top 3 results give me outdated information: I need to include many different icon sizes. I don’t need to include all the different size icons that target different devices. Declaring one icon sized 180px x 180px will provide a large enough icon for devices and it will scale down as appropriate for people on older devices.
The information at the top of the search results isn’t always the correct answer to an issue and we don’t want you to have to search through outdated documentation. As sonarwhal’s capabilities expand, the goal is for it to be the one stop shop for helping preflight your website.
The journey up until now and looking forward
On the Microsoft Edge team, we’re passionate about empowering developers to build great websites. Every day we see so many sites come through our issue tracker. (Thanks for filing those bugs, they help us make Microsoft Edge better and better!) Some issues we see over and over are honest mistakes or outdated ‘best practices’ that could be avoided, so we built this tool to help everyone help make the web a better place.
When we decided to create sonarwhal, we wanted to create a tool that would help developers write better and more up-to-date code for their websites. We want sonarwhal to be useful to anyone so, early on, we defined three guiding principles we’ve used along the way:
Community Driven. We build for the community’s best interests. The web belongs to everyone and this project should too. Not only is it open source, we’ve also donated it to the JS Foundation and have an inclusive governance model that welcomes the collaboration of anyone, individual or company.
User Centric. We want to put the user at the center, making sonarwhal configurable for your needs and easy to use no matter what your skill level is.
Collaborative. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we collaborated with existing tools and services that help developers build for the web. Some examples are aXe, snyk.io, Cloudinary, etc.
This is just the beginning and we still have lots to do. We’re hard at work on a backlog of exciting features for future releases, such as:
New rules for a variety of areas like performance, accessibility, security, progressive web apps, and more.
A plug-in for Visual Studio Code: we want sonarwhal to help you write better websites, and what better moment than when you are in your editor.
Configuration options for the online service: as we fine tune the infrastructure, the rule configuration for our scanner is locked, but we look forward to adding CLI customization options here in the near future.
This is a tool for the web community by the web community so if you are excited about sonarwhal, making a better web, and want to contribute, we have a few issues where you might be able to help. Also, don’t forget to check the rest of the sonarwhal GitHub organization. PRs are always welcome and appreciated!
Let us know what you think about the scanner at @NarwhalNellie on Twitter and we hope you’ll help us lint the web forward!",2017,Stephanie Drescher,stephaniedrescher,2017-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/lint-the-web-forward-with-sonarwhal/,code
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 valuable teammates.
A design system needs support and love to be nurtured and to grow. It also needs investment.
Investment
To have a successful design system, you need to make a continuous effort to invest resources into it. I like to compare this to working out.
You can work out intensely for 3 months and see some gains, but once you stop working out, those will slowly fade away. If you continue to work out, even if its less often than the initial investment, you’ll see yourself maintaining your fitness level at a much higher rate than if you stopped completely.
If you invest once in a design system (say, 3 months of overhauling it) but neglect to keep it up, you’ll face the same situation. You’ll see immediate impact, but that impact will fade as it gets out of sync with new designs and you’ll end up with strange, floating bits of code that nobody is using. Your engineers will stop using it as the patterns become outdated, and then you’ll find yourself in for another round of large investment (while dreading going through the process since its fallen so far out of shape).
With design systems, small incremental investments over time lead to big gains overall.
With this point, I also want to note that because of how they scale, design systems can really make a large impact across the platform, making it extremely important to really invest in things like accessibility and solid architecture from the start. You don’t want to scale a brittle system that’s not easy to use.
Take care of your design systems, and keep working on them to ensure their effectiveness. One way to ensure this is to have a dedicated team working on this design system, managing tickets and styling updates that trickle out to the rest of your company.
Responsibility
With some kind of team to act as an owner of a design system, whether it be the design team, engineering team, or a new team
made of both designers and engineers (the best option), your company is more likely to keep a relevant, up-to-date system that doesn’t break.
This team is responsible for a few things:
Helping others get set up on the system (support)
Designing and building components (development)
Advocating for overall UI consistency and adherence (evangelism)
Creating a rollout plan and update system (product management)
As you can see, these are a lot of roles, so it helps to have multiple people on this team, at least part of the time, if you can. One thing I’ve found to be effective in the past is to hold office hours for coworkers to book slots within to help them get set up and to answer any questions about using the system. Having an open Slack channel also helps for this sort of thing, as well as for bringing up bugs/issues/ideas and being an channel for announcements like new releases.
Communication
Once you have resources and a plan to invest in a design system, its really important that this person or team acts as a bridge between design and engineering. Continuous communication is really important here, and the way you communicate is even more important.
Remember that nobody wants to be told what to do or prescribed a solution, especially developers, who are used to a lot of autonomy (usually they get to choose their own tools at work). Despite how much control the other engineers have on the process, they need to feel like they have input, and feel heard.
This can be challenging, especially since ultimately, some party needs to be making a final decision on direction and execution. Because it’s a hard balance to strike, having open communication channels and being as transparent as possible as early as possible is a good start.
Buy-in
For all of the reasons we’ve just looked over, good communication is really important for getting buy-in from your users (the engineers and designers), as well as from product management.
Building and maintaining a design system is surprisingly a lot of people-ops work.
To get buy-in where you don’t have a previous concensus that this is the right direction to take, you need to make people want to use your design system. A really good way to get someone to want to use a product is to make it the path of least resistance, to show its value.
Gather examples and usage wins, because showing is much more powerful than telling.
If you can, have developers use your product in a low-stakes situation where it provides clear benefits. Hackathons are a great place to debut your design system. Having a hackathon internally at DigitalOcean was a perfect opportunity to:
Evangelize for the design system
See what people were using the component library for and what they were struggling with (excellent user testing there)
Get user feedback afterward on how to improve it in future iterations
Let people experience the benefits of using it themselves
These kinds of moments, where people explore on their own are where you can really get people on your side and using the design system, because they can get their hands on it and draw their own conclusions (and if they don’t love it — listen to them on how to improve it so that they do). We don’t always get so lucky as to have this sort of instantaneous user feedback from our direct users.
Architecture
I briefly mentioned the scalable nature of design systems. This is exactly why it’s important to develop a solid architecture early on in the process. Build your design system with growth and scalability in mind. What happens if your company acquires a new product? What happens when it develops a new market segment? How can you make sure there’s room for customization and growth?
A few things we’ve found helpful include:
Namespacing
Use namespacing to ensure that the system doesn’t collide with existing styles if applying it to an existing codebase. This means prefixing every element in the system to indicate that this class is a part of the design system. To ensure that you don’t break parts of the existing build (which may have styled base elements), you can namespace the entire system inside of a parent class. Sass makes this easy with its nested structure.
This kind of namespacing wouldn’t be necessary per se on new projects, but it is definitely useful when integrating new and old styles.
Semantic Versioning
I’ve used Semantic Versioning on all of the design systems I’ve ever worked on. Semantic versioning uses a system of Major.Minor.Patch for any updates. You can then tag released on Github with versioned updates and ensure that someone’s app won’t break unintentionally when there is an update, if they are anchored to a specific version (which they should be).
We also use this semantic versioning as a link with our design system assets at DigitalOcean (i.e. Sketch library) to keep them in sync, with the same version number corresponding to both Sketch and code.
Our design system is served as a node module, but is also provided as a series of built assets using our CDN for quick prototyping and one-off projects. For these built assets, we run a deploy script that automatically creates folders for each release, as well as a latest folder if someone wanted the always-up-to-date version of the design system.
So, semantic versioning for the system I’m currently building is what links our design system node module assets, sketch library assets, and statically built file assets.
The reason we have so many ways of consuming our design system is to make adoption easier and to reduce friction.
Friction
A while ago, I posed the question of why design systems become outdated and unused, and a major conclusion I drew from the conversation was:
“If it’s harder for people to use than their current system, people just won’t use it”
You have to make your design system the path of least resistance, lowering cognitive overhead of development, not adding to it. This is vital. A design system is intended to make development much more efficient, enforce a consistent style across sites, and allow for the developer to not worry as much about small decisions like naming and HTML semantics. These are already sorted out for them, meaning they can focus on building product.
But if your design system is complicated and over-engineered, they may find it frustrating to use and go back to what they know, even if its not the best solution. If you’re a Sass expert, and base your system on complex mixins and functions, you better hope your user (the developer) is also a Sass expert, or wants to learn. This is often not the case, however. You need to talk to your audience.
With the DigitalOcean design system, we provide a few options:
Option 1
Users can implement the component library into a development environment and use Sass, select just the components they want to include, and extend the system using a hook-based system. This is the most performant and extensible output. Only the components that are called upon are included, and they can be easily extended using mixins.
But as noted earlier, not everyone wants to work this way (including Sass a dependency and potentially needing to set up a build system for it and learn a new syntax). There is also the user who just wants to throw a link onto their page and have it look nice, and thats where our versioned built assets come in.
Option 2
With Option 2, users pull in links that are served via a CDN that contain JS, CSS, and our SVG icon library. The code is a bit bigger than the completely customized version, but often this isn’t the aim when people are using Option 2.
Reducing friction for adoption should be a major goal of your design system rollout.
Conclusion
Having a design system is really beneficial to any product, especially as it grows. In order to have an effective system, it’s important to primarily always keep your user in mind and garner support from your entire company. Once you have support and acceptance, this system will flourish and grow. Make sure someone is responsible for it, and make sure its built with a solid foundation from the start which will be carefully maintained toward the future. Good luck, and happy holidays!",2017,Una Kravets,unakravets,2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/why-design-systems-fail/,process
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 at tech conferences. However, as I began to realize my aspirations of being an author and a speaker, Twitter became a dreaded hall of mirrors where I only saw distorted reflections of my lack of achievement in other people’s success. Every person announcing a publishing deal caused me to drown under waves of envy over the imagined size of her or his book advance as I struggled to pay my mortgage. Every announcement I read of someone speaking at a conference led to thoughts of, “I wish I were speaking at that conference – I must not be good enough to be invited.” Twitter was fertile ground for my Inner Critic to run rampant.
One day in 2011, my comparisons to people who I didn’t even know rose to a fever pitch. I saw a series of tweets that sparked a wave of self-loathing so profound that I spent the day sobbing and despondent, as I chastised myself for being a failure. I had fallen into the deep pit of Comparison Syndrome, and to return to anything close to being productive took a day or two of painstakingly clawing my way out.
Comparison Syndrome Takes Deficiency Anxiety to Eleven
Do any of these scenarios ring true?
You frequently feel like a failure when viewing the success of others.
You feel dispirited and paralyzed in moving forward with your own work because it will never measure up to what others have done.
You discount your ideas because you fear that they aren’t as good as those of your colleagues or industry peers.
Are you making yourself miserable by thinking thoughts like these?
“I’m surrounded by people who are so good at what they do, how can I possibly measure up?”
“Compared to my partner, my musical ability is childish – and music is no longer fun.”
“Why haven’t I accomplished more by now? My peers are so much more successful than I am.”
Unenviable Envy
Many people use the terms envy and jealousy interchangeably, but they are two distinct emotions. Jealousy is the fear of losing someone to a perceived rival: a threat to an important relationship and the parts of the self that are served by that relationship. Jealousy is always about the relationship between three people. Envy is wanting what another has because of a perceived shortcoming on your part. Envy is always based on a social comparison to another.1
Envy is a reaction to the feeling of lacking something. Envy always reflects something we feel about ourselves, about how we are somehow deficient in qualities, possessions, or success.2 It’s based on a scarcity mentality: the idea that there is only so much to go around, and another person got something that should rightfully be yours.3
A syndrome is a condition characterized by a set of associated symptoms. I call it Comparison Syndrome because a perceived deficiency of some sort – in talent, accomplishments, success, skills, etc. – is what initially sparks it. While at the beginning you may merely feel inadequate, the onset of the syndrome will bring additional symptoms. Lack of self-trust and feelings of low self-worth will fuel increased thoughts of not-enoughness and blindness to your unique brilliance. If left unchecked, Deficiency Anxieties can escalate to full-blown Comparison Syndrome: a form of the Inner Critic in which we experience despair from envy and define ourselves as failures in light of another’s success.
The irony is that when we focus so much on what we lack, we can’t see what we have in abundance that the other person doesn’t have. And in doing so, we block what is our birthright: our creative expression. Envy shackles our creativity, keeps us trapped in place, and prevents forward movement. The Inner Critic in the form of Comparison Syndrome caused by envy blocks us from utilizing our gifts, seeing our path clearly, and reveling in our creative power.
In order to keep a grip on reality and not fall into the abyss of Comparison Syndrome, we’ll quell the compulsion to compare before it happens: we will free the mental bandwidth to turn our focus inward so we can start to see ourselves clearly.
Break the Compulsion to Compare
“Why compare yourself with others? No one in the entire world can do a better job of being you than you.”
— Krystal Volney, poet and author
At some point in time, many of us succumb to moments of feeling that we are lacking and comparing ourselves unfavorably to others. As social animals, much of our self-definition comes from comparison with others. This is how our personalities develop. We learn this behavior as children, and we grow up being compared to siblings, peers, and kids in the media. Because of this, the belief that somehow, someway, we aren’t good enough becomes deeply ingrained. The problem is that whenever we deem ourselves to be “less than,” our self-esteem suffers. This creates a negative feedback loop where negative thoughts produce strong emotions that result in self-defeating behaviors that beget more negative thoughts.
Couple this cycle with the messages we get from society that only “gifted” people are creative, and it’s no wonder that many of us will fall down the rabbit hole of Comparison Syndrome like I did on that fated day while reading tweets. Comparing ourselves to others is worse than a zero-sum game, it’s a negative-sum game. No one wins, our self-esteem deteriorates, and our creative spark dies out.
With effort, we can break the compulsion to compare and stop the decline into Comparison Syndrome by turning the focus of comparison inward to ourselves and appreciating who we’ve become. But first, we need to remove some of the instances that trigger our comparisons in the first place.
Arrest: Stop the Triggers
“Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.”
— Bertrand Russell, philosopher
After my Twitter post meltdown, I knew had to make a change. While bolstering my sense of self was clearly a priority, I also knew that my ingrained comparison habit was too strong to resist and that I needed to instill discipline. I decided then and there to establish boundaries with social media.
First, to maintain my sanity, I took this on as my mantra:
“I will not compare myself to strangers on the Internet or acquaintances on Facebook.”
If you find yourself sliding down the slippery slope of social media comparison, you can do the same: repeat this mantra to yourself to help put on the brakes.
Second, in order to reduce my triggers, I stopped reading the tweets of the people I followed. However, I continued to be active on Twitter through sharing information, responding to mentions, crowdsourcing, and direct messaging people. It worked! The only time I’d start to slip into darkness were the rare instances when I would break my rules and look at my Twitstream.
But we can do even more than calm ourselves with helpful mantras. Just like my example of modifying my use of Twitter, and more recently, of separating myself from Facebook, you can get some distance from the media that activates your comparison reflex and start creating the space for other habits that are more supportive to your being to take its place.
Creative Dose: Trigger-free and Happy
Purpose: To stop comparison triggers in their tracks
Mindfulness is a wonderful tool, but sometimes you have to get hardcore and do as much as you can to eliminate distractions so that you can first hear your own thoughts in order to know which ones you need to focus on.
Here are four steps to becoming trigger-free and happier.
Step 1: Make a List
Pay attention when you get the most triggered and hooked.
Is it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat?
Is it YouTube, TV shows, or magazines?
Make list of your top triggers.
My primary trigger is:______________________________________
My second trigger is:______________________________________
My third trigger is:______________________________________
Now that you have your list, you need to get an idea just how often you’re getting triggered.
Step 2: Monitor
It’s easy to think that we should track our activity on the computer, but these days, it’s no longer our computer use that is the culprit: most of us access social media and news from our phones. Fortunately, there are apps that will track the usage for both.
Seeing just how much you consume media from either or both will show you how much of an accomplice the use of devices is to your comparison syndrome, and how much you need to modify your behavior accordingly.
For tracking both computer use and tablet use, this app works great:
RescueTime.com tracks app usage and sends a productivity report at the end of the week via email.
For your phone, there are many for either platform.4 Although I recommend fully researching what is available and will work for you best, here are a few recommendations:
For both platforms: Offtime, Breakfree, Checky
For Android only: Flipd, AppDetox, QualityTime, Stay On Task
For iOS only: Moment
Install your app of choice, and see what you find. How much time are you spending on sites or apps that compel you to compare?
Step 3: Just Say No
Now that you know what your triggers are and how much you’re exposing yourself to them, it’s time to say No.
Put yourself on a partial social media and/or media detox for a specified period of time; consider even going for a full media detox.5 I recommend starting with one month.
To help you to fully commit, I recommend writing this down and posting it where you can see it.
I, ___________________, commit to avoiding my comparison triggers
of ___________________, ___________________, and ___________________
for the period of ___________________,
starting on ___________________ and ending on ___________________ .
To help you out, I’ve created a social media detox commitment sheet for you.
Step 4: Block
When I decided to reduce my use of Twitter and Facebook to break my comparison habit, initially I tried to rely solely on self-discipline, which was only moderately successful. Then I realized that I could use the power of technology to help. Don’t think you have to rely upon sheer willpower to block, or at least limit, your exposure to known triggers. If your primary access to the items that cause you to compare yourself to others is via computers and other digitalia, use these devices to help maintain your mental equilibrium.
Here are some apps and browser extensions that you can use during your media detox to help keep yourself sane and stay away from sites that could throw you into a comparison tailspin.
These apps are installed onto your computer:
RescueTime.com works on both computer and mobile devices, and does a lot more than just prevent you from going to sites that will ruin your concentration, it will also track your apps usage and give you a productivity report at the end of the week.
Focus and SelfControl (Mac-only)
To go right to the source and prevent you from visiting sites through your browser, there are browser extensions.
Not only can you put in the list of the URLs that are your points of weakness, but you can also usually set the times of the day you need the self-control the most.
Google Chrome: StayFocusd, Strict Workflow, and Website Blocker
Firefox: Idderall and Leechblock
Safari: WasteNoTime and MindfulBrowsing
Edge (or Explorer): Unfortunately, there are currently no website blocking extensions for these browsers.
I currently use a browser extension to block me from using Facebook between 9:00am – 6:00pm. It’s been a boon for my sanity: I compare tons less. A bonus is that it’s been terrific for my productivity as well.
Which tool will you use for your media detox time? Explore them all and then settle upon the one(s) that will work the best for you. Install it and put it to work.
Despite the tool, you will still need to exercise discipline. Resist the urge to browse Instagram or Facebook while waiting for your morning train. You can do it!
Step 5: Relax
Instead of panicking from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), take comfort from this thought: what you don’t know won’t affect you. Start embracing JOMO (Joy of Missing Out), and the process of rebuilding and maintaining your sanity.
What will you do instead of consuming the media that compels you to
compare? Here are some ideas:
Read a book
Go for a walk
Have dinner with a friend
Go watch a movie
Learn how to play the harmonica
Take an improv class
Really, you could do anything. And depending on how much of your time and attention you’ve devoted to media, you could be recapturing a lot of lost moments, minutes, hours, and days.
Step 6: Reconnect
Use your recovered time and attention to focus on your life and reconnect with your true value-driven goals, higher aspirations, and activities that you’ve always wanted to do.
This article is an excerpt from the book Banish Your Inner Critic by Denise Jacobs, and has been reprinted with permission. If you’d like to read more, you can find the book on Amazon.
Shane Parrish, “Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy,” Farnam Street, accessed February 9, 2017. ↩
Parrish, “Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy.” ↩
Henrik Edberg, “How to Overcome Envy: 5 Effective Tips,” Practical Happiness Advice That Works | The Positivity Blog, accessed February 9, 2017. ↩
Jeremy Golden, “6 Apps to Stop Your Smartphone Addiction,” Inc.com, accessed February 10, 2017. ↩
Emily Nickerson, “How to Silence the Voice of Doubt,” The Muse, accessed February 8, 2017. ↩",2017,Denise Jacobs,denisejacobs,2017-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/do-a-media-detox/,process
209,Feeding the Audio Graph,"In 2004, I was given an iPod.
I count this as one of the most intuitive pieces of technology I’ve ever owned. It wasn’t because of the the snazzy (colour!) menus or circular touchpad. I loved how smoothly it fitted into my life. I could plug in my headphones and listen to music while I was walking around town. Then when I got home, I could plug it into an amplifier and carry on listening there.
There was no faff. It didn’t matter if I could find my favourite mix tape, or if my WiFi was flakey - it was all just there.
Nowadays, when I’m trying to pair my phone with some Bluetooth speakers, or can’t find my USB-to-headphone jack, or even access any music because I don’t have cellular reception; I really miss this simplicity.
The Web Audio API
I think the Web Audio API feels kind of like my iPod did.
It’s different from most browser APIs - rather than throwing around data, or updating DOM elements - you plug together a graph of audio nodes, which the browser uses to generate, process, and play sounds.
The thing I like about it is that you can totally plug it into whatever you want, and it’ll mostly just work.
So, let’s get started. First of all we want an audio source.
(Song - Night Owl by Broke For Free)
This totally works. However, it’s not using the Web Audio API, so we can’t access or modify the sound it makes.
To hook this up to our audio graph, we can use an AudioSourceNode. This captures the sound from the element, and lets us connect to other nodes in a graph.
const audioCtx = new AudioContext()
const audio = document.querySelector('audio')
const input = audioCtx.createAudioSourceNode(audio)
input.connect(audioCtx.destination)
Great. We’ve made something that looks and sounds exactly the same as it did before. Go us.
Gain
Let’s plug in a GainNode - this allows you to alter the amplitude (volume) of an an audio stream.
We can hook this node up to an
element by setting the gain property of the node. (The syntax for this is kind of weird because it’s an AudioParam which has options to set values at precise intervals).
const node = audioCtx.createGain()
const input = document.querySelector('input')
input.oninput = () => node.gain.value = parseFloat(input.value)
input.connect(node)
node.connect(audioCtx.destination)
You can now see a range input, which can be dragged to update the state of our graph. This input could be any kind of element, so now you’ll be free to build the volume control of your dreams.
There’s a number of nodes that let you modify/filter an audio stream in more interesting ways. Head over to the MDN Web Audio page for a list of them.
Analysers
Something else we can add to our graph is an AnalyserNode. This doesn’t modify the audio at all, but allows us to inspect the sounds that are flowing through it. We can put this into our graph between our AudioSourceNode and the GainNode.
const analyser = audioCtx.createAnalyser()
input.connect(analyser)
analyser.connect(gain)
gain.connect(audioCtx.destination)
And now we have an analyser. We can access it from elsewhere to drive any kind of visuals. For instance, if we wanted to draw lines on a canvas we could totally do that:
const waveform = new Uint8Array(analyser.fftSize)
const frequencies = new Uint8Array(analyser.frequencyBinCount)
const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d')
const loop = () => {
requestAnimationFrame(loop)
analyser.getByteTimeDomainData(waveform)
analyser.getByteFrequencyData(frequencies)
ctx.beginPath()
waveform.forEach((f, i) => ctx.lineTo(i, f))
ctx.lineTo(0,255)
frequencies.forEach((f, i) => ctx.lineTo(i, 255-f))
ctx.stroke()
}
loop()
You can see that we have two arrays of data available (I added colours for clarity):
The waveform - the raw samples of the audio being played.
The frequencies - a fourier transform of the audio passing through the node.
What’s cool about this is that you’re not tied to any specific functionality of the Web Audio API. If it’s possible for you to update something with an array of numbers, then you can just apply it to the output of the analyser node.
For instance, if we wanted to, we could definitely animate a list of emoji in time with our music.
spans.forEach(
(s, i) => s.style.transform = `scale(${1 + (frequencies[i]/100)})`
)
🔈🎤🎤🎤🎺🎷📯🎶🔊🎸🎺🎤🎸🎼🎷🎺🎻🎸🎻🎺🎸🎶🥁🎶🎵🎵🎷📯🎸🎹🎤🎷🎻🎷🔈🔊📯🎼🎤🎵🎼📯🥁🎻🎻🎤🔉🎵🎹🎸🎷🔉🔈🔉🎷🎶🔈🎸🎸🎻🎤🥁🎼📯🎸🎸🎼🎸🥁🎼🎶🎶🥁🎤🔊🎷🔊🔈🎺🔊🎻🎵🎻🎸🎵🎺🎤🎷🎸🎶🎼📯🔈🎺🎤🎵🎸🎸🔊🎶🎤🥁🎵🎹🎸🔈🎻🔉🥁🔉🎺🔊🎹🥁🎷📯🎷🎷🎤🎸🔉🎹🎷🎸🎺🎼🎤🎼🎶🎷🎤🎷📯📯🎻🎤🎷📯🎹🔈🎵🎹🎼🔊🔉🔉🔈🎶🎸🥁🎺🔈🎷🎵🔉🥁🎷🎹🎷🔊🎤🎤🔊🎤🎤🎹🎸🎹🔉🎷
Generating Audio
So far, we’ve been using the
element as a source of sound.
There’s a few other sources of audio that we can use. We’ll look at the AudioBufferNode - which allows you to manually generate a sound sample, and then connect it to our graph.
First we have to create an AudioBuffer, which holds our raw data, then we pass that to an AudioBufferNode which we can then treat just like our AudioSource node. This can get a bit boring, so we’ll use a helper method that makes it simpler to generate sounds.
const generator = (audioCtx, target) => (seconds, fn) => {
const { sampleRate } = audioCtx
const buffer = audioCtx.createBuffer(
1, sampleRate * seconds, sampleRate
)
const data = buffer.getChannelData(0)
for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
data[i] = fn(i / sampleRate, seconds)
}
return () => {
const source = audioCtx.createBufferSource()
source.buffer = audioBuffer
source.connect(target || audioCtx.destination)
source.start()
}
}
const sound = generator(audioCtx, gain)
Our wrapper will let us provide a function that maps time (in seconds) to a sample (between 1 and -1). This generates a waveform, like we saw before with the analyser node.
For example, the following will generate 0.75 seconds of white noise at 20% volume.
const noise = sound(0.75, t => Math.random() * 0.2)
button.onclick = noise
Noise
Now we’ve got a noisy button! Handy.
Rather than having a static set of audio nodes, each time we click the button, we add a new node to our graph. Although this feels inefficient, it’s not actually too bad - the browser can do a good job of cleaning up old nodes once they’ve played.
An interesting property of defining sounds as functions is that we can combine multiple function to generate new sounds. So if we wanted to fade our noise in and out, we could write a higher order function that does that.
const ease = fn => (t, s) =>
fn(t) * Math.sin((t / s) * Math.PI)
const noise = sound(0.75, ease(t => Math.random() * 0.2))
ease(noise)
And we can do more than just white noise - if we use Math.sin, we can generate some nice pure tones.
// Math.sin with period of 0..1
const wave = v => Math.sin(Math.PI * 2 * v)
const hz = f => t => wave(t * f)
const _440hz = sound(0.75, ease(hz(440)))
const _880hz = sound(0.75, ease(hz(880)))
440Hz
880Hz
We can also make our functions more complex. Below we’re combining several frequencies to make a richer sounding tone.
const harmony = f => [4, 3, 2, 1].reduce(
(v, h, i) => (sin(f * h) * (i+1) ) + v
)
const a440 = sound(0.75, ease(harmony(440)))
440Hz
880Hz
Cool.
We’re still not using any audio-specific functionality, so we can repurpose anything that does an operation on data. For example, we can use d3.js - usually used for interactive data visualisations - to generate a triangular waveform.
const triangle = d3.scaleLinear()
.domain([0, .5, 1])
.range([-1, 1, -1])
const wave = t => triangle(t % 1)
const a440 = sound(0.75, ease(harmony(440)))
440Hz
880Hz
It’s pretty interesting to play around with different functions. I’ve plonked everything in jsbin if you want to have a play yourself.
A departure from best practice
We’ve been generating our audio from scratch, but most of what we’ve looked at can be implemented by a series of native Web Audio nodes. This would be way performant (because it’s not happening on the main thread), and more flexible in some ways (because you can set timings dynamically whilst the note is playing). But we’re going to stay with this approach because it’s fun, and sometimes the fun thing to do might not technically be the best thing to do.
Making a keyboard
Having a button that makes a sound is totally great, but how about lots of buttons that make lots of sounds? Yup, totally greater-er.
The first thing we need to know is the frequency of each note. I thought this would be awkward because pianos were invented more than 250 years before the Hz unit was defined, so surely there wouldn’t be a simple mapping between the two?
const freq = note => 27.5 * Math.pow(2, (note - 21) / 12)
This equation blows my mind; I’d never really figured how tightly music and maths fit together. When you see a chord or melody, you can directly map it back to a mathematical pattern.
Our keyboard is actually an SVG picture of a keyboard, so we can traverse the elements of it and map each element to a sound generated by one of the functions that we came up with before.
Array.from(svg.querySelector('rect'))
.sort((a, b) => + a.x - b.x)
.forEach((key, i) =>
key.addEventListener('touchstart',
sound(0.75, ease(harmony(freq(i + 48))))
)
)
rect {stroke: #ddd;}
rect:hover {opacity: 0.8; stroke: #000}
Et voilà. We have a keyboard.
What I like about this is that it’s completely pure - there’s no lookup tables or hardcoded attributes; we’ve just defined a mapping from SVG elements to the sound they should probably make.
Doing better in the future
As I mentioned before, this could be implemented more performantly with Web Audio nodes, or even better - use something like Tone.js to be performant for you.
Web Audio has been around for a while, though we’re getting new challenges with immersive WebXR experiences, where spatial audio becomes really important. There’s also always support and API improvements (if you like AudioBufferNode, you’re going to love AudioWorklet)
Conclusion
And that’s about it. Web Audio isn’t some black box, you can easily link it with whatever framework, or UI that you’ve built (whether you should is an entirely different question).
If anyone ever asks you “could you turn this SVG into a musical instrument?” you don’t have to stare blankly at them any more.
(function(a,c){var b=a.createElement(""script"");if(!(""noModule""in b)&&""on""+c in b){var d=!1;a.addEventListener(c,function(a){if(a.target===b)d=!0;else if(!a.target.hasAttribute(""nomodule"")||!d)return;a.preventDefault()},!0);b.type=""module"";b.src=""."";a.head.appendChild(b);b.remove()}})(document,""beforeload"");",2017,Ben Foxall,benfoxall,2017-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/feeding-the-audio-graph/,code
211,Automating Your Accessibility Tests,"Accessibility is one of those things we all wish we were better at. It can lead to a bunch of questions like: how do we make our site better? How do we test what we have done? Should we spend time each day going through our site to check everything by hand? Or just hope that everyone on our team has remembered to check their changes are accessible?
This is where automated accessibility tests can come in. We can set up automated tests and have them run whenever someone makes a pull request, and even alongside end-to-end tests, too.
Automated tests can’t cover everything however; only 20 to 50% of accessibility issues can be detected automatically. For example, we can’t yet automate the comparison of an alt attribute with an image’s content, and there are some screen reader tests that need to be carried out by hand too. To ensure our site is as accessible as possible, we will still need to carry out manual tests, and I will cover these later.
First, I’m going to explain how I implemented automated accessibility tests on Elsevier’s ecommerce pages, and share some of the lessons I learnt along the way.
Picking the right tool
One of the hardest, but most important parts of creating our automated accessibility tests was choosing the right tool.
We began by investigating aXe CLI, but soon realised it wouldn’t fit our requirements. It couldn’t check pages that required a visitor to log in, so while we could test our product pages, we couldn’t test any customer account pages. Instead we moved over to Pa11y. Its beforeScript step meant we could log into the site and test pages such as the order history.
The example below shows the how the beforeScript step completes a login form and then waits for the login to complete before testing the page:
beforeScript: function(page, options, next) {
// An example function that can be used to make sure changes have been confirmed before continuing to run Pa11y
function waitUntil(condition, retries, waitOver) {
page.evaluate(condition, function(err, result) {
if (result || retries < 1) {
// Once the changes have taken place continue with Pa11y testing
waitOver();
} else {
retries -= 1;
setTimeout(function() {
waitUntil(condition, retries, waitOver);
}, 200);
}
});
}
// The script to manipulate the page must be run with page.evaluate to be run within the context of the page
page.evaluate(function() {
const user = document.querySelector('#login-form input[name=""email""]');
const password = document.querySelector('#login-form input[name=""password""]');
const submit = document.querySelector('#login-form input[name=""submit""]');
user.value = 'user@example.com';
password.value = 'password';
submit.click();
}, function() {
// Use the waitUntil function to set the condition, number of retries and the callback
waitUntil(function() {
return window.location.href === 'https://example.com';
}, 20, next);
});
}
The waitUntil callback allows the test to be delayed until our test user is successfully logged in.
Another thing to consider when picking a tool is the type of error messages it produces. aXe groups all elements with the same error together, so the list of issues is a lot easier to read, and it’s easier to identify the most commons problems. For example, here are some elements that have insufficient colour contrast:
Violation of ""color-contrast"" with 8 occurrences!
Ensures the contrast between foreground and background colors meets
WCAG 2 AA contrast ratio thresholds. Correct invalid elements at:
- #maincontent > .make_your_mark > div:nth-child(2) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .make_your_mark > div:nth-child(4) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(2) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(4) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(6) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(8) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(10) > p > span > span
- #maincontent > .inform_your_decisions > div:nth-child(12) > p > span > span
For details, see: https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast
aXe also provides links to their site where they discuss the best way to fix the problem.
In comparison, Pa11y lists each individual error which can lead to a very verbose list. However, it does provide helpful suggestions of how to fix problems, such as suggesting an alternative shade of a colour to use:
• Error: This element has insufficient contrast at this conformance level.
Expected a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, but text in this element has a contrast ratio of 2.96:1.
Recommendation: change text colour to #767676.
⎣ WCAG2AA.Principle1.Guideline1_4.1_4_3.G18.Fail
⎣ #maincontent > div:nth-child(10) > div:nth-child(8) > p > span > span
⎣ Featured products:
Integrating into our build pipeline
We decided the perfect time to run our accessibility tests would be alongside our end-to-end tests. We have a Jenkins job that detects changes to our staging site and then triggers the end-to-end tests, and in turn our accessibility tests. Our Jenkins job retrieves the contents of a GitHub repository containing our Pa11y script file and npm package manifest.
Once Jenkins has cloned the repository, it installs any dependencies and executes the tests via:
npm install && npm test
Bundling the URLs to be tested into our test script means we don’t have a command line style test where we list each URL we wish to test in the Jenkins CLI. It’s an effective method but can also be cluttered, and obscure which URLs are being tested.
In the middle of the office we have a monitor displaying a Jenkins dashboard and from this we can see if the accessibility tests are passing or failing. Everyone in the team has access to the Jenkins logs and when the build fails they can see why and fix the issue.
Fixing the issues
As mentioned earlier, Pa11y can generate a long list of areas for improvement which can be very verbose and quite overwhelming. I recommend going through the list to see which issues occur most frequently and fix those first. For example, we initially had a lot of errors around colour contrast, and one shade of grey in particular. By making this colour darker, the number of errors decreased, and we could focus on the remaining issues.
Another thing I like to do is to tackle the quick fixes, such as adding alt text to images. These are small things that allow us to make an impact instantly, giving us time to fix more detailed concerns such as addressing tabindex issues, or speaking to our designers about changing the contrast of elements on the site.
Manual testing
Adding automated tests to check our site for accessibility is great, but as I mentioned earlier, this can only cover 20-50% of potential issues. To improve on this, we need to test by hand too, either by ourselves or by asking others.
One way we can test our site is to throw our mouse or trackpad away and interact with the site using only a keyboard. This allows us to check items such as tab order, and ensure menu items, buttons etc. can be used without a mouse. The commands may be different on different operating systems, but there are some great guides online for learning more about these.
It’s tempting to add alt text and aria-labels to make errors go away, but if they don’t make any sense, what use are they really? Using a screenreader we can check that alt text accurately represents the image. This is also a great way to double check that our ARIA roles make sense, and that they correctly identify elements and how to interact with them. When testing our site with screen readers, it’s important to remember that not all screen readers are the same and some may interact with our site differently to others.
Consider asking a range of people with different needs and abilities to test your site, too. People experience the web in numerous ways, be they permanent, temporary or even situational. They may interact with your site in ways you hadn’t even thought about, so this is a good way to broaden your knowledge and awareness.
Tips and tricks
One of our main issues with Pa11y is that it may find issues we don’t have the power to solve. A perfect example of this is the one pixel image Facebook injects into our site. So, we wrote a small function to go though such errors and ignore the ones that we cannot fix.
const test = pa11y({
....
hideElements: '#ratings, #js-bigsearch',
...
});
const ignoreErrors: string[] = [
' option menu. In Safari on the desktop, the browser renders as a popover-style menu. On a touchscreen, Safari overlays the same menu over the lower half of the screen as a “picker view.”
Option menu in Safari on macOS.
Option menu picker in Safari on iOS.
The iOS picker is a much better experience than struggling to pick from a complicated interface inside the page. The menu is shown more clearly than in the confined space on the page, which makes the options easier to read. The required swipe and tap gestures are consistent with the rest of the operating system, making the expected interaction easier to understand. The whole menu is scaled up, meaning the gestures don’t need such fine motor control. Good usability is good accessibility.
When we choose to use a div or span over a more semantic HTML element, we’re also doing hard work the browser could be doing for us. We don’t need to tie ourselves in knots making a custom div into a keyboard navigable option menu. Using select passes the bulk of the responsibility over to the browser.
Letting the browser do most of the work is also more future-friendly. More devices, with different expected interactions, will be released in the future. When that happens, the devices’ browsers can adapt our sites according to those interactions. Then we can spend our time doing something more fun than rewriting cross-browser JavaScript for each new device.
HTML’s impact on accessibility
Assistive technology also uses semantic HTML to understand how best to convey each element to its user.
For screen readers
Semantic HTML gives context to screen readers. Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that reads the content of the screen to the person using it. All sites have a linear page source. Sighted visitors can use visual cues on the page to navigate to their desired content in a non-linear fashion. As screen readers output audio (and sometimes braille), those visual cues aren’t usable in the same way.
Screen readers provide alternative means of navigation, enabling people to jump between different types of content, such as links, forms, headings, lists, and paragraphs. If all our content is marked up using divs and spans, we’re not giving screen readers a chance to index the valuable content.
For keyboard navigation
Keyboard-only navigation is also aided by semantic HTML. Forms, option menus, navigation, video, and audio are particularly hard for people relying on a keyboard to access. For instance, option menus and navigation can be very fiddly if you need to use a mouse to hover a menu open and move to select the desired item at the same time.
Again, we can leave much of the interaction to the browser through semantic HTML. Semantic form elements can convey if a check box has been checked, or which label is associated with which input field. These default behaviours can make the difference between a person being able to use a form or leaving the site out of frustration.
Did I convince you yet? I hope so. Let’s finish with some easy guidelines to follow.
1. Use the most semantic HTML element for the job
When you reach for a div, first check if there’s a better element to do the job. What is the role of that element? How should a person be interacting with the element?
Are you using class names like nav, header, or main? There are HTML5 elements for those sections! Using specific elements can also make writing CSS simpler, and ensure a consistent design with minimal effort.
2. Separate structure and style
Don’t choose HTML elements based on how they’re styled in your CSS. Nowadays, common practice is to use class names rather than elements for CSS selectors. You’re unlikely to wrap all your page content in an element because you want all the text to be big and bold. Still, it can be easy to choose an HTML element because it will be the easiest to style. Focusing on content without style will help us choose the most semantic HTML element without that temptation. For example, you could add a class of .btn to a div to make it look like a button. But we all know that only a button will really behave like a button.
3. Use progressive enhancement for enhanced functionality
Airbnb and Groupon recently proved we’re not past the laziness of “this site only works in X browser.” Baffling disregard for the open web aside, making complex interactive experiences work cross-browser and cross-device is not easy. We can use progressive enhancement to layer fancy or unsupported features on top of a baseline “it works” experience.
We should build the baseline experience on a foundation of accessible, semantic HTML. Then, if you really want to add a specific feature for a proprietary browser, you can layer that on top, without breaking the underlying experience.
4. Test your work
Validators are always valuable for checking the browser will be able to correctly interpret your markup. Document outline checkers can be valuable for testing your structure, but be aware that the HTML5 document outline is not actually implemented in browsers.
Once you’ve got something resembling a web page, test the experience! Ensure that semantic HTML element you chose looks and behaves in a predictable manner consistent with its use across the web. Test cross-browser, test cross-device, and test with assistive technology. Testing with assistive technology is not as expensive as it used to be, you can even use your smartphone for testing on iOS and Android. Your visitors will thank you!
Further reading
Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag
HTML5 Doctor
HTML5 Accessibility
An overview of HTML5 Semantics
HTML reference on MDN
Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Design Checklist
The Paciello Group’s Inclusive Design Principles",2017,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/accessibility-through-semantic-html/,code
289,Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too,"The theme of this year’s World IA Day was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”. This article isn’t about what you may consider an information architect to be: someone in the user-experience field, who maybe studied library science, and who talks about taxonomies. This is about a realisation I had a couple of years ago when I started to run an increasing amount of usability-testing sessions with people who have disabilities: that the structure, labelling, and connections that can be made in front-end code is information architecture. People’s ability to be successful online is unequivocally connected to the quality of the code that is written.
Places made of information
In information architecture we talk about creating places made of information. These places are made of ones and zeros, but we talk about them as physical structures. We talk about going onto a social media platform, posting in blogs, getting locked out of an environment, and building applications. In 2002, Andrew Hinton stated:
People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
25 Theses
We’re creating structures which people rely on for significant parts of their lives, so it’s critical that we carry out our work responsibly. This means we must use our construction materials correctly. Luckily, our most important material, HTML, has a well-documented specification which tells us how to build robust and accessible places. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the semantics of HTML.
Semantics
The word “semantic” has its origin in Greek words meaning “significant”, “signify”, and “sign”. In the physical world, a structure can have semantic qualities that tell us something about it. For example, the stunning Westminster Abbey inspires awe and signifies much about the intent and purpose of the structure. The building’s size; the quality of the stone work; the massive, detailed stained glass: these are all signs that this is a building meant for something the creators deemed important. Alternatively consider a set of large, clean, well-positioned, well-lit doors on the ground floor of an office block: they don’t need an “entrance” sign to communicate their use and to stop people trying to use a nearby fire exit to get into the building. The design of the doors signify their usage. Sometimes a more literal and less awe-inspiring approach to communicating a building’s purpose happens, but the affect is similar: the building is signifying something about its purpose.
HTML has over 115 elements, many of which have semantics to signify structure and affordance to people, browsers, and assistive technology. The HTML 5.1 specification mentions semantics, stating:
Elements, attributes, and attribute values in HTML are defined … to have certain meanings (semantics). For example, the element represents an ordered list, and the lang attribute represents the language of the content.
HTML 5.1 Semantics, structure, and APIs of HTML documents
HTML’s baked-in semantics means that developers can architect their code to signify structure, create relationships between elements, and label content so people can understand what they’re interacting with. Structuring and labelling information to make it available, usable, and understandable to people is what an information architect does. It’s also what a front-end developer does, whether they realise it or not.
A brief introduction to information architecture
We’re going to start by looking at what an information architect is. There are many definitions, and I’m going to quote Richard Saul Wurman, who is widely regarded as the father of information architecture. In 1976 he said an information architect is:
the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.
Of Patterns And Structures
To me, this clearly defines any developer who creates code that a browser, or other user agent (for example, a screen reader), uses to create a structured, navigable place for people.
Just as there are many definitions of what an information architect is, there are for information architecture itself. I’m going to use the definition from the fourth edition of Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, in which the authors define it as:
The structural design of shared information environments.
The synthesis of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within digital, physical, and cross-channel ecosystems.
The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability, findability, and understanding.
Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, 4th Edition
To me, this describes front-end development. Done properly, there is an art to creating robust, accessible, usable, and findable spaces that delight all our users. For example, at 2015’s State Of The Browser conference, Edd Sowden talked about the accessibility of s. He discovered that by simply not using the semantically-correct element to mark up headings, in some situations browsers will decide that a is being used for layout and essentially make it invisible to assistive technology. Another example of how coding practices can affect the usability and findability of content is shown by Léonie Watson in her How ARIA landmark roles help screen reader users video. By using ARIA landmark roles, people who use screen readers are quickly able to identify and jump to common parts of a web page.
Our definitions of information architects and information architecture mention patterns, rules, organisation, labelling, structure, and relationships. There are numerous different models for how these elements get boiled down to their fundamentals. In his Understanding Context book, Andrew Hinton calls them Labels, Relationships, and Rules; Jorge Arango calls them Links, Nodes, And Order; and Dan Klyn uses Ontology, Taxonomy, and Choreography, which is the one we’re going to use. Dan defines these terms as:
Ontology
The definition and articulation of the rules and patterns that govern the meaning of what we intend to communicate.
What we mean when we say what we say.
Taxonomy
The arrangements of the parts. Developing systems and structures for what everything’s called, where everything’s sorted, and the relationships between labels and categories
Choreography
Rules for interaction among the parts. The structures it creates foster specific types of movement and interaction; anticipating the way users and information want to flow and making affordance for change over time.
We now have definitions of an information architect, information architecture, and a model of the elements of information architecture. But is writing HTML really creating information or is it just wrangling data and metadata? When does data turn into information? In his book Managing For The Future Peter Drucker states:
… data is not information. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose.
Managing For The Future
If we use the correct semantic element to mark up content then we’re developing with purpose and creating relevance. For example, if we follow the advice of the HTML 5.1 specification and mark up headings using heading rank instead of the outline algorithm, we’re creating a structure where the depth of one heading is relevant to the previous one. Architected correctly, an element should be relevant to its parent, which should be the . By following the HTML specification we can create a structured, searchable, labeled document that will hopefully be relevant to what our users need to be successful. If you’ve never used a screen reader, you might be wondering how the headings on a page are searchable. Screen readers give users the ability to interact with headings in a couple of ways:
by creating a list of headings so users can quickly scan the page for information
by using a keyboard command to cycle through one heading at a time
If we had a document for Christmas Day TV we might structure it something like this:
Christmas Day TV schedule
BBC1
Morning
Evening
BBC2
Morning
Evening
ITV
Morning
Evening
Channel 4
Morning
Evening
If I use VoiceOver to generate a list of headings, I get this:
Once I have that list I can use keyboard commands to filter the list based on the heading level. For example, I can press 2 to hear just the s:
If we hadn’t used headings, of if we’d nested them incorrectly, our users would be frustrated.
Putting this together
Let’s put this together with an example of a button that, when pressed, toggles the appearance of a panel of links. There are numerous ways we could create a button on a web page, but the best way is to just use a . Every browser understands what a is, how it works, and what keyboard shortcuts should be used with them. The HTML specification for the element says:
The element represents a button labeled by its contents.
The contents that a can have include the type attribute, any relevant ARIA attributes, and the actual text label that the user sees. This information is more important than the visual design: it doesn’t matter how beautiful or obtuse the design is, if the underlying code is non-semantic and poorly labelled, people are going to struggle to use it. Here are three buttons, each created with the same HTML but with different designs:
Regardless of what they look like, because we’ve used semantic HTML instead of a bunch of meaningless s or
s, people who use assistive technology are going to benefit. Out of the box, without any extra development effort, a is accessible and usable with a keyboard. We don’t have to write event handlers to listen for people pressing the Enter key or the space bar, which we would have to do if we’d faked a button with non-semantic elements. Our can also be quickly findable: for example, in the same way it’s possible to create a list of headings with a screen reader, I can also create a list of form elements and then quickly jump to the one I want.
Now we have our , let’s add the panel we’re toggling the appearance of. Here’s our code:
Settings
There’s quite a bit going on here. We’re using the:
aria-controls attribute to architect a connection between the element and the panel whose appearance it controls. When some assistive technology, for example the JAWS screen reader, encounters an element with aria-controls it audibly tells a user about the controlled expanded element and gives them the ability to move focus to it.
aria-expanded attribute to denote whether the panel is visible or not. We toggle this value using JavaScript to true when the panel is visible and false when it’s not. This important attribute tells people who use screen readers about the state of the elements they’re interacting with. For example, VoiceOver announces Settings expanded button when the panel is visible and Settings collapsed button when it’s hidden.
aria-labelledby attribute to give the list a title of “Settings”. This can benefit some users of assistive technology. For example, screen readers can cycle through all the lists on a page, so being able to title them can improve findability. Being able to hear list Settings three items is, I’d argue, more useful than list three items. By doing this we’re supporting usability and findability.
element to contain our list of links in our panel.
Let’s look at the choice of to contain our settings choices. Firstly, our settings are related items, so they belong in a structure that semantically groups things. This is something that a list can do that other elements or patterns can’t. This pattern, for example, isn’t semantic and has no structure:
All we have there is three elements next to each other on the screen and in the DOM. That is not robust code that signifies anything.
Why are we using an unordered list as opposed to an ordered list or a definition list? A quick look at the HTML specification tells us why:
The element represents a list of items, where the order of the items is not important — that is, where changing the order would not materially change the meaning of the document.
The HTML 5.1 specification’s description of the element
Will the meaning of our document materially change if we moved the order of our links around? Nope. Therefore, I’d argue, we’ve used the correct element to structure our content.
These coding decisions are information architecture
I believe that what we’ve done here is pure information architecture. Going back to Dan Klyn’s model, we’ve practiced ontology by looking at the meaning of what we’re intending to communicate:
we want to communicate there is an interactive element that toggles the appearance of an element on a page so we’ve used one, a , with those semantics.
programmatically we’ve used the type='button' attribute to signify that the button isn’t a menu, reset, or submit element.
visually we’ve designed our look like something that can be interacted with and, importantly, we haven’t removed the focus ring.
we’ve labelled the with the word “Settings” so that our users will hopefully understand what the button is for.
we’ve used an element to structure and communicate our list of related items.
We’ve also practiced taxonomy by developing systems and structures and creating relationships between our elements:
by connecting the to the panel using the aria-controls attribute we’ve programmatically created a relationship between two elements.
we’ve developed a structure in our elements by labelling our with the same name as the that controls its appearance.
And finally we’ve practiced choreography by creating elements that foster movement and interaction. We’ve anticipated the way users and information want to flow:
we’ve used a element that is interactive and accessible out of the box.
our aria-controls attribute can help some people who use screen readers move easily from the to the panel it controls.
by toggling the value of the aria-expanded attribute we’ve developed a system that tells assistive technology about the status of the relationship between our elements: the panel is visible or the panel is hidden.
we’ve made sure our information is more usable and findable no matter how our users want or need to interact with it. Regardless of how someone “sees” our work they’re going to be able to use it because we’ve architected multiple ways to access our information.
Information architecture, robust code, and accessibility
The United Nations estimates that around 10% of the world’s population has some form of disability which, at the time of writing, is around 740,000,000 people. That’s a lot of people who rely on well-architected semantic code that can be interpreted by whatever assistive technology they may need to use.
If everyone involved in the creation of our places made of information practiced information architecture it would make satisfying the WCAG 2.0 POUR principles so much easier. Our digital construction practices directly affect the quality of life of millions of people, and we have a responsibility to make technology available to them. In her book How To Make Sense Of Any Mess, Abby Covert states:
If we’re going to be successful in this new world, we need to see information as a workable material and learn to architect it in a way that gets us to our goals.
How To Make Sense Of Any Mess
I believe that the world will be a better place if we start treating front-end development as information architecture.",2016,Francis Storr,francisstorr,2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/,code
290,Creating a Weekly Research Cadence,"Working on a product team, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on building features and lose sight of your users and their daily challenges. User research can be time-consuming to set up, so it often becomes ad-hoc and irregular, only performed in response to a particular question or concern. But without frequent touch points and opportunities for discovery, your product will stagnate and become less and less relevant. Setting up an efficient cadence of weekly research conversations will re-focus your team on user problems and provide a steady stream of insights for product development.
As my team transitioned into a Lean process earlier this year, we needed a way to get more feedback from users in a short amount of time. Our users are internet marketers—always busy and often difficult to reach. Scheduling research took days of emailing back and forth to find mutually agreeable times, and juggling one-off conversations made it difficult to connect with more than one or two people per week. The slow pace of research was allowing additional risk to creep into our product development.
I wanted to find a way for our team to test ideas and validate assumptions sooner and more often—but without increasing the administrative burden of scheduling. The solution: creating a regular cadence of research and testing that required a minimum of effort to coordinate.
Setting up a weekly user research cadence accelerated our learning and built momentum behind strategic experiments. By dedicating time every week to talk to a few users, we made ongoing research a painless part of every weekly sprint. But increasing the frequency of our research had other benefits as well. With only five working days between sessions, a weekly cadence forced us to keep our work small and iterative. Committing to testing something every week meant showing work earlier and more often than we might have preferred—pushing us out of your comfort zone into a process of more rapid experimentation.
Best of all, frequent conversations with users helped us become more customer-focused. After just a few weeks in a consistent research cadence, I noticed user feedback weaving itself through our planning and strategy sessions. Comments like “Remember what Jenna said last week, about not being able to customize her lists?” would pop up as frequent reference points to guide our decisions. As discussions become less about subjective opinions and more about responding to user needs, we saw immediate improvement in the quality of our solutions.
Establishing an efficient recruitment process
The key to creating a regular cadence of ongoing user research is an efficient recruitment and scheduling process—along with a commitment to prioritize the time needed for research conversations. This is an invaluable tool for product teams (whether or not they follow a Lean process), but could easily be adapted for content strategy teams, agency teams, a UX team of one, or any other project that would benefit from short, frequent conversations with users.
The process I use requires a few hours of setup time at the beginning, but pays off in better learning and better releases over the long run. Almost any team could use this as a starting point and adapt it to their own needs.
Pick a dedicated time each week for research
In order to make research a priority, we started by choosing a time each week when everyone on the product team was available. Between stand-ups, grooming sessions, and roadmap reviews, it wasn’t easy to do! Nevertheless, it’s important to include as many people as possible in conversations with your users. Getting a second-hand summary of research results doesn’t have the same impact as hearing someone describe their frustrations and concerns first-hand. The more people in the room to hear those concerns, the more likely they are to become priorities for your team.
I blocked off 2 hours for research conversations every Thursday afternoon. We make this time sacred, and never schedule other meetings or work across those hours.
Divide your time into several research slots
After my weekly cadence was set, I divided the time into four 20-minute time slots. Twenty minutes is long enough for us to ask several open-ended questions or get feedback on a prototype, without being a burden on our users’ busy schedules. Depending on your work, you may need schedule longer sessions—but beware the urge to create blocks that last an hour or more. A weekly research cadence is designed to facilitate rapid, ongoing feedback and testing; it should force you to talk to users often and to keep your work small and iterative. Projects that require longer, more in-depth testing will probably need a dedicated research project of their own.
I used the scheduling software Calendly to create interview appointments on a calendar that I can share with users, and customized the confirmation and reminder emails with information about how to access our video conferencing software. (Most of our research is done remotely, but this could be set up with details for in-person meetings as well.) Automating these emails and reminders took a little bit of time to set up, but was worth it for how much faster it made the process overall.
Invite users to sign up for a time that’s convenient for them
With a calendar set up and follow-up emails automated, it becomes incredibly easy to schedule research conversations. Each week, I send a short email out to a small group of users inviting them to participate, explaining that this is a chance to provide feedback that will improve our product or occasionally promoting the opportunity to get a sneak peek at new features we’re working on. The email includes a link to the Calendly appointments, allowing users who are interested to opt in to a time that fits their schedule.
Setting up appointments the first go around involved a bit of educated guessing. How many invitations would it take to fill all four of my weekly slots? How far in advance did I need to recruit users? But after a few weeks of trial and error, I found that sending 12-16 invitations usually allows me to fill all four interview slots. Our users often have meetings pop up at short notice, so we get the best results when I send the recruiting email on Tuesday, two days before my research block.
It may take a bit of experimentation to fine tune your process, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. (The worst thing that’s happened since I began recruiting this way was receiving emails from users complaining that there were no open slots available!) I can now fill most of an afternoon with back-to-back user research sessions just by sending just one or two emails each week, increasing our research pace while leaving plenty time to focus on discovery and design.
Getting the most out of your research sessions
As you get comfortable with the rhythm of talking to users each week, you’ll find more and more ways to get value out of your conversations. At first, you may prefer to just show work in progress—such as mockups or a simple prototype—and ask open-ended questions to measure user reaction. When you begin new projects, you may want to use this time to research behavior on existing features—either watching participants as they use part of your product or asking them to give an account of a recent experience in your app. You may even want to run more abstracted Lean experiments, if that’s the best way to validate the assumptions your team is working from.
Whatever you do, plan some time a day or two later to come back together and review what you’ve learned each week. Synthesizing research outcomes as a group will help keep your team in alignment and allow each person to highlight what they took away from each conversation.
Over time, you may find that the pace of weekly user research becomes more exhausting than energizing, especially if the responsibility for scheduling and planning falls on just one person. Don’t allow yourself to get burned out; a healthy research cadence should also include time to rest and reflect if the pace becomes too rapid to sustain. Take breaks as needed, then pick up the pace again as soon as you’re ready.",2016,Wren Lanier,wrenlanier,2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/creating-a-weekly-research-cadence/,ux
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 involved copy/pasting HTML and ERB from one view to another. The CSS was roughly structured into modules, but those modules were not responsive to different screen sizes. Our HTML was complete mayhem, and we didn’t consider accessibility. All this made editing views a laborious process.
Grep. Replace all. Test. Ship it. Repeat.
This wasn’t sustainable at Shopify’s scale, so the newly-formed front end team was given two missions:
Make the app responsive (AKA Let’s Make This Thing Responsive ASAP)
Make the view layer scalable and maintainable (AKA Let’s Build a Pattern Library… in Ruby)
Let’s make this thing responsive ASAP
The year was 2015. The Shopify admin wasn’t mobile friendly. Our browser support was set to IE10. We had the wind in our sails. We wanted to achieve complete responsiveness in the shortest amount of time. Our answer: container queries.
It seemed like the obvious decision at the time. We would be able to set rules for each component in isolation and the component would know how to lay itself out on the page regardless of where it was rendered. It would save us a ton of development time since we wouldn’t need to change our markup, it would scale well, and we would achieve complete component autonomy by not having to worry about page layout. By siloing our components, we were going to unlock the ultimate goal of componentization, cutting the tie to external dependencies. We were cool.
Writing the JavaScript handling container queries was my first contribution to Shopify. It was a satisfying project to work on. We could drop our components in anywhere and they would magically look good. It took us less than a couple weeks to push this to production and make our app mostly responsive.
But with time, it became increasingly obvious that this was not as performant as we had hoped. It wasn’t performant at all. Components would jarringly jump around the page before settling in on first paint.
It was only when we started using the flex-wrap: wrap CSS property to build new components that we realized we were not using the right language for the job. So we swapped out JavaScript container queries for CSS flex-wrapping. Even though flex wasn’t yet as powerful as we wanted it to be, it was still a good compromise. Our components stayed independent of the window size but took much less time to render. Best of all: they used CSS instead of relying on JavaScript for layout.
In other words: we were using the wrong language to express our layout to the browser, when another language could do it much more simply and elegantly.
Let’s build a pattern library… in Ruby
In order to make our view layer maintainable, we chose to build a comprehensive library of helpers. This library would generate our markup from a single source of truth, allowing us to make changes system-wide, in one place. No. More. Grepping.
When I joined Shopify it was a Rails shop freshly wounded by a JavaScript framework (See: Batman.js). JavaScript was like Voldemort, the language that could not be named. Because of this baggage, the only way for us to build a pattern library that would get buyin from our developers was to use Rails view helpers. And for many reasons using Ruby was the right choice for us. The time spent ramping developers up on the new UI Components would be negligible since the Ruby API felt familiar. The transition would be simple since we didn’t have to introduce any new technology to the stack. The components would be fast since they would be rendered on the server. We had a plan.
We put in place a set of Rails tools to make it easy to build components, then wrote a bunch of sweet, sweet components using our shiny new tools. To document our design, content and front end patterns we put together an interactive styleguide to demonstrate how every component works. Our research and development department loved it (and still do)! We continue to roll out new components, and generally the project has been successful, though it has had its drawbacks.
Since the Shopify admin is mostly made up of a huge number of forms, most of the content is static. For this reason, using server-rendered components didn’t seem like a problem at the time. With new app features increasing the amount of DOM manipulation needed on the client side, our early design decisions mean making requests to the server for each re-paint. This isn’t going to cut it.
I don’t know the end of this story, because we haven’t written it yet. We’ve been exploring alternatives to our current system to facilitate the rendering of our components on the client, including React, Vue.js, and Web Components, but we haven’t determined the winner yet. Only time (and data gathering) will tell.
Ruby is great but it doesn’t speak the browser’s language efficiently. It was not the right language for the job.
Learning a new spoken language has had an impact on how I write code. It has taught me that you don’t know what you don’t know until you have the language to express it. Understanding the strengths and limitations of any programming language is fundamental to making good design decisions. At the end of the day, you make the best choices with the information you have. But if you still feel like you’re unable to express your thoughts to the fullest with what you know, it might be time to learn a new language.",2016,Annie-Claude Côté,annieclaudecote,2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/watch-your-language/,code
295,Internet of Stranger Things,"This year I’ve been running a workshop about using JavaScript and Node.js to work with all different kinds of electronics on the Raspberry Pi. So especially for 24 ways I’m going to show you how I made a very special Raspberry Pi based internet connected project! And nothing says Christmas quite like a set of fairy lights connected to another dimension1.
What you’ll see
You can rig up the fairy lights in your home, with the scrawly letters written under each one. The people from the other side (i.e. the internet) will be able to write messages to you from their browser in real time. In fact why not try it now; check this web page. When you click the lights in your browser, my lights (and yours) will turn on and off in real life! (There may be a queue if there are lots of people accessing it, hit the “Send a message” button and wait your turn.)
It’s all done with JavaScript, using Node.js running on both the Raspberry Pi and on the server. I’m using WebSockets to communicate in real time between the browser, server and Raspberry Pi.
What you’ll need
Raspberry Pi any of the following models: Zero (will need straight male header pins soldered2 and Micro USB OTG adaptor), A+, B+, 2, or 3
Micro SD card at least 4Gb Class 10 speed3
Micro USB power supply at least 2A
USB Wifi dongle (unless you have a Pi 3 - that has wifi built in).
Addressable fairy lights
Logic level shifter (with pins soldered unless you want to do it!)
Breadboard
Jumper wires (3x male to male and 4x female to male)
Optional but recommended
Base board to hold the Pi and Breadboard (often comes with a breadboard!)
Find links for where to buy all of these items that goes along with this tutorial. The total price should be around $1004.
Setting up the Raspberry Pi
You’ll need to install the SD card for the Raspberry Pi. You’ll find a link to download a disk image on the support document, ready-made with the Raspbian version of Linux, along with Node.js and all the files you need. Download it and write it to the SD card using the fantastic free software Etcher5.
Next up you have to configure the wifi details on the SD card. If you plug the card into your computer you should see a drive called BOOT. There’s a text file on there called wpa_supplicant.conf. Open it up in your favourite text editor and replace mywifi and mypassword with your wifi details6.
network={
ssid=""mywifi""
psk=""mypassword""
}
Save the file, eject the card from your computer and plug it into the Raspberry Pi.
If you have a base board or holder for the Raspberry Pi, attach it now. Then connect the wifi USB dongle7 and power supply, but don’t plug it in yet!
Wiring!
Time to wire everything up!
First of all, push the Logic Level Converter into the middle of the breadboard:
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter may be labelled differently from the one in the diagram but the pins are usually exactly the same internally. I would just make sure the pins marked HV (High Voltage) are on the bottom and LV (Low Voltage) are on the top.
Raspberry Pi pins only output 3.3v but the lights need 5v. That’s why we need the logic level converter in there to boost up the signal.
Connect the first two wires between the Raspberry Pi pins and the breadboard:
Note that the pins on the Raspberry Pi are male, so you need a female to male jumper wire to connect between them and the breadboard. The colours don’t have to match but it’s easier to follow (and check) if you use the same ones as in the diagram.
Then the next two:
This is what you should have so far:
Lights
Now to connect the lights! My ones have a connector with three holes in it that I can push jumper wires into, and hopefully yours will too! So I used the male-to-male jumper wires to connect them to the breadboard.
Make sure that you connect the right end of the lights, mine has a male connector at the wrong end so it’s impossible to do this, but double check.
Also make sure that the holes in the light connector are the same as mine. To do this, follow the wires from the connector to the first light and look at the circuit board inside. You should just about be able to make out the connections labelled + (sometimes 5V, V+ or VCC), GND (or ‘-’ or G) and DI (sometimes DIN for data in).
You can just about make out the +, DI and GND on this picture. Note that on the other side of the board there is a DO for data out - that’s what takes the data along to the chip in the next light. Make sure that you’re plugging into the data-in and not the data-out!
That’s it! Everything’s plugged in and ready to go! But before you plug power into your Pi, double check all your wires and make sure they’re exactly right! You could damage your Raspberry Pi if it is not wired correctly. So triple check!
The Moment of Truth!
Plug in the Raspberry Pi and wait around a minute or two for it to boot up. If all is well, the lights should strobe rainbow colours for one second - that’s your confirmation that it’s connected to my WebSocket server and ready to receive messages from the upside-down!
However, if the first light in the string is pulsing red, it means that you’re not connected to the internet. So check the Troubleshooting section of the support document. If it’s pulsing green then you’re connected to the internet but can’t connect to my server. It must have gone down. Sorry! The code will keep trying so leave it running and maybe it’ll come back up.
Rig up the lights!
Fix the lights up on the wall however you want, pins, nails, tape. I’ve used cable clips. Just be careful! I’m using a 50 light string so I’ve programmed it to use the lights at the end for the letters. That way I have just under half the string to extend down to the floor where I can keep the Raspberry Pi.
Check the photo here to see how the lights line up, note that there are spare unused lights in-between each row:
Now visit lights.seb.ly and you’ll see this :
If you’re the only one online you’ll have direct connection to the lights and any letter you click on will light up both in the browser and in real life. If there are other people there, you’ll need to click the button to join the queue and wait your turn.
How it works - the geeky details!
Electronics:
The pins on the Raspberry Pi are known as GPIO pins, general-purpose input/output. You can connect a wide variety of electronic components to them, LED lights, buttons, switches, and sensors. You can turn the power to the pins on and off using Node.js (or Python, if you prefer).
Addressable LEDs or “Neopixels”
We’re only using one GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi (the other connections are 5V, 3.3V and ground) and that single pin is controlling all of the lights in the string. The code turns the pin on and off really fast in strictly timed morse-code-like dots and dashes to transmit binary data. The chips attached to each LED decode the binary and adjust the output to the LED accordingly. That chip then sends the data on to the next light in the string.
The chips on each light are the WS2811, part of the WS281x family that come in a multitude of different form factors and are often packaged with tiny LEDs in a single component. They are commonly referred to as Neopixels8 and I used them on my Laser Light Synths project.
Neopixels with the chip and the LED all in one - it’s the white square shaped component and the darker square inside is the chip. These are only 5mm wide!
A Laser Light Synth! Covered with around 800 super bright neopixels!
Logic Level Converter
The logic level converter is a really cheap and easy way to change the level from 3.3v to 5v and back again. You must be careful that you do not connect 5v into a GPIO pin or you will most likely damage the Raspberry Pi processor chip.
Power
Neopixels can often draw a lot of current so you need to be careful how you power them. I’ve measured the current draw from the string to be less than 800mA so you should be fine wired directly to the 5V output. But if you use more lights or have them all on really bright at once, you’ll need to use a separate 5V power supply. If you want to learn more, check out Adafruit’s Neopixel Uberguide.
Node.js
There are two Node.js apps running here, one on the Raspberry Pi and one on my server. You can see the code on my GitHub at github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights for the Raspberry Pi and github.com/sebleedelisle/stranger-lights-server for the server. And they’re hosted on npm as stranger-lights and stranger-lights-server.
The server side code sets up a standard web server to deliver the HTML for the web interface. It also sets up a WebSocket server that allows for real-time communication between the browser and the server. This server code also manages the queue and who is in control of the lights at any given time.
WebSockets
I’m using the excellent Socket.io library to manage the WebSocket connection. Both the browser and the Raspberry Pi Node.js app connects to my WebSocket server.
When you click on a letter in the browser, a message is sent to the server, which forwards it to the connected Raspberry Pi clients and also all the web browsers9.
The Raspberry Pi code
The Node.js app runs automatically on startup, and I made this happen by adding this to the /etc/rc.local file:
node /home/pi/strangerthings/client.js > /dev/null &
Anything in the rc.local file gets executed when the Pi boots up and this line of code runs the Node.js app and routes its output to nowhere (ie /dev/null). The & means that it runs it in the background and doesn’t hold up the boot process.
Working with the Raspberry Pi headless
You might know that when a computer has no screen or keyboard, you would refer to it as “running headless”. So just like most web servers, you need to configure it over the network with ssh10. If you’re on a mac you can find your Pi on the network through the name raspberrypi.local11, otherwise you’ll need to find its IP address. There’s more on the guide to Remote Access instructions on the Raspberry Pi website. And if you’re very new to the terminal, I highly recommend this great online Linux command line tutorial.
Improvements
This is quite an early experiment and I’m sure I’ll discover lots of optimisations over the next few weeks, especially if the server gets a proper hammering today! But there are a few things you can do. Obviously I’ve just rigged up my lights with Post-it notes. It’d be a lot nicer to get a paint brush and try to recreate the Winona-in-a-manic-state text style.
Where next?
Finding quality resources about Node.js for electronics on the Pi can be somewhat hit and miss, but this is getting better all the time. Alternatively I am thinking about running some online courses, please let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in, or sign up to my mailing list at st4i.com.
There are many many more resources for the Raspberry Pi with Python (gpiozero is a good place to start), so if that language works for you, you’ll be spoilt for choice!
Also take a look at Arduino - it’s an incredibly popular platform for electronics and the internet is literally bursting with resources.
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into the world of JavaScript electronics on the Raspberry Pi! If you get this working at home please let me know! Tweet me at @seb_ly.
Not a particularly original idea, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it quite like this before, ie using WebSockets, and Node.js on a Raspberry Pi. Other examples: Internet of Stranger Things, Strangerlights.com, and loads of examples on Instructables ↩︎
Video guide to soldering pins on to a Pi Zero and further soldering advice from Adafruit ↩︎
Slower cards will work but performance may suffer ↩︎
Or £5,000 in UK money. Sorry, Brexit joke :) ↩︎
You will need a card reader on your computer - most micro SD cards come with an adaptor that fits standard SD slots. ↩︎
SSID and password should be all that you need but you can see all the config options on this wpa supplicant guide ↩︎
Raspberry Pi Zero will require the OTG to USB adaptor to attach the wifi dongle ↩︎
Thanks to Adafruit who invented the term neopixels so we don’t have to refer to them as WS281x any more! ↩︎
So you can see other people sending messages in the browser ↩︎
ssh is short for Secure Shell and is a way to connect to a remote computer and type in it just like you would in the terminal. ↩︎
You can change this default hostname using raspi-config ↩︎",2016,Seb Lee-Delisle,sebleedelisle,2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/internet-of-stranger-things/,code
298,First Steps in VR,"The web is all around us. As web folk, it is our responsibility to consider the impact our work can have. Part of this includes thinking about the future; the web changes lives and if we are building the web then we are the ones making decisions that affect people in every corner of the world. I find myself often torn between wanting to make the right decisions, and just wanting to have fun. To fiddle and play. We all know how important it is to sometimes just try ideas, whether they will amount to much or not.
I think of these two mindsets as production and prototyping, though of course there are lots of overlap and phases in between. I mention this because virtual reality is currently seen as a toy for rich people, and in some ways at the moment it is. But with WebVR we are able to create interesting experiences with a relatively low entry point. I want us to have open minds, play around with things, and then see how we can use the tools we have at our disposal to make things that will help people.
Every year we see articles saying it will be the “year of virtual reality”, that was especially prevalent this year. 2016 has been a year of progress, VR isn’t quite mainstream but with efforts like Playstation VR and Google Cardboard, we are definitely seeing much more of it. This year also saw the consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So it does seem to be a good time for an overview of how to get involved with creating virtual reality on the web.
WebVR is an API for connecting to devices and retrieving continuous data such as the position and orientation. Unlike the Web Audio API and some other APIs, WebVR does not feel like a framework. You use it however you want, taking the data and using it as you wish. To make it easier, there are plenty of resources such as Three.js, A-Frame and ReactVR that help to make the heavy lifting a bit easier.
Getting Started with A-Frame
I like taking the opportunity to learn new things whenever I can. So while planning this article I thought that instead of trying to teach WebGL or even Three.js in a way that is approachable for all, I would create my first project using A-Frame and write about that. This is not a tutorial as such, I just want to show how to go about getting involved with VR. The beauty of A-Frame is that it is very similar to web components, you can just write HTML to build worlds that will automatically work on all the different types of devices. It uses WebGL and WebVR but in such a way that it quite drastically reduces the learning curve. That’s not to say you can’t build complex things, you have complete access to write JavaScript and shaders.
I’m lazy. Whenever I learn a new language or framework I have found that the best way, personally, for me to learn is to have a project and to copy the starting code from someone else. A project lets you have a good idea of what you want to produce and it means you can ignore a lot of the irrelevant documentation, focussing purely on what you need. That reduces the stress of figuring things out. Copying code also makes it easier, because you know your boilerplate code is working. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck before anything actually works the first time. So I tinker. I take code and I modify it, I play around. It’s fun.
For this project I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so I can easily explain it without the classic “draw a circle then draw an owl”. I wrote a list of requirements, with some stretch goals that you can give a try yourself if you fancy:
Must work on Google Cardboard at a minimum, because of price
Therefore, it must not rely on having a controller
Auto-moving around a maze would be a good example
Move in direction you look
Stretch goal: Scoring, time until you hit a wall or get stuck in maze
Stretch goal: Levels, so the map doesn’t need to be random
Stretch goal: Snow!
I decided to base this project on an example, Platforms, by Don McCurdy who wrote the really useful aframe-extras. Platforms has random 3D blocks that you can jump onto, going up into the sky. So I took his code and reduced it so that the blocks are randomly spread on the ground.
24 ways
As you can see, this is very readable. Especially if you ignore the JavaScript that is used to create the maze. A-Frame (with A-Frame Extras) gives you a lot of power with relatively little to learn. We start with an which is the container for everything that is going to show up on the screen. There are a few which can be compared to as they are essentially non-semantic containers, able to be used for any purpose. The attributes are used to define functionality, for example the camera attribute sets the entity to function as a camera and kinematic-body makes it collide instead of go through objects. Attributes are also used to set position and sizes, often using JavaScript to dynamically define them.
Styling
Now we’ve got the HTML written, we need to style it. To do this we add A-Frame compatible attributes such as color and material. I recommend playing around, you can get some quite impressive effects fairly easily. Originally I wanted a light snowy maze but it ended up being dark and foggy, as I really liked the feeling it gave.
Note, you will probably need a server running for images to work. You can do this by running python -m ""SimpleHTTPServer"" in the folder where the code is, then go to localhost:8000 in browser.
Textures
Unless you are going for a cartoony style, you probably want to find some textures. I found some on textures.com, one image worked well for the walls and the other for the floor.
The
is used to define (as well as preload and cache) all assets, including images, audio and video. As you can see, images in the Asset Management System just use normal img tags. The ids are important here as we can use them later for using the textures.
To apply a texture to an object, you create a material. For a simple material where it just shows the image, you set the src to the id selector of the image.
Replace:
entity or by attaching a light attribute to any other entity. If there are no lights defined then A-Frame adds some by default so that the scene is always lit.
To start with I wanted to light up the scene with a general light, type=""ambient"", so that the whole game felt slightly dark. I chose to set the light to a reddish colour #92455E. After playing around with intensity I chose 0.4, it added enough light to get the feeling I wanted without it being overly red. I also added a blue skybox (), as it looked a bit odd with a white sky.
with type=exponential so it looks thicker the further away it is and a mid intensity, so you feel a bit lost but can still see.
I was very happy with this result. It took a lot of playing around with colours and values, which is fun in itself. I highly recommend you take the code (or write your own) and play around with the numbers.
Movement
One of the reasons I decided to use aframe-extras is that it has a few different camera controls built in. As you saw earlier, I am using the universal-controls which gives WASD (keyboard) controls by default. I wanted to make it automatically move in the direction that you’re looking, but I wasn’t quite sure how without rewriting the controls. So I asked Don McCurdy for advice and he very nicely gave me a small snippet of code to get it working.
AFRAME.registerComponent('automove-controls', {
init: function () {
this.speed = 0.1;
this.isMoving = true;
this.velocityDelta = new THREE.Vector3();
},
isVelocityActive: function () {
return this.isMoving;
},
getVelocityDelta: function () {
this.velocityDelta.z = this.isMoving ? -speed : 0;
return this.velocityDelta.clone();
}
});
Replace:
universal-controls
With:
universal-controls=""movementControls: automove, gamepad, keyboard""
This works by creating a component automove-controls that adds auto-move to the player without overriding movement completely. It doesn’t even touch direction, it just checks if isMoving is true then moves the player by the set speed. Components can be creating for adding all kinds of functionality with relative ease. It makes it very powerful for people of all difficulty levels.
Building a map
Currently the maze is created randomly, which is great but means there will often be walls that overlap or the player gets trapped with nowhere to go. So to solve this, I decided to use a map editor (Tiled) so that we can create the mazes ourselves. This is a great start towards one of the stretch goals, levels.
I made the maze in Tiled by finding a random tileset online (we don’t need to actually show the images), I used one tile for the wall and another for the player. Then I exported as a JavaScript file and modified it in my text editor to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I made it so 0 is the path, 1 is the wall and 2 is the player. I then added the script to the HTML, as a separate file so it’s easy to update in the future.
var map =
{
""data"":[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
""height"":10,
""width"":10
}
As you can see, this gives a simple 10x10 maze with some dead ends. The player starts in the bottom right corner (my choice, could be anywhere). I rewrote the random platforms code (from Don’s example) to instead loop over the map data and place walls where it is 1 and position the player where data is 2. I set the position so that the origin of the map would be 0,1.5,0. The y axis is in this case the height (ground being 0), but if a wall is positioned at 0 by its centre then some of it is underground. So the y needed to be the height divided by 2.
document.querySelector('a-scene').addEventListener('render-target-loaded', function () {
var WALL_SIZE = 5,
WALL_HEIGHT = 3;
var el = document.querySelector('#walls');
var wall;
for (var x = 0; x < map.height; x++) {
for (var y = 0; y < map.width; y++) {
var i = y*map.width + x;
var position = (x-map.width/2)*WALL_SIZE + ' ' + 1.5 + ' ' + (y-map.height/2)*WALL_SIZE;
if (map.data[i] === 1) {
// Create wall
wall = document.createElement('a-box');
el.appendChild(wall);
wall.setAttribute('color', '#fff');
wall.setAttribute('material', 'src: #texture-wall;');
wall.setAttribute('width', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('height', WALL_HEIGHT);
wall.setAttribute('depth', WALL_SIZE);
wall.setAttribute('position', position);
wall.setAttribute('static-body', ');
}
if (map.data[i] === 2) {
// Set player position
document.querySelector('#player').setAttribute('position', position);
}
}
}
console.info('Walls added.');
});
With this added, it makes it nice and easy to change around the map as well as to add new features. Perhaps you want monsters or objects. Just set the number in the map data and add an if statement to the loop. In the future you could add layers, so multiple things can be in the same position. Or perhaps even make the maze go up the y axis too, with ramps or staircases. There’s a lot you can do with relative ease. As you can see, A-Frame really does reduce the learning curve of 3D and VR on the web.
It’s Not All Fun And Games
A lot of examples of virtual reality are games, including this one. So it is understandable to think that VR is for gaming, but actually that’s just a tiny subset. There are all sorts of applications for VR, including story telling, data visualisation and even meditation.
There have been a number of cases where it has been shown virtual reality can help as a tool for therapies:
Oxford study finds virtual reality can help treat severe paranoia
Virtual Reality Therapy for Phobias at the Duke Faculty Practice
Bravemind: Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy at the University of Southern California
These are just a few examples of where virtual reality is being used around the world to help people feel better and get through some very tough times. There have also been examples of it being used for simulating war zones or medical situations, both as a teaching and journalism tool.
Wrapping Up
Ten years ago, on this very site, Cameron Moll wrote an article explaining the mobile web. He explained how mobile phones with data plans were becoming increasingly common, that WAP 2.0 included the XHTML Mobile Profile meaning it would be familiar with web folk. “The mobile web is rapidly becoming an XHTML environment, and thus you and I can apply our existing “desktop web” skills to understand how to develop content for it.”
We can look at that and laugh a little, we have come a very long way in the last decade. Even people in developing countries with very little money have mobile phones with access to a web that is far more capable than the “desktop web” Cameron was referring to.
So while I am not saying virtual reality is going to change the world or replace our phones, who knows! We can use our skills as web folk to dabble, we don’t need to learn any new languages. If on the 2026 edition of 24 ways, somebody references this article and looks at how far we have come… well, let’s hope we have used our skills well and made the world just that little bit better. And if VR is a fad? Well it’s fun… have a go anyway.",2016,Shane Hudson,shanehudson,2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/,code
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 something is the better. I mean it’s not enough by itself.
Imagine a website filled with poorly written and lackadaisically organized information, including a bunch of convoluted and confusing functionality. To make this site accessible is to ensure no barriers prevent people from accessing the content.
But that doesn’t make the content any better. It just means more people get to suffer it.
Whoopdidoo.
Access is certainly a prerequisite of inclusion, but accessibility compliance doesn’t get you all the way there. It’s possible to check all the boxes but still be left with an unusable interface. And unusable interfaces are necessarily inaccessible ones. Sure, you can take an unusable interface and make it accessibility compliant, but that only placates stakeholders’ lawyers, not users. Users get little value from it.
So where have we got to? Access is important, but inclusion is bigger than access. Inclusive design means making something valuable, not just accessible, to as many people as we can.
So inclusive design is kind of accessibility + UX?
Closer, but there are some problems with this definition.
UX is, you will have already noted, a broad term encompassing activities ranging from conducting research studies to optimizing the perceived affordance of interface elements. But overall, what I take from UX is that it’s the pursuit of making interfaces understandable.
As it happens, WCAG 2.0 already contains an ‘Understandable’ principle covering provisions such as readability, predictability and feedback. So you might say accessibility — at least as described by WCAG — already covers UX.
Unfortunately, the criteria are limited, plus some really important stuff (like readability) is relegated to the AAA level; essentially “bonus points if you get the time (you won’t).”
So better to let UX folks take care of this kind of thing. It’s what they do. Except, therein lies a danger. UX professionals don’t tend to be well versed in accessibility, so their ‘solutions’ don’t tend to work for that many people. My friend Billy Gregory coined the term SUX, or “Some UX”: if it doesn’t work for different users, it’s only doing part of the job it should be.
SUX won’t do, but it’s not just a disability issue. All sorts of user circumstances go unchecked when you’re shooting straight for what people like, and bypassing what people need: device type, device settings, network quality, location, native language, and available time to name just a few.
In short, inclusive design means designing things for people who aren’t you, in your situation. In my experience, mainstream UX isn’t very good at that. By bolting accessibility onto mainstream UX we labor under the misapprehension that most people have a ‘normal’ experience, a few people are exceptions, and that all of the exceptions pertain to disability directly.
So inclusive design isn’t really about disability?
It is about disability, but not in the same way as accessibility. Accessibility (as it is typically understood, anyway) aims to make sure things work for people with clinically recognized disabilities. Inclusive design aims to make sure things work for people, not forgetting those with clinically recognized disabilities. A subtle, but not so subtle, difference.
Let’s go back to discussing readability, because that’s a good example. Now: everyone benefits from readable text; text with concise sentences and widely-understood words. It certainly helps people with cognitive impairments, but it doesn’t hinder folks who have less trouble with comprehension. In fact, they’ll more than likely be thankful for the time saved and the clarity. Readable text covers the whole gamut. It’s — you’ve got it — inclusive.
Legibility is another one. A clear, well-balanced typeface makes the reading experience less uncomfortable and frustrating for all concerned, including those who have various forms of visual dyslexia. Again, everyone’s happy — so why even contemplate a squiggly, sketchy typeface? Leave well alone.
Contrast too. No one benefits from low contrast; everyone benefits from high contrast. Simple. There’s no more work involved, it just entails better decision making. And that’s what design is really: decision making.
How about zoom support? If you let your users pinch zoom on their phones they can compensate for poor eyesight, but they can also increase the touch area of controls, inspect detail in images, and compose better screen shots. Unobtrusively supporting options like zoom makes interfaces much more inclusive at very little cost.
And when it comes to the underlying HTML code, you’re in luck: it has already been designed, from the outset, to be inclusive. HTML is a toolkit for inclusion. Using the right elements for the job doesn’t just mean the few who use screen readers benefit, but keyboard accessibility comes out-of-the-box, you can defer to browser behavior rather than writing additional scripts, the code is easier to read and maintain, and editors can create content that is effortlessly presentable.
Wait… are you talking about universal design?
Hmmm. Yes, I guess some folks might think of “universal design” and “inclusive design” as synonymous. I just really don’t like the term universal in this context.
The thing is, it gives the impression that you should be designing for absolutely everyone in the universe. Though few would adopt a literal interpretation of “universal” in this context, there are enough developers who would deliberately misconstrue the term and decry universal design as an impossible task. I’ve actually had people push back by saying, “what, so I’ve got to make it work for people who are allergic to computers? What about people in comas?”
For everyone’s sake, I think the term ‘inclusive’ is less misleading. Of course you can’t make things that everybody can use — it’s okay, that’s not the aim. But with everything that’s possible with web technologies, there’s really no need to exclude people in the vast numbers that we usually are.
Accessibility can never be perfect, but by thinking inclusively from planning, through prototyping to production, you can cast a much wider net. That means more and happier users at very little if any more effort.
If you like, inclusive design is the means and accessibility is the end — it’s just that you get a lot more than just accessibility along the way.
Conclusion
That’s inclusive design. Or at least, that’s a definition for a thing I think is a good idea which I identify as inclusive design. I’ll leave you with a few tips.
Involve code early
Web interfaces are made of code. If you’re not working with code, you’re not working on the interface. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with sketching or paper prototyping — in fact, I recommend paper prototyping in my book on inclusive design. Just work with code as soon as you can, and think about code even before that. Maintain a pattern library of coded solutions and omit any solutions that don’t adhere to basic accessibility guidelines.
Respect conventions
Your content should be fresh, inventive, radical. Your interface shouldn’t. Adopt accepted conventions in the appearance, placement and coding of interface elements. Users aren’t there to experience interface design; they’re there to use an interface. In other words: stop showing off (unless, of course, the brief is to experiment with new paradigms in interface design, for an audience of interface design researchers).
Don’t be exact
“Perfection is the enemy of good”. But the pursuit of perfection isn’t just to be avoided because nothing ever gets finished. Exacting design also makes things inflexible and brittle. If your design depends on elements retaining precise coordinates, they’ll break easily when your users start adjusting font settings or zooming. Choose not to position elements exactly or give them fixed, “magic number” dimensions. Make less decisions in the interface so your users can make more decisions for it.
Enforce simplicity
The virtue of simplicity is difficult to overestimate. The simpler an interface is, the easier it is to use for all kinds of users. Simpler interfaces require less code to make too, so there’s an obvious performance advantage. There are many design decisions that require user research, but keeping things simple is always the right thing to do. Not simplified or simple-seeming or simplistic, but simple.
Do a little and do it well, for as many people as you can.",2016,Heydon Pickering,heydonpickering,2016-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/what-the-heck-is-inclusive-design/,process
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 inform our code every time the value changes. Which is constantly, because you try and hold a phone still and then try and hold the Earth still too.
The API calls those pitch, roll and yaw values alpha, beta and gamma. Chocks away:
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
console.log(e.alpha);
console.log(e.beta);
console.log(e.gamma);
});
If you look at this test page on your phone, you should be able to see the numbers change as you twirl the thing around your body like the dance partner you never had. Wrist strap recommended.
One important note
Like may of these newfangled APIs, Device Orientation is only available over HTTPS. We’re not allowed to have too much fun without protection, so make sure that you’re working on a secure line. I’ve found a quick and easy way to share my local dev environment over TLS with my devices is to use an ngrok tunnel.
ngrok http -host-header=rewrite mylocaldevsite.dev:80
ngrok will then set up a tunnel to your dev site with both HTTP and HTTPS URL options. You, of course, want the HTTPS option.
Right, where were we?
Make something to look at
It’s all well and good having a bunch of numbers, but they’re no use unless we do something with them. Something creative. Something to inspire the generations. Or we could just build that Facebook panoramic image viewer thing (because most of us are familiar with it and we’re not trying to be too clever here). Yeah, let’s just build one of those.
Our basic framework is going to be similar to that used for an image carousel. We have a container, constrained in size, and CSS overflow property set to hidden. Into this we place our wide content and use positioning to move the content back and forth behind the ‘window’ so that the part we want to show is visible.
Here it is mocked up with a slider to set the position. When you release the slider, the position updates. (This actually tests best on desktop with your window slightly narrowed.)
The details of the slider aren’t important (we’re about to replace it with phone-wavy goodness) but the crucial part is that moving the slider results in a function call to position the image. This takes a percentage value (0-100) with 0 being far left and 100 being far right (or ‘alt-nazi’ or whatever).
var position_image = function(percent) {
var pos = (img_W / 100)*percent;
img.style.transform = 'translate(-'+pos+'px)';
};
All this does is figure out what that percentage means in terms of the image width, and set the transform: translate(…); CSS property to move the image. (We use translate because it might be a bit faster to animate than left/right positioning.)
Ok. We can now read the orientation values from our device, and we can programatically position the image. What we need to do is figure out how to convert those raw orientation values into a nice tidy percentage to pass to our function and we’re done. (We’re so not done.)
The maths bit
If we go back to our raw values test page and make-believe that we have a fascinating panoramic image of some far-off beach or historic monument to look at, you’ll note that the main value that is changing as we swing back and forth is the ‘alpha’ value. That’s the one we want to track.
As our goal here is hey, these APIs are interesting and fun and not let’s build the world’s best panoramic image viewer, we’ll start by making a few assumptions and simplifications:
When the image loads, we’ll centre the image and take the current nose-forward orientation reading as the middle.
Moving left, we’ll track to the left of the image (lower percentage).
Moving right, we’ll track to the right (higher percentage).
If the user spins round, does cartwheels or loads the page then hops on a plane and switches earthly hemispheres, they’re on their own.
Nose-forward
When the page loads, the initial value of alpha gives us our nose-forward position. In Safari on iOS, this is normalised to always be 0, whereas most everywhere else it tends to be bound to pointy-uppy north. That doesn’t really matter to us, as we don’t know which direction the user might be facing in anyway — we just need to record that initial state and then use it to compare any new readings.
var initial_position = null;
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
if (initial_position === null) {
initial_position = Math.floor(e.alpha);
};
var current_position = initial_position - Math.floor(e.alpha);
});
(I’m rounding down the values with Math.floor() to make debugging easier - we’ll take out the rounding later.)
We get our initial position if it’s not yet been set, and then calculate the current position as a difference between the new value and the stored one.
These values are weird
One thing you need to know about these values, is that they range from 0 to 360 but then you also get weird left-of-zero values like -2 and whatever. And they wrap past 360 back to zero as you’d expect if you do a forward roll.
What I’m interested in is working out my rotation. If 0 is my nose-forward position, I want a positive value as I turn right, and a negative value as I turn left. That puts the awkward 360-tipping point right behind the user where they can’t see it.
var rotation = current_position;
if (current_position > 180) rotation = current_position-360;
Which way up?
Since we’re talking about orientation, we need to remember that the values are going to be different if the device is held in portrait on landscape mode. See for yourself - wiggle it like a steering wheel and you get different values. That’s easy to account for when you know which way up the device is, but in true browser style, the API for that bit isn’t well supported. The best I can come up with is:
var screen_portrait = false;
if (window.innerWidth < window.innerHeight) {
screen_portrait = true;
}
It works. Then we can use screen_portrait to branch our code:
if (screen_portrait) {
if (current_position > 180) rotation = current_position-360;
} else {
if (current_position < -180) rotation = 360+current_position;
}
Here’s the code in action so you can see the values for yourself. If you change screen orientation you’ll need to refresh the page (it’s a demo!).
Limiting rotation
Now, while the youth of today are rarely seen without a phone in their hands, it would still be unreasonable to ask them to spin through 360° to view a photo. Instead, we need to limit the range of movement to something like 60°-from-nose in either direction and normalise our values to pan the entire image across that 120° range. -60 would be full-left (0%) and 60 would be full-right (100%).
If we set max_rotation = 60, that code ends up looking like this:
if (rotation > max_rotation) rotation = max_rotation;
if (rotation < (0-max_rotation)) rotation = 0-max_rotation;
var percent = Math.floor(((rotation + max_rotation)/(max_rotation*2))*100);
We should now be able to get a rotation from -60° to +60° expressed as a percentage. Try it for yourself.
The big reveal
All that’s left to do is pass that percentage to our image positioning function and would you believe it, it might actually work.
position_image(percent);
You can see the final result and take it for a spin. Literally.
So what have we made here? Have we built some highly technical panoramic image viewer to aid surgeons during life-saving operations using only JavaScript and some slightly questionable mathematics? No, my friends, we have not. Far from it.
What we have made is progress. We’ve taken a relatively newly available hardware API and a bit of simple JavaScript and paired it with existing CSS knowledge and made something that we didn’t have this morning. Something we probably didn’t even want this morning. Something that if you take a couple of steps back and squint a bit might be a prototype for something vaguely interesting. But more importantly, we’ve learned that our browsers are just a little bit more capable than we thought.
The web platform is maturing rapidly. There are new, relatively unexplored APIs for doing all sorts of crazy thing that are often dismissed as the preserve of native apps. Like some sort of app marmalade. Poppycock.
The web is an amazing, exciting place to create things. All it takes is some base knowledge of the fundamentals, a creative mind and a willingness to learn. We have those! So let’s create things.",2016,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/,code
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 wander, make new discoveries and find creative connections. By embracing structured procrastination we can ‘prime the brain’.
As James Webb Young argues, in A Technique for Producing Ideas, all ideas are made of other ideas and the more we fill our minds with other stimuli, the greater the number of creative opportunities we can uncover and bring to life.
By late binding, and availing of a lack of time pressure, you allow the mind space to breathe, enabling you to uncover elements that are important to the problem you’re working on and, perhaps, discover other elements that will serve you well in future tasks.
When setting forth upon the process of writing this article I consciously set aside time to explore. I allowed myself the opportunity to read, taking in new material, safe in the knowledge that what I discovered – if not useful for this article – would serve me well in the future.
Ron Burgundy summarises this neatly:
Procrastinator? No. I just wait until the last second to do my work because I will be older, therefore wiser.
An ‘older, therefore wiser’ mind is a good thing. We’re incredibly fortunate to live in a world where we have a wealth of information at our fingertips. Don’t waste the opportunity to learn, rather embrace that opportunity. Make the most of every second to fill your mind with new material, the rewards will be ample.
Deadlines are deadlines, however, and deadlines offer us the opportunity to focus our minds, bringing together the pieces of the puzzle we found during our structured procrastination.
Like everyone I’ll hear a tiny, but insistent voice in my head that starts to rise when the deadline is approaching. The older you get, the closer to the deadline that voice starts to chirp up.
At this point we need to focus.
Focused Finishing
We live in an age of constant distraction. Smartphones are both a blessing and a curse, they keep us connected, but if we’re not careful the constant connection they provide can interrupt our flow.
When a deadline is accelerating towards us it’s important to set aside the distractions and carve out a space where we can work in a clear and focused manner.
When it’s time to finish, it’s important to avoid context switching and focus. All those micro-interactions throughout the day – triaging your emails, checking social media and browsing the web – can get in the way of you hitting your deadline. At this point, they’re distractions.
Chunking tasks and managing when they’re scheduled can improve your productivity by a surprising order of magnitude. At this point it’s important to remove distractions which result in ‘attention residue’, where your mind is unable to focus on the current task, due to the mental residue of other, unrelated tasks.
By focusing on a single task in a focused manner, it’s possible to minimise the negative impact of attention residue, allowing you to maximise your performance on the task at hand.
Cal Newport explores this in his excellent book, Deep Work, which I would highly recommend reading. As he puts it:
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.
To help you focus on finishing it’s helpful to set up a work-focused environment that is purposefully free from distractions. There’s a time and a place for structured procrastination, but – equally – there’s a time and a place for focused finishing.
The French term ‘mise en place’ is drawn from the world of fine cuisine – I discovered it when I was procrastinating – and it’s applicable in this context. The term translates as ‘putting in place’ or ‘everything in its place’ and it refers to the process of getting the workplace ready before cooking.
Just like a professional chef organises their utensils and arranges their ingredients, so too can you.
Thanks to the magic of multiple users on computers, it’s possible to create a separate user on your computer – without access to email and other social tools – so that you can switch to that account when you need to focus and hit the deadline.
Another, less technical way of achieving the same result – depending, of course, upon your line of work – is to close your computer and find some non-digital, unconnected space to work in.
The goal is to carve out time to focus so you can finish. As Newport states:
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive – no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Procrastination is fine, but only if it’s accompanied by finishing. Create the space to finish and you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds.
In closing…
There is a time and a place for everything: there is a time to procrastinate, and a time to focus. To truly reap the rewards of time, the mind needs both.
By combining the processes of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can make the most of our 86,400 seconds a day, ensuring we are constantly primed to make new discoveries, but just as importantly, ensuring we hit the all-important deadlines.
Make the most of your time, you only get so much. Use every second productively and you’ll be thankful that you did. Don’t waste your time, once it’s gone, it’s gone… and you can never get it back.",2016,Christopher Murphy,christophermurphy,2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/stretching-time/,process
304,Five Lessons From My First 18 Months as a Dev,"I recently moved from Sydney to London to start a dream job with Twitter as a software engineer. A software engineer! Who would have thought.
Having started my career as a journalist, the title ‘engineer’ is very strange to me. The notion of writing in first person is also very strange. Journalists are taught to be objective, invisible, to keep yourself out of the story. And here I am writing about myself on a public platform. Cringe.
Since I started learning to code I’ve often felt compelled to write about my experience. I want to share my excitement and struggles with the world! But as a junior I’ve been held back by thoughts like ‘whatever you have to say won’t be technical enough’, ‘any time spent writing a blog would be better spent writing code’, ‘blogging is narcissistic’, etc.
Well, I’ve been told that your thirties are the years where you stop caring so much about what other people think. And I’m almost 30. So here goes!
These are five key lessons from my first year and a half in tech:
Deployments should delight, not dread
Lesson #1: Making your deployment process as simple as possible is worth the investment.
In my first dev job, I dreaded deployments. We would deploy every Sunday night at 8pm. Preparation would begin the Friday before. A nominated deployment manager would spend half a day tagging master, generating scripts, writing documentation and raising JIRAs. The only fun part was choosing a train gif to post in HipChat: ‘All aboard! The deployment train leaves in 3, 2, 1…”
When Sunday night came around, at least one person from every squad would need to be online to conduct smoke tests. Most times, the deployments would succeed. Other times they would fail. Regardless, deployments ate into people’s weekend time — and they were intense. Devs would rush to have their code approved before the Friday cutoff. Deployment managers who were new to the process would fear making a mistake.
The team knew deployments were a problem. They were constantly striving to improve them. And what I’ve learnt from Twitter is that when they do, their lives will be bliss.
TweetDeck’s deployment process fills me with joy and delight. It’s quick, easy and stress free. In fact, it’s so easy I deployed code on my first day in the job! Anyone can deploy, at any time of day, with a single command. Rollbacks are just as simple. There’s no rush to make the deployment train. No manual preparation. No fuss. Value — whether in the form of big new features, simple UI improvements or even production bug fixes — can be shipped in an instant. The team assures me the process wasn’t always like this. They invested lots of time in making their deployments better. And it’s clearly paid off.
Code reviews need love, time and acceptance
Lesson #2: Code reviews are a three-way gift. Every time I review someone else’s code, I help them, the team and myself.
Code reviews were another pain point in my previous job. And to be honest, I was part of the problem. I would raise code reviews that were far too big. They would take days, sometimes weeks, to get merged. One of my reviews had 96 comments! I would rarely review other people’s code because I felt too junior, like my review didn’t carry any weight.
The review process itself was also tiring, and was often raised in retrospectives as being slow. In order for code to be merged it needed to have ticks of approval from two developers and a third tick from a peer tester. It was the responsibility of the author to assign the reviewers and tester. It was felt that if it was left to team members to assign themselves to reviews, the “someone else will do it” mentality would kick in, and nothing would get done.
At TweetDeck, no-one is specifically assigned to reviews. Instead, when a review is raised, the entire team is notified. Without fail, someone will jump on it. Reviews are seen as blocking. They’re seen to be equally, if not more important, than your own work. I haven’t seen a review sit for longer than a few hours without comments.
We also don’t work on branches. We push single commits for review, which are then merged to master. This forces the team to work in small, incremental changes. If a review is too big, or if it’s going to take up more than an hour of someone’s time, it will be sent back.
What I’ve learnt so far at Twitter is that code reviews must be small. They must take priority. And they must be a team effort. Being a new starter is no “get out of jail free card”. In fact, it’s even more of a reason to be reviewing code. Reviews are a great way to learn, get across the product and see different programming styles. If you’re like me, and find code reviews daunting, ask to pair with a senior until you feel more confident. I recently paired with my mentor at Twitter and found it really helpful.
Get friendly with feature flagging
Lesson #3: Feature flagging gives you complete control over how you build and release a project.
Say you’re implementing a new feature. It’s going to take a few weeks to complete. You’ll complete the feature in small, incremental changes. At what point do these changes get merged to master? At what point do they get deployed? Do you start at the back end and finish with the UI, so the user won’t see the changes until they’re ready? With feature flagging — it doesn’t matter. In fact, with feature flagging, by the time you are ready to release your feature, it’s already deployed, sitting happily in master with the rest of your codebase.
A feature flag is a boolean value that gets wrapped around the code relating to the thing you’re working on. The code will only be executed if the value is true.
if (TD.decider.get(‘new_feature’)) {
//code for new feature goes here
}
In my first dev job, I deployed a navigation link to the feature I’d been working on, making it visible in the product, even though the feature wasn’t ready. “Why didn’t you use a feature flag?” a senior dev asked me. An honest response would have been: “Because they’re confusing to implement and I don’t understand the benefits of using them.” The fix had to wait until the next deployment.
The best thing about feature flagging at TweetDeck is that there is no need to deploy to turn on or off a feature. We set the status of the feature via an interface called Deckcider, and the code makes regular API requests to get the status.
At TweetDeck we are also able to roll our features out progressively. The first rollout might be to a staging environment. Then to employees only. Then to 10 per cent of users, 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and so on. A gradual rollout allows you to monitor for bugs and unexpected behaviour, before releasing the feature to the entire user base.
Sometimes a piece of work requires changes to existing business logic. So the code might look more like this:
if (TD.decider.get(‘change_to_existing_feature’)) {
//new logic goes here
} else {
//old logic goes here
}
This seems messy, right? Riddling your code with if else statements to determine which path of logic should be executed, or which version of the UI should be displayed. But at Twitter, this is embraced. You can always clean up the code once a feature is turned on. This isn’t essential, though. At least not in the early days. When a cheeky bug is discovered, having the flag in place allows the feature to be very quickly turned off again.
Let data and experimentation drive development
Lesson #4: Use data to determine the direction of your product and measure its success.
The first company I worked for placed a huge amount of emphasis on data-driven decision making. If we had an idea, or if we wanted to make a change, we were encouraged to “bring data” to show why it was necessary. “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion,” the chief data scientist would say. This attitude helped to ensure we were building the right things for our customers. Instead of just plucking a new feature out of thin air, it was chosen based on data that reflected its need.
But how do you design that feature? How do you know that the design you choose will have the desired impact? That’s where experiments come into play.
At TweetDeck we make UI changes that we hope will delight our users. But the assumptions we make about our users are often wrong. Our front-end team recently sat in a room and tried to guess which UIs from A/B tests had produced better results. Half the room guessed incorrectly every time.
We can’t assume a change we want to make will have the impact we expect. So we run an experiment. Here’s how it works. Users are placed into buckets. One bucket of users will have access to the new feature, the other won’t. We hypothesise that the bucket exposed to the new feature will have better results. The beauty of running an experiment is that we’ll know for sure. Instead of blindly releasing the feature to all users without knowing its impact, once the experiment has run its course, we’ll have the data to make decisions accordingly.
Hire the developer, not the degree
Lesson #5: Testing candidates on real world problems will allow applicants from all backgrounds to shine.
Surely, a company like Twitter would give their applicants insanely difficult code tests, and the toughest technical questions, that only the cleverest CS graduates could pass, I told myself when applying for the job. Lucky for me, this wasn’t the case. The process was insanely difficult—don’t get me wrong—but the team at TweetDeck gave me real world problems to solve.
The first code test involved bug fixes, performance and testing. The second involved DOM traversal and manipulation. Instead of being put on the spot in a room with a whiteboard and pen I was given a task, access to the internet, and time to work on it. Similarly, in my technical interviews, I was asked to pair program on real world problems that I was likely to face on the job.
In one of my phone screenings I was told Twitter wanted to increase diversity in its teams. Not just gender diversity, but also diversity of experience and background. Six months later, with a bunch of new hires, team lead Tom Ashworth says TweetDeck has the most diverse team it’s ever had. “We designed an interview process that gave us a way to simulate the actual job,” he said. “It’s not about testing whether you learnt an algorithm in school.”
Is this lowering the bar? No. The bar is whether a candidate has the ability to solve problems they are likely to face on the job. I recently spoke to a longstanding Atlassian engineer who said they hadn’t seen an algorithm in their seven years at the company.
These days, only about 50 per cent of developers have computer science degrees. The majority of developers are self taught, learn on the job or via online courses. If you want to increase diversity in your engineering team, ensure your interview process isn’t excluding these people.",2016,Amy Simmons,amysimmons,2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/my-first-18-months-as-a-dev/,process
308,How to Make a Chrome Extension to Delight (or Troll) Your Friends,"If you’re like me, you grew up drawing mustaches on celebrities. Every photograph was subject to your doodling wrath, and your brilliance was taken to a whole new level with computer programs like Microsoft Paint. The advent of digital cameras meant that no one was safe from your handiwork, especially not your friends. And when you finally got your hands on Photoshop, you spent hours maniacally giggling at your artistic genius.
But today is different. You’re a serious adult with important things to do and a reputation to uphold. You keep up with modern web techniques and trends, and have little time for fun other than a random Giphy on Slack… right?
Nope.
If there’s one thing 2016 has taught me, it’s that we—the self-serious, world-changing tech movers and shakers of the universe—haven’t changed one bit from our younger, more delightable selves.
How do I know? This year I created a Chrome extension called Tabby Cat and watched hundreds of thousands of people ditch productivity for randomly generated cats. Tabby Cat replaces your new tab page with an SVG cat featuring a silly name like “Stinky Dinosaur” or “Tiny Potato”. Over time, the cats collect goodies that vary in absurdity from fishbones to lawn flamingos to Raybans. Kids and adults alike use this extension, and analytics show the majority of use happens Monday through Friday from 9-5. The popularity of Tabby Cat has convinced me there’s still plenty of room in our big, grown-up hearts for fun.
Today, we’re going to combine the formula behind Tabby Cat with your intrinsic desire to delight (or troll) your friends, and create a web app that generates your friends with random objects and environments of your choosing. You can publish it as a Chrome extension to replace your new tab, or simply host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension.
Here’s a sneak peek at my final result featuring my partner, my cat, and I in cheerfully weird accessories. Your result will look however you want it to.
Along the way, we’ll cover how to build a Chrome extension that replaces the new tab page, and explore ways to program randomness into your work to create something truly delightful.
What you’ll need
Adobe Illustrator (or a similar illustration program to export PNG)
Some images of your friends
A text editor
Note: This can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Most of the application is pre-built so you can focus on kicking back and getting in touch with your creative side. If you want to dive in deeper, you’ll find ways to do it.
Getting started
Download a local copy of the boilerplate for today’s tutorial here, and open it in a text editor. Inside, you’ll find a simple web app that you can run in Chrome.
Open index.html in Chrome. You should see a grey page that says “Noname”.
Open template.pdf in Adobe Illustrator or a similar program that can export PNG. The file contains an artboard measuring 800px x 800px, with a dotted blue outline of a face. This is your template.
Note: We’re using Google Chrome to build and preview this application because the end-result is a Chrome extension. This means that the application isn’t totally cross-browser compatible, but that’s okay.
Step 1: Gather your friends
The first thing to do is choose who your muses are. Since the holidays are upon us, I’d suggest finding inspiration in your family.
Create your artwork
For each person, find an image where their face is pointed as forward as possible. Place the image onto the Artwork layer of the Illustrator file, and line up their face with the template. Then, rename the artboard something descriptive like face_bob. Here’s my crew:
As you can see, my use of the word “family” extends to cats. There’s no judgement here.
Notice that some of my photos don’t completely fill the artboard–that’s fine. The images will be clipped into ovals when they’re rendered in the application.
Now, export your images by following these steps:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your faces.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your images to config.js
Open scripts/config.js. This is where you configure your extension.
Add key value pairs to the faces object. The key should be the person’s name, and the value should be the filepath to the image.
faces: {
leslie: 'images/face_leslie.png',
kyle: 'images/face_kyle.png',
beep: 'images/face_beep.png'
}
The application will choose one of these options at random each time you open a new tab. This pattern is used for everything in the config file. You give the application groups of choices, and it chooses one at random each time it loads. The only thing that’s special about the faces object is that person’s name will also be displayed when their face is chosen.
Now, when you refresh the project in Chrome, you should see one of your friends along with their name, like this:
Congrats, you’re off and running!
Step 2: Add adjectives
Now that you’ve loaded your friends into the application, it’s time to call them names. This step definitely yields the most laughs for the least amount of effort.
Add a list of adjectives into the prefixes array in config.js. To get the words flowing, I took inspiration from ways I might describe some of my relatives during a holiday gathering…
prefixes: [
'Loving',
'Drunk',
'Chatty',
'Merry',
'Creepy',
'Introspective',
'Cheerful',
'Awkward',
'Unrelatable',
'Hungry',
...
]
When you refresh Chrome, you should see one of these words prefixed before your friend’s name. Voila!
Step 3: Choose your color palette
Real talk: I’m bad at choosing color palettes, so I have a trick up my sleeve that I want to share with you. If you’ve been blessed with the gift of color aptitude, skip ahead.
How to choose colors
To create a color palette, I start by going to a Coolors.co, and I hit the spacebar until I find a palette that I like. We need a wide gamut of hues for our palette, so lock down colors you like and keep hitting the spacebar until you find a nice, full range. You can use as many or as few colors as you like.
Copy these colors into your swatches in Adobe Illustrator. They’ll be the base for any illustrations you create later.
Now you need a set of background colors. Here’s my trick to making these consistent with your illustration palette without completely blending in. Use the “Adjust Palette” tool in Coolors to dial up the brightness a few notches, and the saturation down just a tad to remove any neon effect. These will be your background colors.
Add your background colors to config.js
Copy your hex codes into the bgColors array in config.js.
bgColors: [
'#FFDD77',
'#FF8E72',
'#ED5E84',
'#4CE0B3',
'#9893DA',
...
]
Now when you go back to Chrome and refresh the page, you’ll see your new palette!
Step 4: Accessorize
This is the fun part. We’re going to illustrate objects, accessories, lizards—whatever you want—and layer them on top of your friends.
Your objects will be categorized into groups, and one option from each group will be randomly chosen each time you load the page. Think of a group like “hats” or “glasses”. This will allow combinations of accessories to show at once, without showing two of the same type on the same person.
Create a group of accessories
To get started, open up Illustrator and create a new artboard out of the template. Think of a group of objects that you can riff on. I found hats to be a good place to start. If you don’t feel like illustrating, you can use cut-out images instead.
Next, follow the same steps as you did when you exported the faces. Here they are again:
Turn the Template layer off and export the images as PNGs.
In the Export dialog, tick the “Use Artboards” checkbox and enter the range with your hats.
Export at 72ppi to keep things running fast.
Save your images into the images/ folder in your project.
Add your accessories to config.js
In config.js, add a new key to the customProps object that describes the group of accessories that you just created. Its value should be an array of the filepaths to your images. This is my hats array:
customProps: {
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
]
}
Refresh Chrome and behold, accessories!
Create as many more accessories as you want
Repeat the steps above to create as many groups of accessories as you want. I went on to make glasses and hairstyles, so my final illustrator file looks like this:
The last step is adding your new groups to the config object. List your groups in the order that you want them to be stacked in the DOM. My final output will be hair, then hats, then glasses:
customProps: {
hair: [
'images/hair_bowl.png',
'images/hair_bob.png'
],
hats: [
'images/hat_crown.png',
'images/hat_santa.png',
'images/hat_tophat.png',
'images/hat_antlers.png'
],
glasses: [
'images/glasses_aviators.png',
'images/glasses_monacle.png'
]
}
And, there you have it! Randomly generated friends with random accessories.
Feel free to go much crazier than I did. I considered adding a whole group of animals in celebration of the new season of Planet Earth, or even adding Sir David Attenborough himself, or doing a bit of role reversal and featuring the animals with little safari hats! But I digress…
Step 5: Publish it
It’s time to put this in your new tabs! You have two options:
Publish it as a Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store.
Host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension.
Today, we’re going to cover Option #1 because I want to show you how to make the simplest Chrome extension possible. However, I recommend Option #2 if you want to keep your project private. Every Chrome extension that you publish is made publicly available, so unless your friends want their faces published to an extension that anyone can use, I’d suggest sticking to Option #2.
How to make a simple Chrome extension to replace the new tab page
All you need to do to make your project into a Chrome extension is add a manifest.json file to the root of your project with the following contents. There are plenty of other properties that you can add to your manifest file, but these are the only ones that are required for a new tab replacement:
{
""manifest_version"": 2,
""name"": ""Your extension name"",
""version"": ""1.0"",
""chrome_url_overrides"" : {
""newtab"": ""index.html""
}
}
To test your extension, you’ll need to run it in Developer Mode. Here’s how to do that:
Go to the Extensions page in Chrome by navigating to chrome://extensions/.
Tick the checkbox in the upper-right corner labelled “Developer Mode”.
Click “Load unpacked extension…” and select this project.
If everything is running smoothly, you should see your project when you open a new tab. If there are any errors, they should appear in a yellow box on the Extensions page.
Voila! Like I said, this is a very light example of a Chrome extension, but Google has tons of great documentation on how to take things further. Check it out and see what inspires you.
Share the love
Now that you know how to make a new tab extension, go forth and create! But wield your power responsibly. New tabs are opened so often that they’ve become a part of everyday life–just consider how many tabs you opened today. Some people prefer to-do lists in their tabs, and others prefer cats.
At the end of the day, let’s make something that makes us happy. Cheers!",2016,Leslie Zacharkow,lesliezacharkow,2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension/,code
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, the ReactJS docs are a good place to start.
Getting started
We’re going to create a tiny ReactJS application that will work on the server and the client. First we’ll need to create a new project and install some dependencies. In a new, blank directory, run:
npm init -y
npm install --save ejs express react react-router react-dom
That will create a new project and install our dependencies:
ejs is a templating engine that we’ll use to render our HTML on the server.
express is a small web framework we’ll run our server on.
react-router is a popular routing solution for React so our app can fully support and respect URLs.
react-dom is a small React library used for rendering React components.
We’re also going to write all our code in ECMAScript 6, and therefore need to install BabelJS and configure that too.
npm install --save-dev babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-react
Then, create a .babelrc file that contains the following:
{
""presets"": [""es2015"", ""react""]
}
What we’ve done here is install Babel’s command line interface (CLI) tool and configured it to transform our code from ECMAScript 6 (or ES2015) to ECMAScript 5, which is more widely supported. We’ll need the React transforms when we start writing JSX when working with React.
Creating a server
For now, our ExpressJS server is pretty straightforward. All we’ll do is render a view that says ‘Hello World’. Here’s our server code:
import express from 'express';
import http from 'http';
const app = express();
app.use(express.static('public'));
app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
res.render('index');
});
const server = http.createServer(app);
server.listen(3003);
server.on('listening', () => {
console.log('Listening on 3003');
});
Here we’re using ES6 modules, which I wrote about on 24 ways last year, if you’d like a reminder. We tell the app to render the index view on any GET request (that’s what app.get('*') means, the wildcard matches any route).
We now need to create the index view file, which Express expects to be defined in views/index.ejs:
My App
Hello World
Finally, we’re ready to run the server. Because we installed babel-cli earlier we have access to the babel-node executable, which will transform all your code before running it through node. Run this command:
./node_modules/.bin/babel-node server.js
And you should now be able to visit http://localhost:3003 and see ‘Hello World’ right there:
Building the React app
Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end. Our app will have two routes, / and /about which will both show a small amount of content. This will demonstrate how to use React Router on the server side to make sure our React app plays nicely with URLs.
Firstly, let’s update views/index.ejs. Our server will figure out what HTML it needs to render, and pass that into the view. We can pass a value into our view when we render it, and then use EJS syntax to tell it to output that data. Update the template file so the body looks like so:
<%- markup %>
Next, we’ll define the routes we want our app to have using React Router. For now we’ll just define the index route, and not worry about the /about route quite yet. We could define our routes in JSX, but I think for server-side rendering it’s clearer to define them as an object. Here’s what we’re starting with:
const routes = {
path: '',
component: AppComponent,
childRoutes: [
{
path: '/',
component: IndexComponent
}
]
}
These are just placed at the top of server.js, after the import statements. Later we’ll move these into a separate file, but for now they are fine where they are.
Notice how I define first that the AppComponent should be used at the '' path, which effectively means it matches every single route and becomes a container for all our other components. Then I give it a child route of /, which will match the IndexComponent. Before we hook these routes up with our server, let’s quickly define components/app.js and components/index.js. app.js looks like so:
import React from 'react';
export default class AppComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
Welcome to my App
{ this.props.children }
);
}
}
When a React Router route has child components, they are given to us in the props under the children key, so we need to include them in the code we want to render for this component. The index.js component is pretty bland:
import React from 'react';
export default class IndexComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
);
}
}
Server-side routing with React Router
Head back into server.js, and firstly we’ll need to add some new imports:
import React from 'react';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { match, RoutingContext } from 'react-router';
import AppComponent from './components/app';
import IndexComponent from './components/index';
The ReactDOM package provides react-dom/server which includes a renderToString method that takes a React component and produces the HTML string output of the component. It’s this method that we’ll use to render the HTML from the server, generated by React. From the React Router package we use match, a function used to find a matching route for a URL; and RoutingContext, a React component provided by React Router that we’ll need to render. This wraps up our components and provides some functionality that ties React Router together with our app. Generally you don’t need to concern yourself about how this component works, so don’t worry too much.
Now for the good bit: we can update our app.get('*') route with the code that matches the URL against the React routes:
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
// routes is our object of React routes defined above
match({ routes, location: req.url }, (err, redirectLocation, props) => {
if (err) {
// something went badly wrong, so 500 with a message
res.status(500).send(err.message);
} else if (redirectLocation) {
// we matched a ReactRouter redirect, so redirect from the server
res.redirect(302, redirectLocation.pathname + redirectLocation.search);
} else if (props) {
// if we got props, that means we found a valid component to render
// for the given route
const markup = renderToString(
Welcome to my App
{ this.props.children }
);
}
}
You can now click between the pages to navigate. However, everytime we do so the requests hit the server. Now we’re going to make our final change, such that after the app has been rendered on the server once, it gets rendered and managed in the client, providing that snappy client-side app experience.
Client-side rendering
First, we’re going to make a small change to views/index.ejs. React doesn’t like rendering directly into the body and will give a warning when you do so. To prevent this we’ll wrap our app in a div:
<%- markup %>
I’ve also added in a script tag to build.js, which is the file we’ll generate containing all our client-side code.
Next, create client-render.js. This is going to be the only bit of JavaScript that’s exclusive to the client side. In it we need to pull in our routes and render them to the DOM.
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { Router } from 'react-router';
import { routes } from './routes';
import createBrowserHistory from 'history/lib/createBrowserHistory';
ReactDOM.render(
It’s important to note that in the markup the link used for an individual tab references its panel content using the hash, pointing to the id on the panel. This will allow our content to connect up without JavaScript and give us a bunch of features for free, which we’ll see once we’re on to writing the code.
URL-driven tabbing systems
Instead of making the code responsive to the user’s input, we’re going to exclusively use the browser URL and the hashchange event on the window to drive this tabbing system. This way we get Back button support for free.
With that in mind, let’s start building up our code. I’ll assume we have the jQuery library, but I’ve also provided the full code working without a library (vanilla, if you will), but it depends on relatively new (polyfillable) tech like classList and dataset (which generally have IE10 and all other browser support).
Note that I’ll start with the simplest solution, and I’ll refactor the code as I go along, like in places where I keep calling jQuery selectors.
function show(id) {
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
$('.tab').removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
$('.panel').hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', function () {
show(location.hash);
});
// initialise by showing the first panel
show('#dizzy');
This works pretty well for such little code. Notice that we don’t have any click handlers for the user and the Back button works right out of the box.
However, there’s a number of problems we need to fix:
The initialised tab is hard-coded to the first panel, rather than what’s on the URL.
If there’s no hash on the URL, all the panels are hidden (and thus broken).
If you scroll to the bottom of the example, you’ll find a “top” link; clicking that will break our tabbing system.
I’ve purposely made the page long, so that when you click on a tab, you’ll see the page scrolls to the top of the tab. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying.
From our criteria at the start of this post, we’ve already solved items 4 and 5. Not a terrible start. Let’s solve items 1 through 3 next.
Using the URL to initialise correctly and protect from breakage
Instead of arbitrarily picking the first panel from our collection, the code should read the current location.hash and use that if it’s available.
The problem is: what if the hash on the URL isn’t actually for a tab?
The solution here is that we need to cache a list of known panel IDs. In fact, well-written DOM scripting won’t continuously search the DOM for nodes. That is, when the show function kept calling $('.tab').each(...) it was wasteful. The result of $('.tab') should be cached.
So now the code will collect all the tabs, then find the related panels from those tabs, and we’ll use that list to double the values we give the show function (during initialisation, for instance).
// collect all the tabs
var tabs = $('.tab');
// get an array of the panel ids (from the anchor hash)
var targets = tabs.map(function () {
return this.hash;
}).get();
// use those ids to get a jQuery collection of panels
var panels = $(targets.join(','));
function show(id) {
// if no value was given, let's take the first panel
if (!id) {
id = targets[0];
}
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
tabs.removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
panels.hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', function () {
var hash = location.hash;
if (targets.indexOf(hash) !== -1) {
show(hash);
}
});
// initialise
show(targets.indexOf(location.hash) !== -1 ? location.hash : '');
The core of working out which tab to initialise with is solved in that last line: is there a location.hash? Is it in our list of valid targets (panels)? If so, select that tab.
The second breakage we saw in the original demo was that clicking the “top” link would break our tabs. This was due to the hashchange event firing and the code didn’t validate the hash that was passed. Now this happens, the panels don’t break.
So far we’ve got a tabbing system that:
Works without JavaScript.
Supports right-click and Shift-click (and doesn’t select in these cases).
Loads the correct panel if you start with a hash.
Supports native browser navigation.
Supports the keyboard.
The only annoying problem we have now is that the page jumps when a tab is selected. That’s due to the browser following the default behaviour of an internal link on the page. To solve this, things are going to get a little hairy, but it’s all for a good cause.
Removing the jump to tab
You’d be forgiven for thinking you just need to hook a click handler and return false. It’s what I started with. Only that’s not the solution. If we add the click handler, it breaks all the right-click and Shift-click support.
There may be another way to solve this, but what follows is the way I found – and it works. It’s just a bit… hairy, as I said.
We’re going to strip the id attribute off the target panel when the user tries to navigate to it, and then put it back on once the show code starts to run. This change will mean the browser has nowhere to navigate to for that moment, and won’t jump the page.
The change involves the following:
Add a click handle that removes the id from the target panel, and cache this in a target variable that we’ll use later in hashchange (see point 4).
In the same click handler, set the location.hash to the current link’s hash. This is important because it forces a hashchange event regardless of whether the URL actually changed, which prevents the tabs breaking (try it yourself by removing this line).
For each panel, put a backup copy of the id attribute in a data property (I’ve called it old-id).
When the hashchange event fires, if we have a target value, let’s put the id back on the panel.
These changes result in this final code:
/*global $*/
// a temp value to cache *what* we're about to show
var target = null;
// collect all the tabs
var tabs = $('.tab').on('click', function () {
target = $(this.hash).removeAttr('id');
// if the URL isn't going to change, then hashchange
// event doesn't fire, so we trigger the update manually
if (location.hash === this.hash) {
// but this has to happen after the DOM update has
// completed, so we wrap it in a setTimeout 0
setTimeout(update, 0);
}
});
// get an array of the panel ids (from the anchor hash)
var targets = tabs.map(function () {
return this.hash;
}).get();
// use those ids to get a jQuery collection of panels
var panels = $(targets.join(',')).each(function () {
// keep a copy of what the original el.id was
$(this).data('old-id', this.id);
});
function update() {
if (target) {
target.attr('id', target.data('old-id'));
target = null;
}
var hash = window.location.hash;
if (targets.indexOf(hash) !== -1) {
show(hash);
}
}
function show(id) {
// if no value was given, let's take the first panel
if (!id) {
id = targets[0];
}
// remove the selected class from the tabs,
// and add it back to the one the user selected
tabs.removeClass('selected').filter(function () {
return (this.hash === id);
}).addClass('selected');
// now hide all the panels, then filter to
// the one we're interested in, and show it
panels.hide().filter(id).show();
}
$(window).on('hashchange', update);
// initialise
if (targets.indexOf(window.location.hash) !== -1) {
update();
} else {
show();
}
This version now meets all the criteria I mentioned in my original list, except for the ARIA roles and accessibility. Getting this support is actually very cheap to add.
ARIA roles
This article on ARIA tabs made it very easy to get the tabbing system working as I wanted.
The tasks were simple:
Add aria-role set to tab for the tabs, and tabpanel for the panels.
Set aria-controls on the tabs to point to their related panel (by id).
I use JavaScript to add tabindex=0 to all the tab elements.
When I add the selected class to the tab, I also set aria-selected to true and, inversely, when I remove the selected class I set aria-selected to false.
When I hide the panels I add aria-hidden=true, and when I show the specific panel I set aria-hidden=false.
And that’s it. Very small changes to get full sign-off that the tabbing system is bulletproof and accessible.
Check out the final version (and the non-jQuery version as promised).
In conclusion
There’s a lot of tab implementations out there, but there’s an equal amount that break the browsing paradigm and the simple linkability of content. Clearly there’s a special hell for those tab systems that don’t even use links, but I think it’s clear that even in something that’s relatively simple, it’s the small details that make or break the user experience.
Obviously there are corners I’ve not explored, like when there’s more than one set of tabs on a page, and equally whether you should deliver the initial markup with the correct tab selected. I think the answer lies in using query strings in combination with hashes on the URL, but maybe that’s for another year!",2015,Remy Sharp,remysharp,2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/how-tabs-should-work/,code
57,Cooking Up Effective Technical Writing,"Merry Christmas! May your preparations for this festive season of gluttony be shaping up beautifully. By the time you read this I hope you will have ordered your turkey, eaten twice your weight in Roses/Quality Street (let’s not get into that argument), and your Christmas cake has been baked and is now quietly absorbing regular doses of alcohol.
Some of you may be reading this and scoffing Of course! I’ve also made three batches of mince pies, a seasonal chutney and enough gingerbread men to feed the whole street! while others may be laughing Bake? Oh no, I can’t cook to save my life.
For beginners, recipes are the step-by-step instructions that hand-hold us through the cooking process, but even as a seasoned expert you’re likely to refer to a recipe at some point. Recipes tell us what we need, what to do with it, in what order, and what the outcome will be. It’s the documentation behind our ideas, and allows us to take the blueprint for a tasty morsel and to share it with others so they can recreate it. In fact, this is a little like the open source documentation and tutorials that we put out there, similarly aiming to guide other developers through our creations.
The ‘just’ification of documentation
Lately it feels like we’re starting to consider the importance of our words, and the impact they can have on others. Brad Frost warned us of the dangers of “Just” when it comes to offering up solutions to queries:
“Just use this software/platform/toolkit/methodology…”
“Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word.
“Just” by Brad Frost
I can really empathise with these sentiments. My relationship with code started out as many good web tales do, with good old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. University years involved some time with Perl, PHP, Java and C. In my first job I worked primarily with ColdFusion, a bit of ActionScript, some classic ASP and pinch of Java. I’d do a bit of PHP outside work every now and again. .NET came in, but we never really got on, and eventually I started learning some Ruby, Python and Node. It was a broad set of learnings, and I enjoyed the similarities and differences that came with new languages. I don’t develop day in, day out any more, and my interests and work have evolved over the years, away from full-time development and more into architecture and strategy. But I still make things, and I still enjoy learning.
I have often found myself bemoaning the lack of tutorials or courses that cater for the middle level – someone who may be learning a new language, but who has enough programming experience under their belt to not need to revise the concepts of how loops or objects work, and is perfectly adept at googling the syntax for getting a substring. I don’t want snippets out of context; I want an understanding of architectural principles, of the strengths and weaknesses, of the type of applications that work well with the language.
I’m caught in the place between snoozing off when ‘Using the Instagram API with Ruby’ hand-holds me through what REST is, and feeling like I’m stupid and need to go back to dev school when I can’t get my environment and dependencies set up, let alone work out how I’m meant to get any code to run.
It’s seems I’m not alone with this – Erin McKean seems to have been here too:
“Some tutorials (especially coding tutorials) like to begin things in media res. Great for a sense of dramatic action, bad for getting to “Step 1” without tears. It can be really discouraging to fire up a fresh terminal window only to be confronted by error message after error message because there were obligatory steps 0.1.0 through 0.9.9 that you didn’t even know about.”
“Tips for Learning What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know” by Erin McKean
I’m sure you’ve been here too. Many tutorials suffer badly from the fabled ‘how to draw an owl’-itis.
It’s the kind of feeling you can easily get when sifting through recipes as well as with code. Far from being the simple instructions that let us just follow along, they too can be a minefield. Fall in too low and you may be skipping over an explanation of what simmering is, or set your sights too high and you may get stuck at the point where you’re trying to sous vide a steak using your bathtub and a Ziploc bag.
Don’t be a turkey, use your loaf!
My mum is a great cook in my eyes (aren’t all mums?). I love her handcrafted collection of gathered recipes from over the years, including the one below, which is a great example of how something may make complete sense to the writer, but could be impermeable to a reader.
Depending on your level of baking knowledge, you may ask: What’s SR flour? What’s a tsp? Should I use salted or unsalted butter? Do I use sticks of cinnamon or ground? Why is chopped chocolate better? How do I cream things? How big should the balls be? How well is “well spaced”? How much leeway do I have for “(ish!!)”? Does the “20” on the other cookie note mean I’ll end up with twenty? At any point, making a wrong call could lead to rubbish cookies, and lead to someone heading down the path of an I can’t cook mentality.
You may be able to cook (or follow recipes), but you may not understand the local terms for ingredients, may not be able to acquire something and need to know what kind of substitutes you can use, or may need to actually do some prep before you jump into the main bit.
However, if we look at good examples of recipes, I think there’s a lot we can apply when it comes to technical writing on the web. I’ve written before about the benefit of breaking documentation into small, reusable parts, and this will help us, but we can also take it a bit further. Here are my five top tips for better technical writing.
1. Structure and standardise your information
Think of the structure of a recipe. We very often have some common elements and they usually follow roughly the same format. We have standards and conventions that allow us to understand very quickly what a recipe is and how it should be used.
Great recipes help their chefs know what they need to get ready in advance, both in terms of buying ingredients and putting together their kit. They then talk through the process, using appropriate language, and without making assumptions that the person can fill in any gaps for themselves; they explain why things are done the way they are. The best recipes may also suggest how you can take what you’ve done and put your own spin on it. For instance, a good recipe for the simple act of boiling an egg will explain cooking time in relation to your preference for yolk gooiness. There are also different flavour combinations to try, accompaniments, or presentation suggestions.
By breaking down your technical writing into similar sections, you can help your audience understand the elements they’ll be working with, what they need to do once they have these, and how they can move on from your self-contained illustration.
Title
Ensure your title is suitably descriptive and representative of the result. Getting Started with Python perhaps isn’t as helpful as Learn Python: General Syntax and Basics.
Result
Many recipes include a couple of lines as an overview of what you’ll end up with, and many include a photo of the finished dish. With our technical writing we can do the same:
In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to set up our development environment, and we’ll then undertake some exercises to explore the general syntax, finishing by building a mini calculator.
Ingredients
What are the components we’ll be working with, whether in terms of versions, environment, languages or the software packages and libraries you’ll need along the way? Listing these up front gives the reader a great summary of the things they’ll be using, and any gotchas.
Being able to provide a small amount of supporting information will also help less experienced users. Ideally, explain briefly what things are and why we’re using it.
Prep
As we heard from Erin above, not fully understanding the prep needed can be a huge source of frustration. Attempting to run a code snippet without context will often lead to failure when the prerequisites and process aren’t clear. Be sure to include information around any environment set-up, installation or config you’ll need to have done before you start.
Stu Robson’s Simple Sass documentation aims to do this before getting into specifics, although ideally this would also include setting up Sass itself.
Instructions
The body of the tutorial itself is the whole point of our writing. The next four tips will hopefully make your tutorial much more successful.
Variations
Like our ingredients section, as important as explaining why we’re using something in this context is, it’s also great to explain alternatives that could be used instead, and the impact of doing so.
Perhaps go a step further, explaining ways that people can change what you have done in your tutorial/readme for use in different situations, or to provide further reading around next steps. What happens if they want to change your static array of demo data to use JSON, for instance? By giving some thought to follow-up questions, you can better support your readers.
While not in a separate section, the source code for GreenSock’s GSAP JS basics explains:
We’ll use a window.onload for simplicity, but typically it is best to use either jQuery’s $(document).ready() or $(window).load() or cross-browser event listeners so that you’re not limited to one.
Keep in mind to both:
Explain what variations are possible.
Explain why certain options may be more desirable than others in different situations.
2. Small, reusable components
Reusable components are for life, not just for Christmas, and they’re certainly not just for development. If you start to apply the structure above to your writing, you’re probably going to keep coming across the same elements: Do I really have to explain how to install Sass and Node.js again, Sally? The danger with more clarity is that our writing becomes bloated and overly convoluted for advanced readers, those who don’t need to be told how to beat an egg for the hundredth time.
Instead, by making our writing reusable and modular, and by creating smaller, central resources, we can provide context and extra detail where needed without diluting our core message. These could be references we create, or those already created well by others.
This recipe for katsudon makes use of this concept. Rather than explaining how to make tonkatsu or dashi stock, these each have their own page. Once familiar, more advanced readers will likely skip over the instructions for the component parts.
3. Provide context to aid accessibility
Here I’m talking about accessibility in the broadest sense. Small, isolated snippets can be frustrating to those who don’t fully understand the wider context of how our examples work.
Showing an exciting standalone JavaScript function is great, but giving someone the full picture of how and when this is called, and how it should be included in relation to other HTML and CSS is even better. Giving your readers the ability to view a big picture version, and ideally the ability to download a full version of the source, will help to reduce some of the frustrations of trying to get your component to work in their set-up.
4. Be your own tech editor
A good editor can be invaluable to your work, and wherever possible I’d recommend that you try to get a neutral party to read over your writing. This may not always be possible, though, and you may need to rely on yourself to cast a critical eye over your work.
There are many tips out there around general editing, including printing out your work onto paper, or changing the font size: both will force your eyes to review it in a new light. Beyond this, I’d like to encourage you to think about the following:
Explain what things are. For example, instead of referencing Grunt, in the first instance perhaps reference “Grunt (a JavaScript task runner that minimises repetitive activities through automation).”
Explain how you get things, even if this is a link to official installers and documentation. Don’t leave your readers having to search.
Why are you using this approach/technology over other options?
What happens if I use something else? What depends on this?
Avoid exclusionary lingo or acronyms.
Airbnb’s JavaScript Style Guide includes useful pointers around their reasoning:
Use computed property names when creating objects with dynamic property names.
Why? They allow you to define all the properties of an object in one place.
The language we use often makes assumptions, as we saw with “just”. An article titled “ES6 for Beginners” is hugely ambiguous: is this truly for beginner coders, or actually for people who have a good pre-existing understanding of JavaScript but are new to these features? Review your writing with different types of readers in mind. How might you confuse or mislead them? How can you better answer their questions?
This doesn’t necessarily mean supporting everyone – your audience may need to have advanced skills – but even if you’re providing low-level, deep-dive, reference material, trying not to make assumptions or take shortcuts will hopefully lead to better, clearer writing.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words…
…or even better: use a thousand pictures, stitched together into a quick video or animated GIF. People learn in different ways. Just as recipes often provide visual references or a video to work along with, providing your technical information with alternative demonstrations can really help get your point across. Your audience will be able to see exactly what you’re doing, what they should expect as interaction responses, and what the process looks like at different points.
There are many, many options for recording your screen, including QuickTime Player on Mac OS X (File → New Screen Recording), GifGrabber, or Giffing Tool on Windows.
Paul Swain, a UX designer, uses GIFs to provide additional context within his documentation, improving communication:
“My colleagues (from across the organisation) love animated GIFs. Any time an interaction is referenced, it’s accompanied by a GIF and a shared understanding of what’s being designed. The humble GIF is worth so much more than a thousand words; and it’s great for cats.”
Paul Swain
Next time you’re cooking up some instructions for readers, think back to what we can learn from recipes to help make your writing as accessible as possible. Use structure, provide reusable bitesize morsels, give some context, edit wisely, and don’t scrimp on the GIFs. And above all, have a great Christmas!",2015,Sally Jenkinson,sallyjenkinson,2015-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/cooking-up-effective-technical-writing/,content
58,Beyond the Style Guide,"Much like baking a Christmas cake, designing for the web involves creating an experience in layers. Starting with a solid base that provides the core experience (the fruit cake), we can add further layers, each adding refinement (the marzipan) and delight (the icing).
Don’t worry, this isn’t a misplaced cake recipe, but an evaluation of modular design and the role style guides can play in acknowledging these different concerns, be they presentational or programmatic.
The auteur’s style guide
Although trained as a graphic designer, it was only when I encountered the immediacy of the web that I felt truly empowered as a designer. Given a desire to control every aspect of the resulting experience, I slowly adopted the role of an auteur, exploring every part of the web stack: front-end to back-end, and everything in between. A few years ago, I dreaded using the command line. Today, the terminal is a permanent feature in my Dock.
In straddling the realms of graphic design and programming, it’s the point at which they meet that I find most fascinating, with each dicipline valuing the creation of effective systems, be they for communication or code efficiency. Front-end style guides live at this intersection, demonstrating both the modularity of code and the application of visual design.
Painting by numbers
In our rush to build modular systems, design frameworks have grown in popularity. While enabling quick assembly, these come at the cost of originality and creative expression – perhaps one reason why we’re seeing the homogenisation of web design.
In editorial design, layouts should accentuate content and present it in an engaging manner. Yet on the web we see a practice that seeks templated predictability. In ‘Design Machines’ Travis Gertz argued that (emphasis added):
Design systems still feel like a novelty in screen-based design. We nerd out over grid systems and modular scales and obsess over style guides and pattern libraries. We’re pretty good at using them to build repeatable components and site-wide standards, but that’s sort of where it ends. […] But to stop there is to ignore the true purpose and potential of a design system.
Unless we consider how interface patterns fully embrace the design systems they should be built upon, style guides may exacerbate this paint-by-numbers approach, encouraging conformance and suppressing creativity.
Anatomy of a button
Let’s take a look at that most canonical of components, the button, and consider what we might wish to document and demonstrate in a style guide.
The different layers of our button component.
Content
The most variable aspect of any component. Content guidelines will exert the most influence here, dictating things like tone of voice (whether we should we use stiff, formal language like ‘Submit form’, or adopt a more friendly tone, perhaps ‘Send us your message’) and appropriate language. For an internationalised interface, this may also impact word length and text direction or orientation.
Structure
HTML provides a limited vocabulary which we can use to structure content and add meaning. For interactive elements, the choice of element can also affect its behaviour, such as whether a button submits form data or links to another page:
Button text
Button text
Note: One of the reasons I prefer to use instead of
It’s unlikely that Bill Murray could ever have got through his career without playing a version of Scrooge…
Director: Richard DonnerStars: Bill Murray, Buddy Hackett, Karen Allen
We can then describe the presentation of this HTML by using Sass maps to define our palettes, mixins to include predefined font metrics, and variables to recall common measurements:
.summary {
margin-bottom: ($baseline * 4)
}
.summary__title {
@include font-family(display-serif);
@include font-size(title);
color: palette(neutral, dark);
margin-bottom: ($baseline * 4);
border-top: $rule-height solid palette(primary, purple);
padding-top: ($baseline * 2);
}
.summary__position {
@include font-family(display-sans, 300);
color: palette(neutral, mid);
}
.summary__body {
@include font-family(text-serif);
@include font-size(body);
margin-bottom: ($baseline * 2);
}
.summary__meta {
@include font-family(text-sans);
@include font-size(caption);
}
Of course, this is a simplistic example for the purposes of demonstration. However, such thinking was employed at a much larger scale at the Guardian. Using a set of Sass components, complex patterns could be described using a language familar to everyone on the product team, be they a designer, developer or product owner:
The design of a component on the Guardian website, described in terms of its Sass-powered design system.
Unlocking possibility
Alongside tools like preprocessors, newer CSS layout modules like flexbox and grid layout mean the friction we’ve long been accustomed to when creating layouts on the web is no longer present, and the full separation of presentation from markup is now possible. Now is the perfect time for graphic designers to advocate design systems that these developments empower, and ensure they’re fully represented in both documentation and code. That way, together, we can build systems that allow for greater visual expression. After all, there’s more than one way to bake a Christmas cake.",2015,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/beyond-the-style-guide/,design
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 message sent about who holds the balance of power in this agreement, and whose interests it will benefit, is clear.
By far the most controversial area of the TPP has centred around the provisions on intellectual property. These include copyright terms of up to 120 years, mandatory takedowns of allegedly infringing content in response to just one complaint regardless of that complaint’s validity, heavy and disproportionate penalties for alleged violations, and – most frightening of all – government seizures of equipment allegedly used for copyright violations. All of these provisions have been raised without regard for the fact that a trade agreement is not the appropriate venue to negotiate intellectual property law.
Other draft TPP provisions would restrict the digital rights of people with disabilities by banning the workarounds they use every day. These include no exemptions for the adaptations of copywritten works for use in accessible technology (such as text-to-speech in ebook readers), a ban on circumventing DRM or digital locks in order to convert a file to an accessible format, and requiring the takedown of adapted works, such as a video with added subtitles, even if that adaptation would normally have fallen under the definition of fair use.
The e-commerce provisions would prohibit data localisation, the practice of requiring data to be physically stored on servers within a country’s borders. Data localisation is growing in popularity following the Snowden revelations, and some of your own personal data may have been recently “localised” in response to the Safe Harbor verdict. Prohibiting data localisation through the TPP would address the symptom but not the cause.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an excellent summary of the digital rights issues raised by the agreement along with suggested actions American readers can take to speak out.
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
TTIP stands for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a draft free trade agreement between the United States and the EU. The plan has been hugely controversial and divisive, and the internet and digital provisions of the draft form just a small part of that contention.
The most striking digital provision of TTIP is an attempt to circumvent and override European data protection law. As EDRI, a European digital rights organisation, noted:
“the US proposal would authorise the transfer of EU citizens’ personal data to any country, trumping the EU data protection framework, which ensures that this data can only be transferred in clearly defined circumstances. For years, the US has been trying to bypass the default requirement for storage of personal data in the EU. It is therefore not surprising to see such a proposal being {introduced} in the context of the trade negotiations.”
This draft provision was written before the Safe Harbor data protection agreement between the EU and US was invalidated by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In other words, there is no longer any protective agreement in place, and our data is as vulnerable as this political situation. However, data protection is a matter of its own law, the acting Data Protection Directive and the draft EU Data Protection Reform. A trade agreement, be it the TTIP or the TPP, is not the appropriate place to revamp a law on data protection.
Other digital law issues raised by TTIP include the possibility of renegotiating standards on encryption (which in practice means lowering them) and renegotiating intellectual property rights such as copyright. The spectre of net neutrality has even put in an appearance, with an attempt to introduce rules on access to the internet itself being introduced as provisions.
TTIP is still under discussion, and this month the EU trade representative said that “we agreed to further intensify our work during 2016 to help negotiations move forward rapidly.” This has been cleverly worded: this means the agreement has little chance of being passed or coming into effect in 2016, which buys civil society more precious time to speak out.
The EU Data Protection Regulation
On 15 December 2015 the European Commission announced their agreement on the text of the draft General Data Protection Regulation. This law will replace its predecessor, the EU Data Protection Regulation of 1995, which has done a remarkable job of protecting data privacy across the continent throughout two decades of constant internet evolution.
The goal of the reform process has been to return power over data, and its uses, to citizens. Users will have more control over what data is captured about them, how it is used, how it is retained, and how it can be deleted. Businesses and digital professionals, in turn, will have to restructure their relationships with client and customer data. Compliance obligations will increase, and difficult choices will have to be made. However, this time should be seen as an opportunity to rethink our relationship with data. After Snowden, Schrems, and Safe Harbor, it is clear that we cannot go back to the way things were before. In an era of where every one of our heartbeats is recorded on a wearable device and uploaded to a surveilled data centre in another country, the need for reform has never been more acute.
While texts of the draft GDPR are available, there is not enough mulled wine in the world that will help you get through them. Instead, the law firm Fieldfisher Waterhouse has produced this helpful infographic which will give you a good idea of the changes we can expect to see (view full size):
The most surprising outcome announced on 15 December was the new regulation’s teeth. Under the new law, companies that fail to heed the updated data protection rules will face fines of up to 4% of their global turnover. Additionally, the law expands the liability for data protection to both the controller (the company hosting the data) and the data processor (the company using the data). The new law will also introduce a one-stop shop for resolving concerns over data misuse. Companies will no longer be able to headquarter their European operations in countries which are perceived to have relatively light-touch data protection enforcement (that means you, Ireland) as a means of automatically rejecting any complaints filed by citizens outside that country.
For digital professionals, the most immediate concern is analytics. In fact, I am going to make a prediction: in 2016 we will begin to see the same misguided war on analytics that we saw on cookies. By increasing the legal liabilities for both data processors and controllers – in other words, the company providing the analytics as well as the site administrator studying them – the new regulation risks creating disproportionate burdens as well as the same “guilt by association” risks we saw in 2012. There have already been statements made by some within the privacy community that analytics are tracking, and tracking is surveillance, therefore analytics are evil. Yet “just don’t use analytics,” as was suggested by one advocate, is simply not an option. European regulators should consult with the web community to gain a clear understanding of why analytics are vital to everyday site administrators, and must find a happy medium that protects users’ data without criminalising every website by default. No one wants a repeat of the crisis of consent, as well as the scaremongering, caused by the cookie law.
Assuming the text is adopted in 2016, the new EU Data Protection Regulation would not come into effect until 2018. We have a considerable challenge ahead, but we also have plenty of time to get it right.",2015,Heather Burns,heatherburns,2015-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/whats-ahead-for-your-data-in-2016/,business
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 input using the for attribute. The hover area is shown with a yellow background and a black dotted border:
Open video
The label is clickable and the checkbox has an accessible description. Job done, right? Not really. Take a look at the space between the label and the checkbox:
Open video
The gutter is created using a right margin which pushes the label to the right. Users would certainly expect this space to be clickable as well. The simple solution is to wrap the label around the checkbox and the text:
Open video
You can also set the label to display:block; to further increase the clickable area:
Open video
And while we’re at it, users might expect the whole box to be clickable anyway. Let’s apply the CSS that was on a wrapping div element to the label directly:
Open video
The result enhances the usability of your form element tremendously for people with lower dexterity, using a voice mouse, or using touch interfaces. And we only used basic HTML and CSS techniques; no JavaScript was added and not one extra line of CSS.
Button Example
The button below looks like a typical edit button: a pencil icon on a real button element. But if you are using a screen reader or a braille keyboard, the button is just read as “button” without any indication of what this button is for.
Open video
A screen reader announcing a button. Contains audio.
The code snippet shows why the button is not properly announced:
An icon font is used to display the icon and no text alternative is given. A possible solution to this problem is to use the title or aria-label attributes, which solves the alternative text use case for screen reader users:
Open video
A screen reader announcing a button with a title.
However, screen readers are not the only way people with and without disabilities interact with websites. For example, users can reset or change font families and sizes at will. This helps many users make websites easier to read, including people with dyslexia. Your icon font might be replaced by a font that doesn’t include the glyphs that are icons. Additionally, the icon font may not load for users on slow connections, like on mobile phones inside trains, or because users decided to block external fonts altogether. The following screenshots show the mobile GitHub view with and without external fonts:
The mobile GitHub view with and without external fonts.
Even if the title/aria-label approach was used, the lack of visual labels is a barrier for most people under those circumstances. One way to tackle this is using the old-fashioned img element with an appropriate alt attribute, but surprisingly not every browser displays the alternative text visually when the image doesn’t load.
Providing always visible text is an alternative that can work well if you have the space. It also helps users understand the meaning of the icons.
This also reads just fine in screen readers:
Open video
A screen reader announcing the revised button.
Clever usability enhancements don’t stop at a technical implementation level. Take the BBC iPlayer pages as an example: when a user navigates the “captioned videos” or “audio description” categories and clicks on one of the videos, captions or audio descriptions are automatically switched on. Small things like this enhance the usability and don’t need a lot of engineering resources. It is more about connecting the usability dots for people with disabilities. Read more about the BBC iPlayer accessibility case study.
More information
W3C has created several documents that make it easier to get the gist of what web accessibility is and how it can benefit everyone. You can find out “How People with Disabilities Use the Web”, there are “Tips for Getting Started” for developers, designers and content writers. And for the more seasoned developer there is a set of tutorials on web accessibility, including information on crafting accessible forms and how to use images in an accessible way.
Conclusion
You can only produce a web project with long-lasting accessibility if accessibility is not an afterthought. Your organization, your division, your team need to think about accessibility as something that is the foundation of your website or project. It needs to be at the same level as performance, code quality and design, and it needs the same attention. Users often don’t notice when those fundamental aspects of good website design and development are done right. But they’ll always know when they are implemented poorly.
If you take all this into consideration, you can create accessibility solutions based on the available data and bring accessibility to people who didn’t know they’d need it:
Open video
In this video from the latest Apple keynote, the Apple TV is operated by voice input through a remote. When the user asks “What did she say?” the video jumps back fifteen seconds and captions are switched on for a brief time. All three, the remote, voice input and captions have their roots in assisting people with disabilities. Now they benefit everyone.",2015,Eric Eggert,ericeggert,2015-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/the-accessibility-mindset/,code
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, and display fonts made no sense in this new context.
That’s because the product isn’t about us, and it isn’t about telling our story. Product design is about getting out of the way so people can do their job. The visual design is there to create a pleasant atmosphere for people to work in, and to help support the user experience. Learning to take “us” out of the equation took some work after years of creating gorgeous imagery and content for the sales-driven side of businesses.
I’ve learned it’s very valuable to design both sides of the experience, because marketing and product design flex different muscles. If you’re currently in an environment where the two are separate, consider switching teams in 2016. Designing for product when you’ve mostly done marketing, or vice versa, will deepen your knowledge as a designer overall. You’ll face new unexpected challenges, which is the only way to grow.
Product design can not start with what looks good on Dribbble
I have an embarrassing confession: when I began the redesign, I had a secret goal of making something that would look gorgeous in my portfolio. I have a collection of product shots that I admire on Dribbble; examples of beautiful dashboards and widgets and UI elements that look good enough to frame. I wanted people to feel the same way about the final outcome of our redesign. Mistakenly, this was a factor in my initial work. I opened Photoshop and crafted pixel-perfect static buttons and form elements and color palettes that — when applied to our actual product — looked like a toddler beauty pageant. It added up to a lot of unusable shininess, noise, and silliness.
I was disappointed; these elements seemed so lovely in isolation, but in context, they felt tacky and overblown. I realized: I’m not here to design the world’s most beautiful drop down menu. Good design has nothing to do with ego, but in my experience designers are, at least a little bit, secret divas. I’m no exception. I had to remind myself that I am not working in service of a bigger Dribbble following or to create the most Pinterest-ing work. My function is solely to serve the users — to make life a little better for the good people who keep my company in business.
This meant letting go of pixel-level beauty to create something bigger and harder: a system of elements that work together in harmony in many contexts. The visual style exists to guide the users. When done well, it becomes a language that users understand, so when they encounter a new feature or have a new goal, they already feel comfortable navigating it. This meant stripping back my gorgeous animated menu into something that didn’t detract from important neighboring content, and could easily fit in other parts of the app. In order to know what visual style would support the users, I had to take a wider view of the product as a whole.
Just accept that designing a great product – like many worthwhile pursuits – is initially laborious and messy
Once I realized I couldn’t start by creating the most Dribbble-worthy thing, I knew I’d have to begin with the unglamorous, frustrating, but weirdly wonderful work of mapping out how the product’s content could better be structured. Since we’re redesigning an existing product, I assumed this would be fairly straightforward: the functionality was already in place, and my job was just to structure it in a more easily navigable way.
I started by handing off a few wireframes of the key screens to the developer, and that’s when the questions began rolling in: “If we move this content into a modal, how will it affect this similar action here?” “What happens if they don’t add video tags, but they do add a description?” “What if the user has a title that is 500 characters long?” “What if they want their video to be private to some users, but accessible to others?”.
How annoying (but really, fantastic) that people use our product in so many ways. Turns out, product design isn’t about laying out elements in the most ideal scenario for the user that’s most convenient for you. As product designers, we have to foresee every outcome, and anticipate every potential user need.
Which brings me to another annoying epiphany: if you want to do it well, and account for every user, product design is so much more snarly and tangled than you’d expect going in. I began with a simple goal: to improve the experience on just one of our key product pages. However, every small change impacts every part of the product to some degree, and that impact has to be accounted for. Every decision is based on assumptions that have to be tested; I test my assumptions by observing users, talking to the team, wireframing, and prototyping. Many of my assumptions are wrong. There are days when it’s incredibly frustrating, because an elegant solution for users with one goal will complicate life for users with another goal. It’s vital to solve as many scenarios as possible, even though this is slow, sometimes mind-bending work.
As a side bonus, wireframing and prototyping every potential state in a product is tedious, but your developers will thank you for it. It’s not their job to solve what happens when there’s an empty state, error, or edge case. Showing you’ve accounted for these scenarios will win a developer’s respect; failing to do so will frustrate them.
When you’ve created and tested a system that supports user needs, it will be beautiful
Remember what I said in the beginning about wanting to create a Dribbble-worthy product? When I stopped focusing on the visual details of the design (color, spacing, light and shadow, font choices) and focused instead on structuring the content to maximize usability and delight, a beautiful design began to emerge naturally.
I began with grayscale, flat wireframes as a strategy to keep me from getting pulled into the visual style before the user experience was established. As I created a system of elements that worked in harmony, the visual style choices became obvious. Some buttons would need to be brighter and sit off the page to help the user spot important actions. Some elements would need line separators to create a hierarchy, where others could stand on their own as an emphasized piece of content. As the user experience took shape, the visual style emerged naturally to support it. The result is a product that feels beautiful to use, because I was thoughtful about the experience first.
A big takeaway from this process has been that my assumptions will often be proven wrong. My assumptions about how to design a great product, and how users will interact with that product, have been tested and revised repeatedly. At SproutVideo we’re about to undertake the biggest test of our work; we’re going to launch a small part of the product redesign to our users. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I will continue to be humbled by the ongoing effort of making the best product I can, which is a wonderful thing.
Next year, I hope you all get to do work that takes you out of our comfort zone. Be regularly confounded and embarrassed by your wrong assumptions, learn from them, and come back and tell us what you learned in 2016.",2015,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/,design
68,"Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout","Three years ago for 24 ways 2012, I wrote an article about a new CSS layout method I was excited about. A specification had emerged, developed by people from the Internet Explorer team, bringing us a proper grid system for the web. In 2015, that Internet Explorer implementation is still the only public implementation of CSS grid layout. However, in 2016 we should be seeing it in a new improved form ready for our use in browsers.
Grid layout has developed hidden behind a flag in Blink, and in nightly builds of WebKit and, latterly, Firefox. By being developed in this way, breaking changes could be safely made to the specification as no one was relying on the experimental implementations in production work.
Another new layout method has emerged over the past few years in a more public and perhaps more painful way. Shipped prefixed in browsers, The flexible box layout module (flexbox) was far too tempting for developers not to use on production sites. Therefore, as changes were made to the specification, we found ourselves with three different flexboxes, and browser implementations that did not match one another in completeness or in the version of specified features they supported.
Owing to the different ways these modules have come into being, when I present on grid layout it is often the very first time someone has heard of the specification. A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks.
If there is to be a loser in the battle of the layouts, my hope is that it will be the layout frameworks that tie our design to our markup. They have been a necessary placeholder while we waited for a true web layout system, but I believe that in a few years time we’ll be easily able to date a website to circa 2015 by seeing or
in the markup.
In this article, I’m going to take a look at the common features of our new layout systems, along with a couple of examples which serve to highlight the differences between them.
To see the grid layout examples you will need to enable grid in your browser. The easiest thing to do is to enable the experimental web platform features flag in Chrome. Details of current browser support can be found here.
Relationship
Items only become flex or grid items if they are a direct child of the element that has display:flex, display:grid or display:inline-grid applied. Those direct children then understand themselves in the context of the complete layout. This makes many things possible. It’s the lack of relationship between elements that makes our existing layout methods difficult to use. If we float two columns, left and right, we have no way to tell the shorter column to extend to the height of the taller one. We have expended a lot of effort trying to figure out the best way to make full-height columns work, using techniques that were never really designed for page layout.
At a very simple level, the relationship between elements means that we can easily achieve full-height columns. In flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Alignment
Full-height columns rely on our flex and grid items understanding themselves as part of an overall layout. They also draw on a third new specification: the box alignment module. If vertical centring is a gift you’d like to have under your tree this Christmas, then this is the box you’ll want to unwrap first.
The box alignment module takes the alignment and space distribution properties from flexbox and applies them to other layout methods. That includes grid layout, but also other layout methods. Once implemented in browsers, this specification will give us true vertical centring of all the things.
Our examples above achieved full-height columns because the default value of align-items is stretch. The value ensured our columns stretched to the height of the tallest. If we want to use our new vertical centring abilities on all items, we would set align-items:center on the container. To align one flex or grid item, apply the align-self property.
The examples below demonstrate these alignment properties in both grid layout and flexbox. The portrait image of Widget the cat is aligned with the default stretch. The other three images are aligned using different values of align-self.
Take a look at an example in flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And also in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The alignment properties used with CSS grid layout.
Fluid grids
A cornerstone of responsive design is the concept of fluid grids.
“[…]every aspect of the grid—and the elements laid upon it—can be expressed as a proportion relative to its container.”
—Ethan Marcotte, “Fluid Grids”
The method outlined by Marcotte is to divide the target width by the context, then use that value as a percentage value for the width property on our element.
h1 {
margin-left: 14.575%; /* 144px / 988px = 0.14575 */
width: 70.85%; /* 700px / 988px = 0.7085 */
}
In more recent years, we’ve been able to use calc() to simplify this (at least, for those of us able to drop support for Internet Explorer 8). However, flexbox and grid layout make fluid grids simple.
The most basic of flexbox demos shows this fluidity in action. The justify-content property – another property defined in the box alignment module – can be used to create an equal amount of space between or around items. As the available width increases, more space is assigned in proportion.
In this demo, the list items are flex items due to display:flex being added to the ul. I have given them a maximum width of 250 pixels. Any remaining space is distributed equally between the items as the justify-content property has a value of space-between.
See the Pen Flexbox: justify-content by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
For true fluid grid-like behaviour, your new flexible friends are flex-grow and flex-shrink. These properties give us the ability to assign space in proportion.
The flexbox flex property is a shorthand for:
flex-grow
flex-shrink
flex-basis
The flex-basis property sets the default width for an item. If flex-grow is set to 0, then the item will not grow larger than the flex-basis value; if flex-shrink is 0, the item will not shrink smaller than the flex-basis value.
flex: 1 1 200px: a flexible box that can grow and shrink from a 200px basis.
flex: 0 0 200px: a box that will be 200px and cannot grow or shrink.
flex: 1 0 200px: a box that can grow bigger than 200px, but not shrink smaller.
In this example, I have a set of boxes that can all grow and shrink equally from a 100 pixel basis.
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
What I would like to happen is for the first element, containing a portrait image, to take up less width than the landscape images, thus keeping it more in proportion. I can do this by changing the flex-grow value. By giving all the items a value of 1, they all gain an equal amount of the available space after the 100 pixel basis has been worked out.
If I give them all a value of 3 and the first box a value of 1, the other boxes will be assigned three parts of the available space while box 1 is assigned only one part. You can see what happens in this demo:
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Once you understand flex-grow, you should easily be able to grasp how the new fraction unit (fr, defined in the CSS grid layout specification) works. Like flex-grow, this unit allows us to assign available space in proportion. In this case, we assign the space when defining our track sizes.
In this demo (which requires a CSS grid-supporting browser), I create a four-column grid using the fraction unit to define my track sizes. The first track is 1fr in width, and the others 2fr.
grid-template-columns: 1fr 2fr 2fr 2fr;
See the Pen Grid fraction units by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The four-track grid.
Separation of concerns
My younger self petitioned my peers to stop using tables for layout and to move to CSS. One of the rallying cries of that movement was the concept of separating our source and content from how they were displayed. It was something of a failed promise given the tools we had available: the display leaked into the markup with the need for redundant elements to cope with browser bugs, or visual techniques that just could not be achieved without supporting markup.
Browsers have improved, but even now we can find ourselves compromising the ideal document structure so we can get the layout we want at various breakpoints. In some ways, the situation has returned to tables-for-layout days. Many of the current grid frameworks rely on describing our layout directly in the markup. We add divs for rows, and classes to describe the number of desired columns. We nest these constructions of divs inside one another.
Here is a snippet from the Bootstrap grid examples – two columns with two nested columns:
Not a million miles away from something I might have written in 1999.
Grid and flexbox layouts do not need to be described in markup. The layout description happens entirely in the CSS, meaning that elements can be moved around from within the presentation layer.
Flexbox gives us the ability to reverse the flow of elements, but also to set the order of elements with the order property. This is demonstrated here, where Widget the cat is in position 1 in the source, but I have used the order property to display him after the things that are currently unimpressive to him.
See the Pen Flexbox: order by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Grid layout takes this a step further. Where flexbox lets us set the order of items in a single dimension, grid layout gives us the ability to position things in two dimensions: both rows and columns. Defined in the CSS, this positioning can be changed at any breakpoint without needing additional markup. Compare the source order with the display order in this example (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid positioning in two dimensions by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Laying out our items in two dimensions using grid layout.
As these demos show, a straightforward way to decide if you should use grid layout or flexbox is whether you want to position items in one dimension or two. If two, you want grid layout.
A note on accessibility and reordering
The issues arising from this powerful ability to change the way items are ordered visually from how they appear in the source have been the subject of much discussion. The current flexbox editor’s draft states
“Authors must use order only for visual, not logical, reordering of content. Style sheets that use order to perform logical reordering are non-conforming.”
—CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1, Editor’s Draft (3 December 2015)
This is to ensure that non-visual user agents (a screen reader, for example) can rely on the document source order as being correct. Take care when reordering that you do so from the basis of a sound document that makes sense in terms of source order. Avoid using visual order to convey meaning.
Automatic content placement with rules
Having control over the order of items, or placing items on a predefined grid, is nice. However, we can often do that already with one method or another and we have frameworks and tools to help us. Tools such as Susy mean we can even get away from stuffing our markup full of grid classes. However, our new layout methods give us some interesting new possibilities.
Something that is useful to be able to do when dealing with content coming out of a CMS or being pulled from some other source, is to define a bunch of rules and then say, “Display this content, using these rules.”
As an example of this, I will leave you with a Christmas poem displayed in a document alongside Widget the cat and some of the decorations that are bringing him no Christmas cheer whatsoever.
The poem is displayed first in the source as a set of paragraphs. I’ve added a class identifying each of the four paragraphs but they are displayed in the source as one text. Below that are all my images, some landscape and some portrait; I’ve added a class of landscape to the landscape ones.
The mobile-first grid is a single column and I use line-based placement to explicitly position my poem paragraphs. The grid layout auto-placement rules then take over and place the images into the empty cells left in the grid.
At wider screen widths, I declare a four-track grid, and position my poem around the grid, keeping it in a readable order.
I also add rules to my landscape class, stating that these items should span two tracks. Once again the grid layout auto-placement rules position the rest of my images without my needing to position them. You will see that grid layout takes items out of source order to fill gaps in the grid. It does this because I have set the property grid-auto-flow to dense. The default is sparse meaning that grid will not attempt this backfilling behaviour.
Take a look and play around with the full demo (requires a CSS grid layout-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid auto-flow with rules by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The final automatic placement example.
My wish for 2016
I really hope that in 2016, we will see CSS grid layout finally emerge from behind browser flags, so that we can start to use these features in production — that we can start to move away from using the wrong tools for the job.
However, I also hope that we’ll see developers fully embracing these tools as the new system that they are. I want to see people exploring the possibilities they give us, rather than trying to get them to behave like the grid systems of 2015. As you discover these new modules, treat them as the new paradigm that they are, get creative with them. And, as you find the edges of possibility with them, take that feedback to the CSS Working Group. Help improve the layout systems that will shape the look of the future web.
Some further reading
I maintain a site of grid layout examples and resources at Grid by Example.
The three CSS specifications I’ve discussed can be found as editor’s drafts: CSS grid, flexbox, box alignment.
I wrote about the last three years of my interest in CSS grid layout, which gives something of a history of the specification.
More examples of box alignment and grid layout.
My presentation at Fronteers earlier this year, in which I explain more about these concepts.",2015,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/grid-flexbox-box-alignment-our-new-system-for-layout/,code
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 attackers to easily steal and manipulate data going to or from the server. HTTPS adds a layer of crypto that ensures the parties know who they’re talking to, and that the information exchanged can be neither modified nor sniffed.
HTTPS is relevant to any site. If your non-HTTPS site holds opinions, reading it may get your users in trouble with employers or governments. If your users believe what you say, attackers can modify your non-HTTPS to take advantage of and abuse that trust. If you want to use new browser technologies like HTTP2 and service workers, your site will need to be HTTPS. And if you want to be discovered on the web, using HTTPS can help your Google ranking. For more details on why I think you should make the switch to HTTPS, check out this post, these slides and this video.
Using HTTPS is becoming easier and cheaper. Here are a few free tools that can help:
Get free and easy HTTPS delivery from Cloudflare (be sure to use “Full SSL”!)
Get a free and automation-friendly certificate from Let’s Encrypt (now in open beta).
Test how well your HTTPS is set up using SSLTest.
Other vendors and platforms are rapidly simplifying and reducing the cost of their HTTPS offering, as demand and importance grows.
Two-Factor Authentication
The most sensitive data is usually stored behind a login, and the authentication process is the primary gate in front of this data. Making this process secure has many aspects, including using HTTPS when accepting credentials, having a strong password policy, never storing the password, and more.
All of these are important, but the best single step to boost your authentication security is to introduce two-factor authentication (2FA). Adding 2FA usually means prompting users for an additional one-time code when logging in, which they get via SMS or a mobile app (e.g. Google Authenticator). This code is short-lived and is extremely hard for a remote attacker to guess, thus vastly reducing the risk a leaked or easily guessed password presents.
The typical algorithm for 2FA is based on an IETF standard called the time-based one-time password (TOTP) algorithm, and it isn’t that hard to implement. Joel Franusic wrote a great post on implementing 2FA; modules like speakeasy make it even easier; and you can swap SMS with Google Authenticator or your own app if you prefer. If you don’t want to build 2FA support yourself, you can purchase two/multi-factor authentication services from vendors such as DuoSecurity, Auth0, Clef, Hypr and others.
If implementing 2FA still feels like too much work, you can also choose to offload your entire authentication process to an OAuth-based federated login. Many companies offer this today, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, GitHub and others. These bigger players tend to do authentication well and support 2FA, but you should consider what data you’re sharing with them in the process.
Tracking Known Vulnerabilities
Most of the code in a modern application was actually written by third parties, and pulled into your app as frameworks, modules and libraries. While using these components makes us much more productive, along with their functionality we also adopt their security flaws. To make things worse, some of these flaws are well-known vulnerabilities, making it easy for hackers to take advantage of them in an attack.
This is a real problem and happens on pretty much every platform. Do you develop in Java? In 2014, over 6% of Java modules downloaded from Maven had a known severe security issue, the typical Java applications containing 24 flaws. Are you coding in Node.js? Roughly 14% of npm packages carry a known vulnerability, and over 60% of dev shops find vulnerabilities in their code. 30% of Docker Hub containers include a high priority known security hole, and 60% of the top 100,000 websites use client-side libraries with known security gaps.
To find known security issues, take stock of your dependencies and match them against language-specific lists such as Snyk’s vulnerability DB for Node.js, rubysec for Ruby, victims-db for Python and OWASP’s Dependency Check for Java. Once found, you can fix most issues by upgrading the component in question, though that may be tricky for indirect dependencies.
This process is still way too painful, which means most teams don’t do it. The Snyk team and I are hoping to change that by making it as easy as possible to find, fix and monitor known vulnerabilities in your dependencies. Snyk’s wizard will help you find and fix these issues through guided upgrades and patches, and adding Snyk’s test to your continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) will help you stay secure as your code evolves.
Note that newly disclosed vulnerabilities usually impact old code – the one you’re running in production. This means you have to stay alert when new vulnerabilities are disclosed, so you can fix them before attackers can exploit them. You can do so by subscribing to vulnerability lists like US-CERT, OSVDB and NVD. Snyk’s monitor will proactively let you know about new disclosures relevant to your code, but only for Node.js for now – you can register to get updated when we expand.
Securing Yourself
In addition to making your application secure, you should make the contributors to that application secure – including you. Earlier this year we’ve seen attackers target mobile app developers with a malicious Xcode. The real target, however, wasn’t these developers, but rather the users of the apps they create. That you create. Securing your own work environment is a key part of keeping your apps secure, and your users from being compromised.
There’s no single step that will make you fully secure, but here are a few steps that can make a big impact:
Use 2FA on all the services related to the application, notably source control (e.g. GitHub), cloud platform (e.g. AWS), CI/CD, CDN, DNS provider and domain registrar. If an attacker compromises any one of those, they could modify or replace your entire application. I’d recommend using 2FA on all your personal services too.
Use a password manager (e.g. 1Password, LastPass) to ensure you have a separate and complex password for each service. Some of these services will get hacked, and passwords will leak. When that happens, don’t let the attackers access your other systems too.
Secure your workstation. Be careful what you download, lock your screen when you walk away, change default passwords on services you install, run antivirus software, etc. Malware on your machine can translate to malware in your applications.
Be very wary of phishing. Smart attackers use ‘spear phishing’ techniques to gain access to specific systems, and can trick even security savvy users. There are even phishing scams targeting users with 2FA. Be alert to phishy emails.
Don’t install things through curl
| sudo bash, especially if the URL is on GitHub, meaning someone else controls it. Don’t do it on your machines, and definitely don’t do it in your CI/CD systems. Seriously.
Staying secure should be important to you personally, but it’s doubly important when you have privileged access to an application. Such access makes you a way to reach many more users, and therefore a more compelling target for bad actors.
A Culture of Security
Using HTTPS, enabling two-factor authentication and fixing known vulnerabilities are significant steps in building security at your core. As you implement them, remember that these are just a few steps in a longer journey.
The end goal is to embrace security as an aspect of quality, and accept we all share the responsibility of keeping ourselves – and our users – safe.",2015,Guy Podjarny,guypodjarny,2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/upping-your-web-security-game/,code
72,Designing with Contrast,"When an appetite for aesthetics over usability becomes the bellwether of user interface design, it’s time to reconsider who we’re designing for.
Over the last few years, we have questioned the signifiers that gave obvious meaning to the function of interface elements. Strong textures, deep shadows, gradients — imitations of physical objects — were discarded. And many, rightfully so. Our audiences are now more comfortable with an experience that feels native to the technology, so we should respond in kind.
Yet not all of the changes have benefitted users. Our efforts to simplify brought with them a trend of ultra-minimalism where aesthetics have taken priority over legibility, accessibility and discoverability. The trend shows no sign of losing popularity — and it is harming our experience of digital content.
A thin veneer
We are in a race to create the most subdued, understated interface. Visual contrast is out. In its place: the thinnest weights of a typeface and white text on bright color backgrounds. Headlines, text, borders, backgrounds, icons, form controls and inputs: all grey.
While we can look back over the last decade and see minimalist trends emerging on the web, I think we can place a fair share of the responsibility for the recent shift in priorities on Apple. The release of iOS 7 ushered in a radical change to its user interface. It paired mobile interaction design to the simplicity and eloquence of Apple’s marketing and product design. It was a catalyst. We took what we saw, copied and consumed the aesthetics like pick-and-mix.
New technology compounds this trend. Computer monitors and mobile devices are available with screens of unprecedented resolutions. Ultra-light type and subtle hues, difficult to view on older screens, are more legible on these devices. It would be disingenuous to say that designers have always worked on machines representative of their audience’s circumstances, but the gap has never been as large as it is now. We are running the risk of designing VIP lounges where the cost of entry is a Mac with a Retina display.
Minimalist expectations
Like progressive enhancement in an age of JavaScript, many good and sensible accessibility practices are being overlooked or ignored. We’re driving unilateral design decisions that threaten accessibility. We’ve approached every problem with the same solution, grasping on to the integrity of beauty, focusing on expression over users’ needs and content.
Someone once suggested to me that a client’s website should include two states. The first state would be the ideal experience, with low color contrast, light font weights and no differentiation between links and text. It would be the default. The second state would be presented in whatever way was necessary to meet accessibility standards. Users would have to opt out of the default state via a toggle if it wasn’t meeting their needs. A sort of first-class, upper deck cabin equivalent of graceful degradation. That this would divide the user base was irrelevant, as the aesthetics of the brand were absolute.
It may seem like an unusual anecdote, but it isn’t uncommon to see this thinking in our industry. Again and again, we place the burden of responsibility to participate in a usable experience on others. We view accessibility and good design as mutually exclusive. Taking for granted what users will tolerate is usually the forte of monopolistic services, but increasingly we apply the same arrogance to our new products and services.
Imitation without representation
All of us are influenced in one way or another by one another’s work. We are consciously and unconsciously affected by the visual and audible activity around us. This is important and unavoidable. We do not produce work in a vacuum. We respond to technology and culture. We channel language and geography. We absorb the sights and sounds of film, television, news. To mimic and copy is part and parcel of creating something an audience of many can comprehend and respond to. Our clients often look first to their competitors’ products to understand their success.
However, problems arise when we focus on style without context; form without function; mimicry as method. Copied and reused without any of the ethos of the original, stripped of deliberate and informed decision-making, the so-called look and feel becomes nothing more than paint on an empty facade.
The typographic and color choices so in vogue today with our popular digital products and services have little in common with the brands they are meant to represent.
For want of good design, the message was lost
The question to ask is: does the interface truly reflect the product? Is it an accurate characterization of the brand and organizational values? Does the delivery of the content match the tone of voice?
The answer is: probably not. Because every organization, every app or service, is unique. Each with its own personality, its own values and wonderful quirks. Design is communication. We should do everything in our role as professionals to use design to give voice to the message. Our job is to clearly communicate the benefits of a service and unreservedly allow access to information and content. To do otherwise, by obscuring with fashionable styles and elusive information architecture, does a great disservice to the people who chose to engage with and trust our products.
We can achieve hierarchy and visual rhythm without resorting to extreme reduction. We can craft a beautiful experience with fine detail and curiosity while meeting fundamental standards of accessibility (and strive to meet many more).
Standards of excellence
It isn’t always comfortable to step back and objectively question our design choices. We get lost in the flow of our work, using patterns and preferences we’ve tried and tested before. That our decisions often seem like second nature is a gift of experience, but sometimes it prevents us from finding our blind spots.
I was first caught out by my own biases a few years ago, when designing an interface for the Bank of England. After deciding on the colors for the typography and interactive elements, I learned that the site had to meet AAA accessibility standards. My choices quickly fell apart. It was eye-opening. I had to start again with restrictions and use size, weight and placement instead to construct the visual hierarchy.
Even now, I make mistakes. On a recent project, I used large photographs on an organization’s website to promote their products. Knowing that our team had control over the art direction, I felt confident that we could compose the photographs to work with text overlays. Despite our best effort, the cropped images weren’t always consistent, undermining the text’s legibility. If I had the chance to do it again, I would separate the text and image.
So, what practical things can we consider to give our users the experience they deserve?
Put guidelines in place
Think about your brand values. Write down keywords and use them as a framework when choosing a typeface. Explore colors that convey the organization’s personality and emotional appeal.
Define a color palette that is web-ready and meets minimum accessibility standards. Note which colors are suitable for use with text. Only very dark hues of grey are consistently legible so keep them for non-essential text (for example, as placeholders in form inputs).
Find which background colors you can safely use with white text, and consider integrating contrast checks into your workflow.
Use roman and medium weights for body copy. Reserve lighter weights of a typeface for very large text. Thin fonts are usually the first to break down because of aliasing differences across platforms and screens.
Check that the size, leading and length of your type is always legible and readable. Define lower and upper limits. Small text is best left for captions and words in uppercase.
Avoid overlaying text on images unless it’s guaranteed to be legible. If it’s necessary to optimize space in the layout, give the text a container. Scrims aren’t always reliable: the text will inevitably overlap a part of the photograph without a contrasting ground.
Test your work
Review legibility and contrast on different devices. It’s just as important as testing the layout of a responsive website. If you have a local device lab, pay it a visit.
Find a computer monitor near a window when the sun is shining. Step outside the studio and try to read your content on a mobile device with different brightness levels.
Ask your friends and family what they use at home and at work. It’s one way of making sure your feedback isn’t always coming from a closed loop.
Push your limits
You define what the user sees. If you’ve inherited brand guidelines, question them. If you don’t agree with the choices, make the case for why they should change.
Experiment with size, weight and color to find contrast. Objects with low contrast appear similar to one another and undermine the visual hierarchy. Weak relationships between figure and ground diminish visual interest. A balanced level of contrast removes ambiguity and creates focal points. It captures and holds our attention.
If you’re lost for inspiration, look to graphic design in print. We have a wealth of history, full of examples that excel in using contrast to establish visual hierarchy.
Embrace limitations. Use boundaries as an opportunity to explore possibilities.
More than just a facade
Designing with standards encourages legibility and helps to define a strong visual hierarchy. Design without exclusion (through neither negligence or intent) gets around discussions of demographics, speaks to a larger audience and makes good business sense. Following the latest trends not only weakens usability but also hinders a cohesive and distinctive brand.
Users will make means when they need to, by increasing browser font sizes or enabling system features for accessibility. But we can do our part to take as much of that burden off of the user and ask less of those who need it most.
In architecture, it isn’t buildings that mimic what is fashionable that stand the test of time. Nor do we admire buildings that tack on separate, poorly constructed extensions to meet a bare minimum of safety regulations. We admire architecture that offers well-considered, remarkable, usable spaces with universal access.
Perhaps we can take inspiration from these spaces. Let’s give our buildings a bold voice and make sure the doors are open to everyone.",2015,Mark Mitchell,markmitchell,2015-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/designing-with-contrast/,design
26,Integrating Contrast Checks in Your Web Workflow,"It’s nearly Christmas, which means you’ll be sure to find an overload of festive red and green decorating everything in sight—often in the ugliest ways possible.
While I’m not here to battle holiday tackiness in today’s 24 ways, it might just be the perfect reminder to step back and consider how we can implement colour schemes in our websites and apps that are not only attractive, but also legible and accessible for folks with various types of visual disabilities.
This simulated photo demonstrates how red and green Christmas baubles could appear to a person affected by protanopia-type colour blindness—not as festive as you might think. Source: Derek Bruff
I’ve been fortunate to work with Simply Accessible to redesign not just their website, but their entire brand. Although the new site won’t be launching until the new year, we’re excited to let you peek under the tree and share a few treats as a case study into how we tackled colour accessibility in our project workflow. Don’t worry—we won’t tell Santa!
Create a colour game plan
A common misconception about accessibility is that meeting compliance requirements hinders creativity and beautiful design—but we beg to differ. Unfortunately, like many company websites and internal projects, Simply Accessible has spent so much time helping others that they had not spent enough time helping themselves to show the world who they really are. This was the perfect opportunity for them to practise what they preached.
After plenty of research and brainstorming, we decided to evolve the existing Simply Accessible brand. Or, rather, salvage what we could. There was no established logo to carry into the new design (it was a stretch to even call it a wordmark), and the Helvetica typography across the site lacked any character. The only recognizable feature left to work with was colour. It was a challenge, for sure: the oranges looked murky and brown, and the blues looked way too corporate for a company like Simply Accessible. We knew we needed to inject a lot of personality.
The old Simply Accessible website and colour palette.
After an audit to round up every colour used throughout the site, we dug in deep and played around with some ideas to bring some new life to this palette.
Choose effective colours
Whether you’re starting from scratch or evolving an existing brand, the first step to having an effective and legible palette begins with your colour choices. While we aren’t going to cover colour message and meaning in this article, it’s important to understand how to choose colours that can be used to create strong contrast—one of the most important ways to create hierarchy, focus, and legibility in your design.
There are a few methods of creating effective contrast.
Light and dark colours
The contrast that exists between light and dark colours is the most important attribute when creating effective contrast.
Try not to use colours that have a similar lightness next to each other in a design.
The red and green colours on the left share a similar lightness and don’t provide enough contrast on their own without making some adjustments. Removing colour and showing the relationship in greyscale reveals that the version on the right is much more effective.
It’s important to remember that red and green colour pairs cause difficulty for the majority of colour-blind people, so they should be avoided wherever possible, especially when placed next to each other.
Complementary contrast
Effective contrast can also be achieved by choosing complementary colours (other than red and green), that are opposite each other on a colour wheel.
These colour pairs generally work better than choosing adjacent hues on the wheel.
Cool and warm contrast
Contrast also exists between cool and warm colours on the colour wheel.
Imagine a colour wheel divided into cool colours like blues, purples, and greens, and compare them to warm colours like reds, oranges and yellows.
Choosing a dark shade of a cool colour, paired with a light tint of a warm colour will provide better contrast than two warm colours or two cool colours.
Develop colour concepts
After much experimentation, we settled on a simple, two-colour palette of blue and orange, a cool-warm contrast colour scheme. We added swatches for call-to-action messaging in green, error messaging in red, and body copy and form fields in black and grey. Shades and tints of blue and orange were added to illustrations and other design elements for extra detail and interest.
First stab at a new palette.
We introduced the new palette for the first time on an internal project to test the waters before going full steam ahead with the website. It gave us plenty of time to get a feel for the new design before sharing it with the public.
Putting the test palette into practice with an internal report
It’s important to be open to changes in your palette as it might need to evolve throughout the design process. Don’t tell your client up front that this palette is set in stone. If you need to tweak the colour of a button later because of legibility issues, the last thing you want is your client pushing back because it’s different from what you promised.
As it happened, we did tweak the colours after the test run, and we even adjusted the logo—what looked great printed on paper looked a little too light on screens.
Consider how colours might be used
Don’t worry if you haven’t had the opportunity to test your palette in advance. As long as you have some well-considered options, you’ll be ready to think about how the colour might be used on the site or app.
Obviously, in such early stages it’s unlikely that you’re going to know every element or feature that will appear on the site at launch time, or even which design elements could be introduced to the site later down the road. There are, of course, plenty of safe places to start.
For Simply Accessible, I quickly mocked up these examples in Illustrator to get a handle on the elements of a website where contrast and legibility matter the most: text colours and background colours. While it’s less important to consider the contrast of decorative elements that don’t convey essential information, it’s important for a reader to be able to discern elements like button shapes and empty form fields.
A basic list of possible colour combinations that I had in mind for the Simply Accessible website
Run initial tests
Once these elements were laid out, I manually plugged in the HTML colour code of each foreground colour and background colour on Lea Verou’s Contrast Checker. I added the results from each colour pair test to my document so we could see at a glance which colours needed adjustment or which colours wouldn’t work at all.
Note: Read more about colour accessibility and contrast requirements
As you can see, a few problems were revealed in this test. To meet the minimum AA compliance, we needed to slightly darken the green, blue, and orange background colours for text—an easy fix. A more complicated problem was apparent with the button colours. I had envisioned some buttons appearing over a blue background, but the contrast ratios were well under 3:1. Although there isn’t a guide in WCAG for contrast requirements of two non-text elements, the ISO and ANSI standard for visible contrast is 3:1, which is what we decided to aim for.
We also checked our colour combinations in Color Oracle, an app that simulates the most extreme forms of colour blindness. It confirmed that coloured buttons over blue backgrounds was simply not going to work. The contrast was much too low, especially for the more common deuteranopia and protanopia-type deficiencies.
How our proposed colour pairs could look to people with three types of colour blindness
Make adjustments if necessary
As a solution, we opted to change all buttons to white when used over dark coloured backgrounds. In addition to increasing contrast, it also gave more consistency to the button design across the site instead of introducing a lot of unnecessary colour variants.
Putting more work into getting compliant contrast ratios at this stage will make the rest of implementation and testing a breeze. When you’ve got those ratios looking good, it’s time to move on to implementation.
Implement colours in style guide and prototype
Once I was happy with my contrast checks, I created a basic style guide and added all the colour values from my colour exploration files, introduced more tints and shades, and added patterned backgrounds. I created examples of every panel style we were planning to use on the site, with sample text, links, and buttons—all with working hover states. Not only does this make it easier for the developer, it allows you to check in the browser for any further contrast issues.
Run a final contrast check
During the final stages of testing and before launch, it’s a good idea to do one more check for colour accessibility to ensure nothing’s been lost in translation from design to code. Unless you’ve introduced massive changes to the design in the prototype, it should be fairly easy to fix any issues that arise, particularly if you’ve stayed on top of updating any revisions in the style guide.
One of the more well-known evaluation tools, WAVE, is web-based and will work in any browser, but I love using Chrome’s Accessibility Tools. Not only are they built right in to the Inspector, but they’ll work if your site is password-protected or private, too.
Chrome’s Accessibility Tools audit feature shows that there are no immediate issues with colour contrast in our prototype
The human touch
Finally, nothing beats a good round of user testing. Even evaluation tools have their flaws. Although they’re great at catching contrast errors for text and backgrounds, they aren’t going to be able to find errors in non-text elements, infographics, or objects placed next to each other where discernible contrast is important.
Our final palette, compared with our initial ideas, was quite different, but we’re proud to say it’s not just compliant, but shows Simply Accessible’s true personality. Who knows, it may not be final at all—there are so many opportunities down the road to explore and expand it further.
Accessibility should never be an afterthought in a project. It’s not as simple as adding alt text to images, or running your site through a compliance checker at the last minute and assuming that a pass means everything is okay. Considering how colour will be used during every stage of your project will help avoid massive problems before launch, or worse, launching with serious issues.
If you find yourself working on a personal project over the Christmas break, try integrating these checks into your workflow and make colour accessibility a part of your New Year’s resolutions.",2014,Geri Coady,gericoady,2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/,design
27,Putting Design on the Map,"The web can leave us feeling quite detached from the real world. Every site we make is really just a set of abstract concepts manifested as tools for communication and expression. At any minute, websites can disappear, overwritten by a newfangled version or simply gone. I think this is why so many of us have desires to create a product, write a book, or play with the internet of things. We need to keep in touch with the physical world and to prove (if only to ourselves) that we do make real things.
I could go on and on about preserving the web, the challenges of writing a book, or thoughts about how we can deal with the need to make real things. Instead, I’m going to explore something that gives us a direct relationship between a website and the physical world – maps.
A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.
Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
The simplest form of map on a website tends to be used for showing where a place is and often directions on how to get to it. That’s an incredibly powerful tool. So why is it, then, that so many sites just plonk in a default Google Map and leave it as that? You wouldn’t just use dark grey Helvetica on every site, would you? Where’s the personality? Where’s the tailored experience? Where is the design?
Jumping into design
Let’s keep this simple – we all want to be better web folk, not cartographers. We don’t need to go into the history, mathematics or technology of map making (although all of those areas are really interesting to research). For the sake of our sanity, I’m going to gloss over some of the technical areas and focus on the practical concepts.
Tiles
If you’ve ever noticed a map loading in sections, it’s because it uses tiles that are downloaded individually instead of requiring the user to download everything that they might need. These tiles come in many styles and can be used for anything that covers large areas, such as base maps and data. You’ve seen examples of alternative base maps when you use Google Maps as Google provides both satellite imagery and road maps, both of which are forms of base maps. They are used to provide context for the real world, or any other world for that matter. A marker on a blank page is useless.
The tiles are representations of the physical; they do not have to be photographic imagery to provide context. This means you can design the map itself. The easiest way to conceive this is by comparing Google’s road maps with Ordnance Survey road maps. Everything about the two maps is different: the colours, the label fonts and the symbols used. Yet they still provide the exact same context (other maps may provide different context such as terrain contours).
Comparison of Google Maps (top) and the Ordnance Survey (bottom).
Carefully designing the base map tiles is as important as any other part of the website. The most obvious, yet often overlooked, aspect are aesthetics and branding. Maps could fit in with the rest of the site; for example, by matching the colours and line weights, they can enhance the full design rather than inhibiting it. You’re also able to define the exact purpose of the map, so instead of showing everything you could specify which symbols or labels to show and hide.
I’ve not done any real research on the accessibility of base maps but, having looked at some of the available options, I think a focus on the typography of labels and the colour of the various elements is crucial. While you can choose to hide labels, quite often they provide the data required to make sense of the map. Therefore, make sure each zoom level is not too cluttered and shows enough to give context. Also be as careful when choosing the typeface as you are in any other design work. As for colour, you need to pay closer attention to issues like colour-blindness when using colour to convey information. Quite often a spectrum of colour will be used to show data, or to show the topography, so you need to be aware that some people struggle to see colour differences within a spectrum.
A nice example of a customised base map can be found on Michael K Owens’ check-in pages:
One of Michael K Owens’ check-in pages.
As I’ve already mentioned, tiles are not just for base maps: they are also for data. In the screenshot below you can see how Plymouth Marine Laboratory uses tiles to show data with a spectrum of colour.
A map from the Marine Operational Ecology data portal, showing data of adult cod in the North Sea.
Technical
You’re probably wondering how to design the base layers. I will briefly explain the concepts here and give you tools to use at the end of the article. If you’re worried about the time it takes to design the maps, don’t be – you can automate most of it. You don’t need to manually draw each tile for the entire world!
We’ve learned the importance of web standards the hard way, so you’ll be glad (and I won’t have to explain the advantages) of the standard for web mapping from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) called the Web Map Service (WMS). You can use conventional file formats for the imagery but you need a way to query for the particular tiles to show for the area and zoom level, that is what WMS does.
Features
Tiles are great for covering large areas but sometimes you need specific smaller areas. We call these features and they usually consist of polygons, lines or points. Examples include postcode boundaries and routes between places, or even something more dynamic such as borders of nations changing over time.
Showing features on a map presents interesting design challenges. If the colour or shape conveys some kind of data beyond geographical boundaries then it needs to be made obvious. This is actually really hard, without building complicated user interfaces. For example, in the image below, is it obvious that there is a relationship between the colours? Does it need a way of showing what the colours represent?
Choropleth map showing ranked postcode areas, using ViziCities.
Features are represented by means of lines or colors; and the effective use of lines or colors requires more than knowledge of the subject – it requires artistic judgement.
Erwin Josephus Raisz, cartographer (1893–1968)
Where lots of boundaries are small and close together (such as a high street or shopping centre) will it be obvious where the boundaries are and what they represent? When designing maps, the hardest challenge is dealing with how the data is represented and how it is understood by the user.
Technical
As you probably gathered, we use WMS for tiles and another standard called the web feature service (WFS) for specific features. I need to stress that the difference between the two is that WMS is for tiling, whereas WFS is for specific features. Both can use similar file formats but should be used for their particular use cases. You may be wondering why you can’t just use a vector format such as KML, GeoJSON (or even SVG) – and you can – but the issue is the same as for WMS: you need a way to query the data to get the correct area and zoom level.
User interface
There is of course never a correct way to design an interface as there are so many different factors to take into consideration for each individual project. Maps can be used in a variety of ways, to provide simple information about directions or for complex visualisations to explain large amounts of data. I would like to just touch on matters that need to be taken into account when working with maps.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there are so many Google Maps on the web that people seem to think that its UI is the only way you can use a map. To some degree we don’t want to change that, as people know how to use them; but does every map require a zoom slider or base map toggle? In fact, does the user need to zoom at all? The answer to that one is generally yes, zooming does provide more context to where the map is zoomed in on.
In some cases you will need to let users choose what goes on the map (such as data layers or directions), so how do they show and hide the data? Does a simple drop-down box work, or do you need search? Google’s base map toggle is quite nice since it doesn’t offer many options yet provides very different contexts and styling.
It isn’t until we get to this point that we realise just plonking a quick Google map is really quite ridiculous, especially when compared to the amount of effort we make in other areas such as colour, typography or how the CSS is written. Each of these is important but we need to make sure the whole site is designed, and that includes the maps as much as any other content.
Putting it into practice
I could ramble on for ages about what we can do to customise maps to fit a site’s personality and correctly represent the data. I wanted to focus on concepts and standards because tools constantly change and it is never good to just rely on a tool to do the work. That said, there are a large variety of tools that will help you turn these concepts into reality. This is not a comparison; I just want to show you a few of the many options you have for maps on the web.
Google
OK, I’ve been quite critical so far about Google Maps but that is only because there is such a large amount of the default maps across the web. You can style them almost as much as anything else. They may not allow you to use custom WMS layers but Google Maps does have its own version, called styled maps. Using an array of map features (in the sense of roads and lakes and landmarks rather than the kind WFS is used for), you can style the base map with JavaScript. It even lets you toggle visibility, which helps to avoid the issue of too much clutter on the map. As well as lacking WMS, it doesn’t support WFS, but it does support GeoJSON and KML so you can still show the features on the map. You should also check out Google Maps Engine (the new version of My Maps), which provides an interface for creating more advanced maps with a selection of different base maps. A premium version is available, essentially for creating map-based visualisations, and it provides a step up from the main Google Maps offering. A useful feature in some cases is that it gives you access to many datasets.
Leaflet
You have probably seen Leaflet before. It isn’t quite as popular as Google Maps but it is definitely used often and for good reason. Leaflet is a lightweight open source JavaScript library. It is not a service so you don’t have to worry about API throttling and longevity. It gives you two options for tiling, the ability to use WMS, or to directly get the file using variables in the filename such as /{z}/{x}/{y}.png. I would recommend using WMS over dynamic file names because it is a standard, but the ability to use variables in a file name could be useful in some situations. Leaflet has a strong community and a well-documented API.
Mapbox
As a freemium service, Mapbox may not be perfect for every use case but it’s definitely worth looking into. The service offers incredible customisation tools as well as lots of data sources and hosting for the maps. It also provides plenty of libraries for the various platforms, so you don’t have to only use the maps on the web.
Mapbox is a service, though its map design tool is open source. Mapbox Studio is a vector-only version of their previous tool called Tilemill. Earlier I wrote about how typography and colour are as important to maps as they are to the rest of a website; if you thought, “Yes, but how on earth can I design those parts of a map?” then this is the tool for you. It is incredibly easy to use. Essentially each map has a stylesheet.
If you do not want to open a paid-for Mapbox account, then you can export the tiles (as PNG, SVG etc.) to use with other map tools.
OpenLayers
After a long wait, OpenLayers 3 has been released. It is similar to Leaflet in that it is a library not a service, but it has a much broader scope. During the last year I worked on the GIS portal at Plymouth Marine Laboratory (which I used to show the data tiles earlier), it essentially used OpenLayers 2 to create a web-based geographic information system, taking a large amount of data and permitting analysis (such as graphs) without downloading entire datasets and complicated software. OpenLayers 3 has improved greatly on the previous version in both performance and accessibility. It is the ideal tool for complex map-based web apps, though it can be used for the simple use cases too.
OpenStreetMap
I couldn’t write an article about maps on the web without at least mentioning OpenStreetMap. It is the place to go for crowd-sourced data about any location, with complete road maps and a strong API.
ViziCities
The newest project on this list is ViziCities by Robin Hawkes and Peter Smart. It is a open source 3-D visualisation tool, currently in the very early stages of development. The basic example shows 3-D buildings around the world using OpenStreetMap data. Robin has used it to create some incredible demos such as real-time London underground trains, and planes landing at an airport. Edward Greer and I are currently working on using ViziCities to show ideal housing areas based on particular personas. We chose it because the 3-D aspect gives us interesting possibilities for the data we are able to visualise (such as bar charts on the actual map instead of in the UI). Despite not being a completely stable, fully featured system, ViziCities is worth taking a look at for some use cases and is definitely going to go from strength to strength.
So there you have it – a whistle-stop tour of how maps can be customised. Now please stop plonking in maps without thinking about it and design them as you design the rest of your content.",2014,Shane Hudson,shanehudson,2014-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/putting-design-on-the-map/,design
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 application design. The benefits to doing this are far better than an unsolicited redesign. You get a great portfolio piece that actually has greater potential to get used (especially if the core team is on board with it). It’s a win-win situation.
Not all designers are in need of portfolio filler, but there are other benefits to contributing design.
Giving back to the community
My first experience with voluntary work was when I collaborated with my friend, Vineet Thapar, on a pro bono project for the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative redesign project back in 2004. I was very excited to contribute CSS to a website that would get used by the W3C! Unfortunately, it decided to go a different direction and my work did not get used. However, it was still pretty exciting to have the opportunity, and I don’t regret a moment of that work. I learned a lot about accessibility from this experience and it helped me land some of the jobs I’ve had since.
Almost a decade later, I got super into Sass. One of the core maintainers, Chris Eppstein, lamented on Twitter one day that the Sass website and brand was in dire need of design help. That led to the creation of an open source task force, Team Sass Design, and we revived the brand and the website, which launched at SassConf in 2013.
It helped me in my current job. I showed it during my portfolio review when I interviewed for the role. Then I was able to use inspiration from a technique I’d tried on the Sass website to help create the more feature-rich design system that my team at work is building. But most importantly, I soon learned that it is exhilarating to be a part of the Sass community. This is the biggest benefit of all. It feels really good to give back to the technology I love and use for getting my work done.
Ben Werdmuller writes about the need for design in open source. It’s great to see designers contributing to open source in awesome ways. When A List Apart’s website went open source, Anna Debenham contributed by helping build its pattern library. Bevan Stephens worked with FontForge on the design of its website. There are also designers who have created their own open source projects. There’s Dan Cederholm’s Pears, which shares common patterns in markup and style. There’s also Brad Frost’s Pattern Lab, which shares his famous method of atomic design and applies it to a design system. These systems and patterns have been used in real-world projects, such as RetailMeNot, so designers have contributed to the web in an even larger way simply by putting their work out there for others to use. That’s kind of fun to think about.
How to get started
So are you stoked about getting into the open source community? That’s great!
Initially, you might get worried or uncomfortable in getting involved. That’s okay. But first consider that the project is open source for a reason. Your contribution (no matter how large or small) can help in a big way.
If you find a project you’re interested in helping, make sure you do your research. Sometimes project team members will be attached to their current design. Is there already a designer on the core team? Reach out to that designer first. Don’t be too aggressive with why you think your design is better than theirs. Rather, offer some constructive feedback and a proposal of what would make the design better. Chances are, if the designer cares about the project, and you make a strong case, they’ll be up for it.
Are there contribution guidelines? It’s proper etiquette to read these and follow the community’s rules. You’ll have a better chance of getting your work accepted, and it shows that you take the time to care and add to the overall quality of the project. Does the project lack guidelines? Consider starting a draft for that before getting started in the design.
When contributing to open source, use your initiative to solve problems in a manageable way. Huge pull requests are hard to review and will often either get neglected or rejected. Work in small, modular, and iterative contributions.
So this is my personal take on what I’ve learned from my experience and why I love open source. I’d love to hear from you if you have your own experience in doing this and what you’ve learned along the way as well. Please share in the comments!
Thanks Drew McLellan, Eric Suzanne, Kyle Neath for sharing their thoughts with me on this!",2014,Jina Anne,jina,2014-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/why-you-should-design-for-open-source/,design
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 the differences in the code between the local and live version in a single config file. Ultimately, if you can get all the differences between environments down to a config level then you’ll be in a really good position to automate the deployment process at some point in the future.
Anything that creates a significant difference between the development and the live environments has the potential to cause problems you won’t know about until the site goes live – and at that point the problems are very public and very embarrassing, not to mention unprofessional.
A reasonable solution is to use a tool like MAMP PRO which enables you to set up an individual local website for each project you work on. Importantly, individual sites give you both consistency of paths between development and live, but also the ability to configure server options (like PHP versions and configuration, for example) to match the live site.
Better yet is to use a virtual machine, managed with a tool such as Vagrant. If you’re interested in learning more about that, we have an article on that subject later in the series.
Use source control
Trent Walton writes:
We use source control, and it’s become the centerpiece for how we handle collaboration, enhancements, and issues. It drives our process.
I’m hoping by now that you’re either using source control for all your work, or feeling a nagging guilt that you should be. Be it Git, Mercurial, Subversion (name your poison), a revision control system enables you to keep track of changes, revert anything that breaks, and keep rolling backups of your project.
The benefits only start there, and Charlie Perrins recommends using source control “not just as a personal backup of your code, but as a way to play nicely with other developers.“
Noting the benefits when collaborating with other developers, he adds:
Graduating from being the sole architect of your codebase to contributing to a shared codebase is a huge leap for a developer. Perhaps a practical way for people who tend to work on their own to do that would be to submit a pull request or a patch to an open source project or plugin.”
Richard Rutter of Clearleft sees clear advantages for the client, too. He recommends using source control “preferably in some sort of collaborative environment that you can open up or hand over to the client” – a feature found with hosted services such as GitHub.
If you’d like to hone your Git skills, Emma Jane Westby wrote Git for Grown-ups in last year’s 24 ways.
Don’t repeat, automate!
Tim Kadlec is a big proponent of automating your build process:
I’ve been hammering that home to every client I’ve had this year. It’s amazing how many companies don’t really have a formal build/deployment process in place. So many issues on the web (performance, accessibility, etc.) can be greatly improved just by having a layer of automation involved.
For example, graphic editing software spits out ridiculously bloated images. Very frequently, that’s what ends up getting put on a site. If you have a build process, you can have the compression automated and start seeing immediate gains for no effort. On a recent project, they were able to shave around 1.5MB from their site weight simply by automating compression.
Once you have your code in source control, some of that automation can be made easier. Brian Suda writes:
We have a few bash scripts that run on git commit: they compile the less, jslint and remove white-space, basically the 3 Cs, Compress, Concatenate, Combine. This is now part of our workflow without even realising it.
One great way to get started with a build process is to use a tool like Grunt, and a great way to get started with Grunt is to read Chris Coyier’s Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard.
Tim reinforces:
Issues like [image compression] — or simple accessibility issues like alt tags on images — should never be able to hit a live server. If you can detect it, you can automate it. And if you can automate it, you can free up time for designers and developers to focus on more challenging — and interesting — problems.
A clear call to arms to tighten up and formalise development and deployment practices. The less that has to be done manually or is susceptible to change, the less that can go wrong when a site is built and deployed. Any procedures that are automated are no longer dependant on a single person’s knowledge, making it easier to build your team or just cope when someone important is out of the office or leaves.
If you’re interested in kicking the FTP habit and automating your site deployments, we have an article later in the series just for you.
Build systems, not sites
One big theme arising this year was that of building websites as systems, not as individual pages.
Brad Frost:
For me, teams making websites in 2015 shouldn’t be working on just-another-redesign redesign. People are realizing that in order to make stable, future-friendly, scalable, extensible web experiences they’re going to need to think more systematically. That means crafting deliberate and thoughtful design systems. That means establishing front-end style guides. That means killing the out-dated, siloed, assembly-line waterfall process and getting cross-disciplinary teams working together in meaningful ways. That means treating development as design. That means treating performance as design. That means taking the time out of the day to establish the big picture, rather than aimlessly crawling along quarter by quarter.
Designer and developer Jina Bolton also advocates the use of style guides, and recommends making the guide a project deliverable:
Consider adding on a style guide/UI library to your project as a deliverable for maintainability and thinking through all UI elements and components.
Val Head agrees: “build and maintain a style guide for each project” she wrote. On the subject of approaching a redesign, she added:
A UI inventory goes a long way to helping get your head around what a design system needs in the early stages of a redesign project.
So what about that old chestnut, responsive web design? Should we be making sites responsive by default? How about mobile first?
Richard Rutter:
Think mobile first unless you have a very good reason not to. Remember to take the client with you on this principle, otherwise it won’t work as a convincing piece of design.
Trent Walton adds:
The more you can test and sort of skew your perception for what is typical on the web, the better. 4k displays hooked up to 100Mbps connections can make one extremely unsympathetic.
The value of testing with real devices is something Ruth John appreciates. She wrote:
I still have my own small device lab at home, even though I work permanently for a well-established company (which has a LOT of devices at its disposal) – it just means I can get a good overview of how things are looking during development.
And speaking of systems, Mark Norman Francis recommends the use of measuring tools to aid the design process; “[U]se analytics and make decisions from actual data” he suggests, rather than relying totally on intuition.
Tim Kadlec adds a word on performance planning:
I think having a performance budget in place should now be a given on any project. We’ve proven pretty conclusively through a hundred and one case studies that performance matters. And over the last year or so, we’ve really seen a lot of great tools emerge to help track and enforce performance budgets. There’s not really a good excuse for not using one any more.
It’s clear that in the four years since Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article the diversity of screen sizes, network connection speeds and input methods has only increased. New web projects should presume visitors will be using anything from a watch up to a big screen desktop display, and from being offline, through to GPRS, 3G and fast broadband.
Will it take more time to design and build for those constraints? Yes, it most likely will. If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask to be your default browser, you can be brave enough to tell your client they need to build responsively.
Working collaboratively
A big part of delivering a successful website project is how we work together, both as a design team and a wider project team with the client.
Val Head recommends an open line of communication:
Keep conversations going. With clients, with teammates. Talking is so important with the way we work now. A good team conversation place, like Slack, is slowly becoming invaluable for me too.
Ruth John agrees:
We’ve recently opened up our lines of communication by using Slack. It has transformed the way we work. We’re easily more productive and collaborative on projects, as well as making it a lot easier for us all to work remotely (including freelancers).
She goes on to point out how tools can be combined to ease team communication without adding further complications:
We have a private GitHub organisation (which everyone who works with us is granted access to), which not only holds all our project code but also a team wiki. This has lots of information to get you set up within the team, as well as coding guidelines and best practices and other admin info, like contact numbers/emails for the team.
Small-A agile is also the theme of the day, with Mark Norman Francis suggesting an approach of “small iterations with constant feedback around individual features, not spec-it-all-first”. He also encourages you to review as you go, at each stage of the project:
Always reflect on what went well and what went badly, and how you can learn from that, even if not Doing Agile™. Ultimately “best practices” should come from learning lessons (both good and bad).
Richard Rutter echoes this, warning against working in isolation from the client for too long:
Avoid big reveals. Your engagement with the client should be participatory. In business no one likes surprises.
This experience rings true for Ruth John who recommends involving real users in the feedback loop, not just the client:
We also try and get feedback on what we’re building as soon and as often as we can with our stakeholders/clients and real users.
We should also remember that our role is to serve the client’s needs, not just bill them for whatever we can. Brian Suda adds:
Don’t sell clients on things they don’t need. We can spout a lot of jargon and scare clients into thinking you are a god. We can do things few can now, but you can’t rip people off because they are unknowledgeable.
But do clients know what they’re getting, even when they see it? Trent Walton has an interesting take:
We focus on prototypes over image-based comps at all costs, especially when meetings are involved. It’s much easier to assess a prototype, and too often with image-based comps, discussions devolve into how something might feel when actually live, or how a layout could change to fit a given viewport.
Val Head also likes to get work into the browser:
Sketch design ideas with any software you like, but get to the browser as soon as possible.
Beyond your immediate team, Emma Jane Westby has advice for looking further afield:
Invest time into building relationships within your (technical) community. You never know when you might be able to lend a hand; or benefit from someone who’s able to lend theirs.
And when things don’t go according to plan, Brian Suda has the following advice:
If something doesn’t work out, be professional and don’t burn bridges. It will always come back to you.
The best work comes from working collaboratively, not just as a team within an agency or department, but with the client and stakeholders too. If doing your job and chucking it over the fence ever worked, it certainly doesn’t fly any more. You can work in isolation, but doing really great work requires collaboration.
The business end
When you’re building sites professionally, every team member has to think about the business aspects. Estimating time, setting billing rates, and establishing deliverables are all part of the job.
In 2008, Andrew Clarke gave us the Contract Killer sample contract we could use to establish a working agreement for a web design project. Richard Rutter agrees that contracts are still an essential part of business:
They are there for both parties’ protection. Make sure you know what will happen if you decide you don’t want to work with the client any more (it happens) and, of course, what circumstances mean they can stop taking your services.
Having a contract is one thing, but does it adequately protect both you and the client? Emma Jane Westby adds:
Find a good IP lawyer/legal counsel. I routinely had an IP lawyer read all of my contracts to find loopholes I wouldn’t have noticed. I didn’t always change the contract, but at least I knew what might come back to bite me.
So, you have a contract in place, and know what the project is. Brian Suda recommends keeping track of time and making sure you bill fairly for the hours the project costs you:
If I go to a meeting and they are 15 minutes late, the billing clock has already started. They can’t expect me to be in the 1h meeting and not bill for the extra 15–30 minutes they wasted. It goes both ways too. You need to do your best to respect their deadlines and time frame – this is always hard to get right.
As ever, it’s good business to do good business. Perhaps we can at last shed the old image of web designers being snowboarding layabouts and demonstrate to clients that we care as much about conducting professional business as they do.
Time to review
It’s a lot to take in. Some of these ideas and practices will be familiar, others new and yet to be evaluated. The web moves at a fast pace, and we need to be constantly reexamining our tools, techniques and working practices. The most important thing is not to blindly adopt any and all suggestions, but to carefully look at what the benefits might be and decide how they apply to your work.
Could you benefit from more formalised development and deployment procedures? Would your design projects run more smoothly and have a longer maintainable life if you approached the solution as a componentised system rather than a series of pages? Are your teams structured in a way that enables the most fluid communication, or are there changes you could make? Are your billing procedures and business agreements serving you and your clients in the best way possible?
The new year is a good time to look at your working practices and see what can be improved, and maybe this time next year you’ll look back and think “thank goodness we don’t work like that any more”.",2014,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/what-it-takes-to-build-a-website/,business
30,"Making Sites More Responsive, Responsibly","With digital projects we’re used to shifting our thinking to align with our target audience. We may undertake research, create personas, identify key tasks, or observe usage patterns, with our findings helping to refine our ongoing creations. A product’s overall experience can make or break its success, and when it comes to defining these experiences our development choices play a huge role alongside more traditional user-focused activities.
The popularisation of responsive web design is a great example of how we are able to shape the web’s direction through using technology to provide better experiences. If we think back to the move from table-based layouts to CSS, initially our clients often didn’t know or care about the difference in these approaches, but we did. Responsive design was similar in this respect – momentum grew through the web industry choosing to use an approach that we felt would give a better experience, and which was more future-friendly.
We tend to think of responsive design as a means of displaying content appropriately across a range of devices, but the technology and our implementation of it can facilitate much more. A responsive layout not only helps your content work when the newest smartphone comes out, but it also ensures your layout suitably adapts if a visually impaired user drastically changes the size of the text.
The 24 ways site at 400% on a Retina MacBook Pro displays a layout more typically used for small screens.
When we think more broadly, we realise that our technical choices and approaches to implementation can have knock-on effects for the greater good, and beyond our initial target audiences. We can make our experiences more responsive to people’s needs, enhancing their usability and accessibility along the way.
Being responsibly responsive
Of course, when we think about being more responsive, there’s a fine line between creating useful functionality and becoming intrusive and overly complex. In the excellent Responsible Responsive Design, Scott Jehl states that:
A responsible responsive design equally considers the following throughout a project:
Usability: The way a website’s user interface is presented to the user, and how that UI responds to browsing conditions and user interactions.
Access: The ability for users of all devices, browsers, and assistive technologies to access and understand a site’s features and content.
Sustainability: The ability for the technology driving a site or application to work for devices that exist today and to continue to be usable and accessible to users, devices, and browsers in the future.
Performance: The speed at which a site’s features and content are perceived to be delivered to the user and the efficiency with which they operate within the user interface.
Scott’s book covers these ideas in a lot more detail than I’ll be able to here (put it on your Christmas list if it’s not there already), but for now let’s think a bit more about our roles as digital creators and the power this gives us.
Our choices around technology and the decisions we have to make can be extremely wide-ranging. Solutions will vary hugely depending on the needs of each project, though we can further explore the concept of making our creations more responsive through the use of humble web technologies.
The power of the web
We all know that under the HTML5 umbrella are some great new capabilities, including a number of JavaScript APIs such as geolocation, web audio, the file API and many more. We often use these to enhance the functionality of our sites and apps, to add in new features, or to facilitate device-specific interactions.
You’ll have seen articles with flashy titles such as “Top 5 JavaScript APIs You’ve Never Heard Of!”, which you’ll probably read, think “That’s quite cool”, yet never use in any real work.
There is great potential for technologies like these to be misused, but there are also great prospects for them to be used well to enhance experiences. Let’s have a look at a few examples you may not have considered.
Offline first
When we make websites, many of us follow a process which involves user stories – standardised snippets of context explaining who needs what, and why.
“As a student I want to pay online for my course so I don’t have to visit the college in person.”
“As a retailer I want to generate unique product codes so I can manage my stock.”
We very often focus heavily on what needs doing, but may not consider carefully how it will be done. As in Scott’s list, accessibility is extremely important, not only in terms of providing a great experience to users of assistive technologies, but also to make your creation more accessible in the general sense – including under different conditions.
Offline first is yet another ‘first’ methodology (my personal favourite being ‘tea first’), which encourages us to develop so that connectivity itself is an enhancement – letting users continue with tasks even when they’re offline. Despite the rapid growth in public Wi-Fi, if we consider data costs and connectivity in developing countries, our travel habits with planes, underground trains and roaming (or simply if you live in the UK’s signal-barren East Anglian wilderness as I do), then you’ll realise that connectivity isn’t as ubiquitous as our internet-addled brains would make us believe. Take a scenario that I’m sure we’re all familiar with – the digital conference. Your venue may be in a city served by high-speed networks, but after overloading capacity with a full house of hashtag-hungry attendees, each carrying several devices, then everyone’s likely to be offline after all. Wouldn’t it be better if we could do something like this instead?
Someone visits our conference website.
On this initial run, some assets may be cached for future use: the conference schedule, the site’s CSS, photos of the speakers.
When the attendee revisits the site on the day, the page shell loads up from the cache.
If we have cached content (our session timetable, speaker photos or anything else), we can load it directly from the cache. We might then try to update this, or get some new content from the internet, but the conference attendee already has a base experience to use.
If we don’t have something cached already, then we can try grabbing it online.
If for any reason our requests for new content fail (we’re offline), then we can display a pre-cached error message from the initial load, perhaps providing our users with alternative suggestions from what is cached.
There are a number of ways we can make something like this, including using the application cache (AppCache) if you’re that way inclined. However, you may want to look into service workers instead. There are also some great resources on Offline First! if you’d like to find out more about this.
Building in offline functionality isn’t necessarily about starting offline first, and it’s also perfectly possible to retrofit sites and apps to catch offline scenarios, but this kind of graceful degradation can end up being more complex than if we’d considered it from the start. By treating connectivity as an enhancement, we can improve the experience and provide better performance than we can when waiting to counter failures. Our websites can respond to connectivity and usage scenarios, on top of adapting how we present our content. Thinking in this way can enhance each point in Scott’s criteria.
As I mentioned, this isn’t necessarily the kind of development choice that our clients will ask us for, but it’s one we may decide is simply the right way to build based on our project, enhancing the experience we provide to people, and making it more responsive to their situation.
Even more accessible
We’ve looked at accessibility in terms of broadening when we can interact with a website, but what about how? Our user stories and personas are often of limited use. We refer in very general terms to students, retailers, and sometimes just users. What if we have a student whose needs are very different from another student? Can we make our sites even more usable and accessible through our development choices?
Again using JavaScript to illustrate this concept, we can do a lot more with the ways people interact with our websites, and with the feedback we provide, than simply accepting keyboard, mouse and touch inputs and displaying output on a screen.
Input
Ambient light detection is one of those features that looks great in simple demos, but which we struggle to put to practical use. It’s not new – many satnav systems automatically change the contrast for driving at night or in tunnels, and our laptops may alter the screen brightness or keyboard backlighting to better adapt to our surroundings. Using web technologies we can adapt our presentation to be better suited to ambient light levels.
If our device has an appropriate light sensor and runs a browser that supports the API, we can grab the ambient light in units using ambient light events, in JavaScript. We may then change our presentation based on different bandings, perhaps like this:
window.addEventListener('devicelight', function(e) {
var lux = e.value;
if (lux < 50) {
//Change things for dim light
}
if (lux >= 50 && lux <= 10000) {
//Change things for normal light
}
if (lux > 10000) {
//Change things for bright light
}
});
Live demo (requires light sensor and supported browser).
Soon we may also be able to do such detection through CSS, with light-level being cited in the Media Queries Level 4 specification. If that becomes the case, it’ll probably look something like this:
@media (light-level: dim) {
/*Change things for dim light*/
}
@media (light-level: normal) {
/*Change things for normal light*/
}
@media (light-level: washed) {
/*Change things for bright light*/
}
While we may be quick to dismiss this kind of detection as being a gimmick, it’s important to consider that apps such as Light Detector, listed on Apple’s accessibility page, provide important context around exactly this functionality.
“If you are blind, Light Detector helps you to be more independent in many daily activities. At home, point your iPhone towards the ceiling to understand where the light fixtures are and whether they are switched on. In a room, move the device along the wall to check if there is a window and where it is. You can find out whether the shades are drawn by moving the device up and down.”
everywaretechnologies.com/apps/lightdetector
Input can be about so much more than what we enter through keyboards. Both an ever increasing amount of available sensors and more APIs being supported by the major browsers will allow us to cater for more scenarios and respond to them accordingly. This can be as complex or simple as you need; for instance, while x-webkit-speech has been deprecated, the web speech API is available for a number of browsers, and research into sign language detection is also being performed by organisations such as Microsoft.
Output
Web technologies give us some great enhancements around input, allowing us to adapt our experiences accordingly. They also provide us with some nice ways to provide feedback to users.
When we play video games, many of our modern consoles come with the ability to have rumble effects on our controller pads. These are a great example of an enhancement, as they provide a level of feedback that is entirely optional, but which can give a great deal of extra information to the player in the right circumstances, and broaden the scope of our comprehension beyond what we’re seeing and hearing.
Haptic feedback is possible on the web as well. We could use this in any number of responsible applications, such as alerting a user to changes or using different patterns as a communication mechanism. If you find yourself in a pickle, here’s how to print out SOS in Morse code through the vibration API. The following code indicates the length of vibration in milliseconds, interspersed by pauses in milliseconds.
navigator.vibrate([100, 300, 100, 300, 100, 300, 600, 300, 600, 300, 600, 300, 100, 300, 100, 300, 100]);
Live demo (requires supported browser)
With great power…
What you’ve no doubt come to realise by now is that these are just more examples of progressive enhancement, whose inclusion will provide a better experience if the capabilities are available, but which we should not rely on. This idea isn’t new, but the most important thing to remember, and what I would like you to take away from this article, is that it is up to us to decide to include these kind of approaches within our projects – if we don’t root for them, they probably won’t happen. This is where our professional responsibility comes in.
We won’t necessarily be asked to implement solutions for the scenarios above, but they illustrate how we can help to push the boundaries of experiences. Maybe we’ll have to switch our thinking about how we build, but we can create more usable products for a diverse range of people and usage scenarios through the choices we make around technology. Let’s stop thinking simply in terms of features inside a narrow view of our target users, and work out how we can extend these to cater for a wider set of situations.
When you plan your next digital project, consider the power of the web and the enhancements we can use, and try to make your projects even more responsive and responsible.",2014,Sally Jenkinson,sallyjenkinson,2014-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/making-sites-more-responsive-responsibly/,code
31,Dealing with Emergencies in Git,"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that version control soon would be there.
This summer I moved to the UK with my partner, and the onslaught of the Christmas holiday season began around the end of October (October!). It does mean that I’ve had more than a fair amount of time to come up with horrible Git analogies for this article. Analogies, metaphors, and comparisons help the learner hook into existing mental models about how a system works. They only help, however, if the learner has enough familiarity with the topic at hand to make the connection between the old and new information.
Let’s start by painting an updated version of Clement Clarke Moore’s Christmas living room. Empty stockings are hung up next to the fireplace, waiting for Saint Nicholas to come down the chimney and fill them with small treats. Holiday treats are scattered about. A bowl of mixed nuts, the holiday nutcracker, and a few clementines. A string of coloured lights winds its way up an evergreen.
Perhaps a few of these images are familiar, or maybe they’re just settings you’ve seen in a movie. It doesn’t really matter what the living room looks like though. The important thing is to ground yourself in your own experiences before tackling a new subject. Instead of trying to brute-force your way into new information, as an adult learner constantly ask yourself: ‘What is this like? What does this remind me of? What do I already know that I can use to map out this new territory?’ It’s okay if the map isn’t perfect. As you refine your understanding of a new topic, you’ll outgrow the initial metaphors, analogies, and comparisons.
With apologies to Mr. Moore, let’s give it a try.
Getting Interrupted in Git
When on the roof there arose such a clatter!
You’re happily working on your software project when all of a sudden there are freaking reindeer on the roof! Whatever you’ve been working on is going to need to wait while you investigate the commotion.
If you’ve got even a little bit of experience working with Git, you know that you cannot simply change what you’re working on in times of emergency. If you’ve been doing work, you have a dirty working directory and you cannot change branches, or push your work to a remote repository while in this state.
Up to this point, you’ve probably dealt with emergencies by making a somewhat useless commit with a message something to the effect of ‘switching branches for a sec’. This isn’t exactly helpful to future you, as commits should really contain whole ideas of completed work. If you get interrupted, especially if there are reindeer on the roof, the chances are very high that you weren’t finished with what you were working on.
You don’t need to make useless commits though. Instead, you can use the stash command. This command allows you to temporarily set aside all of your changes so that you can come back to them later. In this sense, stash is like setting your book down on the side table (or pushing the cat off your lap) so you can go investigate the noise on the roof. You aren’t putting your book away though, you’re just putting it down for a moment so you can come back and find it exactly the way it was when you put it down.
Let’s say you’ve been working in the branch waiting-for-st-nicholas, and now you need to temporarily set aside your changes to see what the noise was on the roof:
$ git stash
After running this command, all uncommitted work will be temporarily removed from your working directory, and you will be returned to whatever state you were in the last time you committed your work.
With the book safely on the side table, and the cat safely off your lap, you are now free to investigate the noise on the roof. It turns out it’s not reindeer after all, but just your boss who thought they’d help out by writing some code on the project you’ve been working on. Bless. Rolling your eyes, you agree to take a look and see what kind of mischief your boss has gotten themselves into this time.
You fetch an updated list of branches from the remote repository, locate the branch your boss had been working on, and checkout a local copy:
$ git fetch
$ git branch -r
$ git checkout -b helpful-boss-branch origin/helpful-boss-branch
You are now in a local copy of the branch where you are free to look around, and figure out exactly what’s going on.
You sigh audibly and say, ‘Okay. Tell me what was happening when you first realised you’d gotten into a mess’ as you look through the log messages for the branch.
$ git log --oneline
$ git log
By using the log command you will be able to review the history of the branch and find out the moment right before your boss ended up stuck on your roof.
You may also want to compare the work your boss has done to the main branch for your project. For this article, we’ll assume the main branch is named master.
$ git diff master
Looking through the commits, you may be able to see that things started out okay but then took a turn for the worse.
Checking out a single commit
Using commands you’re already familiar with, you can rewind through history and take a look at the state of the code at any moment in time by checking out a single commit, just like you would a branch.
Using the log command, locate the unique identifier (commit hash) of the commit you want to investigate. For example, let’s say the unique identifier you want to checkout is 25f6d7f.
$ git checkout 25f6d7f
Note: checking out '25f6d7f'.
You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around,
make experimental changes and commit them, and you can
discard any commits you make in this state without
impacting any branches by performing another checkout.
If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may do so (now or later) by using @-b@ with the checkout command again. Example:
$ git checkout -b new_branch_name
HEAD is now at 25f6d7f... Removed first paragraph.
This is usually where people start to panic. Your boss screwed something up, and now your HEAD is detached. Under normal circumstances, these words would be a very good reason to panic.
Take a deep breath. Nothing bad is going to happen. Being in a detached HEAD state just means you’ve temporarily disconnected from a known chain of events. In other words, you’re currently looking at the middle of a story (or branch) about what happened – and you’re not at the endpoint for this particular story.
Git allows you to view the history of your repository as a timeline (technically it’s a directed acyclic graph). When you make commits which are not associated with a branch, they are essentially inaccessible once you return to a known branch. If you make commits while you’re in a detached HEAD state, and then try to return to a known branch, Git will give you a warning and tell you how to save your work.
$ git checkout master
Warning: you are leaving 1 commit behind, not connected to
any of your branches:
7a85788 Your witty holiday commit message.
If you want to keep them by creating a new branch, this may be a good time to do so with:
$ git branch new_branch_name 7a85788
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
So, if you want to save the commits you’ve made while in a detached HEAD state, you simply need to put them on a new branch.
$ git branch saved-headless-commits 7a85788
With this trick under your belt, you can jingle around in history as much as you’d like. It’s not like sliding around on a timeline though. When you checkout a specific commit, you will only have access to the history from that point backwards in time. If you want to move forward in history, you’ll need to move back to the branch tip by checking out the branch again.
$ git checkout helpful-boss-branch
You’re now back to the present. Your HEAD is now pointing to the endpoint of a known branch, and so it is no longer detached. Any changes you made while on your adventure are safely stored in a new branch, assuming you’ve followed the instructions Git gave you. That wasn’t so scary after all, now, was it?
Back to our reindeer problem.
If your boss is anything like the bosses I’ve worked with, chances are very good that at least some of their work is worth salvaging. Depending on how your repository is structured, you’ll want to capture the good work using one of several different methods.
Back in the living room, we’ll use our bowl of nuts to illustrate how you can rescue a tiny bit of work.
Saving just one commit
About that bowl of nuts. If you’re like me, you probably had some favourite kinds of nuts from an assorted collection. Walnuts were generally the most satisfying to crack open. So, instead of taking the entire bowl of nuts and dumping it into a stocking (merging the stocking and the bowl of nuts), we’re just going to pick out one nut from the bowl. In Git terms, we’re going to cherry-pick a commit and save it to another branch.
First, checkout the main branch for your development work. From this branch, create a new branch where you can copy the changes into.
$ git checkout master
$ git checkout -b rescue-the-boss
From your boss’s branch, helpful-boss-branch locate the commit you want to keep.
$ git log --oneline helpful-boss-branch
Let’s say the commit ID you want to keep is e08740b. From your rescue branch, use the command cherry-pick to copy the changes into your current branch.
$ git cherry-pick e08740b
If you review the history of your current branch again, you will see you now also have the changes made in the commit in your boss’s branch.
At this point you might need to make a few additional fixes to help your boss out. (You’re angling for a bonus out of all this. Go the extra mile.) Once you’ve made your additional changes, you’ll need to add that work to the branch as well.
$ git add [filename(s)]
$ git commit -m ""Building on boss's work to improve feature X.""
Go ahead and test everything, and make sure it’s perfect. You don’t want to introduce your own mistakes during the rescue mission!
Uploading the fixed branch
The next step is to upload the new branch to the remote repository so that your boss can download it and give you a huge bonus for helping you fix their branch.
$ git push -u origin rescue-the-boss
Cleaning up and getting back to work
With your boss rescued, and your bonus secured, you can now delete the local temporary branches.
$ git branch --delete rescue-the-boss
$ git branch --delete helpful-boss-branch
And settle back into your chair to wait for Saint Nicholas with your book, your branch, and possibly your cat.
$ git checkout waiting-for-st-nicholas
$ git stash pop
Your working directory has been returned to exactly the same state you were in at the beginning of the article.
Having fun with analogies
I’ve had a bit of fun with analogies in this article. But sometimes those little twists on ideas can really help someone pick up a new idea (git stash: it’s like when Christmas comes around and everyone throws their fashion sense out the window and puts on a reindeer sweater for the holiday party; or git bisect: it’s like trying to find that one broken light on the string of Christmas lights). It doesn’t matter if the analogy isn’t perfect. It’s just a way to give someone a temporary hook into a concept in a way that makes the concept accessible while the learner becomes comfortable with it. As the learner’s comfort increases, the analogies can drop away, making room for the technically correct definition of how something works.
Or, if you’re like me, you can choose to never grow old and just keep mucking about in the analogies. I’d argue it’s a lot more fun to play with a string of Christmas lights and some holiday cheer than a directed acyclic graph anyway.",2014,Emma Jane Westby,emmajanewestby,2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/dealing-with-emergencies-in-git/,code
32,Cohesive UX,"With Yosemite, Apple users can answer iPhone calls on their MacBooks. This is weird. And yet it’s representative of a greater trend toward cohesion.
Shortly after upgrading to Yosemite, a call came in on my iPhone and my MacBook “rang” in parallel. And I was all, like, “Wut?” This was a new feature in Yosemite, and honestly it was a little bizarre at first.
Apple promotional image showing a phone call ringing simultaneously on multiple devices.
However, I had just spoken at a conference on the very topic you’re reading about now, and therefore I appreciated the underlying concept: the cohesion of user experience, the cohesion of screens.
This is just one of many examples I’ve encountered since beginning to speak about this topic months ago. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at the past few years, specifically the role of responsive web design.
RWD != cohesive experience
I needn’t expound on the virtues of responsive web design (RWD). You’ve likely already encountered more than a career’s worth on the topic. This is a good thing. Count me in as one of its biggest fans.
However, if we are to sing the praises of RWD, we must also acknowledge its shortcomings. One of these is that RWD ends where the browser ends. For all its goodness, RWD really has no bearing on native apps or any other experiences that take place outside the browser. This makes it challenging, therefore, to create cohesion for multi-screen users if RWD is the only response to “let’s make it work everywhere.”
We need something that incorporates the spirit of RWD while unifying all touchpoints for the entire user experience—single device or several devices, in browser or sans browser, native app or otherwise.
I call this cohesive UX, and I believe it’s the next era of successful user experiences.
Toward a unified whole
Simply put, the goal of cohesive UX is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends.
Two facets are vital to cohesive UX:
Function and form
Data symmetry
Let’s examine each of these.
Function AND form
Function over form, of course. Right? Not so fast, kiddo.
Consider Bruce Lawson’s dad. After receiving an Android phone for Christmas and thumbing through his favorite sites, he was puzzled why some looked different from their counterparts on the desktop. “When a site looked radically different,” Bruce observed, “he’d check the URL bar to ensure that he’d typed in the right address. In short, he found RWD to be confusing and it meant he didn’t trust the site.” A lack of cohesive form led to a jarring experience for Bruce’s dad.
Now, if I appear to be suggesting websites must look the same in every browser—you already learned they needn’t—know that I recognize the importance of context, especially in regards to mobile. I made a case for this more than seven years ago.
Rather, cohesive UX suggests that form deserves the same respect as function when crafting user experiences that span multiple screens or devices. And users are increasingly comfortable traversing media. For example, more than 40% of adults in the U.S. owning more than one device start an activity on one screen and finish it on another, according to a study commissioned by Facebook. I suspect that percentage will only increase in 2015, and I suspect the tech-affluent readers of 24 ways are among the 40%.
There are countless examples of cohesive form and function. Consider Gmail, which displays email conversations visually as a stack that can be expanded and collapsed like the bellows of an accordion. This visual metaphor has been consistent in virtually any instance of Gmail—website or app—since at least 2007 when I captured this screenshot on my Nokia 6680:
Screenshot captured while authoring Mobile Web Design (2007). Back then we didn’t call this an app, but rather a ‘smart client’.
When the holistic experience is cohesive as it is with Gmail, users’ mental models and even muscle memory are preserved.1 Functionality and aesthetics align with the expectations users have for how things should function and what they should look like. In other words, the experience is roughly the same across screens.
But don’t be ridiculous, peoples. Note that I said “roughly.” It’s important to avoid mindless replication of aesthetics and functionality for the sake of cohesion. Again, the goal is a unified whole, not a carbon copy. Affordances and concessions should be made as context and intuition require. For example, while Facebook users are accustomed to top-aligned navigation in the browser, they encounter bottom-aligned navigation in the iOS app as justified by user testing:
The iOS app model has held up despite many attempts to better it: http://t.co/rSMSAqeh9m pic.twitter.com/mBp36lAEgc— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) December 10, 2014
Despite the (rather minor) lack of consistency in navigation placement, other elements such as icons, labels, and color theme work in tandem to produce a unified, holistic whole.
Data symmetry
Data symmetry involves the repetition, continuity, or synchronicity of data across screens, devices, and platforms. As regards cohesive UX, data includes not just the material (such as an article you’re writing on Medium) but also the actions that can be performed on or with that material (such as Medium’s authoring tools). That is to say, “sync verbs, not just nouns” (Josh Clark).
In my estimation, Amazon is an archetype of data symmetry, as is Rdio. When logged in, data is shared across virtually any device of any kind, irrespective of using a browser or native app. Add a product to your Amazon cart from your phone during the morning commute, and finish the transaction at work on your laptop. Easy peasy.
Amazon’s aesthetics are crazy cohesive, to boot:
Amazon web (left) and native app (right).
With Rdio, not only are playlists and listening history synced across screens as you would expect, but the cohesion goes even further. Rdio’s remote control feature allows you to control music playing on one device using another device, all in real time.
Rdio’s remote control feature, as viewed on my MacBook while music plays on my iMac.
At my office I often work from my couch using my MacBook, but my speakers are connected to my iMac. When signed in to Rdio on both devices, my MacBook serves as proxy for controlling Rdio on my iMac, much the same as any Yosemite-enabled device can serve as proxy for an incoming iPhone call.
Me, in my office. Note the iMac and speakers at far right.
This is a brilliant example of cohesive design, and it’s executed entirely via the cloud.
Things to consider
Consider the following when crafting cohesive experiences:
Inventory the elements that comprise your product experience, and cohesify them.2
Consider things such as copy, tone, typography, iconography, imagery, flow, placement, brand identification, account data, session data, user preferences, and so on. Then, create cohesion among these elements to the greatest extent possible, while adapting to context as needed.
Store session data in the cloud rather than locally.
For example, avoid using browser cookies to store shopping cart data, as cookies are specific to a single browser on a single device. Instead, store this data in the cloud so it can be accessed from other devices, as well as beyond the browser.
Consider using web views when developing your native app.
“You’re already using web apps in native wrappers without even noticing it,” Lukas Mathis contends. “The fact that nobody even notices, the fact that this isn’t a story, shows that, when it comes to user experience, web vs. native doesn’t matter anymore.” Web views essentially allow you to display HTML content inside a native wrapper. This can reduce the time and effort needed to make the overall experience cohesive. So whereas the navigation bar may be rendered by the app, for example, the remaining page display may be rendered via the web. There’s readily accessible documentation for using web views in C++, iOS, Android, and so forth.
Nature is calling
Returning to the example of Yosemite and sychronized phone calls, is it really that bizarre in light of cohesive UX? Perhaps at first. But I suspect that, over time, Yosemite’s cohesiveness — and the cohesiveness of other examples like the ones we’ve discussed here — will become not only more natural but more commonplace, too.
1 I browse Flipboard on my iPad nearly every morning as part of my breakfast routine. Swiping horizontally advances to the next page. Countless times I’ve done the same gesture in Flipboard for iPhone only to have it do nothing. This is because the gesture for advancing is vertical on phones. I’m so conditioned to the horizontal swipe that I often fail to make the switch to vertical swipe, and apparently others suffer from the same muscle memory, too.
2 Cohesify isn’t a thing. But chances are you understood what I meant. Yay neologism!",2014,Cameron Moll,cameronmoll,2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/cohesive-ux/,ux
34,Collaborative Responsive Design Workflows,"Much has been written about workflow and designer-developer collaboration in web design, but many teams still struggle with this issue; either with how to adapt their internal workflow, or how to communicate the need for best practices like mobile first and progressive enhancement to their teams and clients. Christmas seems like a good time to have another look at what doesn’t work between us and how we can improve matters.
Why is it so difficult?
We’re still beginning to understand responsive design workflows, acknowledging the need to move away from static design tools and towards best practices in development. It’s not that we don’t want to change – so why is it so difficult?
Changing the way we do something that has become routine is always problematic, even with small things, and the changes today’s web environment requires from web design and development teams are anything but small.
Although developers also have a host of new skills to learn and things to consider, designers are probably the ones pushed furthest out of their comfort zones: as well as graphic design, a web designer today also needs an understanding of interaction design and ergonomics, because more and more websites are becoming tools rather than pages meant to be read like a book or magazine. In addition to that there are thousands of different devices and screen sizes on the market today that layout and interactions need to work on.
These aspects make it impossible to design in a static design tool, so beyond having to learn about new aspects of design, the designer has to either learn how to code or learn to work with a responsive design tool.
Why do it
That alone is enough to leave anyone overwhelmed, as learning a new skill takes time and slows you down in a project – and on most projects time is in short supply. Yet we have to make time or fall behind in the industry as others pitch better, interactive designs. For an efficient workflow, both designers and developers must familiarise themselves with new tools and techniques.
A designer has to be able to play with ideas, make small adjustments here and there, look at the result, go back to the settings and make further adjustments, and so on. You can only realistically do that if you are able to play with all the elements of a design, including interactivity, accessibility and responsiveness.
Figuring out the right breakpoints in a layout is one of the foremost reasons for designing in a responsive design tool. Even if you create layouts for three viewport sizes (i.e. smartphone, tablet and the most common desktop size), you’d only cover around 30% of visitors and you might miss problems like line breaks and padding at other viewport sizes.
Another advantage is consistency. In static design tools changes will not be applied across all your other layouts. A developer referring back to last week’s comps might work with outdated metrics. Furthermore, you cannot easily test what impact changes might have on previously designed areas. In a dynamic design tool such changes will be applied to the entire design and allow you to test things in site areas you had already finished.
No static design tool allows you to do this, and having somebody else produce a mockup from your static designs or wireframes will duplicate work and is inefficient.
How to do it
When working in a responsive design tool rather than in the browser, there is still the question of how and when to communicate with the developer. I have found that working with Sass in combination with a visual style guide is very efficient, but it does need careful planning: fundamental metrics for padding, margins and font sizes, but also design elements like sliders, forms, tabs, buttons and navigational elements, should be defined at the beginning of a project and used consistently across the site. Working with a grid can help you develop a consistent design language across your site.
Create a visual style guide that shows what the elements look like and how they behave across different screen sizes – and when interacted with. Put all metrics on paddings, margins, breakpoints, widths, colours and so on in a text document, ideally with names that your developer can use as Sass variables in the CSS. For example:
$padding-default-vertical: 1.5em;
Developers, too, need an efficient workflow to keep code maintainable and speed up the time needed for more complex interactions with an eye on accessibility and performance. CSS preprocessors like Sass allow you to work with variables and mixins for default rules, as well as style sheet partials for different site areas or design elements. Create your own boilerplate to use for your projects and then update your variables with the information from your designer for each individual project.
How to get buy-in
One obstacle when implementing responsive design, accessibility and content strategy is the logistics of learning new skills and iterating on your workflow. Another is how to sell it. You might expect everyone on a project (including the client) to want to design and develop the best website possible: ultimately, a great site will lead to more conversions. However, we often hear that people find it difficult to convince their teammates, bosses or clients to implement best practices.
Why is that? Well, I believe a lot of it is down to how we sell it. You will have experienced this yourself: some people you trust to know what they are talking about, and others you don’t. Think about why you trust that first person but don’t buy what the other one is telling you. It is likely because person A has a self-assured, calm and assertive demeanour, while person B seems insecure and apologetic. To sell our ideas, we need to become person A! For a timid designer or developer suffering from imposter syndrome (like many of us do in this industry) that is a difficult task. So how can we become more confident in selling our expertise?
Write
We need to become experts. And I mean not just in writing great code or coming up with beautiful designs but at explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing. Why do you code this way or that? Why is this the best layout? Why does a website have to be accessible and responsive? Write about it. Putting your thoughts down on paper or screen is a really efficient way of getting your head around a topic and learning to make a case for something. You may even find that you come up with new ideas as you are writing, so you’ll become a better designer or developer along the way.
Talk
Then, talk about it. Start out in front of your team, then do a lightning talk at a web event near you, then a longer talk or workshop. Having to talk about a topic is going to help you put into spoken words the argument that you’ve previously put together in writing. Writing comes more easily when you’re starting out but we use a different register when writing than talking and you need to learn how to speak your case. Do the talk a couple of times and after each talk make adjustments where you found it didn’t work well. By this time, you are more than ready to make your case to the client. In fact, you’ve been ready since that first talk in front of your colleagues ;)
Pitch
Pitches used to be based on a presentation of static layouts for for three to five typical pages and three different designs. But if we want to sell interactivity, structure, usability, accessibility and responsiveness, we need to demonstrate these things and I believe that it can only do us good. I have seen a few pitches sitting in the client’s chair and static layouts are always sort of dull. What makes a website a website is the fact that I can interact with it and smooth interactions or animations add that extra sparkle.
I can’t claim personal experience for this one but I’d be bold and go for only one design. One demo page matching the client’s corporate design but not any specific page for the final site. Include design elements like navigation, photography, typefaces, article layout (with real content), sliders, tabs, accordions, buttons, forms, tables (yes, tables) – everything you would include in a style tiles document, only interactive. Demonstrate how the elements behave when clicked, hovered and touched, and how they change across different screen sizes. You may even want to demonstrate accessibility features like tabbed navigation and screen reader use.
Obviously, there are many approaches that will work in different situations but don’t give up on finding a process that works for you and that ultimately allows you to build delightful, accessible, responsive user experiences for the web. Make time to try new tools and techniques and don’t just work on them on the side – start using them on an actual project. It is only when we use a tool or process in the real world that we become true experts. Remember your driving lessons: once the instructor had explained how to operate the car, you were sent to practise driving on the road in actual traffic!",2014,Sibylle Weber,sibylleweber,2014-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/collaborative-responsive-design-workflows/,process
37,JavaScript Modules the ES6 Way,"JavaScript admittedly has plenty of flaws, but one of the largest and most prominent is the lack of a module system: a way to split up your application into a series of smaller files that can depend on each other to function correctly.
This is something nearly all other languages come with out of the box, whether it be Ruby’s require, Python’s import, or any other language you’re familiar with. Even CSS has @import! JavaScript has nothing of that sort, and this has caused problems for application developers as they go from working with small websites to full client-side applications. Let’s be clear: it doesn’t mean the new module system in the upcoming version of JavaScript won’t be useful to you if you’re building smaller websites rather than the next Instagram.
Thankfully, the lack of a module system will soon be a problem of the past. The next version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 6, will bring with it a full-featured module and dependency management solution for JavaScript. The bad news is that it won’t be landing in browsers for a while yet – but the good news is that the specification for the module system and how it will look has been finalised. The even better news is that there are tools available to get it all working in browsers today without too much hassle. In this post I’d like to give you the gift of JS modules and show you the syntax, and how to use them in browsers today. It’s much simpler than you might think.
What is ES6?
ECMAScript is a scripting language that is standardised by a company called Ecma International. JavaScript is an implementation of ECMAScript. ECMAScript 6 is simply the next version of the ECMAScript standard and, hence, the next version of JavaScript. The spec aims to be fully comfirmed and complete by the end of 2014, with a target initial release date of June 2015. It’s impossible to know when we will have full feature support across the most popular browsers, but already some ES6 features are landing in the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox. You shouldn’t expect to be able to use the new features across browsers without some form of additional tooling or library for a while yet.
The ES6 module spec
The ES6 module spec was fully confirmed in July 2014, so all the syntax I will show you in this article is not expected to change. I’ll first show you the syntax and the new APIs being added to the language, and then look at how to use them today. There are two parts to the new module system. The first is the syntax for declaring modules and dependencies in your JS files, and the second is a programmatic API for loading in modules manually. The first is what most people are expected to use most of the time, so it’s what I’ll focus on more.
Module syntax
The key thing to understand here is that modules have two key components. First, they have dependencies. These are things that the module you are writing depends on to function correctly. For example, if you were building a carousel module that used jQuery, you would say that jQuery is a dependency of your carousel. You import these dependencies into your module, and we’ll see how to do that in a minute. Second, modules have exports. These are the functions or variables that your module exposes publicly to anything that imports it. Using jQuery as the example again, you could say that jQuery exports the $ function. Modules that depend on and hence import jQuery get access to the $ function, because jQuery exports it.
Another important thing to note is that when I discuss a module, all I really mean is a JavaScript file. There’s no extra syntax to use other than the new ES6 syntax. Once ES6 lands, modules and files will be analogous.
Named exports
Modules can export multiple objects, which can be either plain old variables or JavaScript functions. You denote something to be exported with the export keyword:
export function double(x) {
return x + x;
};
You can also store something in a variable then export it. If you do that, you have to wrap the variable in a set of curly braces.
var double = function(x) {
return x + x;
}
export { double };
A module can then import the double function like so:
import { double } from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
Again, curly braces are required around the variable you would like to import. It’s also important to note that from 'mymodule' will look for a file called mymodule.js in the same directory as the file you are requesting the import from. There is no need to add the .js extension.
The reason for those extra braces is that this syntax lets you export multiple variables:
var double = function(x) {
return x + x;
}
var square = function(x) {
return x * x;
}
export { double, square }
I personally prefer this syntax over the export function …, but only because it makes it much clearer to me what the module exports. Typically I will have my export {…} line at the bottom of the file, which means I can quickly look in one place to determine what the module is exporting.
A file importing both double and square can do so in just the way you’d expect:
import { double, square } from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
square(3); // 9
With this approach you can’t easily import an entire module and all its methods. This is by design – it’s much better and you’re encouraged to import just the functions you need to use.
Default exports
Along with named exports, the system also lets a module have a default export. This is useful when you are working with a large library such as jQuery, Underscore, Backbone and others, and just want to import the entire library. A module can define its default export (it can only ever have one default export) like so:
export default function(x) {
return x + x;
}
And that can be imported:
import double from 'mymodule';
double(2); // 4
This time you do not use the curly braces around the name of the object you are importing. Also notice how you can name the import whatever you’d like. Default exports are not named, so you can import them as anything you like:
import christmas from 'mymodule';
christmas(2); // 4
The above is entirely valid.
Although it’s not something that is used too often, a module can have both named exports and a default export, if you wish.
One of the design goals of the ES6 modules spec was to favour default exports. There are many reasons behind this, and there is a very detailed discussion on the ES Discuss site about it. That said, if you find yourself preferring named exports, that’s fine, and you shouldn’t change that to meet the preferences of those designing the spec.
Programmatic API
Along with the syntax above, there is also a new API being added to the language so you can programmatically import modules. It’s pretty rare you would use this, but one obvious example is loading a module conditionally based on some variable or property. You could easily import a polyfill, for example, if the user’s browser didn’t support a feature your app relied on. An example of doing this is:
if(someFeatureNotSupported) {
System.import('my-polyfill').then(function(myPolyFill) {
// use the module from here
});
}
System.import will return a promise, which, if you’re not familiar, you can read about in this excellent article on HTMl5 Rocks by Jake Archibald. A promise basically lets you attach callback functions that are run when the asynchronous operation (in this case, System.import), is complete.
This programmatic API opens up a lot of possibilities and will also provide hooks to allow you to register callbacks that will run at certain points in the lifetime of a module. Those hooks and that syntax are slightly less set in stone, but when they are confirmed they will provide really useful functionality. For example, you could write code that would run every module that you import through something like JSHint before importing it. In development that would provide you with an easy way to keep your code quality high without having to run a command line watch task.
How to use it today
It’s all well and good having this new syntax, but right now it won’t work in any browser – and it’s not likely to for a long time. Maybe in next year’s 24 ways there will be an article on how you can use ES6 modules with no extra work in the browser, but for now we’re stuck with a bit of extra work.
ES6 module transpiler
One solution is to use the ES6 module transpiler, a compiler that lets you write your JavaScript using the ES6 module syntax (actually a subset of it – not quite everything is supported, but the main features are) and have it compiled into either CommonJS-style code (CommonJS is the module specification that NodeJS and Browserify use), or into AMD-style code (the spec RequireJS uses). There are also plugins for all the popular build tools, including Grunt and Gulp.
The advantage of using this transpiler is that if you are already using a tool like RequireJS or Browserify, you can drop the transpiler in, start writing in ES6 and not worry about any additional work to make the code work in the browser, because you should already have that set up already. If you don’t have any system in place for handling modules in the browser, using the transpiler doesn’t really make sense. Remember, all this does is convert ES6 module code into CommonJS- or AMD-compliant JavaScript. It doesn’t do anything to help you get that code running in the browser, but if you have that part sorted it’s a really nice addition to your workflow. If you would like a tutorial on how to do this, I wrote a post back in June 2014 on using ES6 with the ES6 module transpiler.
SystemJS
Another solution is SystemJS. It’s the best solution in my opinion, particularly if you are starting a new project from scratch, or want to use ES6 modules on a project where you have no current module system in place. SystemJS is a spec-compliant universal module loader: it loads ES6 modules, AMD modules, CommonJS modules, as well as modules that just add a variable to the global scope (window, in the browser).
To load in ES6 files, SystemJS also depends on two other libraries: the ES6 module loader polyfill; and Traceur. Traceur is best accessed through the bower-traceur package, as the main repository doesn’t have an easy to find downloadable version. The ES6 module load polyfill implements System.import, and lets you load in files using it. Traceur is an ES6-to-ES5 module loader. It takes code written in ES6, the newest version of JavaScript, and transpiles it into ES5, the version of JavaScript widely implemented in browsers. The advantage of this is that you can play with the new features of the language today, even though they are not supported in browsers. The drawback is that you have to run all your files through Traceur every time you save them, but this is easily automated. Additionally, if you use SystemJS, the Traceur compilation is done automatically for you.
All you need to do to get SystemJS running is to add a
When you load the page, app.js will be asynchronously loaded. Within app.js, you can now use ES6 modules. SystemJS will detect that the file is an ES6 file, automatically load Traceur, and compile the file into ES5 so that it works in the browser. It does all this dynamically in the browser, but there are tools to bundle your application in production, so it doesn’t make a lot of requests on the live site. In development though, it makes for a really nice workflow.
When working with SystemJS and modules in general, the best approach is to have a main module (in our case app.js) that is the main entry point for your application. app.js should then be responsible for loading all your application’s modules. This forces you to keep your application organised by only loading one file initially, and having the rest dealt with by that file.
SystemJS also provides a workflow for bundling your application together into one file.
Conclusion
ES6 modules may be at least six months to a year away (if not more) but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used today. Although there is an overhead to using them now – with the work required to set up SystemJS, the module transpiler, or another solution – that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Using any module system in the browser, whether that be RequireJS, Browserify or another alternative, requires extra tooling and libraries to support it, and I would argue that the effort to set up SystemJS is no greater than that required to configure any other tool. It also comes with the extra benefit that when the syntax is supported in browsers, you get a free upgrade. You’ll be able to remove SystemJS and have everything continue to work, backed by the native browser solution.
If you are starting a new project, I would strongly advocate using ES6 modules. It is a syntax and specification that is not going away at all, and will soon be supported in browsers. Investing time in learning it now will pay off hugely further down the road.
Further reading
If you’d like to delve further into ES6 modules (or ES6 generally) and using them today, I recommend the following resources:
ECMAScript 6 modules: the final syntax by Axel Rauschmayer
Practical Workflows for ES6 Modules by Guy Bedford
ECMAScript 6 resources for the curious JavaScripter by Addy Osmani
Tracking ES6 support by Addy Osmani
ES6 Tools List by Addy Osmani
Using Grunt and the ES6 Module Transpiler by Thomas Boyt
JavaScript Modules and Dependencies with jspm by myself
Using ES6 Modules Today by Guy Bedford",2014,Jack Franklin,jackfranklin,2014-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/javascript-modules-the-es6-way/,code
40,Don’t Push Through the Pain,"In 2004, I lost my web career. In a single day, it was gone. I was in too much pain to use a keyboard, a Wacom tablet (I couldn’t even click the pen), or a trackball. Switching my mouse to use my left (non-dominant) hand only helped a bit; then that hand went, too. I tried all the easy-to-find equipment out there, except for expensive gizmos with foot pedals. I had tingling in my fingers—which, when I was away from the computer, would rhythmically move as if some other being controlled them. I worried about Parkinson’s because the movements were so dramatic. Pen on paper was painful. Finally, I discovered one day that I couldn’t even turn a doorknob.
The only highlight was that I couldn’t dust, scrub, or vacuum. We were forced to hire someone to come in once a week for an hour to whip through the house. You can imagine my disappointment.
My injuries had gradually slithered into my life without notice. I’d occasionally have sore elbows, or my wrist might ache for a day, or my shoulders feel tight. But nothing to keyboard home about. That’s the critical bit of news. One day, you’re pretty fine. The next day, you don’t have your job—or any job that requires the use of your hands and wrists.
I had to walk away from the computer for over four months—and partially for several months more. That’s right: no income. If I hadn’t found a gifted massage therapist, the right book of stretches, the equipment I should have been using all along, and learned how to pay attention to my body—even just a little bit more—I quite possibly wouldn’t be writing this article today. I wouldn’t be writing anything, anywhere.
Most of us have heard of (and even claimed to have read all of) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who describes the state of flow—the place our minds go when we are fully engaged and in our element. This lovely state of highly focused activity is deeply satisfying, often creative, and quite familiar to many of us on the web who just can’t quit until the copy sings or the code is untangled or we get our highest score yet in Angry Birds. Our minds may enter that flow, but too often as our brains take flight, all else recedes. And we leave something very important behind.
Our bodies.
My body wasn’t made to make the same minute movements thousands of times a day, most days of the year, for decades, and neither was yours. The wear and tear sneaks up on you, especially if you’re the obsessive perfectionist that we all pretend not to be. Oh? You’re not obsessed? I wasn’t like this all the time, but I remember sitting across from my husband, eating dinner, and I didn’t hear a word he said. I’d left my brain upstairs in my office, where it was wrestling in a death match with the box model or, God help us all, IE 5.2. I was a writer, too, and I was having my first inkling that I was a content strategist. Work was exciting. I could sit up late, in the flow, fingers flying at warp speed. I could sit until those wretched birds outside mocked me with their damn, cheerful “Hurray, it’s morning!” songs. Suddenly, while, say, washing dishes, the one magical phrase that captured the essence of a voice or idea would pop up, and I would have mowed down small animals and toddlers to get to my computer and hammer out that website or article, to capture that thought before it escaped. Note my use of the word hammer. Sound at all familiar?
But where was my body during my work? Jaw jutting forward to see the screen, feet oddly positioned—and then left in place like chunks of marble—back unsupported, fingers pounding the keys, wrists and arms permanently twisted in unnatural angles that we thought were natural. And clicking. Clicking, clicking, clicking that mouse. Thumbing tiny keyboards on phones. A lethal little gesture for tiny little tendons. Though I was fine from, say 1997 to 2004, by the end of 2004 this behavior culminated in disaster. I had repetitive stress injuries, aka repetitive motion injuries. As the Apple site says, “A brief exposure to these conditions would not cause harm. But a prolonged exposure may, in some people, result in reduced ability to function.” I’ll say.
I frantically turned to people on lists and forums. “Try a track ball.” Already did that. “Try a tablet.” Worse. One person wrote, “I still come here once in a while and can type a couple sentences, but I’ve permanently got thoracic outlet syndrome and I’ll never work again.” Oh, beauteous web, oh, long-distance friends, farewell.
The Wrist Bone’s Connected to the Brain Bone
That variation on the old song tells part of the story. Most people (and many of their physicians) believe that tingling fingers and aching wrists MUST be carpel tunnel syndrome. Nope. If your neck juts forward, it tenses and stays tense the entire time you work in that position. Remember how your muscles felt after holding a landline phone with your neck tilted to one side for a long client meeting? Regrettable. Tensing your shoulders because your chair’s not designed properly puts you at risk for thoracic outlet syndrome, a career-killer if ever there was one. The nerves and tendons in your neck and shoulder refer down your arms, and muscles swell around nerves, causing pain and dysfunction. Your elbows have a tendon that is especially vulnerable to repetitive movements (think tennis elbow). Your wrists are performing something akin to a circus act with one thousand shows a day.
So, all the fine tendons and ligaments in your fingers have problems that may not start at your wrists at all. Though some people truly do have carpal tunnel syndrome, my finger and wrist problems weren’t solved by heavily massaging my fingers (though, that was helpful, too) or my wrists. They were fixed by work on my neck, upper back, shoulders, arms, and elbows. This explains why many people have surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome and just months later say, “What?! How can I possibly have it again? I had an operation!” Well, fellow buckaroo, you may never have had carpel tunnel syndrome. You may have had—or perhaps will have—one long disaster area from your neck to your fingertips.
How to Crawl Back
Before trying extreme measures, you may be able to function again even if you feel hopeless. I managed to heal, and so have others, but I’ll always be at risk.
As Jen Simmons, of The Web Ahead podcast and other projects told me, “It took a long time to injure myself. It took a long time to get back to where I was. My right arm between my elbow and wrist would start aching intermittently. Eventually, my arm even ached at night. I started each day with yesterday’s pain.” Simple measures, used consistently, helped her back.
1. Massage therapy
I don’t remember what the rest of the world is like, but in Portland, Oregon, we have more than one massage therapy college. (Of course we do.) I saw a former teacher at the most respected school. This is not your “It was all so soothing. Why, I fell asleep!” massage. This is “Holy crap, he’s grinding his elbow into my armpit!“ massage therapy, with the emphasis on therapy. I owe him everything. Make sure you have someone who really knows what they’re doing. Get many referrals. Try a question, “Does my psoas muscle affect my back?” If they can’t answer it, flee. Regularly see the one you choose and after a while, depending on how injured you are, you may be able to taper off.
2. Change your equipment
You may need to be hands-on with several pieces of equipment before you find the ones that don’t cause more pain. Many companies have restocking fees, charges to ship the equipment you want to return, and other retail atrocities. Always be sure to ask what the return policies are at any company before purchasing.
Mice
You may have more success than I did with equipment such as the Wacom tablet. Mine came with a pen, and it hurt to repetitively click it. Trackballs are another option but, for many, they are better at prevention than recovery. But let’s get to the really effective stuff. One of the biggest sources of pain is using your mouse. One major reason is that your hand and wrist are in a perpetually unnatural position and you’re also moving your arm quite a bit. Each time you move the mouse, it is placing stress on your neck, shoulders and arms, because you need to lift them slightly in order to move the mouse and you need to angle your wrist. You may also be too injured to use the trackpad all the time, and this mouse, the vertical mouse is a dandy preventative measure, too. Shaking up your patterns is a wise move. I have long fingers, not especially thin, yet the small size works best for me. (They have larger choices available.) What?! A sideways mouse? Yep. All the weight of your hand will be resting on it in the handshake position. Your forearms aren’t constantly twisting over hill and dale. You aren’t using any muscles in your wrist or hand. They are relaxing. You’ll adapt in a day, and oh, oh, what a relief it is.
Keyboards
I really liked doing business with the people at Kinesis-Ergo. (I’m not affiliated with them in any way.) They have the vertical mouse and a number of keyboards. The one that felt the most natural to me, and, once again, it only takes a day to adapt, is the Freestyle2 for the Mac. They have several options. I kept the keyboard halves attached to each other at first, and then spread them apart a little more. I recommend choosing one that slants and can separate. You can adjust the angle. For a little extra, they’ll make sure it’s all set up and ready to go for you. I’m guessing that some Googling will find you similar equipment, wherever you live.
Warning: if you use the ergonomic keyboards, you may have fewer USB ports. The laptop will be too far away to see unless you find a satisfactory setup using a stand. This is the perfect excuse for purchasing a humongous display.
You may not look cool while jetting coast to coast in your skinny jeans and what appears to be the old-time orthopedic shoe version of computing gear. But once you have rested and used many of these suggestions consistently, you may be able to use your laptop or other device in all its lovely sleekness during the trip.
Other doohickies
The Kinesis site and The Human Solution have a wide selection of ergonomic products: standing desks, ergonomically correct chairs, and, yes, even things with foot pedals. Explore!
3. Stop clicking, at least for a while
Use keyboard shortcuts, but use them slowly. This is not the time to show off your skillz. You’ll be sort of like a recovering alcoholic, in that you’ll be a recovering repetitive stress survivor for the rest of your life, once you really injure yourself. Always be vigilant. There’s also a bit of software sold by The Human Solution and other places, and it was my salvation. It’s called the McNib for Macs, and the Nib for PCs. (I’ve only used the McNib.) It’s for click-free mousing. I found it tricky to use when writing markup and code, but you may become quite adept at it. A little rectangle pops up on your screen, you mouse over it and choose, let’s say, “Double-click.” Until you change that choice, if you mouse over a link or anything else, it will double-click it for you. All you do is glide your mouse around. Awkward for a day or two, but you’ll pick it up quickly. Though you can use it all day for work, even if you just use this for browsing LOLcats or Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube videos, it will help you by giving your fingers a sweet break.
But here’s the sad news. The developer who invented this died a few years ago. (Yes, I used to speak to him on the phone.) While it is for sale, it isn’t compatible with Mac OS X Lion or anything subsequent. PowerPC strikes again. His site is still up. Demos for use with older software can be downloaded free at his old site, or at The Human Solution. Perhaps an enterprising developer can invent something that would provide this help, without interfering with patents. Rumor has it among ergonomic retailers (yes, I’m like a police dog sniffing my way to a criminal once I head down a trail) that his company was purchased by a company in China, with no update in sight.
4. Use built-in features
That little microphone icon that comes up alongside the keyboard on your iPhone allows you to speak your message instead of incessantly thumbing it. I believe it works in any program that uses the keyboard. It’s not Siri. She’s for other things, like having a personal relationship with an inanimate object. Apple even has a good section on ergonomics. You think I’m intense about this subject? To improve your repetitive stress, Apple doesn’t want you to use oral contraceptives, alcohol, or tobacco, to which I say, “Have as much sex, bacon, and chocolate as possible to make up for it.”
Apple’s info even has illustrations of things like a faucet dripping into what is labeled a bucket full of “TRAUMA.” Sounds like upgrading to Yosemite, but I digress.
5. Take breaks
If it’s a game or other non-essential activity, take a break for a month. Fine, now that I’ve called games non-essential, I suppose you’ll all unfollow me on Twitter.
6. Whether you are sore or not, do stretches throughout the day
This is a big one. Really big. The best book on the subject of repetitive stress injuries is Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Other Repetitive Strain Injuries: A Self-Care Program by Sharon J. Butler. Don’t worry, most of it is illustrations. Pretend it’s a graphic novel.
I’m notorious for never reading instructions, and who on earth reads the introduction of a book, unless they wrote it? I wrote a book a long time ago, and I bet my house, husband, and life savings that my own parents never read the intro. Well, I did read the intro to this book, and you should, too. Stretching correctly, in a way that doesn’t further hurt you, that keeps you flexible if you aren’t injured, that actually heals you, calls for precision. Read and you’ll see. The key is to stretch just until you start to feel the stretch, even if that’s merely a tiny movement. Don’t force anything past that point. Kindly nurse yourself back to health, or nurture your still-healthy body by stretching. Over the following days, weeks, months, you’ll be moving well past that initial stretch point.
The book is brimming with examples. You only have to pick a few stretches, if this is too much to handle. Do it every single day. I can tell you some of the best ones for me, but it depends on the person. You’ll also discover in Butler’s book that areas that you think are the problem are sometimes actually adjacent to the muscle or tendon that is the source of the problem. Add a few stretches or two for that area, too.
But please follow the instructions in the introduction. If you overdo it, or perform some other crazy-ass hijinks, as I would be tempted to do, I am not responsible for your outcome. I give you fair warning that I am not a healthcare provider. I’m just telling you as a friend, an untrained one, at that, who has been through this experience.
7. Follow good habits
Develop habits like drinking lots of water (which helps with lactic acid buildup in muscles), looking away from the computer for twenty seconds every twenty to thirty minutes, eating right, and probably doing everything else your mother told you to do. Maybe this is a good time to bring up flossing your teeth, and going outside to play instead of watching TV. As your mom would say, “It’s a beautiful day outside, what are you kids doing in here?”
8. Speak instead of writing, if you can
Amber Simmons, who is very smart and funny, once tweeted in front of the whole world that, “@carywood is a Skype whore.” I was always asking people on Twitter if we could Skype instead of using iChat or exchanging emails. (I prefer the audio version so I don’t have to, you know, do something drastic like comb my hair.) Keyboarding is tough on hands, whether you notice it or not at the time, and when doing rapid-fire back-and-forthing with people, you tend to speed up your typing and not take any breaks. This is a hand-killer. Voice chats have made such a difference for me that I am still a rabid Skype whore. Wait, did I say that out loud?
Speak your text or emails, using Dragon Dictate or other software. In about 2005, accessibility and user experience design expert, Derek Featherstone, in Canada, and I, at home, chatted over the internet, each of us using a different voice-to-text program. The programs made so many mistakes communicating with each other that we began that sort of endless, tearful laughing that makes you think someone may need to call an ambulance. This type of software has improved quite a bit over the years, thank goodness. Lack of accessibility of any kind isn’t funny to Derek or me or to anyone who can’t use the web without pain.
9. Watch your position
For example, if you lift up your arms to use the computer, or stare down at your laptop, you’ll need to rearrange your equipment. The internet has a lot of information about ideal ergonomic work areas. Please use a keyboard drawer. Be sure to measure the height carefully so that even a tented keyboard, like the one I recommend, will fit. I also recommend getting the version of the Freestyle with palm supports. Just these two measures did much to help both Jen Simmons and me.
10. If you need to take anti-inflammatories, stop working
If you are all drugged up on ibuprofen, and pounding and clicking like mad, your body will not know when you are tired or injuring yourself. I don’t recommend taking these while using your computing devices. Perhaps just take it at night, though I’m not a fan of that category of medications. Check with your healthcare provider. At least ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, which may help you. In contrast, acetaminophen (paracetamol) only makes your body think it’s not in pain. Ice is great, as is switching back and forth between ice and heat. But again, if you need ice and ibuprofen you really need to take a major break.
11. Don’t forget the rest of your body
I’ve zeroed in on my personal area of knowledge and experience, but you may be setting yourself up for problems in other areas of your body. There’s what is known to bad writers as “a veritable cornucopia” of information on the web about how to help the rest of your body. A wee bit of research on the web and you’ll discover simple exercises and stretches for the rest of your potential catastrophic areas: your upper back, your lower back, your legs, ankles, and eyes. Do gentle stretches, three or four times a day, rather than powering your way through. Ease into new equipment such as standing desks. Stretch those newly challenged areas until your body adapts. Pay attention to your body, even though I too often forget mine.
12. Remember the children
Kids are using equipment to play highly addictive games or to explore amazing software, and if these call for repetitive motions, children are being set up for future injuries. They’ll grab hold of something, as parents out there know, and play it 3,742 times. That afternoon. Perhaps by the time they are adults, everything will just be holograms and mind-reading, but adult fingers and hands are used for most things in life, not just computing devices and phones with keyboards sized for baby chipmunks.
I’ll be watching you
Quickly now, while I (possibly) have your attention. Don’t move a muscle. Is your neck tense? Are you unconsciously lifting your shoulders up? How long since you stopped staring at the screen? How bright is your screen? Are you slumping (c’mon now, ‘fess up) and inviting sciatica problems? Do you have to turn your hands at an angle relative to your wrist in order to type? Uh-oh. That’s a bad one. Your hands, wrists, and forearms should be one straight line while keyboarding. Future you is begging you to change your ways. Don’t let your #ThrowbackThursday in 2020 say, “Here’s a photo from when I used to be able to do so many wonderful things that I can’t do now.” And, whatever you do, don’t try for even a nanosecond to push through the pain, or the next thing you know, you’ll be an unpaid extra in The Expendables 7.",2014,Carolyn Wood,carolynwood,2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/,business
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 changed the face of the internet over the past fifteen years.
Simply put, Vagrant makes it really easy to work with virtual machines. According to the Vagrant docs:
If you’re a designer, Vagrant will automatically set everything up that is required for that web app in order for you to focus on doing what you do best: design. Once a developer configures Vagrant, you don’t need to worry about how to get that app running ever again. No more bothering other developers to help you fix your environment so you can test designs. Just check out the code, vagrant up, and start designing.
While I’m not sure I agree with the implication that all designers would get others to do the configuring, I think you’ll agree that the “Just check out the code… and start designing” premise is very compelling.
You don’t need Vagrant to develop your web applications on virtual machines. All you need is a virtualisation software package, something like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox, and some code. Download the half-gigabyte operating system image that you want and install it. Then download and configure the stack you’ll be working with: let’s say Apache, MySQL, PHP. Then install some libraries, CuRL and ImageMagick maybe, and finally configure the ability to easily copy files from your machine to the new virtual one, something like Samba, or install an FTP server. Once this is all done, copy the code over, import the database, configure Apache’s virtual host, restart and cross your fingers.
If you’re a bit weird like me then the above is pretty easy to do and secretly quite fun. Indeed, the amount of traffic to one of my more popular blog posts proves that a lot of people have been building themselves development servers from scratch for some time (or at least trying to anyway), whether that’s on virtual or physical hardware.
Or you could use Vagrant. It allows you, or someone else, to specify in plain text how the machine’s virtual hardware should be configured and what should be installed on it. It also makes it insanely easy to get the code on the server. You check out your project, type vagrant up and start work.
Why?
It’s worth labouring the point that Vagrant makes it really easy; I mean look-no-tangle-of-wires-or-using-vim-and-loads-of-annoying-command-line-stuff easy to run a development environment.
That’s all well and good, I hear you say, but there’s a steep learning curve, an overhead to switch. You’re busy and this all sounds great but you need to get on; you’ve got a career to build or a business to run and you don’t have time to learn new stuff right now.
In short, what’s the business case?
The business case involves saved time, a very low barrier to entry and the ability to give the exact same environment to somebody else.
Getting your first development virtual machine running will take minutes, not counting download time. Seriously, use pre-built Vagrant files and provisioners (we’ll touch on this below) and you can start developing immediately.
Once you’ve finished developing you can check in your changes, ask a colleague or freelancer to check them out, and then they run the code on the exact same machine – even if they are on the other side of the world and regardless of whether they are on Windows, Linux or Apple OS X.
The configuration to build the machine isn’t a huge binary disk image that’ll take ages to download from Git; it’s two small text files that can be version controlled too, so you can see any changes made to the config and roll back if needed.
No more ‘It works for me’ reports; no ‘Oh, I was using PHP 5.3.3, not PHP 5.3.11’ – you’re both working on exact same copies of the development environment. With a tested and verified provisioning file you’ll have the confidence that when you brief your next freelancer in to your team there won’t be that painful to and fro of getting the system up and running, where you’re on a Skype call and they are uttering the immortal words, ‘It still doesn’t work’. You know it works because you can run it too.
This portability becomes even more important when you’re working on larger sites and systems. Need a load balancer? Multiple front-end servers and a clustered database back-end? No problem. Add each server into the same Vagrant file and a single command will build all of them. As you’ll know if you work on larger, business critical systems, keeping the operating systems in sync is a real problem: one server with a slightly different library causing sporadic and hard to trace issues is a genuine time black hole. Well, the good news is that you can use the same provisioning files to keep test and production machines in sync using your current build workflow.
Let’s also not forget the most simple use case: a single developer with multiple websites running on a single machine. If that’s you and you switch to using Vagrant-managed virtual machines then the next time you upgrade your operating system or do a fresh install there’s no chance that things will all stop working. The server config is all tucked away in version control with your code. Just pull it down and carry on coding.
OK, got it. Show me already
If you want to try this out you’ll need to install the latest VirtualBox and Vagrant for your platform. If you already have VMware Workstation or another supported virtualisation package installed you can use that instead but you may need to tweak my Vagrant file below. Depending on your operating system, a reboot might also be wise.
Note: the commands below were executed on my MacBook, but should also work on Windows and Linux. If you’re using Windows make sure to run the command prompt as Administrator or it’ll fall over when trying to update the hosts file.
As a quick sanity check let’s just make sure that we have the vagrant command in our path, so fire up a terminal and check the version number:
$ vagrant -v
Vagrant 1.6.5
We’ve one final thing to install and that’s the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin. Once again, in your terminal:
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
Installing the 'vagrant-hostsupdater' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-hostsupdater (0.0.11)'!
Hopefully that wasn’t too painful for you.
There are two things that you need to manage a virtual machine with Vagrant:
a Vagrant file: this tells Vagrant what hardware to spin up
a provisioning file: this tells Vagrant what to do on the machine
To save you copying and pasting I’ve supplied you with a simple example (ZIP) containing both of these. Unzip it somewhere sensible and in your terminal make sure you are inside the Vagrant folder:
$ cd where/you/placed/it/24ways
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 11055 9 Nov 09:16 bealers-24ways.md
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 118152 9 Nov 10:08 it-works.png
drwxr-xr-x 5 bealers staff 170 8 Nov 22:54 vagrant
$ cd vagrant/
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 1661 8 Nov 21:50 Vagrantfile
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 bealers staff 3841 9 Nov 08:00 provision.sh
The Vagrant file tells Vagrant how to configure the virtual hardware of your development machine. Skipping over some of the finer details, here’s what’s in that Vagrant file:
www.vm.box = ""ubuntu/trusty64""
Use Ubuntu 14.04 for the VM’s OS. Vagrant will only download this once. If another project uses the same OS, Vagrant will use a cached version.
www.vm.hostname = ""bealers-24ways.dev""
Set the machine’s hostname. If, like us, you’re using the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin, this will also get added to your hosts file, pointing to the virtual machine’s IP address.
www.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
vb.customize [""modifyvm"", :id, ""--cpus"", ""2"" ]
end
Here’s an example of configuring the virtual machine’s hardware on the fly. In this case we want two virtual processors.
Note: this is specific for the VirtualBox provider, but you could also have a section for VMware or other supported virtualisation software.
www.vm.network ""private_network"", ip: ""192.168.13.37""
This specifies that we want a private networking link between your computer and the virtual machine. It’s probably best to use a reserved private subnet like 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8
www.vm.synced_folder ""../"", ""/var/www/24ways"",
owner: ""www-data"", group: ""www-data""
A particularly handy bit of Vagrant magic. This maps your local 24ways parent folder to /var/www/24ways on the virtual machine. This means the virtual machine already has direct access to your code and so do you. There’s no messy copying or synchronisation – just edit your files and immediately run them on the server.
www.vm.provision :shell, :path => ""provision.sh""
This is where we specify the provisioner, the script that will be executed on the machine.
If you open up the provisioner you’ll see it’s a bash script that does things like:
install Apache, PHP, MySQL and related libraries
configure the libraries: set permissions, enable logging
create a database and grant some access rights
set up some code for us to develop on; in this case, fire up a vanilla WordPress installation
To get this all up and running you simply need to run Vagrant from within the vagrant folder:
$ vagrant up
You should now get a Matrix-like stream of stuff shooting up the screen. If this is the first time Vagrant has used this particular operating system image – remember we’ve specified the latest version of Ubuntu – it’ll download the disc image and cache it for future reuse. Then all the packages are downloaded and installed and finally all our configuration steps occur incluing the download and configuration of WordPress.
Halfway through proceedings it’s likely that the process will halt at a prompt something like this:
==> www: adding to (/etc/hosts) : 192.168.13.37 bealers-24ways.dev # VAGRANT: 2dbfbced1b1e79d2a0942728a0a57ece (www) / 899bd80d-4251-4f6f-91a0-d30f2d9918cc
Password:
You need to enter your password to give vagrant sudo rights to add the IP address and hostname mapping to your local hosts file.
Once finished, fire up your browser and go to http://bealers-24ways.dev. You should see a default WordPress installation. The username for wp-admin is admin and the password is 24ways.
If you take a look at your local filesystem the 24ways folder should now look like:
$ cd ../
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 13074 9 Nov 10:14 bealers-24ways.md
drwxr-xr-x 21 bealers staff 714 9 Nov 10:06 code
drwxr-xr-x 3 bealers staff 102 9 Nov 10:06 etc
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 118152 9 Nov 10:08 it-works.png
drwxr-xr-x 5 bealers staff 170 9 Nov 10:03 vagrant
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bealers staff 1315849 9 Nov 10:06 wp-cli
$ cd vagrant/
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bealers staff 1661 9 Nov 09:41 Vagrantfile
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 bealers staff 3836 9 Nov 10:06 provision.sh
The code folder contains all the WordPress files. You can edit these directly and refresh that page to see your changes instantly.
Staying in the vagrant folder, we’ll now SSH to the machine and have a quick poke around.
$ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-39-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
System information as of Sun Nov 9 10:03:38 UTC 2014
System load: 1.35 Processes: 102
Usage of /: 2.7% of 39.34GB Users logged in: 0
Memory usage: 16% IP address for eth0: 10.0.2.15
Swap usage: 0%
Graph this data and manage this system at:
https://landscape.canonical.com/
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.
vagrant@bealers-24ways:~$
You’re now logged in as the Vagrant user; if you want to become root this is easy:
vagrant@bealers-24ways:~$ sudo su -
root@bealers-24ways:~#
Or you could become the webserver user, which is a good idea if you’re editing the web files directly on the server:
root@bealers-24ways:~# su - www-data
www-data@bealers-24ways:~$
www-data’s home directory is /var/www so we should be able to see our magically mapped files:
www-data@bealers-24ways:~$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 306 Nov 9 10:09 24ways
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 9 10:05 html
www-data@bealers-24ways:~$ cd 24ways/
www-data@bealers-24ways:~/24ways$ ls -l
total 1420
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 13682 Nov 9 10:19 bealers-24ways.md
drwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 714 Nov 9 10:06 code
drwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 102 Nov 9 10:06 etc
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 118152 Nov 9 10:08 it-works.png
drwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 170 Nov 9 10:03 vagrant
-rwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 1315849 Nov 9 10:06 wp-cli
We can also see some of our bespoke configurations:
www-data@bealers-24ways:~/24ways$ cat /etc/php5/mods-available/siftware.ini
upload_max_filesize = 15M
log_errors = On
display_errors = On
display_startup_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/apache2/php.log
memory_limit = 1024M
date.timezone = Europe/London
www-data@bealers-24ways:~/24ways$ ls -l /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 43 Nov 9 10:06 bealers-24ways.dev.conf -> /var/www/24ways/etc/bealers-24ways.dev.conf
If you want to leave the server, simply type Ctrl+D a few times and you’ll be back where you started.
www-data@bealers-24ways:~/24ways$ logout
root@bealers-24ways:~# logout
vagrant@bealers-24ways:~$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
$
You can now halt the machine:
$ vagrant halt
==> www: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM...
==> www: Removing hosts
Bonus level
The example I’ve provided isn’t very realistic. In the real world I’d expect the Vagrant file and provisioner to be included with the project and for it not to create the directory structure, which should already exist in your project. The same goes for the Apache VirtualHost file. You’ll also probably have a default SQL script to populate the database.
As you work with Vagrant you might start to find bash provisioning to be quite limiting, especially if you are working on larger projects which use more than one server. In that case I would suggest you take a look at Ansible, Puppet or Chef. We use Ansible because we like YAML but they all do the same sort of thing. The main benefit is being able to use the same Vagrant provisioning scripts to also provision test, staging and production environments using your build workflows.
Having to supply a password so the hosts file can be updated gets annoying very quicky so you can give Vagrant sudo rights:
$ sudo visudo
Add these lines to the bottom (Shift+G then i then Ctrl+V then Esc then :wq)
Cmnd_Alias VAGRANT_HOSTS_ADD = /bin/sh -c echo ""*"" >> /etc/hosts
Cmnd_Alias VAGRANT_HOSTS_REMOVE = /usr/bin/sed -i -e /*/ d /etc/hosts
%staff ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: VAGRANT_HOSTS_ADD, VAGRANT_HOSTS_REMOVE
Vagrant caches the operating system images that you download but it’ll download the installed software packages every time. You can get around this by using a plugin like vagrant-cachier or, if you’re really keen, maintain local Apt repositories (or whatever the equivalent is for your server architecture).
At some point you might start getting a large number of virtual machines running on your poor hardware all at the same time, especially if you’re switching between projects a lot and each of those projects use lots of servers. We’re just getting to that stage now, so are considering a medium-term move to a containerised option like Docker, which seems to be maturing now.
If you are keen not to use any command line tools whatsoever and you’re on OS X then you could check out Vagrant Manager as it looks quite shiny.
Finally, there are a huge amount of resources to give you pre-built Vagrant machines from the likes of VVV for Wordpress, something similar for Perch, PuPHPet for generating various configurations, and a long list of pre-built operating systems at VagrantBox.es.
Wrapping up
Hopefully you can now see why it might be worthwhile to add Vagrant to your development workflow. Whether you’re an agency drafting in freelancers or a one-person band running lots of sites on your laptop using MAMP or something similar.
Vagrant makes it easy to launch exact copies of the same machine in a repeatable and version controlled way. The learning curve isn’t too steep and, once configured, you can forget about it and focus on getting your work done.",2014,Darren Beale,darrenbeale,2014-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/what-is-vagrant-and-why-should-i-care/,process
47,Developing Robust Deployment Procedures,"Once you have developed your site, how do you make it live on your web hosting? For many years the answer was to log on to your server and upload the files via FTP. Over time most hosts and FTP clients began to support SFTP, ensuring your files were transmitted over a secure connection. The process of deploying a site however remained the same.
There are issues with deploying a site in this way. You are essentially transferring files one by one to the server without any real management of that transfer. If the transfer fails for some reason, you may end up with a site that is only half updated. It can then be really difficult to work out what hasn’t been replaced or added, especially where you are updating an existing site. If you are updating some third-party software your update may include files that should be removed, but that may not be obvious to you and you risk leaving outdated files littering your file system. Updating using (S)FTP is a fragile process that leaves you open to problems caused by both connectivity and human error. Is there a better way to do this?
You’ll be glad to know that there is. A modern professional deployment workflow should have you moving away from fragile manual file transfers to deployments linked to code committed into source control.
The benefits of good practice
You may never have experienced any major issues while uploading files over FTP, and good FTP clients can help. However, there are other benefits to moving to modern deployment practices.
No surprises when you launch
If you are deploying in the way I suggest in this article you should have no surprises when you launch because the code you committed from your local environment should be the same code you deploy – and to staging if you have a staging server. A missing vital file won’t cause things to start throwing errors on updating the live site.
Being able to work collaboratively
Source control and good deployment practice makes working with your clients and other developers easy. Deploying first to a staging server means you can show your client updates and then push them live. If you subcontract some part of the work, you can give your subcontractor the ability to deploy to staging, leaving you with the final push to launch, once you know you are happy with the work.
Having a proper backup of site files with access to them from anywhere
The process I will outline requires the use of hosted, external source control. This gives you a backup of your latest commit and the ability to clone those files and start working on them from any machine, wherever you are.
Being able to jump back into a site quickly when the client wants a few changes
When doing client work it is common for some work to be handed over, then several months might go by without you needing to update the site. If you don’t have a good process in place, just getting back to work on it may take several hours for what could be only a few hours of work in itself. A solid method for getting your local copy up to date and deploying your changes live can cut that set-up time down to a few minutes.
The tool chain
In the rest of this article I assume that your current practice is to deploy your files over (S)FTP, using an FTP client. You would like to move to a more robust method of deployment, but without blowing apart your workflow and spending all Christmas trying to put it back together again. Therefore I’m selecting the most straightforward tools to get you from A to B.
Source control
Perhaps you already use some kind of source control for your sites. Today that is likely to be Git but you might also use Subversion or Mercurial. If you are not using any source control at all then I would suggest you choose Git, and that is what I will be working with in this article.
When you work with Git, you always have a local repository. This is where your changes are committed. You also have the option to push those changes to a remote repository; for example, GitHub. You may well have come across GitHub as somewhere you can go to download open source code. However, you can also set up private repositories for sites whose code you don’t want to make publicly accessible.
A hosted Git repository gives you somewhere to push your commits to and deploy from, so it’s a crucial part of our tool chain.
A deployment service
Once you have your files pushed to a remote repository, you then need a way to deploy them to your staging environment and live server. This is the job of a deployment service.
This service will connect securely to your hosting, and either automatically (or on the click of a button) transfer files from your Git commit to the hosting server. If files need removing, the service should also do this too, so you can be absolutely sure that your various environments are the same.
Tools to choose from
What follows are not exhaustive lists, but any of these should allow you to deploy your sites without FTP.
Hosted Git repositories
GitHub
Beanstalk
Bitbucket
Standalone deployment tools
Deploy
dploy.io
FTPloy
I’ve listed Beanstalk as a hosted Git repository, though it also includes a bundled deployment tool. Dploy.io is a standalone version of that tool just for deployment. In this tutorial I have chosen two separate services to show how everything fits together, and because you may already be using source control. If you are setting up all of this for the first time then using Beanstalk saves having two accounts – and I can personally recommend them.
Putting it all together
The steps we are going to work through are:
Getting your local site into a local Git repository
Pushing the files to a hosted repository
Connecting a deployment tool to your web hosting
Setting up a deployment
Get your local site into a local Git repository
Download and install Git for your operating system.
Open up a Terminal window and tell Git your name using the following command (use the name you will set up on your hosted repository).
> git config --global user.name ""YOUR NAME""
Use the next command to give Git your email address. This should be the address that you will use to sign up for your remote repository.
> git config --global user.email ""YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS""
Staying in the command line, change to the directory where you keep your site files. If your files are in /Users/rachel/Sites/mynicewebite you would type:
> cd /Users/rachel/Sites/mynicewebsite
The next command tells Git that we want to create a new Git repository here.
> git init
We then add our files:
> git add .
Then commit the files:
> git commit -m “Adding initial files”
The bit in quotes after -m is a message describing what you are doing with this commit. It’s important to add something useful here to remind yourself later why you made the changes included in the commit.
Your local files are now in a Git repository! However, everything should be just the same as before in terms of working on the files or viewing them in a local web server. The only difference is that you can add and commit changes to this local repository.
Want to know more about Git? There are some excellent resources in a range of formats here.
Setting up a hosted Git repository
I’m going to use Atlassian Bitbucket for my first example as they offer a free hosted and private repository.
Create an account on Bitbucket. Then create a new empty repository and give it a name that will identify the repository easily.
Click Getting Started and under Command Line select “I have an existing project”. This will give you a set of instructions to run on the command line. The first instruction is just to change into your working directory as we did before. We then add a remote repository, and run two commands to push everything up to Bitbucket.
cd /path/to/my/repo
git remote add origin https://myuser@bitbucket.org/myname/24ways-tutorial.git
git push -u origin --all
git push -u origin --tags
When you run the push command you will be asked for the password that you set for Bitbucket. Having entered that, you should be able to view the files of your site on Bitbucket by selecting the navigation option Source in the sidebar.
You will also be able to see commits. When we initially committed our files locally we added the message “Adding initial files”. If you select Commits from the sidebar you’ll see we have one commit, with the message we set locally. You can imagine how useful this becomes when you can look back and see why you made certain changes to a project that perhaps you haven’t worked on for six months.
Before working on your site locally you should run:
> git pull
in your working directory to make sure you have all of the most up-to-date files. This is especially important if someone else might work on them, or you just use multiple machines.
You then make your changes and add any changed or modified files, for example:
> git add index.php
Commit the change locally:
> git commit -m “updated the homepage”
Then push it to Bitbucket:
> git push origin master
If you want to work on your files on a different computer you clone them using the following command:
> git clone https://myuser@bitbucket.org/myname/24ways-tutorial.git
You then have a copy of your files that is already a Git repository with the Bitbucket repository set up as a remote, so you are all ready to start work.
Connecting a deployment tool to your repository and web hosting
The next step is deploying files. I have chosen to use a deployment tool called Deploy as it has support for Bitbucket. It does have a monthly charge – but offers a free account for open source projects.
Sign up for your account then log in and create your first project. Select Create an empty project. Under Configure Repository Details choose Bitbucket and enter your username and password.
If Deploy can connect, it will show you your list of projects. Select the one you want.
The next screen is Add New Server and here you need to configure the server that you want to deploy to. You might set up more than one server per project. In an ideal world you would deploy to a staging server for your client preview changes and then deploy once everything is signed off. For now I’ll assume you just want to set up your live site.
Give the server a name; I usually use Production for the live web server. Then choose the protocol to connect with. Unless your host really does not support SFTP (which is pretty rare) I would choose that instead of FTP.
You now add the same details your host gave you to log in with your SFTP client, including the username and password. The Path on server should be where your files are on the server. When you log in with an SFTP client and you get put in the directory above public_html then you should just be able to add public_html here.
Once your server is configured you can deploy. Click Deploy now and choose the server you just set up. Then choose the last commit (which will probably be selected for you) and click Preview deployment. You will then get a preview of which files will change if you run the deployment: the files that will be added and any that will be removed. At the very top of that screen you should see the commit message you entered right back when you initially committed your files locally.
If all looks good, run the deployment.
You have taken the first steps to a more consistent and robust way of deploying your websites. It might seem like quite a few steps at first, but you will very soon come to realise how much easier deploying a live site is through this process.
Your new procedure step by step
Edit your files locally as before, testing them through a web server on your own computer.
Commit your changes to your local Git repository.
Push changes to the remote repository.
Log into the deployment service.
Hit the Deploy now button.
Preview the changes.
Run the deployment and then check your live site.
Taking it further
I have tried to keep things simple in this article because so often, once you start to improve processes, it is easy to get bogged down in all the possible complexities. If you move from deploying with an FTP client to working in the way I have outlined above, you’ve taken a great step forward in creating more robust processes. You can continue to improve your procedures from this point.
Staging servers for client preview
When we added our server we could have added an additional server to use as a staging server for clients to preview their site on. This is a great use of a cheap VPS server, for example. You can set each client up with a subdomain – clientname.yourcompany.com – and this becomes the place where they can view changes before you deploy them.
In that case you might deploy to the staging server, let the client check it out and then go back and deploy the same commit to the live server.
Using Git branches
As you become more familiar with using Git, and especially if you start working with other people, you might need to start developing using branches. You can then have a staging branch that deploys to staging and a production branch that is always a snapshot of what has been pushed to production. This guide from Beanstalk explains how this works.
Automatic deployment to staging
I wouldn’t suggest doing automatic deployment to the live site. It’s worth having someone on hand hitting the button and checking that everything worked nicely. If you have configured a staging server, however, you can set it up to deploy the changes each time a commit is pushed to it.
If you use Bitbucket and Deploy you would create a deployment hook on Bitbucket to post to a URL on Deploy when a push happens to deploy the code. This can save you a few steps when you are just testing out changes. Even if you have made lots of changes to the staging deployment, the commit that you push live will include them all, so you can do that manually once you are happy with how things look in staging.
Further Reading
The tutorials from Git Client Tower, already mentioned in this article, are a great place to start if you are new to Git.
A presentation from Liam Dempsey showing how to use the GitHub App to connect to Bitbucket
Try Git from Code School
The Git Workbook a self study guide to Git from Lorna Mitchell
Get set up for the new year
I love to start the New Year with a clean slate and improved processes. If you are still wrangling files with FTP then this is one thing you could tick off your list to save you time and energy in 2015. Post to the comments if you have suggestions of tools or ideas for ways to enhance this type of set-up for those who have already taken the first steps.",2014,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/developing-robust-deployment-procedures/,process
48,A Holiday Wish,"A friend and I were talking the other day about why clients spend more on toilet cleaning than design, and how the industry has changed since the mid-1990s, when we got our starts. Early in his career, my friend wrote a fine CSS book, but for years he has called himself a UX designer. And our conversation got me thinking about how I reacted to that title back when I first started hearing it.
“Just what this business needs,” I said to myself, “another phony expert.”
Okay, so I was wrong about UX, but my touchiness was not altogether unfounded. In the beginning, our industry was divided between freelance jack-of-all-trade punks, who designed and built and coded and hosted and Photoshopped and even wrote the copy when the client couldn’t come up with any, and snot-slick dot-com mega-agencies that blew up like Alice and handed out titles like impoverished nobles in the years between the world wars.
I was the former kind of designer, a guy who, having failed or just coasted along at a cluster of other careers, had suddenly, out of nowhere, blossomed into a web designer—an immensely curious designer slash coder slash writer with a near-insatiable lust to shave just one more byte from every image. We had modems back then, and I dreamed in sixteen colors. My source code was as pretty as my layouts (arguably prettier) and I hoovered up facts and opinions from newsgroups and bulletin boards as fast as any loudmouth geek could throw them. It was a beautiful life.
But soon, too soon, the professional digital agencies arose, buying loft buildings downtown, jacking in at T1 speeds, charging a hundred times what I did, and communicating with their clients in person, in large artfully bedecked rooms, wearing hand-tailored Barney’s suits and bringing back the big city bullshit I thought I’d left behind when I quit advertising to become a web designer.
Just like the big bad ad agencies of my early career, the new digital agencies stocked every meeting with a totem pole worth of ranks and titles. If the client brought five upper middle managers to the meeting, the agency did likewise. If fifteen stakeholders got to ask for a bigger logo, fifteen agency personnel showed up to take notes on the percentage of enlargement required.
But my biggest gripe was with the titles.
The bigger and more expensive the agency, the lousier it ran with newly invented titles. Nobody was a designer any more. Oh, no. Designer, apparently, wasn’t good enough. Designer was not what you called someone you threw that much money at.
Instead of designers, there were user interaction leads and consulting middleware integrators and bilabial experience park rangers and you name it. At an AIGA Miami event where I was asked to speak in the 1990s, I once watched the executive creative director of the biggest dot-com agency of the day make a presentation where he spent half his time bragging that the agency had recently shaved down the number of titles for people who basically did design stuff from forty-six to just twenty-three—he presented this as though it were an Einsteinian coup—and the other half of his time showing a film about the agency’s newly opened branch in Oslo. The Oslo footage was shot in December. I kept wondering which designer in the audience who lived in the constant breezy balminess of Miami they hoped to entice to move to dark, wintry Norway. But I digress.
Shortly after I viewed this presentation, the dot-com world imploded, brought about largely by the euphoric excess of the agencies and their clients. But people still needed websites, and my practice flourished—to the point where, in 1999, I made the terrifying transition from guy in his underwear working freelance out of his apartment to head of a fledgling design studio. (Note: you never stop working on that change.)
I had heard about experience design in the 1990s, but assumed it was a gig for people who only knew one font.
But sometime around 2004 or 2005, among my freelance and small-studio colleagues, like a hobbit in the Shire, I began hearing whispers in the trees of a new evil stirring. The fires of Mordor were burning. Web designers were turning in their HTML editing tools and calling themselves UXers.
I wasn’t sure if they pronounced it “uck-sir,” or “you-ex-er,” but I trusted their claims to authenticity about as far as I trusted the actors in a Doctor Pepper commercial when they claimed to be Peppers. I’m an UXer, you’re an UXer, wouldn’t you like to be an UXer too? No thanks, said I. I still make things. With my hands.
Such was my thinking. I may have earned an MFA at the end of some long-past period of soul confusion, but I have working-class roots and am profoundly suspicious of, well, everything, but especially of anything that smacks of pretense. I got exporting GIFs. I didn’t get how white papers and bullet points helped anybody do anything.
I was wrong. And gradually I came to know I was wrong. And before other members of my tribe embraced UX, and research, and content strategy, and the other airier consultant services, I was on board. It helped that my wife of the time was a librarian from Michigan, so I’d already bought into the cult of information architecture. And if I wasn’t exactly the seer who first understood how borderline academic practices related to UX could become as important to our medium and industry as our craft skills, at least I was down a lot faster than Judd Apatow got with feminism. But I digress.
I love the web and all the people in it. Today I understand design as a strategic practice above all. The promise of the web, to make all knowledge accessible to all people, won’t be won by HTML5, WCAG 2, and responsive web design alone.
We are all designers. You may call yourself a front-end developer, but if you spend hours shaving half-seconds off an interaction, that’s user experience and you, my friend, are a designer. If the client asks, “Can you migrate all my old content to the new CMS?” and you answer, “Of course we can, but should we?”, you are a designer. Even our users are designers. Think about it.
Once again, as in the dim dumb dot-com past, we seem to be divided by our titles. But, O, my friends, our varied titles are only differing facets of the same bright gem. Sisters, brothers, we are all designers. Love on! Love on!
And may all your web pages, cards, clusters, clumps, asides, articles, and relational databases be bright.",2014,Jeffrey Zeldman,jeffreyzeldman,2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/a-holiday-wish/,ux
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:
astigmatism
colour blindness
akinetopsia (motion blindness)
scotopic visual sensitivity (visual stress related to light)
visual agnosia (impaired recognition or identification of objects)
While we might have medical and government-recognised definitions that tell us what makes a disability, day-to-day life is not so straightforward. People experience varying degrees of different conditions, and often one or more conditions at a time, creating a false divide when you view disability in terms of us and them.
Impairments aren’t always permanent
As we age, we’re more likely to experience different levels of visual, auditory, motor and cognitive impairments. We might have an accident or illness that affects us temporarily. We might struggle more earlier or later in the day. There are so many little physiological factors that affect the way people interact with the web that we can’t afford to make any assumptions based on our own limited experiences.
Impairments might be somewhere between the user and the website
There are also impairments that aren’t directly related to the user. Environmental factors have a huge effect on the way people interact with the web. These could be:
Low bandwidth, or intermittent internet connection
Bright light, rain, or other weather-based conditions
Noisy environments, or a location where the user doesn’t want to disturb their neighbours with sound
Browsing with mobile devices, games consoles and other non-desktop devices
Browsing with legacy browsers or operating systems
Such environmental factors show that it’s not just those with physical impairments who benefit from more accessible websites. We started designing responsive websites so we could be more future-friendly, and with a shared goal of better optimised experiences, accessibility should be at the core of responsive web design.
Excuse 2: “We don’t want to affect the experience for the majority of our users”
Accessibility will improve your site for all your users — the usability case
On a basic level, the different disability groups, as shown in the inclusion case, equate to simple usability goals:
Visual – make it easy to read
Auditory – make it easy to hear
Motor – make it easy to interact
Cognitive – make it easy to understand and focus
Taking care to ensure good usability in these areas will also have an impact on accessibility. Unless your site is catering specifically to a particular disability, where extreme optimisation is most beneficial, taking care to design with accessibility in mind will rarely negatively affect the experience of your wider audience.
Excuse 3: “We don’t have the budget for accessibility”
Accessibility will make you money — the business case
By reducing your audience through ignoring accessibility, you’re potentially excluding the income from those users. Designing with accessibility in mind from the beginning of a project makes it easier to make small inexpensive optimisations as part of the design and development process, rather than bolting on costly updates to increase your potential audience later on.
The following are excerpts from a white paper about companies that increased the accessibility of their websites to comply with government regulation.
Improvements in accessibility doubled Legal and General’s life insurance sales online.
Improvements in accessibility increased Tesco’s grocery home delivery sales by £13 million in 2005… To their surprise they found that many normal visitors preferred the ease of navigation and improved simplicity of the [parallel] accessible site and switched to use it. Tesco have replaced their ‘normal’ site with their accessible version and expect a further increase in revenues.
Improvements in accessibility increased Virgin.net sales by 68%.
Statistics all from WSI white paper: Improve your website’s usability and accessibility to increase sales (PDF).
Excuse 4: “Accessible websites are ugly”
Accessibility won’t stop your site from being beautiful — the beauty case
Many people use ugly accessible websites as proof that all accessible websites are ugly. This just isn’t the case. I’ve compiled some examples of beautiful and accessible websites with screenshots of how they look through the Color Oracle simulator and how they perform when run through Webaim’s Wave accessibility checker tool.
While automated tools are no substitute for real users, they can help you learn more about good practices, and give you guidance on where your site needs improvements to make it more accessible.
Amazon.co.uk
It may not be a decorated beauty, but Amazon is often first in functional design. It’s a huge website with a lot of interactive content, but it generates just five errors on the Wave test, and is easy to read under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of Amazon website
Screenshot of Amazon’s Wave results – five errors
Screenshot of Amazon through a Color Oracle filter
24 ways
When Tim Van Damme redesigned 24 ways back in 2007, it was a striking and unusual design that showed what could be achieved with CSS and some imagination. Despite the complexity of the design, it gets an outstanding zero errors on the Wave test, and is still readable under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of pre-2013 24 ways website design
Screenshot of 24 ways Wave results – zero errors
Screenshot of 24ways through a Color Oracle filter
Opera’s Shiny Demos
Demos and prototypes are notorious for ignoring accessibility, but Opera’s Shiny Demos site shows how exploring new technologies doesn’t have to exclude anyone. It only gets one error on the Wave test, and looks fine under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos website
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos Wave results – 1 error
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos through a Color Oracle filter
SoundCloud
When a site is more app-like, relying on more interaction from the user, accessibility can be more challenging. However, SoundCloud only gets one error on the Wave test, and the colour contrast holds up well under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of SoundCloud website
Screenshot of SoundCloud’s Wave results – one error
Screenshot of SoundCloud through a Color Oracle filter
Education and balance
As with most web design, doing accessibility well is about combining your knowledge of accessibility with your project’s context to create a balance that serves your users’ needs. Your types of content and interactions will dictate one set of constraints. Your users’ needs and goals will dictate another. In broad terms, web design as a practice is finding the equilibrium between these constraints.
And then there’s just caring. The web as a platform is open, affordable and available to many. Accessibility is our way to ensure that nobody gets shut out.",2013,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/,design
3,Project Hubs: A Home Base for Design Projects,"SCENE: A design review meeting. Laptop screens. Coffee cups.
Project manager: Hey, did you get my email with the assets we’ll be discussing?
Client: I got an email from you, but it looks like there’s no attachment.
PM: Whoops! OK. I’m resending the files with the attachments. Check again?
Client: OK, I see them. It’s homepage_v3_brian-edits_FINAL_for-review.pdf, right?
PM: Yeah, that’s the one.
Client: OK, hang on, Bill’s going to print them out. (3-minute pause. Small talk ensues.)
Client: Alright, Bill’s back. We’re good to start.
Brian: Oh, actually those homepage edits we talked about last time are in the homepage_v4_brian_FINAL_v2.pdf document that I posted to Basecamp earlier today.
Client: Oh, OK. What message thread was that in?
Brian: Uh, I’m pretty sure it’s in “Homepage Edits and Holiday Schedule.”
Client: Alright, I see them. Bill’s going back to the printer. Hang on a sec…
This is only a slightly exaggerated version of my experience in design review meetings.
The design project dance is a sloppy one. It involves a slew of email attachments, PDFs, PSDs, revisions, GitHub repos, staging environments, and more. And while tools like Basecamp can help manage all these moving parts, it can still be incredibly challenging to extract only the important bits, juggle deliverables, and see how your project is progressing.
Enter project hubs.
Project hubs
A project hub consolidates all the key design and development materials onto a single webpage presented in reverse chronological order. The timeline lives online (either publicly available or password protected), so that everyone involved in the team has easy access to it.
A project hub.
I was introduced to project hubs after seeing Dan Mall’s open redesign of Reading Is Fundamental. Thankfully, I had a chance to work with Dan on two projects where I got to see firsthand how beneficial a project hub can be. Here’s what makes a project hub great:
Serves as a centralized home base for the project
Trains clients and teams to decide in the browser
Easily and visually view project’s progress
Provides an archive for project artifacts
A home base
Your clients and colleagues can expect to get the latest and greatest updates to your project when visiting the project hub, the same way you’d expect to get the latest information on a requested topic when you visit a Wikipedia page. That’s the beauty of URIs that don’t change.
Creating a project hub reduces a ton of email volley nonsense, and eliminates the need to produce files and directories with staggeringly ridiculous names like design/12.13.13/team/brian/for_review/_FINAL/styletile_121313_brian-edits-final_v2_FINAL.pdf. The team can simply visit the project hub’s URL and click the link to whatever artifact they need. Need to make an update? Simply update the link on the project hub. No more email tango and silly file names.
Deciding in the browser
Let’s change the phrase “designing in the browser” to “deciding in the browser.”
Dan Mall
We make websites, but all too often we find ourselves looking at web design artifacts in abstractions. We email PDFs to each other, glance at mockup JPGs on our desktops, and of course kill trees in order to print out designs so that we can scribble in the margins. All of these practices subtly take everyone further and further away from the design’s eventual final resting place: the browser.
Because a project hub is just a simple webpage, reviewing designs is as easy as clicking some links, which keep your clients and teams in the browser.
You can keep people in the browser with yet another clever trick from the wily Dan Mall: instead of sending clients PDFs or JPGs, he created a simple webpage and tossed his static visuals into the template (you can view an example here). This forces clients to review web design work in the browser rather than launching a PDF viewer or Preview.
Now this all might sound trivial to you (“Of course my client knows that we’re designing a website!”), but keeping the design artifacts in the browser subconsciously helps remind everyone of the medium for which you’re designing, which helps everyone focus on the right aspects of the design and have the right conversations.
Progress over time
When you’re in the trenches, it’s often hard to visualize how a project is progressing. Tools like Basecamp include discussions, files, to-dos, and more, which are all great tools but also make things a bit noisy. Project hubs provide you and your clients a quick and easy way to see at a glance how things are coming along. Teams can rest assured they’re viewing the most current versions of designs, and managers can share progress with stakeholders simply by providing a link to the project hub.
Over time, a project hub becomes an easily accessible archive of all the design decisions, which makes it easy to compare and contrast different versions of designs and prototypes.
Setting up a project hub
Setting up your own project hub is pretty simple. Simply create a webpage with some basic styles and branding. I’ve created a project hub template that’s available on GitHub if you want a jump-start.
Publish the webpage to a URL somewhere that makes sense (we’ve found that a subdomain of your site works quite well) and share it with everyone involved in the project. Bookmark it. Let everyone know that this is where design updates will be shared, and that they can always come back to the project hub to track the project’s progress.
When it comes time to share new updates, simply add a new node to the timeline and republish the webpage. Simple FTPing works just fine, but it might make sense to keep track of changes using version control. Our project hub for our open redesign of the Pittsburgh Food Bank is managed on GitHub, which means that I can make edits to the hub right from GitHub. Thanks to the magical wizardry of webhooks, I can automatically deploy the project hub so that everything stays in sync. That’s the fancy-pants way to do it, and is certainly not a requirement. As long as you’re able to easily make edits and keep your project hub up to date, you’re good to go.
So that’s the hubbub
Project hubs can help tame the chaos of the design process by providing a home base for all key design and development materials. Keep the design artifacts in the browser and give clients and colleagues quick insight into your project’s progress.
Happy hubbing!",2013,Brad Frost,bradfrost,2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/project-hubs/,process
8,Coding Towards Accessibility,"“Can we make it AAA-compliant?” – does this question strike fear into your heart? Maybe for no other reason than because you will soon have to wade through the impenetrable WCAG documentation once again, to find out exactly what AAA-compliant means?
I’m not here to talk about that.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a comprehensive and peer-reviewed resource which we’re lucky to have at our fingertips. But they are also a pig to read, and they may have contributed to the sense of mystery and dread with which some developers associate the word accessibility.
This Christmas, I want to share with you some thoughts and some practical tips for building accessible interfaces which you can start using today, without having to do a ton of reading or changing your tools and workflow.
But first, let’s clear up a couple of misconceptions.
Dreary, flat experiences
I recently built a front-end framework for the Post Office. This was a great gig for a developer, but when I found out about my client’s stringent accessibility requirements I was concerned that I’d have to scale back what was quite a complex set of visual designs.
Sites like Jakob Neilsen’s old workhorse useit.com and even the pioneering GOV.UK may have to shoulder some of the blame for this. They put a premium on usability and accessibility over visual flourish. (Although, in fairness to Mr Neilsen, his new site nngroup.com is really quite a snazzy affair, comparatively.)
Of course, there are other reasons for these sites’ aesthetics — and it’s not because of the limitations of the form. You can make an accessible site look as glossy or as plain as you want it to look. It’s always our own ingenuity and attention to detail that are going to be the limiting factors.
Synecdoche
We must always guard against the tendency to assume that catering to screen readers means we have the whole accessibility ballgame covered.
There’s so much more to accessibility than assistive technology, as you know. And within the field of assistive technology there are plenty of other devices for us to consider.
Planning to accommodate all these users and devices can be daunting. When I first started working in this field I thought that the breadth of technology was prohibitive. I didn’t even know what a screen reader looked like. (I assumed they were big and heavy, perhaps like an old typewriter, and certainly they would be expensive and difficult to fathom.) This is nonsense, of course. Screen reader emulators are readily available as browser extensions and can be activated in seconds. Chromevox and Fangs are both excellent and you should download one or the other right now.
But the really good news is that you can emulate many other types of assistive technology without downloading a byte. And this is where we move from misconceptions into some (hopefully) useful advice.
The mouse trap
The simplest and most effective way to improve your abilities as a developer of accessible interfaces is to unplug your mouse.
Keyboard operation has its own WCAG chapter, because most users of assistive technology are navigating the web using only their keyboards. You can go some way towards putting yourself into their shoes so easily — just by ditching a peripheral.
Learning this was a lightbulb moment for me. When I build interfaces I am constantly flicking between code and the browser, testing or viewing the changes I have made. Now, instead of checking a new element once, I check it twice: once with my mouse and then again without.
Don’t just :hover
The reality is that when you first start doing this you can find your site becomes unusable straightaway. It’s easy to lose track of which element is in focus as you hit the tab key repeatedly.
One of the easiest changes you can make to your coding practice is to add :focus and :active pseudo-classes to every hover state that you write. I’m still amazed at how many sites fail to provide a decent focus state for links (and despite previous 24 ways authors in 2007 and 2009 writing on this same issue!).
You may find that in some cases it makes sense to have something other than, or in addition to, the hover state on focus, but start with the hover state that your designer has taken the time to provide you with. It’s a tiny change and there is no downside. So instead of this:
.my-cool-link:hover {
background-color: MistyRose ;
}
…try writing this:
.my-cool-link:hover,
.my-cool-link:focus,
.my-cool-link:active {
background-color: MistyRose ;
}
I’ve toyed with the idea of making a Sass mixin to take care of this for me, but I haven’t yet. I worry that people reading my code won’t see that I’m explicitly defining my focus and active states so I take the hit and write my hover rules out longhand.
JavaScript can play, too
This was another revelation for me. Keyboard-only navigation doesn’t necessitate a JavaScript-free experience, and up-to-date screen readers can execute JavaScript. So we’re able to create complex JavaScript-driven interfaces which all users can interact with.
Some of the hard work has already been done for us. First, there are already conventions around keyboard-driven interfaces. Think about the last time you viewed a photo album on Facebook. You can use the arrow keys to switch between photos, and the escape key closes whichever lightbox-y UI thing Facebook is showing its photos in this week. Arrow keys (up/down as well as left/right) for progression through content; Escape to back out of something; Enter or space bar to indicate a positive intention — these are established keyboard conventions which we can apply to our interfaces to improve their accessiblity.
Of course, by doing so we are improving our interfaces in general, giving all users the option to switch between keyboard and mouse actions as and when it suits them.
Second, this guy wants to help you out. Hans Hillen is a developer who has done a great deal of work around accessibility and JavaScript-powered interfaces. Along with The Paciello Group he has created a version of the jQuery UI library which has been fully optimised for keyboard navigation and screen reader use. It’s a fantastic reference which I revisit all the time
I’m not a huge fan of the jQuery UI library. It’s a pain to style and the code is a bit bloated. So I’ve not used this demo as a code resource to copy wholesale. I use it by playing with the various components and seeing how they react to keyboard controls. Each component is also fully marked up with the relevant ARIA roles to improve screen reader announcement where possible (more on this below).
Coding for accessibility promotes good habits
This is a another observation around accessibility and JavaScript. I noticed an improvement in the structure and abstraction of my code when I started adding keyboard controls to my interface elements.
Your code has to become more modular and event-driven, because any number of events could trigger the same interaction. A mouse-click, the Enter key and the space bar could all conceivably trigger the same open function on a collapsed accordion element. (And you want to keep things DRY, don’t you?)
If you aren’t already in the habit of separating out your interface functionality into discrete functions, you will be soon.
var doSomethingCool = function(){
// Do something cool here.
}
// Bind function to a button click - pretty vanilla
$('.myCoolButton').on('click', function(){
doSomethingCool();
return false;
});
// Bind the same function to a range of keypresses
$(document).keyup(function(e){
switch(e.keyCode) {
case 13: // enter
case 32: // spacebar
doSomethingCool();
break;
case 27: // escape
doSomethingElse();
break;
}
});
To be honest, if you’re doing complex UI stuff with JavaScript these days, or if you’ve been building any responsive interfaces which rely on JavaScript, then you are most likely working with an application framework such as Backbone, Angular or Ember, so an abstraced and event-driven application structure will be familar to you. It should be super easy for you to start helping out your keyboard-only users if you aren’t already — just add a few more event bindings into your UI layer!
Manipulating the tab order
So, you’ve adjusted your mindset and now you test every change to your codebase using a keyboard as well as a mouse. You’ve applied all your hover states to :focus and :active so you can see where you’re tabbing on the page, and your interactive components react seamlessly to a mixture of mouse and keyboard commands. Feels good, right?
There’s another level of optimisation to consider: manipulating the tab order. Certain DOM elements are naturally part of the tab order, and others are excluded. Links and input elements are the main elements included in the tab order, and static elements like paragraphs and headings are excluded. What if you want to make a static element ‘tabbable’?
A good example would be in an expandable accordion component. Each section of the accordion should be separated by a heading, and there’s no reason to make that heading into a link simply because it’s interactive.
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus; meaning ""tyrant lizard""...
Utahraptor
Utahraptor is a genus of theropod dinosaurs...
Dromiceiomimus
Ornithomimus is a genus of ornithomimid dinosaurs...
Adding the heading elements to the tab order is trivial. We just set their tabindex attribute to zero. You could do this on the server or the client. I prefer to do it with JavaScript as part of the accordion setup and initialisation process.
$('.accordion-widget h3').attr('tabindex', '0');
You can apply this trick in reverse and take elements out of the tab order by setting their tabindex attribute to −1, or change the tab order completely by using other integers. This should be done with great care, if at all. You have to be sure that the markup you remove from the tab order comes out because it genuinely improves the keyboard interaction experience. This is hard to validate without user testing. The danger is that developers will try to sweep complicated parts of the UI under the carpet by taking them out of the tab order. This would be considered a dark pattern — at least on my team!
A farewell ARIA
This is where things can get complex, and I’m no expert on the ARIA specification: I feel like I’ve only dipped my toe into this aspect of coding for accessibility. But, as with WCAG, I’d like to demystify things a little bit to encourage you to look into this area further yourself.
ARIA roles are of most benefit to screen reader users, because they modify and augment screen reader announcements.
Let’s take our dinosaur accordion from the previous section. The markup is semantic, so a screen reader that can’t handle JavaScript will announce all the content within the accordion, no problem.
But modern screen readers can deal with JavaScript, and this means that all the lovely dino information beneath each heading has probably been hidden on document.ready, when the accordion initialised. It might have been hidden using display:none, which prevents a screen reader from announcing content. If that’s as far as you have gone, then you’ve committed an accessibility sin by hiding content from screen readers. Your user will hear a set of headings being announced, with no content in between. It would sound something like this if you were using Chromevox:
> Tyrannosaurus. Heading Three.
> Utahraptor. Heading Three.
> Dromiceiomimus. Heading Three.
We can add some ARIA magic to the markup to improve this, using the tablist role. Start by adding a role of tablist to the widget, and roles of tab and tabpanel to the headings and paragraphs respectively. Set boolean values for aria-selected, aria-hidden and aria-expanded. The markup could end up looking something like this.
Utahraptor
Utahraptor is a genus of theropod dinosaurs...
Now, if a screen reader user encounters this markup they will hear the following:
> Tyrannosaurus. Tab not selected; one of three.
> Utahraptor. Tab not selected; two of three.
> Dromiceiomimus. Tab not selected; three of three.
You could add arrow key events to help the user browse up and down the tab list items until they find one they like.
Your accordion open() function should update the ARIA boolean values as well as adding whatever classes and animations you have built in as standard. Your users know that unselected tabs are meant to be interacted with, so if a user triggers the open function (say, by hitting Enter or the space bar on the second item) they will hear this:
> Utahraptor. Selected; two of three.
The paragraph element for the expanded item will not be hidden by your CSS, which means it will be announced as normal by the screen reader.
This kind of thing makes so much more sense when you have a working example to play with. Again, I refer you to the fantastic resource that Hans Hillen has put together: this is his take on an accessible accordion, on which much of my example is based.
Conclusion
Getting complex interfaces right for all of your users can be difficult — there’s no point pretending otherwise. And there’s no substitute for user testing with real users who navigate the web using assistive technology every day. This kind of testing can be time-consuming to recruit for and to conduct. On top of this, we now have accessibility on mobile devices to contend with. That’s a huge area in itself, and it’s one which I have not yet had a chance to research properly.
So, there’s lots to learn, and there’s lots to do to get it right. But don’t be disheartened. If you have read this far then I’ll leave you with one final piece of advice: don’t wait.
Don’t wait until you’re building a site which mandates AAA-compliance to try this stuff out. Don’t wait for a client with the will or the budget to conduct the full spectrum of user testing to come along. Unplug your mouse, and start playing with your interfaces in a new way. You’ll be surprised at the things that you learn and the issues you uncover.
And the next time an true accessibility project comes along, you will be way ahead of the game.",2013,Charlie Perrins,charlieperrins,2013-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/coding-towards-accessibility/,code
13,Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey,"Too often, we base designs on assumptions that don’t match customer perspectives. Why? Because the data we need to make informed decisions isn’t available.
Imagine starting off the year with a treasure trove of user data that can be filtered, sliced, and diced to inform new UI designs, help you discover where users struggle the most, and expose emerging trends in your customers’ needs that could lead to new features. Why, that would be useful indeed. And it’s easy to obtain by conducting an annual survey.
Annual surveys may seem as exciting as receiving socks and undies for Christmas, but they’re the gift that keeps on giving all year long (just like fresh socks and undies). I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love surveys! Each time my design research team runs a survey, we learn so much about customer motivations, interests, and behaviors.
Surveys provide an aggregate snapshot of your users that can’t easily be obtained by other research methods, and they can be conducted quickly too. You can build a survey in a few hours, run a pilot test in a day, and have real results streaming in the following day. Speed is essential if design research is going to keep pace with a busy product release schedule.
Surveys are also an invaluable springboard for customer interviews, which provide deep perspectives on user behavior. If you play your cards right as you construct your survey, you can capture a user ID and an email address for each respondent, making it easy to get in touch with customers whose feedback is particularly intriguing. No more recruiting customers for your research via Twitter or through a recruiting company charging a small fortune. You can filter survey responses and isolate the exact customers to talk with in moments, not months.
I love this connected process of sending targeted surveys, filtering the results, and then — with surgical precision — selecting just the right customers to interview. Not only is it fast and cheap, but it lets design researchers do quantitative and qualitative research in a coordinated way. Aggregate survey responses help you quantify the perspectives of different user segments, and interviews help you get into the heads of your customers.
An annual survey can give your team the data needed to make more informed designs in the new year. It all starts with a plan.
Planning your survey
Before you start jotting down questions to ask users, spend some time thinking about the work your team will be doing in the coming year. Are you planning new mobile apps or a responsive redesign? Then questions about devices used and behaviors around mobile devices might be in order. Rethinking your content strategy? Then you might want to ask a few questions about how your customers consume content.
You can’t predict all of the projects you’ll be working on in the coming year, but tuck a couple of sections in your survey about the projects you’re certain about. This will give you the research you need to start new projects with solid foundational data.
Google Drive is a great place to start collaboratively building survey questions with colleagues. Questions that seem crystal clear in your head get challenged, refined, or even expanded quickly when the entire team can chime in.
As you craft your survey, try to consider how you’ll filter it once all of the data is compiled. Do you need to see responses by industry, by age of an account, by devices used, or by size of company? Adding the right filter questions can help you discover fascinating patterns in user segments. Filtering on responses to a few questions can surface insights like: customers in non-profit companies with more than 100 employees are 17% more likely to use an Android phone and are most attracted to features A, D, and F. A designer working on the landing page for a non-profit would love to have concrete information like this. Filter questions are key, so consider them carefully. But don’t go overboard — too many of them and you’ll start to hurt your survey response rate.
Multiple choice questions are the heart of most surveys because respondents can complete them quickly, which increases response rate, and researchers can analyze them without a lot of manual categorization. Open text field questions are valuable too, but be careful not to add too many to your survey. You’ll hate yourself after the survey’s done and you have to sort through and tag thousands of open responses so patterns become visible. Oy vey!
An open-ended question works well towards the end of the survey. At this point respondents have a lot of topics swirling around in their head and tend to say weird things that will pique your interest. This is where you’ll find the outliers who are using your product. They’ll be fascinating to interview, and on occasion will help you see your work in a brand new way.
Conclude your survey with a question asking permission to get in touch for a followup interview so you don’t pester people who want to be left alone.
With your questions nailed down, it’s time to build out that survey and get it ready for sending!
Building your survey
There are dozens of apps you could use to build your survey, but SurveyMonkey is the one that I prefer. It lets you pass in variables for each respondent such as user ID and email address. Metadata about respondents is essential if you’re going to do any follow-up interviews with your customers in the coming year. SurveyMonkey also makes it easy to set up question logic, showing questions to customers only if they responded in a certain way to a prior question. This helps you avoid asking irrelevant questions to some respondents.
Determining survey recipients
Once you’ve chosen a survey tool and entered all of your questions, you need to gather a list of recipients. Your first instinct will be to send it to everyone. You might say, “I need maximum response and metric shit tons of data!” But this is rarely the best approach — broad distribution almost always leads to lower response rates, increased noise, and decreased signal in your data. Are there subsets of customers you could send to, like only those who are active, those who are paying, or have been with you for a certain length of time? Talk to the keepers of your customer database and see how they can segment it so you can be certain you’re talking to just the people who will have the most relevant responses for your needs.
If you want to get super nerdy when finding the right customer sample to survey, use a [sample size calculator]. Sampling is a deep subject best explored in other articles.
Crafting your survey email
After focusing your energies on writing and building your survey, the email asking your customers to respond seems almost trivial, but it will greatly influence your response rate. Take great care when writing your subject line and the body of the email. If you can pull it off, A/B testing subject lines can greatly improve the open rate of your email and click-through to your survey. My design research team has seen a ~10% increase in open and click rates when we A/B tested. We’ve found that personalizing subject lines and greetings with the recipients name (ie. “Hey, Aarron. How can we make our app work better for you?”) gave us the best response rates. Your mileage may vary.
The tone of your email is important — be friendly, honest, and to the point. Those that are passionate about your product will be happy to share their perspective. Writing a survey email that people will actually respond to ain’t easy — in fact, they’re almost always annoying. But Ben Chestnut found a non-annoying way to send a survey email and improve response rates.
The email sent for the 2013 MailChimp survey let customers know what we’d been up to in the previous year, and invited feedback on what we should work on in the coming year.
The link to your survey should be a clear call to action. A big button with a label like “Answer a few questions” generally does the trick. The URL linking to the survey will need to include some variables like user ID and email. It might look something like this if you’re using SurveyMonkey:
http://surveymonkey.com/s/somesurveyid/?uid=*|UID|*&email=*|email|*
As each email is sent, the proper data will be populated in the variables, passing it on to the survey app for inclusion in each response. This is the magic that will help you pinpoint customers to interview down the road, so take special care to test that all is working before sending to all recipients. How you construct the survey link will vary depending on what survey tool and email service provider you use, so don’t take my example as gospel. You’ll need to read the documentation for your survey and email apps to set things up properly.
Pilot before sending
By now, you’ve whipped yourself into a fever pitch over your brilliant survey and the data you hope to collect. Your finger is on the send button, poised for action, but there’s one very important thing to do before you send to the entire list of customers: send a pilot email. How do you know if your questions are clear, your form logic is sound, and you’re passing variables from the email to the survey properly? You won’t, unless you send to a small segment of your recipients first.
The data collected in your pilot will make plain where your survey needs refinement. This data won’t be used in your final analysis, as you’re probably going to make a few changes to your questions.
Send the pilot survey to enough people that you can really stress test the clarity of the questions and data you’re gathering, while considering how much data can you comfortably throw out. If you’re sending your final survey to a few thousand people, you might find a couple of hundred recipients for your pilot will give you enough insight into what to improve while leaving the vast majority of the recipients for your final survey.
After you’ve sent your pilot, made your survey adjustments, and ensured the variables are being passed from your email into the survey app, you’re ready to send to the remainder of your customers. This is your moment of glory!
Analyzing your results
After a couple of weeks you can probably safely close the survey so no other responses come in as you transition from data gathering to data analysis. Any survey app worth its salt will chart responses to your multiple choice questions. Reviewing these charts is a great place to start your analysis. Is there anything particularly interesting that stands out? Jot down some of your observations. I like to print screenshots of the charts for each question, highlighting areas of interest. These prints become a particularly handy reference point for the next step in your analysis.
Printing results from a survey makes comparing different customers easy.
Viewing aggregate data about all responses is interesting, but the deltas between different types of customers are where the real revelations happen. Remember those filter questions you added to your survey? They’re the tool that’ll help you compare customer segments.
Most survey apps will let you filter the data based on response to a question. If the one you’re using doesn’t, you can always export your data and create pivot tables in Excel. Try filtering your data based on one of your filter questions, such as industry, company size, or devices used. Now compare those printed screenshots of baseline responses to the filtered data. Chances are you’ll see some significant differences in how each group responded to your questions, giving you clues about the variance in interests and motivations in customer segments and a leg up as you work on future design projects.
Open-ended responses are equally interesting, but much more time-consuming to analyze. Yes, you need to read through thousands of responses, some of which are constructive and some of which are not. Taking the time to tag each open response will help you see trends and filter out the responses that are unhelpful.
Unlike questions with predefined answers, open-ended responses let users express unique ideas and use cases you may not be looking for. The tedium of reading thousands of response is always cut by eureka moments when users tell you something fascinating that changes your perspective on your app. These are the folks you want to pull out for follow-up interviews. Because you’ve already captured their email addresses when you set up your survey and your email, getting in touch will be a piece of cake.
Filter, compare, interview, and summarize; then share your findings with your colleagues. Reports are great for head honchos, but if you want to really inform and inspire, create a video, a poster series, or even a comic to communicate what you’ve learned. Want to get really fancy? Store your survey results in a centrally accessible location so anyone in your company can research and discover the insights they need to make more informed designs.
Good design researchers discover valuable insights. Great design researchers turn those insights into stories.
Conclusion
As we enter the new year, it’s a great time to reflect on the work we’ve done in the past and how we can do better in the future. Without a doubt, designers working with a foundation of insights about customers can make more effective UIs. But designers aren’t the only ones who stand to gain from the data collected in an annual survey—anyone who makes things for or communicates with customers will find themselves empowered to do better work when they know more about the people they serve. The data you collect with your survey is a fantastic holiday gift to your colleagues, one that they’ll appreciate throughout the year.",2013,Aarron Walter,aarronwalter,2013-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/data-driven-design-with-an-annual-survey/,design
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 of two things: redirecting the browser to a different URL; or rewriting the URL internally to use a particular file. We’ll look at those in turn.
Redirects
Redirects match an incoming URL, and then redirect the user’s browser to a different address. These can be useful for maintaining legacy URLs if content changes location as part of a site redesign. Redirecting the old URL to the new location makes sure that any incoming links, such as those from search engines, continue to work.
In 1998, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote that Cool URIs don’t change, encouraging us all to go the extra mile to make sure links keep working forever. I think that sometimes it’s fine to move things around — especially to correct bad URL design choices of the past — provided that you can do so while keeping those old URLs working. That’s where redirects can help.
A redirect might look like this
RewriteRule ^article/used/to/be/here.php$ /article/now/lives/here/ [R=301,L]
Rewriting
By default, web servers closely map page URLs to the files in your site. On receiving a request for http://example.com/about/history.html the server goes to the configured folder for the example.com website, and then goes into the about folder and returns the history.html file.
A rewrite rule changes that process by breaking the direct relationship between the URL and the file system. “When there’s a request for /about/history.html” a rewrite rule might say, “use the file /about_section.php instead.”
This opens up lots of possibilities for creative ways to map URLs to the files that know how to serve up the page. Most MVC frameworks will have a single rule to rewrite all page URLs to one single file. That file will be a script which kicks off the framework to figure out what to do to serve the page.
RewriteRule ^for/this/url/$ /use/this/file.php [L]
Matching patterns
By now you’ll have noted the weird ^ and $ characters wrapped around the URL we’re trying to match. That’s because what we’re actually using here is a pattern. Technically, it is what’s called a Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) or simply a regex or regexp. We’ll call it a pattern because we’re not animals.
What are these patterns? If I asked you to enter your credit card expiry date as MM/YY then chances are you’d wonder what I wanted your credit card details for, but you’d know that I wanted a two-digit month, a slash, and a two-digit year. That’s not a regular expression, but it’s the same idea: using some placeholder characters to define the pattern of the input you’re trying to match.
We’ve already met two regexp characters.
^
Matches the beginning of a string
$
Matches the end of a string
When a pattern starts with ^ and ends with $ it’s to make sure we match the complete URL start to finish, not just part of it. There are lots of other ways to match, too:
[0-9]
Matches a number, 0–9. [2-4] would match numbers 2 to 4 inclusive.
[a-z]
Matches lowercase letters a–z
[A-Z]
Matches uppercase letters A–Z
[a-z0-9]
Combining some of these, this matches letters a–z and numbers 0–9
These are what we call character groups. The square brackets basically tell the server to match from the selection of characters within them. You can put any specific characters you’re looking for within the brackets, as well as the ranges shown above.
However, all these just match one single character. [0-9] would match 8 but not 84 — to match 84 we’d need to use [0-9] twice.
[0-9][0-9]
So, if we wanted to match 1984 we could to do this:
[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]
…but that’s getting silly. Instead, we can do this:
[0-9]{4}
That means any character between 0 and 9, four times. If we wanted to match a number, but didn’t know how long it might be (for example, a database ID in the URL) we could use the + symbol, which means one or more.
[0-9]+
This now matches 1, 123 and 1234567.
Putting it into practice
Let’s say we need to write a rule to match article URLs for this website, and to rewrite them to use /article.php under the hood. The articles all have URLs like this:
2013/article-title/
They start with a year (from 2005 up to 2013, currently), a slash, and then have a URL-safe version of the article title (a slug), ending in a slash. We’d match it like this:
^[0-9]{4}/[a-z0-9-]+/$
If that looks frightening, don’t worry. Breaking it down, from the start of the URL (^) we’re looking for four numbers ([0-9]{4}). Then a slash — that’s just literal — and then anything lowercase a–z or 0–9 or a dash ([a-z0-9-]) one or more times (+), ending in a slash (/$).
Putting that into a rewrite rule, we end up with this:
RewriteRule ^[0-9]{4}/[a-z0-9-]+/$ /article.php
We’re getting close now. We can match the article URLs and rewrite them to use article.php. Now we just need to make sure that article.php knows which article it’s supposed to display.
Capturing groups, and replacements
When rewriting URLs you’ll often want to take important parts of the URL you’re matching and pass them along to the script that handles the request. That’s usually done by adding those parts of the URL on as query string arguments. For our example, we want to make sure that article.php knows the year and the article title we’re looking for. That means we need to call it like this:
/article.php?year=2013&slug=article-title
To do this, we need to mark which parts of the pattern we want to reuse in the destination. We do this with round brackets or parentheses. By placing parentheses around parts of the pattern we want to reuse, we create what’s called a capturing group. To capture an important part of the source URL to use in the destination, surround it in parentheses.
Our pattern now looks like this, with parentheses around the parts that match the year and slug, but ignoring the slashes:
^([0-9]{4})/([a-z0-9-]+)/$
To use the capturing groups in the destination URL, we use the dollar sign and the number of the group we want to use. So, the first capturing group is $1, the second is $2 and so on. (The $ is unrelated to the end-of-pattern $ we used before.)
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([a-z0-9-]+)/$ /article.php?year=$1&slug=$2
The value of the year capturing group gets used as $1 and the article title slug is $2. Had there been a third group, that would be $3 and so on. In regexp parlance, these are called back-references as they refer back to the pattern.
Options
Several brain-taxing minutes ago, I mentioned some options as the final part of a rewrite rule. There are lots of options (or flags) you can set to change how the rule is processed. The most useful (to my mind) are:
R=301
Perform an HTTP 301 redirect to send the user’s browser to the new URL. A status of 301 means a resource has moved permanently and so it’s a good way of both redirecting the user to the new URL, and letting search engines know to update their indexes.
L
Last. If this rule matches, don’t bother processing the following rules.
Options are set in square brackets at the end of the rule. You can set multiple options by separating them with commas:
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([a-z0-9-]+)/$ /article.php?year=$1&slug=$2 [L]
or
RewriteRule ^about/([a-z0-9-]+).jsp/$ /about/$1/ [R=301,L]
Common pitfalls
Once you’ve built up a few rewrite rules, things can start to go wrong. You may have been there: a rule which looks perfectly good is somehow not matching. One common reason for this is hidden behind that [L] flag.
L for Last is a useful option to tell the rewrite engine to stop once the rule has been matched. This is what it does — the remaining rules in the .htaccess file are then ignored. However, once a URL has been rewritten, the entire set of rules are then run again on the new URL. If the new URL matches any of the rules, that too will be rewritten and on it goes.
One way to avoid this problem is to keep your ‘real’ pages under a folder path that will never match one of your rules, or that you can exclude from the rewrite rules.
Useful snippets
I find myself reusing the same few rules over and over again, just with minor changes. Here are some useful examples to refer back to.
Excluding a directory
As mentioned above, if you’re rewriting lots of fancy URLs to a collection of real files it can be helpful to put those files in a folder and exclude it from rewrite rules. This helps solve the issue of rewrite rules reapplying to your newly rewritten URL. To exclude a directory, put a rule like this at the top of your file, before your other rules. Our files are in a folder called _source, the dash in the rule means do nothing, and the L flag means the following rules won’t be applied.
RewriteRule ^_source - [L]
This is also useful for excluding things like CMS folders from your website’s rewrite rules
RewriteRule ^perch - [L]
Adding or removing www from the domain
Some folk like to use a www and others don’t. Usually, it’s best to pick one and go with it, and redirect the one you don’t want. On this site, we don’t use www.24ways.org so we redirect those requests to 24ways.org.
This uses a RewriteCond which is like an if for a rewrite rule: “If this condition matches, then apply the following rule.” In this case, it’s if the HTTP HOST (or domain name, basically) matches this pattern, then redirect everything:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.24ways.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://24ways.org/$1 [R=301,L]
The [NC] flag means ‘no case’ — the match is case-insensitive. The dots in the domain are escaped with a backslash, as a dot is a regular expression character which means match anything, so we escape it because we literally mean a dot in this instance.
Removing file extensions
Sometimes all you need to do to tidy up a URL is strip off the technology-specific file extension, so that /about/history.php becomes /about/history. This is easily achieved with the help of some more rewrite conditions.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.php [L,QSA]
This says if the file being asked for isn’t a file (!-f) and if it isn’t a directory (!-d) and if the file name plus .php is an actual file (-f) then rewrite by adding .php on the end. The QSA flag means ‘query string append’: append the existing query string onto the rewritten URL.
It’s these sorts of more generic catch-all rules that you need to watch out for when your .htaccess gets rerun after a successful match. Without care they can easily rematch the newly rewritten URL.
Logging for when it all goes wrong
Although not possible within your .htaccess file, if you have access to your Apache configuration files you can enable rewrite logging. This can be useful to track down where a rule is going wrong, if it’s matching incorrectly or failing to match. It also gives you an overview of the amount of work being done by the rewrite engine, enabling you to rearrange your rules and maximise performance.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteLog ""/full/system/path/to/rewrite.log""
RewriteLogLevel 5
To be doubly clear: this will not work from an .htaccess file — it needs to be added to the main Apache configuration files. (I sometimes work using MAMP PRO locally on my Mac, and this can be pasted into the snappily named Customized virtual host general settings box in the Advanced tab for your site.)
The white screen of death
One of the most frustrating things when working with rewrite rules is that when you make a mistake it can result in the server returning an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error. This in itself isn’t an error message, of course. It’s more of a notification that an error has occurred. The real error message can usually be found in your Apache error log.
If you have access to your server logs, check the Apache error log and you’ll usually find a much more descriptive error message, pointing you towards your mistake. (Again, if using MAMP PRO, go to Server, Apache and the View Log button.)
In conclusion
Rewriting URLs can be a bear, but the advantages are clear. Keeping a tidy URL structure, disconnected from the technology or file structure of your site can result in URLs that are easier to use and easier to maintain into the future.
If you’re redesigning a site, remember that cool URIs don’t change, so budget some time to make sure that any content you move has a rewrite rule associated with it to keep any links working.
Further reading
To find out more about URL rewriting and perhaps even learn more about regular expressions, I can recommend the following resources.
From the horse’s mouth, the Apache mod_rewrite documentation
Particularly useful with that documentation is the RewriteRule Flags listing
You may wish to don sunglasses to follow the otherwise comprehensive Regular-Expressions.info tutorial
Friend of 24 ways, Neil Crosby has a mod_rewrite Beginner’s Guide which I’ve found handy over the years.
As noted at the start, this isn’t a fully comprehensive guide, but I hope it’s useful in finding your feet with a powerful but sometimes annoying technology. Do you have useful snippets you often use on projects? Feel free to share them in the comments.",2013,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/,code
17,Bringing Design and Research Closer Together,"The ‘should designers be able to code’ debate has raged for some time, but I’m interested in another debate: should designers be able to research?
Are you a designer who can do research? Good research and the insights you uncover inspire fresh ways of thinking and get your creative juices flowing. Good research brings clarity to a woolly brief. Audience insight helps sharpen your focus on what’s really important. Experimentation through research and design brings a sense of playfulness and curiosity to your work. Good research helps you do good design.
Being a web designer today is pretty tough, particularly if you’re a freelancer and work on your own. There are so many new ideas, approaches to workflow and trends and tools to keep up with. How do you decide which things to do and which to ignore? A modern web designer needs to be able to consider the needs of the audience, design appropriate IAs and layouts, choose colour palettes, pick appropriate typefaces and type layouts, wrangle with content, style, code, dabble in SEO, and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but today’s web designer also has to keep up with the latest talking points in the industry: responsive design, Agile, accessibility, Sass, Git, lean UX, content first, mobile first, blah blah blah. Any good web designer doesn’t need to be persuaded about the merits of including research in their toolkit, but do you really have time to include research too?
Who is responsible for research?
Generally, research in the web industry forms part of other disciplines and isn’t so much a discipline in its own right. It’s very often thought of as part of UX, or activities that make up a process such as IA or content strategy. Research is often undertaken by UX designers, information architects or content strategists and isn’t something designers or developers get that involved in. Some people lump all of these activities together and label it design research and have design researchers to do it. Some companies, such as the one I run with my husband Mark, are lucky enough to have someone with specialist research knowledge (yup, that would be me folks) who can lead all or most of the research work undertaken by the company. See also Mule Design, GOV.UK, the BBC, Mailchimp, Facebook and Twitter.
What if you’re not lucky enough to have your own researcher or team of researchers? Often research is the kind of thing that’s nice to have, or it can be cut from scope when doing the budget dance with a client. It often forms part of the discovery phase of a project and sometimes just becomes a tick-box exercise. But research isn’t just user testing and it shouldn’t just live in a report on Basecamp that no one reads. I would argue that research and experimentation is a way of working or an approach to how you design. Research can be used during the whole design process and must be a vital part of a designer’s workflow on every project. Even if you work in a small studio, you can still create a culture of audience insight. Even if you work on your own, you can still absorb yourself in as much audience data as you can throughout the project life cycle. Here’s how.
Research is everyone’s job
There is a subtle difference between writing a research report and delivering it to a client, and them actually using it and applying the insights to their thought process. In my experience of working in the audiences team at the BBC, research was most effective when the role was embedded in the production team and insights were used as part of the editorial process.
In this section I’ll talk through some common problems you might encounter in a typical project life cycle and show you ways you can use research to help you. For the sake of this article, let’s imagine that we’re talking about a particular project here and not ongoing product development. The same principles can of course be applied then, but even if you work in-house rather than on the agency side, you’re probably used to working on distinct projects or phases of work.
1. Problem: I want to come up with a new product idea.
Solution: Inspiration through insights.
Before you begin a new project, a good way of quickly absorbing all the existing knowledge that there maybe about a theme, product type or website is to literally surround yourself with it. This is especially relevant for new ideas or product development. Create an incident room if you can: fill the walls of your meeting room, the walls near your desk, or even just use a pinboard or online pinboard if space is tight or you’re working with a dispersed team. The same process can be used throughout a project’s or product life cycle — read about how MailChimp has applied this idea.
Let’s take a new product idea as an example. Say you wanted to develop a responsive tool for web designers but you weren’t sure what aspect of responsive design to focus on. First of all, you should pose a hypothesis or problem statement to gather ideas around. For example: “How to speed up a designer’s responsive workflow.” You would then need to gather insights around this topic. You could run some interviews with freelance designers about how they work responsively. You could shadow a development team for the day to understand their processes. You could observe conversations on Twitter or IRC or wherever your target audience interact to see what people talk about. You could search out industry data and articles currently available.
The next stage is to comb through this data and extract insights from it. You can use good old Post-it notes and a sharpie: capture one insight or thought per Post-it. If one insight leads into another, use two Post-its. The objective is volume. Try to ensure clarity in each Post-it so you don’t have to go back and reference material again (maybe you could use a key if you think it’ll get confusing).
After this, stick them all up and synthesise the same way you would for any kind of cluster or affinity sort. Organise into broad themes. These themes then become springboards for further exploration and idea generation. You might see a gap or opportunity in one particular area, both from a workflow perspective but also from a business perspective. Bingo. Your insights then become the fuel for ideas generation.
This method doesn’t just have to be used for new products — it works particularly well in a discovery phase for new projects or for new features in an existing product. We’re doing something similar for our own responsive tool, Gridset at the moment.
Resources:
Sticky Wisdom by Dave Allan, Matt Kingdon, Kris Murrin, Daz Rudkin
The Science of Serendipity by Matt Kingdon
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
2. Problem: You’re starting a new project and need to know the basics before you get headlong into designing or building.
Solution: Quantitative survey.
Common questions might be:
Who are the users?
How many are there?
What are they like?
Why do they use the site?
What do they need from the site?
What are their goals?
Print out and stick up what you already know and have in your project space or ‘incident room’: any reports you have found or been given, analytics graphs, personas, pen portraits, as well as screengrabs of the current website, product or branding. Spend time looking through it all and identify the gaps.
If you have very little existing audience data, a quick and easy way to get some baseline information is to run a quick user survey on a current website. You can establish basic demographic information, appreciation and views of the website as it stands, as well as delve a little deeper into needs and wants. This is also vital if you want some kind of trackable measures to go back to once you have designed and built your shiny new website for your client — read more in my article for 24 ways last year.)
We use surveys a lot at Mark Boulton Design for our client work. Here’s a screen grab of one we ran in March on http://info.cern.ch before we redesigned the site and did the work on the First Website Project. We repeated the survey after the new website went live and were able to compare the results. Both surveys were a great source of insight to the project team as well as for the project stakeholders who needed to pitch the idea of the hack days and fundraise for them.
Once you’ve run your survey, you should always write up a short summary for yourself and your client to refer to. If you’re not a trained researcher, you should try to read up on analysis techniques or data visualisation. It can be easy to misinterpret data and make it bend to the story you are trying to tell. You should be looking for the story in the data and present it without bias.
If you’re using the ‘incident room’ method I mentioned earlier on, you can also extract the insights onto post it notes and add them to your growing body of knowledge.
Resources:
Using Questionnaires for Design Research by Emma Boulton
Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey by Aarron Walter
Research Methods for Product Design by Alex Milton and Paul Rodgers
A Practical Guide to Designing with Data by Brian Suda
3. Problem: You have a prototype of a new design and you need some feedback from real users.
Solution: User interviews and task based testing.
Interviewing is a staple research method that every designer should master as it can be used throughout a project life cycle. Erika Hall recently wrote a great article on the basics for A List Apart. From stakeholder interviews in a discovery phase, to initial user research, right through to task based testing and iteration, interviews can be enormously helpful. They are very time-consuming, however, and although speaking to someone is better than speaking to no one, it’s always better to plan to do a few interviews at once, rather than one or two. I generally find that patterns only start to emerge after I’ve spoken to 4 or 5 people. Interviews are another thing we do a lot of at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the interviews we do are remote due to the location of our clients and their users.
Rigour is an important consideration in all research activities and especially if you’re a non-researcher. Interviews particularly can be easily skewed by an inexperienced facilitator, which is why pairing can be a good approach. Building rapport, questioning, time keeping, note taking and thinking on your feet can be difficult to do all at once, so having a colleague take notes while you concentrate on leading the conversation can work really well. It’s important for the note taker to sit in on more than one interview so that they get a more rounded view of the feedback. The same person should also be involved in the analysis of the data.
Interviews can be analysed and written up in a report or summary as with other types of research. I often use the same kind of collaborative process detailed earlier for deciding on themes, particularly if multiple members of the team have been involved in interviewing.
Interviews are particularly useful for our incident room and can provide much colour and insight to an exploratory process. I often find verbatim quotes to be the most insightful type of data. You might find that an inexperienced researcher (or designer who is used to solving problems) will jump to interpretation too soon and forget to just listen to what the interviewee is saying. Capturing the exact form of words a person uses can help get away from this.
Resources:
Interviewing Humans by Erika Hall
A Pocket Guide to Interviewing for Research by Andrew Travers
Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal
4. Problem: How successful have I been with this new design?
Solution: Key performance indicators
Once your new design has been realised, it’s important to evaluate it. What works, what doesn’t work so well? As well as a straightforward design crit, don’t forget to introduce audience insights into a review meeting or project wash up.
Work out what your KPIs — your key performance indicators — will be beforehand and then you can start to track them over time. For example, number of visits, appreciation of the site, willingness to recommend the site to a friend, number of sales, and number of conversions are all sensible measures to track. Interviews can again be helpful but cold, hard numbers are often better here. Read Corey Vilhauer’s take on this on A List Apart.
Consistency is key here. If you have looked at your analytics and done a survey beforehand, you will have a baseline to start from. Don’t keep changing your measures and questions, or your data will not be comparable. Pick a few key questions or a set of measures, create a survey and then run it once a month, once a quarter, every six months or annually. You’ll start to see changes over time as the design beds in. You may see seasonal trends and spot patterns in the data related to other activities like marketing, promotion and so on. Keeping a record of all of this will increase your understanding of your audience. We’ve created a satisfaction survey for Gridset with a number of measures that we track on an ongoing basis. MailChimp has also created an annual survey with the aim of tracking their audience measures over time
Resources:
Search Analytics by Louis Rosenfeld
A Primer on A/B Testing by Lara Swanson
Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf
Anyone can do research
Research can be brought into the project life cycle at any stage. And of course, anyone can do research — you don’t need to be a researcher. Some of the main skills most designers possess are also key research skills: inquisitive nature, problem solving, playfulness, empathy, and so on.
We have a small team at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the team are designers and the rest of us focus on supporting the team and clients both in terms of billable work (research, content strategy, project management) as well as the non-billable things like finance and studio management.
Despite my best intentions, in the past I’ve undertaken research for clients in isolation — first being briefed by the design lead, carrying out the research and then delivering the findings back, trusting the design team to take the findings on board. This was often due to time and availability of resources.
We’ve been trying hard to join up our processes and collaborate even more across the team. Undertaking heuristic or design reviews collaboratively; taking part in frequent critiques of our work and the work of others together; pairing a researcher and a designer to run interviews; workshopping results from interviews to come up with recommendations; working closely together on questionnaire design; shadowing each other on tasks that don’t fall within our core skills. A little thing like moving our desks around has also helped us have more conversations that we can all be a part of.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my role as the research director at Mark Boulton Design is actually a facilitator of research. As well as carrying out research, I am responsible for ensuring that research happens consistently across the team. I am responsible for empowering and training our designers so they feel confident in carrying out their own user, audience or design research for clients. So they know what to look for, when to listen, when to probe and when to take note of something. So they know how to look for themes, how to synthesise insights from research and how to apply them to their work.
Better research leads to better design
So, are you a designer who can do research? Are you a researcher who can design? The best designers are a lucky combination of researcher and designer. If you’re not one of those, look at ways of enhancing the skills you lack. Because there’s no doubt in my mind, that becoming a better researcher will make you a better designer.
General resources:
Seeing the Elephant by Louis Rosenfeld
Connected UX by Aarron Walter
Beyond Usability Testing by Devan Goldstein
Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley
Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
A Pocket Guide to Psychology for Designers by Joe Leech
A Pocket Guide to International User Research by Chui Chui Tan
Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte
A Pocket Guide to Experiments for Designers by Colin McFarland",2013,Emma Boulton,emmaboulton,2013-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/bringing-design-and-research-closer-together/,ux
19,In Their Own Write: Web Books and their Authors,"The currency of written communication — words on the page, words on the screen — comprises many denominations. To further our ends in web design and development, we freely spend and receive several: tweets aphoristic and trenchant, banal and perfunctory; blog posts and articles that call us to action or reflection; anecdotes, asides, comments, essays, guides, how-tos, manuals, musings, notes, opinions, stories, thoughts, tips pro and not-so-pro. So many, many words.
Our industry (so much more than this, but what on earth are we, collectively?), our community thrives on writing and sharing knowledge and experience. 24 ways is a case in point. Everyone can learn and contribute through reading and writing — it’s what we’ve always done.
To web authors and readers seeking greater returns, though, broader culture has vouchsafed an enduring and singular artefact: the book.
Last month I asked a small sample of web book authors if they would be prepared to answer a few questions; most of them kindly agreed. In spirit, the survey was informal: I had neither hypothesis nor unground axe. I work closely with writers — and yes, I’ve edited or copy-edited books by several of the authors I surveyed — and wanted to share their thoughts about what it was like to write a book (“…it was challenging to find a coherent narrative”), why they did it (“Who wouldn’t want to?”) and what they learned from the experience (“That I could!”).
Reasons for writing a book
In web development the connection between authors and readers is unusually close and immediate. Working in our medium precipitates a unity that’s rare elsewhere. Yet writing and publishing a book, even during the current books revolution, is something only a few of us attempt and it remains daunting and a little remote. What spurs an author to try it? For some, it’s a deeply held resistance to prevailing trends:
I felt that designers and developers needed to be shaken out of what seemed to me had been years of stagnation.
—Andrew Clarke
Or even a desire to protect us from ourselves:
I felt that without a book that clearly defined progressive enhancement in a very approachable and succinct fashion, the web was at risk. I was seeing Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of universal availability slip away…
—Aaron Gustafson
Sometimes, there’s a knowledge gap to be filled by an author with the requisite excitement and need to communicate. Jon Hicks took his “pet subject” and was “enthused enough to want to spend all that time writing”, particularly because:
…there was a gap in the market for it. No one had done it before, and it’s still on its own out there, with no competition. It felt like I was able to contribute something.
Cennydd Bowles felt a professional itch at a particular point in his career, understanding that
[a]s a designer becomes more senior, they start looking for ways to scale the effects of their work. For some, that leads into management. For others, into writing.
Often, though, it’s also simply a personal challenge and ambition to explore a subject at length and create something substantial. Anna Debenham describes a motivation shared by several authors:
To be able to point to something more tangible than an article and be able to say “I did that.”
That sense of a book’s significance, its heft and gravity even, stems partly from the cultural esteem which honours books and their authors. Books have a long history as sources of wisdom, truth and power. Even with more books being published each year than ever before, writing one is still commonly considered a laudable achievement, including in our field.
Challenges of writing a book
Received wisdom has it that writing online should be brief and chunky and approachable: get to the point; divide it all up; subheadings and lists are our friends; write like you’re talking; no one has time to read. Much of such advice is true. Followed well, it lends our writing punch and pith, vigour and vim. The web is nimble, the web keeps up, and it suits what we write about developing for it. It’s perfect for delivering our observations, queries and investigations into all the various aspects of the work, professional and personal.
Yet even for digital natives like web authors, books printed and electronic retain an attractive glister.
Ideas can be developed more fully, their consequences explored to greater depth and extended with more varied examples, and the whole conveyed with more eloquence, more style. Why shouldn’t authors delay their conclusions if the intervening text is apposite, rich with value and helps to flesh out the skeleton of an argument? Conclusions might or might not be reached, of course, but a writer is at greater liberty in a book to digress in tangential and interesting ways.
Writing a book involves committing time, energy, thought and money. As Brian Suda found, it can be tough “getting the ideas out of my head into a cohesive blob of text.” Some authors end up talking to themselves…
It helps me to keep a real person in mind, someone who I’m talking to as I write. Sometimes I have the same conversations over and over in my head.
—Andrew Clarke
…while others are thinking ahead, concerned with how their book will be received:
Would anyone want to read it? Would they care? Would it be respected by my peers?
—Joe Leech
Challenges that arose time and again included “starting” and “getting words on the page” as well as “knowing when to stop” or “letting go”. Personal organization problems and those caused by publishers were also widely mentioned. Time loomed large. Making time, finding time. Giving up “sleep and some sanity” and realizing “it will take you far, far, far longer than you naively assumed”. Importantly, writing time is time away from gainful employment: Aaron Gustafson found the hardest thing about writing a book to be “the loss of income while I was writing.”
Perils and pleasures of editing
Editing, be it structural, technical or copy editing, is founded on reciprocity. Without openness and a shared belief that the book is worthwhile, work can founder in acrimony and mistrust. Editors are a book’s first and most critical (in every sense) readers. Effective and perceptive editing makes a book as good as it can be, finding the book within the draft like sculpture reveals the statue in the stone.
A good editor calls you out on poor assumptions and challenges you to really clarify your thinking. Whilst it can be difficult during the process to have your thinking challenged, it’s always been worth it — for me personally — in the long run. A good editor also reins you in when you’ve perhaps wandered off track or taken a little too long to make a point.
—Christopher Murphy
Andy Croll found editing “all positive” and Aaron Gustafson loves “working with a strong editor […] I want someone to tell it to me straight.” But it can be a rollercoaster, “both terrifying and the real moment of elation”. Mixed emotions during the editing process are common:
It was very uncomfortable! I knew it was making the work stronger, but it was awkward having my inconsistencies and waffle picked apart.
—Jon Hicks
It can be distressing to have written work looked over by a professional, particularly for first-time book authors whose expertise lies elsewhere:
I was a little nervous because I don’t consider myself a skilled writer — I never dreamed of becoming an author. I’m a designer, after all.
—Geri Coady
Communication is key, particularly when it comes to checking or changing the author’s words.
I like a good banter between me and the tech editor — if we can have a proper argument in Word comments, that’s great.
—Rachel Andrew
But if handled poorly, small battles can break out. Rachel Andrew again:
However, having had plenty of times where the technical editor has done nothing more than give a cursory glance, I started to leave little issues in for them to spot. If they picked them up I knew they were actually testing the code and I could be sure the work was being properly tech edited. If they didn’t spot them, I’d find someone myself to read through and check it!
A major concern for writers is that their voices will be altered, filtered, mangled or otherwise obscured by the editing process. Good copy editing must remain unnoticed while enhancing the author’s voice in print. Donna Spencer appreciated the way her editor “tidied up my work and made it a million times better, but left it sounding exactly like me.” Similarly, Andrew Travers “was incredibly impressed at how well my editor tightened up my own writing without it feeling like another’s voice” and Val Head sums up the consensus that:
the editor was able to help me express what I was trying to say in a better way […] I want to have editors for everything now.
At the keyboard, keep your friends close, but your editors closer.
Publishing and publishers
Conditions ought to militate against the allure of writing a book about web design and development. More books are published each year than ever before, so readerships elude new authors and readers can struggle to find authors to trust in their fields of interest. New spaces for more expansive online writing about working on and with the web are opening up (sites like Contents Magazine and STET), and seminal online web development texts are emerging. Publishing online is simple, far-reaching and immediate.
Much more so than articles and blog posts, books take time to research, write and read; add the complexity of commissioning, editing, designing, proofreading, printing, marketing and distribution processes, and it can take many months, even years to publish. The ceaseless headlong momentum of the web can leave articles more than a few weeks old whimpering in its wake, but updating them at least is straightforward; printed books about web development can depreciate as rapidly as the technology and techniques they describe, while retaining the “terrifying permanence that print bestows: your opinions will follow you forever”.
So much moves on, and becomes out of date. Companies featured get bought by larger companies and die, techniques improve and solutions featured become terribly out of date. Unlike a website, which could be updated continuously, a book represents the thinking ‘at that time’.
—Jon Hicks
Publishers work hard to mitigate these issues, promoting new books and new authors, bringing authors and readers together under a trusted banner. When a publisher packages up and releases a writer’s words, it confers a seal of approval and “badge of quality”, very important to new authors.
Publishers have other benefits to offer, from expert knowledge:
My publisher was extraordinarily supportive (and patient). Her expertise in my chosen subject was both a pressure (I didn’t want to let her down) and a reassurance (if she liked it, I knew it was going to be fine).
—Andrew Travers
…to systems and support mechanisms set up specifically to encourage writers and publish books:
Working as a team means you’re bringing in everyone’s expertise.
—Chui Chui Tan
As a writer, the best part about writing for a publisher was the writing infrastructure offered.
—Christopher Murphy
There can be drawbacks, however, and the occasional horror story:
We were just one small package on a huge conveyor belt. The publisher’s process ruled all.
—Cennydd Bowles
It’s only looking back I realise how poorly some publishers treat writers — especially when the work is so poorly remunerated.My worst experience was when a publisher decided, after I had completed the book, that they wanted to push a different take on the subject than the brief I had been given. Instead of talking to me, they rewrote chunks of my words, turning my advice into something that I would never have encouraged. Ultimately, I refused to let the book go out under my name alone, and I also didn’t really promote the book as I would have had to point out the things I did not agree with that had been inserted!
—Rachel Andrew
Self-publishing is now a realistic option for web authors, and can offers “complete control over the end product” as well as the possibility of earning more than a “pathetic author revenue percentage”. There can be substantial barriers, of course, as self-publishing authors must face for themselves the risks and challenges conventional publishers usually bear. Ideally, creating a book is a collaboration between author and publisher. Geri Coady found that “working with my publisher felt more like working with a partner or co-worker, rather than working for a boss.”
Wise words
So, after meeting the personal costs of writing and publishing a web book — fear, uncertainty, doubt, typing (so much typing) — and then smelling the roses of success, what’s left for an author to say? Some words, perhaps, to people thinking of writing a book.
Donna Spencer identifies a stumbling block common to many writers with an insight into the writing process:
Having talked to a lot of potential authors, I think most have the problem that they haven’t actually figured out the ‘answer’ to their premise yet. They feel like they are stuck in the writing, but they are actually stuck in the thinking.
For some no-nonsense, straightforward advice to cut through any anxiety or inadequacy, Rachel Andrew encourages authors to “treat it like any other work. There is no mystery to writing, you just have to write. Schedule the time, sit down, write words.” Tim Brown notes the importance of the editing process to refine a book and help authors reach their readers:
Hire good editors. Editors are amazing thinkers who can vastly improve the quality and clarity of a piece of writing.
We are too much beholden to the practical demands and challenges of technology, so Aaron Gustafson suggests a writer should “favor philosophies over techniques and your book will have a longer shelf life.”
Most intimations of renown and recognition are nipped in the bud by Joe Leech’s warning: “Don’t expect fame and fortune.” Although Cennydd Bowles’ bitter experience can be discouraging:
The sacrifices required are immense. You probably won’t make it.
…he would do things differently for a future book:
I would approach the book with […] far more concern about conveying the damn joy of what I do for a living.
The pleasure of writing, not just having written is captured by James Chudley when he recalls:
How much I enjoy writing and also how much I enjoy the discipline or having a side project like this. It’s a really good supplement to working life.
And Jon Hicks has words that any author will find comforting:
It will be fine. Everything will be fine. Just get on with it!
As the web expands effortlessly and ceaselessly to make room for all our words, yet it can also discourage the accumulation of any particular theme in one space, dividing rich seams and scattering knowledge across the web’s surface and into its deepest reaches. How many words become weightless and insubstantial, signals lost in the constant white noise of indistinguishable voices, unloved, unlinked? The web forgets constantly, despite the (somewhat empty) promise of digital preservation: articles and data are sacrificed to expediency, profit and apathy; online attention, acknowledgement and interest wax and wane in days, hours even.
Books can encourage deeper engagement in readers, and foster faith in an author, particularly if released under the imprint of a recognized publisher within the field. And books are changing. Although still not widely adopted, EPUB3 is the new standard in ebooks, bringing with it new possibilities for interaction and connection: readers with the text; readers with readers; and readers with authors. EPUB3 is built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript — sound familiar? In the past, we took what we could from the printed page to make the web; now books are rubbing up against what we’ve made.
So: a book.
Ever thought you could write one? Should write one? Would?
I’d like to thank all the authors who wrote their books and answered my questions.
Rachel Andrew · CSS3 Layout Modules, The CSS3 Anthology and more
Cennydd Bowles · Undercover User Experience Design, with James Box
Tim Brown · Combining Typefaces
James Chudley · Usability of Web Photos
Andrew Clarke · Hardboiled Web Design
Geri Coady · Colour Accessibility
Andy Croll · HTML Email
Anna Debenham · Front-end Style Guides
Aaron Gustafson · Adaptive Web Design
Val Head · CSS Animations
Jon Hicks · The Icon Handbook
Joe Leech · Psychology for Designers
Christopher Murphy · The Craft of Words, with Niklas Persson
Donna Spencer · Information Architecture, Card Sorting and How to Write Great Copy for the Web
Brian Suda · Designing with Data
Chui Chui Tan · International User Research
Andrew Travers · Interviewing for Research",2013,Owen Gregory,owengregory,2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/web-books/,content
20,Make Your Browser Dance,"It was a crisp winter’s evening when I pulled up alongside the pier. I stepped out of my car and the bitterly cold sea air hit my face. I walked around to the boot, opened it and heaved out a heavy flight case. I slammed the boot shut, locked the car and started walking towards the venue.
This was it. My first gig. I thought about all those weeks of preparation: editing video clips, creating 3-D objects, making coloured patterns, then importing them all into software and configuring effects to change as the music did; targeting frequency, beat, velocity, modifying size, colour, starting point; creating playlists of these… and working out ways to mix them as the music played.
This was it. This was me VJing.
This was all a lifetime (well a decade!) ago.
When I started web designing, VJing took a back seat. I was more interested in interactive layouts, semantic accessible HTML, learning all the IE bugs and mastering the quirks that CSS has to offer. More recently, I have been excited by background gradients, 3-D transforms, the @keyframe directive, as well as new APIs such as getUserMedia, indexedDB, the Web Audio API
But wait, have I just come full circle? Could it be possible, with these wonderful new things in technologies I am already familiar with, that I could VJ again, right here, in a browser?
Well, there’s only one thing to do: let’s try it!
Let’s take to the dance floor
Over the past couple of years working in The Lab I have learned to take a much more iterative approach to projects than before. One of my new favourite methods of working is to create a proof of concept to make sure my theory is feasible, before going on to create a full-blown product. So let’s take the same approach here.
The main VJing functionality I want to recreate is manipulating visuals in relation to sound. So for my POC I need to create a visual, with parameters that can be changed, then get some sound and see if I can analyse that sound to detect some data, which I can then use to manipulate the visual parameters. Easy, right?
So, let’s start at the beginning: creating a simple visual. For this I’m going to create a CSS animation. It’s just a funky i element with the opacity being changed to make it flash.
See the Pen Creating a light by Rumyra (@Rumyra) on CodePen
A note about prefixes: I’ve left them out of the code examples in this post to make them easier to read. Please be aware that you may need them. I find a great resource to find out if you do is caniuse.com. You can also check out all the code for the examples in this article
Start the music
Well, that’s pretty easy so far. Next up: loading in some sound. For this we’ll use the Web Audio API. The Web Audio API is based around the concept of nodes. You have a source node: the sound you are loading in; a destination node: usually the device’s speakers; and any number of processing nodes in between. All this processing that goes on with the audio is sandboxed within the AudioContext.
So, let’s start by initialising our audio context.
var contextClass = window.AudioContext;
if (contextClass) {
//web audio api available.
var audioContext = new contextClass();
} else {
//web audio api unavailable
//warn user to upgrade/change browser
}
Now let’s load our sound file into the new context we created with an XMLHttpRequest.
function loadSound() {
//set audio file url
var audioFileUrl = '/octave.ogg';
//create new request
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open(""GET"", audioFileUrl, true);
request.responseType = ""arraybuffer"";
request.onload = function() {
//take from http request and decode into buffer
context.decodeAudioData(request.response, function(buffer) {
audioBuffer = buffer;
});
}
request.send();
}
Phew! Now we’ve loaded in some sound! There are plenty of things we can do with the Web Audio API: increase volume; add filters; spatialisation. If you want to dig deeper, the O’Reilly Web Audio API book by Boris Smus is available to read online free.
All we really want to do for this proof of concept, however, is analyse the sound data. To do this we really need to know what data we have.
Learning the steps
Let’s take a minute to step back and remember our school days and science class. I’m sure if I drew a picture of a sound wave, we would all start nodding our heads.
The sound you hear is caused by pressure differences in the particles in the air. Sound pushes these particles together, causing vibrations. Amplitude is basically strength of pressure. A simple example of change of amplitude is when you increase the volume on your stereo and the output wave increases in size.
This is great when everything is analogue, but the waveform varies continuously and it’s not suitable for digital processing: there’s an infinite set of values. For digital processing, we need discrete numbers.
We have to sample the waveform at set time intervals, and record data such as amplitude and frequency. Luckily for us, just the fact we have a digital sound file means all this hard work is done for us. What we’re doing in the code above is piping that data in the audio context. All we need to do now is access it.
We can do this with the Web Audio API’s analysing functionality. Just pop in an analysing node before we connect the source to its destination node.
function createAnalyser(source) {
//create analyser node
analyser = audioContext.createAnalyser();
//connect to source
source.connect(analyzer);
//pipe to speakers
analyser.connect(audioContext.destination);
}
The data I’m really interested in here is frequency. Later we could look into amplitude or time, but for now I’m going to stick with frequency.
The analyser node gives us frequency data via the getFrequencyByteData method.
Don’t forget to count!
To collect the data from the getFrequencyByteData method, we need to pass in an empty array (a JavaScript typed array is ideal). But how do we know how many items the array will need when we create it?
This is really up to us and how high the resolution of frequencies we want to analyse is. Remember we talked about sampling the waveform; this happens at a certain rate (sample rate) which you can find out via the audio context’s sampleRate attribute. This is good to bear in mind when you’re thinking about your resolution of frequencies.
var sampleRate = audioContext.sampleRate;
Let’s say your file sample rate is 48,000, making the maximum frequency in the file 24,000Hz (thanks to a wonderful theorem from Dr Harry Nyquist, the maximum frequency in the file is always half the sample rate). The analyser array we’re creating will contain frequencies up to this point. This is ideal as the human ear hears the range 0–20,000hz.
So, if we create an array which has 2,400 items, each frequency recorded will be 10Hz apart. However, we are going to create an array which is half the size of the FFT (fast Fourier transform), which in this case is 2,048 which is the default. You can set it via the fftSize property.
//set our FFT size
analyzer.fftSize = 2048;
//create an empty array with 1024 items
var frequencyData = new Uint8Array(1024);
So, with an array of 1,024 items, and a frequency range of 24,000Hz, we know each item is 24,000 ÷ 1,024 = 23.44Hz apart.
The thing is, we also want that array to be updated constantly. We could use the setInterval or setTimeout methods for this; however, I prefer the new and shiny requestAnimationFrame.
function update() {
//constantly getting feedback from data
requestAnimationFrame(update);
analyzer.getByteFrequencyData(frequencyData);
}
Putting it all together
Sweet sticks! Now we have an array of frequencies from the sound we loaded, updating as the sound plays. Now we want that data to trigger our animation from earlier.
We can easily pause and run our CSS animation from JavaScript:
element.style.webkitAnimationPlayState = ""paused"";
element.style.webkitAnimationPlayState = ""running"";
Unfortunately, this may not be ideal as our animation might be a whole heap longer than just a flashing light. We may want to target specific points within that animation to have it stop and start in a visually pleasing way and perhaps not smack bang in the middle.
There is no really easy way to do this at the moment as Zach Saucier explains in this wonderful article. It takes some jiggery pokery with setInterval to try to ascertain how far through the CSS animation you are in percentage terms.
This seems a bit much for our proof of concept, so let’s backtrack a little. We know by the animation we’ve created which CSS properties we want to change. This is pretty easy to do directly with JavaScript.
element.style.opacity = ""1"";
element.style.opacity = ""0.2"";
So let’s start putting it all together. For this example I want to trigger each light as a different frequency plays. For this, I’ll loop through the HTML elements and change the opacity style if the frequency gain goes over a certain threshold.
//get light elements
var lights = document.getElementsByTagName('i');
var totalLights = lights.length;
for (var i=0; i 160){
//start animation on element
lights[i].style.opacity = ""1"";
} else {
lights[i].style.opacity = ""0.2"";
}
}
See all the code in action here. I suggest viewing in a modern browser :)
Awesome! It is true — we can VJ in our browser!
Let’s dance!
So, let’s start to expand this simple example. First, I feel the need to make lots of lights, rather than just a few. Also, maybe we should try a sound file more suited to gigs or clubs.
Check it out!
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited — that’s just a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript!
The other thing to think about, of course, is the sound that you would get at a venue. We don’t want to load sound from a file, but rather pick up on what is playing in real time. The easiest way to do this, I’ve found, is to capture what my laptop’s mic is picking up and piping that back into the audio context. We can do this by using getUserMedia.
Let’s include this in this demo. If you make some noise while viewing the demo, the lights will start to flash.
And relax :)
There you have it. Sit back, play some music and enjoy the Winamp like experience in front of you.
So, where do we go from here? I already have a wealth of ideas. We haven’t started with canvas, SVG or the 3-D features of CSS. There are other things we can detect from the audio as well. And yes, OK, it’s questionable whether the browser is the best environment for this. For one, I’m using a whole bunch of nonsensical HTML elements (maybe each animation could be held within a web component in the future). But hey, it’s fun, and it looks cool and sometimes I think it’s OK to just dance.",2013,Ruth John,ruthjohn,2013-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/make-your-browser-dance/,code
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 appropriate for your site; if it is, then hover responses can be a real asset.
Why hover?
We have all these capabilities with CSS properties to create the aforementioned fun interactions, and it would be quite easy to fall back into some old patterns and animation abuse. The world of Flash intros and skip links could be recreated with CSS keyframes. However, I don’t think any of us want to go the route of forcing users into unwanted exchanges and road blocking content.
What’s great about utilizing hover to pair with CSS powered actions is that it’s user initiated. It’s a well-established expectation that when a user mouses over an object, something changes. If we can identify that something as a link, then we will expect something to change as we move our mouse over it. By waiting to trigger a CSS-based response until a user chooses to engage with a target makes for a more polished experience (as opposed to barraging our screens with animations all willy-nilly). This makes it the perfect opportunity to add some unique spunk.
What about mobile, touch, and responsive?
So, you’re on board with this so far, but what about mobile and touch devices? Sure, some devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4 have some hovering capabilities, but certainly most do not. Beyond mobile devices, we also have to worry about desktops with touch capabilities. It’s super difficult to detect if a user is currently using touch or hover. One option we have is to design strictly for touch only and send hover enhancements to the graveyard. However, being that I’m all “fuck yeah hovers!,” I like to explore all options. So, let’s examine four different types of hover patterns and see how they can translate to our touch devices.
1. The essential text hover
Changing text color on hover is something we’ve done for a while and it has helped aid in identifying links. To maintain the best accessibility we can achieve, it helps to have a different visual indicator on the default :link state, such as an underline. By making sure all text links have an underline, we won’t have to rely on visual changes during hover to make sure touch device users know that it is a link. For hover-enabled devices, we can add a basic color transition. Doing so creates a nice fade, which makes the change on hover less jarring. Kinda like smooth jazz. The code* to achieve this is quite simple:
a {
color: #6dd4b1;
transition: color 0.25s linear;
}
a:hover, a:focus {
color: #357099;
}
Browser prefixes are omitted
You can see in the final result that, for both touch and hover, everyone wins:
See the Pen Most Basic Link Transition by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
2. Visual background wizardry and animated hovers
We can take this a step further by again making changes to our aesthetic on hover, but not making any content changes. Altering image hovers for fun and personality can separate your site from others; that personality is important and can enhance our content.
Let’s look at a few sites that do this really well. Scroll down to the judges section of CSS Off and check out the illustrations of the judges. On hover, the illustration fades into a photo of the judge. This provides a realistic alternative to the drawing. Users without the hover can click into the detail page, where they can see the full color picture and learn more about the judges; the information is still available through a different pathway.
Going back to the higher education field, let’s visit Delaware Valley College. The school had recently gone through a rebranding that included loop icons as a symbol to connect ideas. These icons are brought into the website on hover of the slideshow arrows (WebKit browsers). The hover reveals a loop animation, tying in overall themes and adding some extra pizzazz that makes me think, “This is a hip place that feels current.” For visitors who can’t access the hover effect, the default arrow state clearly represents a clickable link, and there is swipe functionality on mobile devices to boot.
DIY.org’s Frontend Dev page has a bunch of enjoyable hover actions happening, featuring scaling transforms and looping animations. Nothing new is revealed on hover, so touch devices won’t miss anything, but it intrigues the user who is visiting a site about front-end dev doing cool front-end things. It backs up its claim of front-end knowledge by adding this enhancement.
The old Cowork Chicago (now redirecting) had a great example, captured here:
Coop: Chicago Coworking from Jenn Lukas on Vimeo.
The code for the Join areas is quite simple:
.join-buttons .daily, .join-buttons .monthly {
height: 260px; z-index: 0; margin-top: 30px;
transition: height .2s linear,margin .2s linear;
}
.join-buttons .daily:hover, .join-buttons .monthly:hover {
height: 280px; margin-top: 20px;
}
li.button:hover {
z-index: 20;
}
The slight rotation on the photos, and the change of color and size of the rate options on hover, add to the fun factor. The site attempts to advertise the co-working space by letting bits of their charisma show through with these transitions. They don’t hit the user over the head with animations, but provide a nice addition to make sure visitors know it’s a welcoming place to work. Some text is added on the hover, but the text isn’t essential to determine where the link goes.
3. Image block hovers
There have been more designs popping up with large image blocks acting as extensive hit area links to subsequent pages. On hover of these links, text is revealed, letting the user know where the link destination goes.
See the Pen Transitioning Max Height by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
This type of link is tough for users on touch as the image might not provide enough context to reveal its target. If you weren’t aware of what my illustrated avatar from 2007 looked like (or even if you did), then how would you know that this is a link to my Twitter page? Instead, if we provide enough context — such as the @jennlukas handle — you could assume the destination. Users who receive the hover can also see the Twitter bio. It won’t break the experience for users that can’t hover, but it will provide a nice interaction and some more information for those that can.
See the Pen Transitioning Max Height by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
The Esquire site follows this same pattern, in which the title of the story is shown and the subheading is revealed on hover. Dining at Altitude took the opposite approach, where all text is shown by default and, on hover, you can see more of the image that the text sits atop. This is a nice technique to follow. For touch users, following the link will allow them to see more of the image detail that was revealed on hover.
4. Drop-down navigation menu hovers
Main navigation options that rely on hover have come up as a problem for touch. One way to address this is to be sure your top level items are all functional links to somewhere, and not blank anchors to trigger a submenu drop-down. This ensures that, even without the hover-triggered menu, users can still navigate to those top-level pages. From there, they should be able to access the tertiary pages shown in the drop-down. Following this arrangement, drop-down menus act as a quick shortcut and aren’t necessary to the navigational structure. If the top navigation items are your most visited pages, this execution won’t hinder your visitors.
If the information within the menu is vital, such as a lone account menu, another option is to show drop-down menus on click instead of hover. This pattern will allow both mouse and touch users to access the drop-downs.
Why can’t we just detect hover?
This is a really tricky thing to do. Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 uses the aria-haspopup attribute to simulate hover on touch devices, but usually our audience stretches beyond that group. There’s been discussion around using Modernizr, but false positives have come with that. A W3C draft for Media Queries Level 4 includes a hover feature, but it’s not supported yet. Since some devices can hover and touch, should you rely on hover effects for those? Arguments have come up that users can be browsing your site with a mouse and then decide to switch to touch, or vice versa. That might be a large concern for you, or it might be an edge case that isn’t vital to your site’s success.
For one site, I used mousemove and touchstart JavaScript events in order to detect if a visitor starts to browse the site with a mouse. The design initiates for touch users, showing all text on load, but as soon as a mouse movement occurs, the text becomes hidden and is then revealed on hover.
See the Pen Detect Touch devices with mousemove and touchstart by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
One downside to this approach is that the text is viewable until a mouse enters the document, but if the elements are further down the page it might not be noticed. A second downside is if a user on a touch- and hover-enabled device starts browsing with the mouse and then switches back to touch, the hover-centric styles will remain until a new page load. These were acceptable scenarios in the project I worked on, but might not be for every project.
Can we give our visitors a choice?
I’ve been thinking about how we can combat the concern of not knowing if our customers are using touch or a mouse, not to mention keyboard or Wacom tablets or Minority Report screens. We can cover keyboards with our friend :focus, but that still doesn’t solve our other dilemmas.
Remember when we couldn’t rely on browsers to zoom text and we had to use those small A, medium A, big A [AAA] buttons? On selection of one of those options, a different style sheet would load with small, medium, or large text sizes to satisfy our user’s request. We could even set cookies to remember their font choices. What if we offered a similar solution, a hover/touch switcher, for our new predicament?
See the Pen cwuJf by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
We could add this switcher to our design. Maybe add it to the header on smaller screens and the footer on larger screens to play the odds. Then be sure to deliver the appropriate touch- or hover-optimized adventure for our guests.
How about adding View options in the areas where we’re hiding content until hover? Looking at Delta Cycle, there’s logic in place to switch layouts on some mobile devices. On desktops we can see the layout shows the product and price by default, and the name of the item and an Add to cart button on hover. If you want to keep this hover, but also worry that touch users can’t access it — or even if you are concerned that people might want to view it with more details up front — we could add another view switcher.
See the Pen List/Grid Views for Hover or Touch by Jenn Lukas (@Jenn) on CodePen
Similar to the list versus grid view we often see in operating systems, a choice here could cover all of our bases.
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to hover patterns. Design for your content. If you are providing important information about driving directions or healthcare, you might want to err on the side of designing for touch only. If you are behind an educational site and trying to entice more traffic and sign-ups, or a more immersive e-commerce site selling pies, then hover activity can help support your content and engage your visitors without being a detriment. While content can be our top priority, let’s not forget that our designs and interactions, hovers included, can have a great positive impact on how visitors experience our site. Hover wisely, friends.",2013,Jenn Lukas,jennlukas,2013-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/the-responsive-hover-paradigm/,
24,Kill It With Fire! What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs,"In the mid-1640s, a man named Matthew Hopkins attempted to rid England of the devil’s influence, primarily by demanding payment for the service of tying women to chairs and tossing them into lakes.
Unsurprisingly, his methods garnered criticism. Hopkins defended himself in The Discovery of Witches in 1647, subtitled “Certaine Queries answered, which have been and are likely to be objected against MATTHEW HOPKINS, in his way of finding out Witches.”
Each “querie” was written in the voice of an imagined detractor, and answered in the voice of an imagined defender (always referring to himself as “the discoverer,” or “him”):
Quer. 14.
All that the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money, and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him.
Ans.
You doe him a great deale of wrong in every of these particulars.
Hopkins’ self-defense was an early modern English FAQ.
Digital beginnings
Question and answer formatting certainly isn’t new, and stretches back much further than witch-hunt days. But its most modern, most notorious, most reviled incarnation is the internet’s frequently asked questions page.
FAQs began showing up on pre-internet mailing lists as a way for list members to answer and pre-empt newcomers’ repetitive questions:
The presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through ftp. In practice, this rarely happened and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the “right” answers becomes tedious…
When all the users of a system can hear all the other users, FAQs make a lot of sense: the conversation needs to be managed and manageable. FAQs were a stopgap for the technological limitations of the time.
But the internet moved past mailing lists. Online information can be stored, searched, filtered, and muted; we choose and control our conversations. New users no longer rely on the established community to answer their questions for them.
And yet, FAQs are still around. They’re a content anti-pattern, replicated from site to site to solve a problem we no longer have.
What we hate when we hate FAQs
As someone who creates and structures online content – always with the goal of making that content as useful as possible to people – FAQs drive me absolutely batty. Almost universally, FAQs represent the opposite of useful. A brief list of their sins:
Double trouble
Duplicated content is practically a given with FAQs. They’re written as though they’ll be accessed in a vacuum – but search results, navigation patterns, and curiosity ensure that users will seek answers throughout the site. Is our goal to split their focus? To make them uncertain of where to look? To divert them to an isolated microcosm of the website? Duplicated content means user confusion (to say nothing of the duplicated workload for maintaining content).
Leaving the job unfinished
Many FAQs fail before they’re even out of the gate, presenting a list of questions that’s incomplete (too short and careless to be helpful) or irrelevant (avoiding users’ real concerns in favor of soundbites). Alternately, if the right questions are there, the answers may be convoluted, jargon-heavy, or otherwise difficult to understand.
Long lists of not-my-question
Getting a single answer often means sifting through a haystack of questions. For each potential question, the user must read, comprehend, assess, move on, rinse, repeat. That’s a lot of legwork for little reward – and a lot of opportunity for mistakes. Users may miss their question, or they may fail to recognize a differently worded version of their question, or they may not notice when their sought-after answer appears somewhere they didn’t expect.
The ventriloquist act
FAQs shift the point of view. While websites speak on behalf of the organization (“our products,” “our services,” “you can call us for assistance,” etc.), FAQs speak as the user – “I can’t find my password” or “How do I sign up?” Both voices are written from the first-person perspective, but speak for different entities, which is disorienting: it breaks the tone and messaging across the website. It’s also presumptuous: why do you get to speak for the user?
These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.)
Instead of sending users to a jumble of maybe-it’s-here-maybe-it’s-not questions, the answers to FAQs should be found naturally throughout a website. They are not separated, not isolated, not other. They are the content.
To present it otherwise is to create a runaround, and users know it. Jay Martel’s parody, “F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s” captures the silliness and frustration of such a system:
Q: Why are you so rude?
A: For that answer, you would have to consult an F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s. But your time might be better served by simply abandoning your search for a magic answer and taking responsibility for your own profound ignorance.
FAQs aren’t magic answers. They don’t resolve a content dilemma or even help users. Yet they keep cropping up, defiant, weedy, impossible to eradicate.
Where are they all coming from?
Blame it on this: writing is hard. When generating content, most of us do whatever it takes to get some words on the screen. And the format of question and answer makes it easy: a reactionary first stab at content development.
After all, the point of website content is to answer users’ questions. So this – to give everyone credit – is a really good move. Content creators who think in terms of questions and answers are actually thinking of their users, particularly first-time users, trying to anticipate their needs and write towards them.
It’s a good start. But it’s scaffolding: writing that helps you get to the writing you’re supposed to be doing. It supports you while you write your way to the heart of your content. And once you get there, you have to look back and take the scaffolding down.
Leaving content in the Q&A format that helped you develop it is missing the point. You’re not there to build scaffolding. You have to see your content in its naked purpose and determine the best method for communicating that purpose – and it usually won’t be what got you there.
The goal (to borrow a lesson from content management systems) is to separate the content from its presentation, to let the meaning of the content inform its display.
This is, of course, a nice theory.
An occasionally necessary evil
I have a lot of clients who adore FAQs. They’ve developed their content over a long period of time. They’ve listened to the questions their users are asking. And they’ve answered them all on a page that I simply cannot get them to part with.
Which means I’ve had to consider that there may be occasions where an FAQ page is appropriate.
As an example: one of my clients is a financial office in a large institution. Because this office manages several third-party systems that serve a range of niche audiences, they had developed FAQs that addressed hyper-specific instances of dysfunction within systems for different users – à la “I’m a financial director and my employee submitted an expense report in such-and-such system and it returned such-and-such error. What do I do?”
Yes, this content could be removed from the question format and rewritten. But I’m not sure it would be an improvement. It won’t necessarily resolve concerns about length and searchability, and the different audiences may complicate the delivery. And since the work of rewriting it didn’t fit into the client workflow (small team, no writers, pressed for time), I didn’t recommend the change.
I’ve had to make peace with not being to torch all the FAQs on the internet. Some content, like troubleshooting information or complex procedures, may be better in that format. It may be the smartest way for a particular client to handle that particular information.
Of course, this has to be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the amount of content, the subject matter, the skill levels of the content creators, the publishing workflow, and the search habits of the users.
If you determine that an FAQ page is the only way to go, ask yourself:
Is there a better label or more specific term for the page (support, troubleshooting, product concerns, etc.)?
Is there way to structure the page, categorize the questions, or otherwise make it easier for users to navigate quickly to the answer they need?
Is a question and answer format absolutely the best way to communicate this information?
Form follows function
Just as a question and answer format isn’t necessarily required to deliver the content, neither is it an inappropriate method in and of itself. Content professionals have developed a knee-jerk reaction: It’s an FAQ page! Quick, burn it! Buuuuurn it!
But there’s no inherent evil in questions and answers. Framing content in an interrogatory construct is no more a deal with the devil than subheads and paragraphs, or narrative arcs, or bullet points.
Yes, FAQs are riddled with communication snafus. They deserve, more often than not, to be tied to a chair and thrown into a lake. But that wouldn’t fix our content problems. FAQs are a shiny and obvious target for our frustration, but they’re not unique in their flaws. In any format, in any display, in any kind of page, weak content can rear its ugly, poorly written head.
It’s not the Q&A that’s to blame, it’s bad content. Content without context will always fail users. That’s the real witch in our midst.",2013,Lisa Maria Martin,lisamariamartin,2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/what-to-do-with-faqs/,content
73,How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour,"Programmers like me are often intimidated by design – but a little effort can give a huge return on investment. Here are one coder’s tips for making any site quickly look more professional.
I am a programmer. I am not a designer. I have a degree in computer science, and I don’t mind Comic Sans. (It looks cheerful. Move on.)
But although I am a programmer, I want to make my sites look attractive. This is partly out of vanity, and partly realism. Vanity because I want people to think my work is good, and realism because the research shows that people won’t think a site is credible unless it also looks attractive.
For a very long time after I became a programmer, I was scared of design. Design seemed to consist of complicated rules that weren’t written down anywhere, plus an unlearnable sense of taste, possessed only by a black-clad elite.
But a little while ago, I decided to do my best to hack what it took to make my own projects look vaguely attractive. And although this doesn’t come close to the effect a professional designer could achieve, gathering these resources for improving a site’s look and feel has been really helpful.
If I hadn’t figured out some basic design shortcuts, it’s unlikely that a weekend hack of mine would have ended up on page three of the Daily Mail. And too often now, I see excellent programming projects that don’t reach the audience they deserve, simply because their design doesn’t match their execution.
So, if you are a developer, my Christmas present to you is this: my own collection of hacks that, used rightly, can make your personal programming projects look professional, quickly. None are hard to learn, most are free, and they let you focus on writing code.
One thing to note about these tips, though. They are a personal, pragmatic compilation. They are suggestions, not a definitive guide. You will definitely get better results by working with a professional designer, and by studying design more deeply.
If you are a designer, I would love to hear your suggestions for the best tools that I’ve missed, and I’d love to know how we programmers can do things better.
With that, on to the tools…
1. Use Bootstrap
If you’re not already using Bootstrap, start now. I really think that Bootstrap is one of the most significant technical achievements of the last few years: it democratizes the whole process of web design.
Essentially, Bootstrap is a a grid system, with a bunch of common elements. So you can lay your site out how you want, drop in simple elements like forms and tables, and get a good-looking, consistent result, without spending hours fiddling with CSS. You just need HTML.
Another massive upside is that it makes it easy to make any site responsive, so you don’t have to worry about writing media queries. Go, get Bootstrap and check out the examples. To keep your site lightweight, you can customize your download to include only the elements you want.
If you have more time, then Mark Otto’s article on why and how Bootstrap was created at Twitter is well worth a read.
2. Pimp Bootstrap
Using Bootstrap is already a significant advance on not using Bootstrap, and massively reduces the tedium of front-end development. But you also run the risk of creating Yet Another Bootstrap Site, or Hack Day Design, as it’s known.
If you’re really pressed for time, you could buy a theme from Wrap Bootstrap. These are usually created by professional designers, and will give a polish that we can’t achieve ourselves. Your site won’t be unique, but it will look good quickly.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make Bootstrap not look too much like Bootstrap – using fonts, CSS effects, background images, colour schemes and so on. Most of the rest of this article covers different ways to achieve this.
We are going to customize this Bootstrap example page.
This already has some custom CSS in the . We’ll pull it all out, and create a new CSS file, custom.css. Then we add a reference to it in the header. Now we’re ready to start customizing things.
3. Fonts
Web fonts are one of the quickest ways to make your site look distinctive, modern, and less Bootstrappy, so we’ll start there.
First, we can add some sweet fonts, from Google Web Fonts. The intimidating bit is choosing fonts that look nice together. Luckily, there are plenty of suggestions around the web: we’re going to use one of DesignShack’s suggested free Google Fonts pairings. Our fonts are Corben (for headings) and Nobile (for body copy).
Then we add these files to our .
element markup pattern was proposed by Mat Marquis and is now being developed by the Responsive Images Community Group. By providing a means of declaring multiple sources, authors could use media queries to control which version of an image is displayed and under what conditions:
Accessible text
A second proposal put forward by Apple, the srcset attribute, uses a more concise syntax intended for use with the element too. This would allow authors to provide a set of images, but with the decision on which to use left to the browser:
markup pattern is to allow for greater art direction. For example, rather than scaling down images on smaller displays to the point that their content is hard to discern, we could present closer crops instead:
This can be achieved with CSS of course, although with a download penalty for those parts of an image not shown. This point may be negligible, however, since in the context of adaptable layouts, these hidden areas may end up being revealed anyway.
Art direction concerns design, not content. If we wish to maintain a separation of concerns, including presentation within our markup seems misguided.
3. The size of a display has little relation to the size of an image
By using media queries, the element allows authors to choose which characteristics of the screen or viewport to query for different images to be displayed.
In developing sites at Clearleft, we have noticed that the viewport is essentially arbitrary, with the size of an image’s containing element more important. For example, look at how this grid of images may adapt at different viewport widths:
As we build more modular systems, components need to be adaptable in and of themselves. There is a case to be made for developing more contextual methods of querying, rather than those based on attributes of the display.
4. We haven’t lived with the problem long enough
A key strength of the web is that the underlying platform can be continually iterated. This can also be problematic if snap judgements are made about what constitutes an improvement.
The early history of the web is littered with such examples, be it the perceived need for blinking text or inline typographic styling. To build a platform for the future, additions to it should be carefully considered. And if we want more consistent support across browsers, burdening vendors with an ever increasing list of features seems counterproductive.
Only once the need for a new feature is sufficiently proven, should we look to standardise it. Before we could declare hover effects, rounded corners and typographic styling in CSS, we used JavaScript as a polyfill. Sure, doing so was painful, but use cases were fully explored, and the CSS specification better reflected the needs of authors.
5. Images and the web aesthetic
The srcset proposal has emerged from a company that markets its phones as being able to browse the real – yet squashed down, tapped and zoomable – web. Perhaps Apple should make its own website responsive before suggesting how the rest of us should do so.
Converserly, while the proposal has the backing of a few respected developers and designers, it was born out of the work Mat Marquis and Filament Group did for the Boston Globe. As the first large-scale responsive design, this was a landmark project that ignited the responsive web design movement and proved its worth. But it was the first.
Its design shares a vernacular to that of contemporary newspaper websites, with a columnar, image-laden and densely packed layout. Compared to more recent examples – Quartz, The Next Web and the New York Times Skimmer – it feels out of step with the future direction of news sites. In seeking out a truer aesthetic for the web in which software interfaces have greater influence, we might discover that the need for responsive images isn’t as great as originally thought.
Building for the future
With responsive design, we’ve accepted the idea that a fully fluid layout, rather than a set of fixed layouts, is best suited to the web’s unpredictable nature. Current responsive image proposals are antithetical to this approach.
We need solutions that lack complexity, are device-agnostic and work within existing workflows. Any proposal that requires different versions of the same image to be created, is likely to have to acquiesce under the pressure of reality.
While it’s easy to get distracted about the size and quality of an image, and how we might choose to serve it, often the simplest solution is not to include it at all. After years of gluttonous design practice, in which fast connections and expansive display sizes were an accepted norm, we have got use to filling pages with needless images and countless items of page furniture.
To design more adaptable experiences, the presence of every element needs to be questioned, for its existence requires additional data to be downloaded or futher complexity within a design system. Conditional loading techniques mean that the inclusion of images is no longer a binary choice, but can instead appear in a progressively enhanced manner.
So here is my proposal. Instead of spending the next year worrying about responsive images, let’s embrace the constraints of the medium, and seek out new solutions that can work within them.",2012,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-images-what-we-thought-we-needed/,code
80,HTML5 Video Bumpers,"Video is a bigger part of the web experience than ever before. With native browser support for HTML5 video elements freeing us from the tyranny of plugins, and the availability of faster internet connections to the workplace, home and mobile networks, it’s now pretty straightforward to publish video in a way that can be consumed in all sorts of ways on all sorts of different web devices.
I recently worked on a project where the client had shot some dedicated video shorts to publish on their site. They also had some five-second motion graphics produced to top and tail the videos with context and branding. This pretty common requirement is a great idea on the web, where a user might land at your video having followed a link and be viewing a page without much context.
Known as bumpers, these short introduction clips help brand a video and make it look a lot more professional.
Adding bumpers to a video
The simplest way to add bumpers to a video would be to edit them on to the start and end of the video file itself. Cooking the bumpers into the video file is easy, but should you ever want to update them it can become a real headache. If the branding needs updating, for example, you’d need to re-edit and re-encode all your videos. Not a fun task.
What if the bumpers could be added dynamically? That would enable you to use the same bumper for multiple videos (decreasing download time for users who might watch more than one) and to update the bumpers whenever you wanted. You could change them seasonally, update them for special promotions, run different advertising slots, perform multivariate testing, or even target different bumpers to different users.
The trade-off, of course, is that if you dynamically add your bumpers, there’s a chance that a user in a given circumstance might not see the bumper. For example, if the main video feature was uploaded to YouTube, you’d have no way to control the playback. As always, you need to weigh up the pros and cons and make your choice.
HTML5 bumpers
If you wanted to dynamically add bumpers to your HTML5 video, how would you go about it? That was the question I found myself needing to answer for this particular client project.
My initial thought was to treat it just like an image slideshow. If I were building a slideshow that moved between images, I’d use CSS absolute positioning with z-index to stack the images up on top of each other in a pile, with the first image on top. To transition to the second image, I’d use JavaScript to fade the top image out, revealing the second image beneath it.
Now that video is just a native object in the DOM, just like an image, why not do the same? Stack the videos up with the opening bumper on top, listen for the video’s onended event, and fade it out to reveal the main feature behind. Good idea, right?
Wrong
Remember that this is the web. It’s never going to be that easy. The problem here is that many non-desktop devices use native, dedicated video players. Think about watching a video on a mobile phone – when you play the video, the phone often goes full-screen in its native player, leaving the web page behind. There’s no opportunity to fade or switch z-index, as the video isn’t being viewed in the page. Your page is left powerless. Powerless!
So what can we do? What can we control?
Those of us with particularly long memories might recall a time before CSS, when we’d have to use JavaScript to perform image rollovers. As CSS background images weren’t a practical reality, we would use lots of element, or perhaps more likely the src attribute of a source element, will swap from one video to another.
Swappin’ it
Let’s take a deliberately simple example of a super-basic video tag:
no fallback coz i is lame, innit.
We could very simply write a script to find all video tags and give them a new src to show our bumper.
View the example in a browser with WebM support. You’ll see that the video is swapped out for the opening bumper. Great!
Beefing it up
Of course, we can’t just publish video in one format. In practical use, you need a element with multiple elements containing your different source formats.
This time, our script needs to loop through the sources, not the videos. We’ll use a regular expression replacement to swap out the file name while maintaining the correct file extension.
The difference this time is that when changing the src of a we need to call the .load() method on the video to get it to acknowledge the change.
See the code in action, this time in a wider range of browsers.
But, my video!
I guess we should get the original video playing again. Keeping the same markup, we need to modify the script to do two things:
Store the original src in a data- attribute so we can access it later
Add an event listener so we can detect the end of the bumper playing, and load the original video back in
As we need to loop through the videos this time to add the event listener, I’ve moved the .load() call into that loop. It’s a bit more efficient to call it only once after modifying all the video’s sources.
Again, view the example to see the bumper play, followed by our spectacular main feature. (That’s my cat, Widget. His interests include sleeping and internet marketing.)
Tidying things up
The final thing to do is add our closing bumper after the main video has played. This involves the following changes:
We need to keep track of whether the src has been changed, so we only play the video if it’s changed. I’ve added the modified variable to track this, and it stops us getting into a situation where the video just loops forever.
Add an else to the event listener, for when the orig is false (so the main feature has been playing) to load in the end bumper. We also check that we’re not already playing the end bumper. Because looping.
Yo ho ho, that’s a lot of JavaScript. See it in action – you should get a bumper, the cat video, and an end bumper.
Of course, this code works fine for demonstrating the principle, but it’s very procedural. Nothing wrong with that, but to do something similar in production, you’d probably want to make the code more modular to ease maintainability. Besides, you may want to use a framework, rather than basic JavaScript.
The end credits
One really important principle here is that of progressive enhancement. If the browser doesn’t support JavaScript, the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video. If the browser supports JavaScript but doesn’t allow you to modify the src (as was the case with older versions of iOS), the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video.
If a search engine or social media bot grabs your page and looks for content, they won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video – which is absolutely what you want.
This means that if the bumper is absolutely crucial, you may still need to cook it into the video. However, for many applications, running it dynamically can work quite well.
As always, it comes down to three things:
Measure your audience: know how people access your site
Test the solution: make sure it works for your audience
Plan for failure: it’s the web and that’s how things work ‘round these parts
But most of all play around with it, have fun and build something awesome.",2012,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/html5-video-bumpers/,code
84,Responsive Responsive Design,"Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things.”
With those two sentences, Ethan closed the article that introduced the web to responsive design. Since then, responsive design has taken the web by storm. Seemingly every day, some company is touting their new responsive redesign. Large brands such as Microsoft, Time and Disney are getting in on the action, blowing away the once common criticism that responsive design was a technique only fit for small blogs.
Certainly, this is a good thing. As Ethan and John Allsopp before him, were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug. The web’s unique ability to be consumed and interacted with on any number of devices, with any number of input methods is something to be embraced.
But there’s one part of the web’s inherent flexibility that seems to be increasingly overlooked: the ability for the web to be interacted with on any number of networks, with a gradient of bandwidth constraints and latency costs, on devices with varying degrees of hardware power.
A few months back, Stephanie Rieger tweeted
“Shoot me now…responsive design has seemingly become confused with an opportunity to reduce performance rather than improve it.”
I would love to disagree, but unfortunately the evidence is damning. Consider the size and number of requests for four highly touted responsive sites that were launched this year:
74 requests, 1,511kb
114 requests, 1,200kb
99 requests, 1,298kb
105 requests, 5,942kb
And those numbers were for the small screen versions of each site!
These sites were praised for their visual design and responsive nature, and rightfully so. They’re very easy on the eyes and a lot of thought went into their appearance. But the numbers above tell an inconvenient truth: for all the time spent ensuring the visual design was airtight, seemingly very little (if any) attention was given to their performance.
It would be one thing if these were the exceptions, but unfortunately they’re not. Guy Podjarny, who has done a lot of research around responsive performance, discovered that 86% of the responsive sites he tested were either the same size or larger on the small screen as they were on the desktop.
The reality is that high performance should be a requirement on any web project, not an afterthought. Poor performance has been tied to a decrease in revenue, traffic, conversions, and overall user satisfaction. Case study after case study shows that improving performance, even marginally, will impact the bottom line. The situation is no different on mobile where 71% of people say they expect sites to load as quickly or faster on their phone when compared to the desktop.
The bottom line: performance is a fundamental component of the user experience.
So, given it’s extreme importance in the success of any web project, why is it that we’re seeing so many bloated responsive sites?
First, I adamantly disagree with the belief that poor performance is inherent to responsive design. That’s not a rule – it’s a cop-out. It’s an example of blaming the technique when we should be blaming the implementation. This argument also falls flat because it ignores the fact that the trend of fat sites is increasing on the web in general. While some responsive sites are the worst offenders, it’s hardly an issue resigned to one technique.
To fix the issue, we need to stop making excuses and start making improvements instead. Here, then, are some things we can do to start improving the state of responsive performance, and performance in general, right now.
Create a culture of performance
If you understand just how important performance is to the success of a project, the natural next step is to start creating a culture where high performance is a key consideration.
One of the things you can do is set a baseline. Determine the maximum size and number of requests you are going to allow, and don’t let a page go live if either of those numbers is exceeded. The BBC does this with its responsive mobile site.
A variation of that, which Steve Souders discussed in a recent podcast is to create a performance budget based on those numbers. Once you have that baseline set, if someone comes along and wants to add a something to the page, they have to make sure the page remains under budget. If it exceeds the budget, you have three options:
Optimize an existing feature or asset on the page
Remove an existing feature or asset from the page
Don’t add the new feature or asset
The idea here is that you make performance part of the process instead of something that may or may not get tacked on at the end.
Embrace the pain
This troubling trend of web bloat can be blamed in part on the lack of pain associated with poor performance. Most of us work on high-speed connections with low latency. When we fire up a 4Mb site, it doesn’t feel so bad.
When I tested the previously mentioned 5,942kb site on a 3G network, it took over 93 seconds to load. A minute and a half just staring at a white screen. Had anyone working on that project experienced that, you can bet the site wouldn’t have launched in that state.
Don’t just crunch numbers. Fire up your site on a slower network and see what it feels like to wait. If you don’t have access to a slow network, simulate one using a tool like Slowy, Throttle or the Network Conditioner found in Mac OS X 10.7.
Watch for low-hanging fruit
There are a bunch of general performance improvements that apply to any site (responsive or not) but often aren’t made. A great starting point is to refer to Yahoo!‘s list of rules.
Some of this might sound complicated or intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. You can grab an .htaccess file from HTML 5 Boilerplate or use Sergey Chernyshev’s drop-in .htaccess file. You can use tools like SpriteMe to simplify the creation of sprites, and ImageOptim to compress images.
Just by implementing these simple optimizations you will achieve a noticeable improvement in terms of weight and page load time.
Be careful with images
The most common offender for poor responsive performance is downloading unnecessarily large images, or worse yet, multiple sizes of the same image.
For background images, simply being careful with where and how you include the image can ensure you don’t get caught in the trap of multiple background images being downloaded without being used. Don’t count on display:none to help. While it may hide elements from displaying on screen, those images will still be requested and downloaded.
Content images can be a little trickier. Whatever you do, don’t serve a large image that works on a large screen display to small screens. It’s wasteful, not only in terms of adding weight to the page, but also in wasting precious memory. Instead, use a tool like Adaptive Images or src.sencha.io to make sure only appropriately sized images are being downloaded.
The new element that has been so often discussed is another excellent solution if you’re feeling particularly future-oriented. A picture polyfill exists so that you can start using the element now without any worries about support.
Conditional loading
Don’t load any more than you absolutely need to. If a script isn’t needed at certain sizes, use the matchMedia polyfill to ensure it only loads when needed. Use eCSSential to do the same for unnecessary CSS files.
Last year on 24 ways, Jeremy Keith wrote an article about conditional loading of content in a responsive design based on the screen width. The technique was later refined by the Filament Group into what they dubbed the Ajax-Include Pattern. It’s a powerful and simple way to lighten the load on small screens as well as reduce clutter.
Go vanilla?
If you take a look at the HTTP Archive you’ll see that other than image size, JavaScript is the heaviest asset on a page weighing in at 215kb on average. It also boasts the fifth highest correlation to load time as well as the second highest correlation to render time.
Much of the weight can be attributed to our industry’s increasing reliance on frameworks. This is especially a concern on mobile devices. PPK recently exclaimed that current JavaScript libraries are just “too heavy for mobile”. “Research from Stoyan Stefanov on parse times supports this. On some Android and iOS devices, it can take as long as 200-300ms just to parse jQuery.
There’s nothing wrong about using a framework, but the problem is that they’ve become the default. Before dropping another framework or plugin into a page, we should stop to consider the value it adds and whether we could accomplish what we need to do using a combination of vanilla JavaScript and CSS instead. (This is a great example of a scenario where a performance budget could help.)
Start thinking beyond visual aesthetics
We love to tout the web’s universality when discussing the need for responsive design. But that universality is not limited simply to screen size. Networks and hardware capabilities must factor in as well.
The web is an incredibly dynamic and interactive medium, and designing for it demands that we consider more than just visual aesthetics. Let’s not forget to give those other qualities the attention they deserve.",2012,Tim Kadlec,timkadlec,2012-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-responsive-design/,design
89,"Direction, Distance and Destinations","With all these new smartphones in the hands of lost and confused owners, we need a better way to represent distances and directions to destinations. The immediate examples that jump to mind are augmented reality apps which let you see another world through your phone’s camera. While this is interesting, there is a simpler way: letting people know how far away they are and if they are getting warmer or colder.
In the app world, you can easily tap into the phone’s array of sensors such as the GPS and compass, but what people rarely know is that you can do the same with HTML. The native versus web app debate will never subside, but at least we can show you how to replicate some of the functionality progressively in HTML and JavaScript.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a simple webpage listing distances and directions of a few popular locations around the world. We’ll use JavaScript to access the device’s geolocation API and also attempt to access the compass to get a heading. Both of these APIs are documented, to be included in the W3C geolocation API specification, and can be used on both desktop and mobile devices today.
To get started, we need a list of a few locations around the world. I have chosen the highest mountain peak on each continent so you can see a diverse set of distances and directions.
Mountain
°Latitude
°Longitude
Kilimanjaro
-3.075833
37.353333
Vinson Massif
-78.525483
-85.617147
Puncak Jaya
-4.078889
137.158333
Everest
27.988056
86.925278
Elbrus
43.355
42.439167
Mount McKinley
63.0695
-151.0074
Aconcagua
-32.653431
-70.011083
Source: Wikipedia
We can put those into an HTML list to be styled and accessed by JavaScript to create some distance and directions calculations.
The next thing we need to do is check to see if the browser and operating system have geolocation support. To do this we test to see if the function is available or not using a single JavaScript if statement.
The if statement will be false if geolocation support is not present, and then it is up to you to do something else instead as a fallback. For this example, we’ll do nothing since our page should work as is and only get progressively better if more functionality is available.
The if statement will be true if there is support and therefore will continue inside the curly brackets to try to get the location. This should prompt the reader to accept or deny the request to get their location. If they say no, the second function callback is processed, in this case a function called geo_error; whereas if the location is available, it fires the geo_success function callback.
The function geo_error(){ } isn’t that exciting. You can handle this in any way you see fit. The success function is more interesting. We get a position object passed into the function which contains a series of exciting attributes, namely the latitude and longitude of the device’s current location.
function geo_success(position){
gLat = position.coords.latitude;
gLon = position.coords.longitude;
}
Now, in the variables gLat and gLon we have the user’s approximate geographical position. We can use this information to start to calculate some distances between where they are and all the destinations.
At the time of writing, you can also get position.coords.heading, but on Windows and iOS devices this returned NULL. In the future, if and when this is supported, this is also where you can easily grab the compass information.
Inside the geo_success function, we want to loop through the HTML to get all of the mountain peaks’ latitudes and longitudes and compute the distance.
...
$('.geo').each(function(){
// Get the lat/lon from the HTML
tLat = $(this).find('.lat').html()
tLon = $(this).find('.lon').html()
// compute the distances between the current location and this points location
dist = distance(tLat,tLon,gLat,gLon);
// set the return values into something useful
d = parseInt(dist[0]*10)/10;
a = parseFloat(dist[1]);
// display the value in the HTML and style the arrow
$(this).find('.distance').html(d+' km away');
$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + a + 'deg)');
// store the arc for later use if compass is available
$(this).attr('data-arc',a);
}
In the variable d we have the distance between the current location and the location of the mountain peak based on the Haversine Formula. The variable a is the arc, which has a value from 0 to 359.99. This will be useful later if we have compass support. Given these two values we have a distance and a heading to style the HTML.
The next thing we want to do is check to see if the device has a compass and then get access to the the current heading. As we’ll see, there are several ways to do this, some of which work on certain devices but not others. The W3C geolocation spec says that, along with the coordinates, there are several other attributes: accuracy; altitude; and heading. Heading is the direction to true north, which is different than magnetic north! WebKit and Windows return NULL for the heading value, but WebKit has an experimental method to fetch the heading. If you get into accessing these sensors, you’ll have to try to catch a few of these methods to finally get a value. Assuming you do, we can move on to the more interesting display opportunities.
In an ideal world, this would succeed and set a variable we’ll call compassHeading to get a value between 0 and 359.99 degrees. Now we know which direction north is, we also know the direction relative to north of the path to our destination, so we can can subtract the two values to get an arrow to display on the screen. But we’re not finished yet: we also need to get the device’s orientation (landscape or portrait) and subtract the correct amount from the angle for the arrow. Once we have a value, we can use CSS to rotate the arrow the correct number of degrees.
-webkit-transform: rotate(-180deg)
Not all devices support a standard way to access compass information, so in the meantime we need to use a work around. On iOS, you can use the experimental event method e.webkitCompassHeading. We want the compass to update in real time as the device is moved around, so we’ll put this inside an event listener.
window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
// Loop through all the locations on the page
$('.geo').each(function(){
// get the arc value from north we computed and stored earlier
destination_arc = parseInt($(this).attr('data-arc'))
compassHeading = e.webkitCompassHeading + window.orientation + destination_arc;
// find the arrow element and rotate it accordingly
$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + compassHeading + 'deg)');
}
}
As the device is rotated, the compass arrow will constantly be updated. If you want to see an example, you can have a look at this page which shows the distances to all the peaks on each continent.
With progressive enhancement, we slowly layer on additional functionality as we go. The reader will first see the list of locations with a latitude and longitude. If the device is capable and permissions allow, it will then compute the distance. If a compass is available, with the correct permissions it will then add the final layer which is direction.
You should consider this code a stub for your projects. If you are making a hyperlocal webpage with restaurant locations, for example, then consider adding these features. Knowing not only how far away a place is, but also the direction can be hugely important, and since the compass is always active, it acts as a guide to the location.
Future developments
Improvements to this could include setting a timer and recalling the navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() function and updating the distances. I chose very distant mountains so kilometres made sense, but you can divide again by 1,000 to convert to metres if you are dealing with much nearer places. Walking or driving would change the distances so the ability to refresh would be important.
It is outside the scope of this article, but if you manage to get this HTML to work offline, then you can make a nice web app which sits on your devices’ homescreens and works even without an internet connection. This could be ideal for travellers in an unknown city looking for your destination. Just with offline storage, base64 encoding and data URIs, it is possible to embed plenty of design and functionality into a small offline webpage.
Now you know how to use JavaScript to look up a destination’s location and figure out the distance and direction – never get lost again.",2012,Brian Suda,briansuda,2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/direction-distance-and-destinations/,code
91,Infinite Canvas: Moving Beyond the Page,"Remember Web 2.0? I do. In fact, that phrase neatly bifurcates my life on the internet. Pre-2.0, I was occupied by chatting on AOL and eventually by learning HTML so I could build sites on Geocities. Around 2002, however, I saw a WYSIWYG demo in Dreamweaver. The instructor was dragging boxes and images around a canvas. With a few clicks he was able to build a dynamic, single-page interface. Coming from the world of tables and inline HTML styles, I was stunned.
As I entered college the next year, the web was blossoming: broadband, Wi-Fi, mobile (proud PDA owner, right here), CSS, Ajax, Bloglines, Gmail and, soon, Google Maps. I was a technology fanatic and a hobbyist web developer. For me, the web had long been informational. It was now rapidly becoming something else, something more: sophisticated, presentational, actionable.
In 2003 we watched as the internet changed. The predominant theme of those early Web 2.0 years was the withering of Internet Explorer 6 and the triumph of web standards. Upon cresting that mountain, we looked around and collectively breathed the rarefied air of pristine HMTL and CSS, uncontaminated by toxic hacks and forks – only to immediately begin hurtling down the other side at what is, frankly, terrifying speed.
Ten years later, we are still riding that rocket. Our days (and nights) are spent cramming for exams on CSS3 and RWD and Sass and RESS. We are the proud, frazzled owners of tiny pocket computers that annihilate the best laptops we could have imagined, and the architects of websites that are no longer restricted to big screens nor even segregated by device. We dragoon our sites into working any time, anywhere. At this point, we can hardly ask the spec developers to slow down to allow us to catch our breath, nor should we. It is, without a doubt, a most wonderful time to be a web developer.
But despite the newfound luxury of rounded corners, gradients, embeddable fonts, low-level graphics APIs, and, glory be, shadows, the canyon between HTML and native appears to be as wide as ever. The improvements in HTML and CSS have, for the most part, been conveniences rather than fundamental shifts. What I’d like to do now, if you’ll allow me, is outline just a few of the remaining gaps that continue to separate web sites and applications from their native companions.
What I’d like for Christmas
There is one irritant which is the grandfather of them all, the one from which all others flow and have their being, and it is, simply, the page refresh. That’s right, the foundational principle of the web is our single greatest foe. To paraphrase a patron saint of designers everywhere, if you see a page refresh, we blew it.
The page refresh brings with it, of course, many noble and lovely benefits: addressability, for one; and pagination, for another. (See also caching, resource loading, and probably half a dozen others.) Still, those concerns can be answered (and arguably answered more compellingly) by replacing the weary page with the young and hearty document. Flash may be dead, but it has many lessons yet to bequeath.
Preparing a single document when the site loads allows us to engage the visitor in a smooth and engrossing experience. We have long known this, of course. Twitter was not the first to attempt, via JavaScript, to envelop the user in a single-page application, nor the first to abandon it. Our shared task is to move those technologies down the stack, to make them more primitive, so that the next Twitter can be built with the most basic combination of HTML and CSS rather than relying on complicated, slow, and unreliable scripted solutions.
So, let’s take a look at what we can do, right now, that we might have a better idea of where our current tools fall short.
A print magazine in HTML clothing
Like many others, I suspect, one of my earliest experiences with publishing was laying out newsletters and newspapers on a computer for print. If you’ve ever used InDesign or Quark or even Microsoft Publisher, you’ll remember reflowing content from page to page. The advent of the internet signaled, in many ways, the abandonment of that model. Articles were no longer constrained by the physical limitations of paper. In shedding our chains, however, it is arguable that we’ve lost something useful. We had a self-contained and complete package, a closed loop. It was a thing that could be handled and finished, and doing so provided a sense of accomplishment that our modern, infinitely scrolling, ever-fractal web of content has stolen.
For our purposes today, we will treat 24 ways as the online equivalent of that newspaper or magazine. A single year’s worth of articles could easily be considered an issue. Right now, navigating between articles means clicking on the article you’d like to view and being taken to that specific address via a page reload. If Drew wanted to, it wouldn’t be difficult to update the page in place (via JavaScript) and change the address (again via JavaScript with the History API) to reflect the new content found at the new location. But what if Drew wanted to do that without JavaScript? And what if he wanted the site to not merely load the content but actually whisk you along the page in a compelling and delightful way, à la the Mag+ demo we all saw a few years ago when the iPad was first introduced? Uh, no.
We’re all familiar with websites that have attempted to go beyond the page by weaving many chunks of content together into a large document and for good reason. There is tremendous appeal in opening and exploring the canvas beyond the edges of our screens.
In one rather straightforward example from last year, Mozilla contacted Full Stop to build a website promoting Aza Raskin’s proposal for a set of Creative Commons-style privacy icons. Like a lot of the sites we build (including our own), the amount of information we were presenting was minimal. In these instances, we encourage our clients to consider including everything on a single page. The result was a horizontally driven site that was, if not whimsical, at least clever and attractive to the intended audience. An experience that is taken for granted when using device-native technology is utterly, maddeningly impossible to replicate on the web without jumping through JavaScript hoops.
In another, more complex example, we again had the pleasure of working with Aza earlier this year, this time on a redesign of the Massive Health website. Our assignment was to design and build a site that communicated Massive’s commitment to modern personal health. The site had to be visually and interactively stunning while maintaining a usable and clear interface for the casual visitor. Our solution was to extend the infinite company logo into a ribbon that carried the visitor through the site narrative. It also meant we’d be asking the browser to accommodate something it was never designed to handle: a non-linear design. (Be sure to play around. There’s a lot going on under the hood. We were also this close to a ZUI, if WebKit didn’t freak out when pages were scaled beyond 10×.) Despite the apparent and deliberate design simplicity, the techniques necessary to implement it are anything but. From updating the URL to moving the visitor from section to section, we’re firmly in JavaScript territory. And that’s a shame.
What can we do?
We might not be able to specify these layouts in HTML and CSS just yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a few new tricks while we wait. Let’s see how close we can come to recreating the privacy icons design, the Massive design, or the Mag+ design without resorting to JavaScript.
A horizontally paginated site
The first thing we’re going to need is the concept of a page within our HTML document. Using plain old HTML and CSS, we can stack a series of s sideways (with a little assist from our new friend, the viewport-width unit, not that he was strictly necessary). All we need to know is how many pages we have. (And, boy, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know that without having to predetermine it or use JavaScript?)
.window {
overflow: hidden;
width: 100%;
}
.pages {
width: 200vw;
}
.page {
float: left;
overflow: hidden;
width: 100vw;
}
If you look carefully, you’ll see that the conceit we’ll use in the rest of the demos is in place. Despite the document containing multiple pages, only one is visible at any given time. This allows us to keep the user focused on the task (or content) at hand.
By the way, you’ll need to use a modern, WebKit-based browser for these demos. I recommend downloading the WebKit nightly builds, Chrome Canary, or being comfortable with setting flags in Chrome.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions
Ah, here’s the rub. We have functional navigation, but precious few cues for the user. It’s not much good shoving the visitor around various parts of the document if they don’t get the pleasant whooshing experience of the journey. You might be thinking, what about that new CSS selector, target-something…? Well, my friend, you’re on the right track. Let’s test it. We’re going to need to use a bit of sleight of hand. While we’d like to simply offset the containing element by the number of pages we’re moving (like we did on Massive), CSS alone can’t give us that information, and that means we’re going to need to fake it by expanding and collapsing pages as you navigate. Here are the bits we’re going to need:
.page {
-webkit-transition: width 1s; // Naturally you're going to want to include all the relevant prefixes here
float: left;
left: 0;
overflow: hidden;
position: relative;
width: 100vw;
}
.page:not(:target) {
width: 0;
}
Ah, but we’re not fooling anyone with that trick. As soon as you move beyond a single page, the visitor’s disbelief comes tumbling down when the linear page transitions are unaffected by the distance the pages are allegedly traveling. And you may have already noticed an even more fatal flaw: I secretly linked you to the first page rather than the unadorned URL. If you visit the same page with no URL fragment, you get a blank screen. Sure, we could force a redirect with some server-side trickery, but that feels like cheating. Perhaps if we had the CSS4 subject selector we could apply styles to the parent based on the child being targeted by the URL. We might also need a few more abilities, like determining the total number of pages and having relative sibling selectors (e.g. nth-sibling), but we’d sure be a lot closer.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating
Well, what other cards can we play? How about the checkbox hack? Sure, it’s a garish trick, but it might be the best we can do today. Check it out.
label {
cursor: pointer;
}
input {
display: none;
}
input:not(:checked) + .page {
max-height: 100vh;
width: 0;
}
Finally, we can see the first page thanks to the state we are able to set on the appropriate radio button. Of course, now we don’t have URLs, so maybe this isn’t a winning plan after all. While our HTML and CSS toolkit may feel primitive at the moment, we certainly don’t want to sacrifice the addressability of the web. If there’s one bedrock principle, that’s it.
A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating and a gorgeous homepage
Gorgeous may not be the right word, but our little magazine is finally shaping up. Thanks to the CSS regions spec, we’ve got an exciting new power, the ability to begin an article in one place and bend it to our will. (Remember, your everyday browser isn’t going to work for these demos. Try the WebKit nightly build to see what we’re talking about.) As with the rest of the examples, we’re clearly abusing these features. Off-canvas layouts (you can thank Luke Wroblewski for the name) are simply not considered to be normal patterns… yet.
Here’s a quick look at what’s going on:
.excerpt-container {
float: left;
padding: 2em;
position: relative;
width: 100%;
}
.excerpt {
height: 16em;
}
.excerpt_name_article-1,
.page-1 .article-flow-region {
-webkit-flow-from: article-1;
}
.article-content_for_article-1 {
-webkit-flow-into: article-1;
}
The regions pattern is comprised of at least three components: a beginning; an ending; and a source. Using CSS, we’re able to define specific elements that should be available for the content to flow through. If magazine-style layouts are something you’re interested in learning more about (and you should be), be sure to check out the great work Adobe has been doing.
Looking forward, and backward
As designers, builders, and consumers of the web, we share a desire to see the usability and enjoyability of websites continue to rise. We are incredibly lucky to be working in a time when a three-month-old website can be laughably outdated. Our goal ought to be to improve upon both the weaknesses and the strengths of the web platform. We seek not only smoother transitions and larger canvases, but fine-grained addressability. Our URLs should point directly and unambiguously to specific content elements, be they pages, sections, paragraphs or words. Moreover, off-screen design patterns are essential to accommodating and empowering the multitude of devices we use to access the web. We should express the desire that interpage links take advantage of the CSS transitions which have been put to such good effect in every other aspect of our designs. Transitions aren’t just nice to have, they’re table stakes in the highly competitive world of native applications.
The tools and technologies we have right now allow us to create smart, beautiful, useful webpages. With a little help, we can begin removing the seams and sutures that bind the web to an earlier, less sophisticated generation.",2012,Nathan Peretic,nathanperetic,2012-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/infinite-canvas-moving-beyond-the-page/,code
93,Design Systems,"The most important part of responsive web design is that, no matter what the viewport width, the content is accessible in an optimum display. The best responsive designs are those that allow you to go from one optimised display to another, but with the feeling that these experiences are part of a greater product whole.
Responsive design: where we’ve been going wrong
Responsive web design was a shock to my web designer system. Those of us who had already been designing sites for mobile probably had the biggest leap to make. We might have been detecting user agents in order to deliver a mobile-specific site, or using the slightly more familiar Bushido technique to deliver sites optimised for device type and viewport size, but either way our focus was on devices. A site was optimised for either a mobile phone or a desktop.
Responsive web design brought us back to pre-table layout fluid sites that expanded or contracted to fit the viewport. This was a big difference to get our heads around when we were so used to designing for fixed-width layouts. Suddenly, an element could be any width or, at least, we needed to consider its maximum and minimum widths. Pixel perfection, while pretty, became wholly unrealistic, and a whole load of designers who prided themselves in detailed and precise designs got a bit scared.
Hanging on to our previous processes and typical deliverables led us to continue to optimise our sites for particular devices and provide pixel-perfect mockups for those device widths.
With all this we were concentrating on devices, not content, deliverables and not process, and making assumptions about users and their devices based on nothing but the width of the viewport.
I don’t think this is a crime, I think it was inevitable.
We can be up to date with our principles and ideals, but it’s never as easy in practice. That’s why it’s more important than ever to share our successful techniques and processes. Let’s drag each other into modern web design.
Design systems: the principles
What are design systems?
A visual design system is built out of the core components of typography, layout, shape or form, and colour. When considering the design of a whole product, a design system should also include patterns in user flow, content strategy, copy, and tone of voice. These concepts, design decisions or rules, created around the core components are used consistently across your product to create a cohesive feel, whether it’s from one element to another, page to page, or viewport width to viewport width.
Responsive design is one of the most important considerations in the components of a design system. For each component, you must decide what will unite the design across the viewports to maintain that consistent feel, and what parts of the design will differentiate in order to provide a flexible and optimal experience for different viewport sizes.
Components you might keep the same across viewports
typeface
base unit
colour
shape/form
Components you might differentiate across viewports
grids
layout
font size
measure (line length)
leading (line height)
Content: it must always be the same
The focus of a design system is the optimum display of content. As Mark Boulton put it, designing “content out, not canvas in.” Chris Armstrong puts the emphasis on not designing for viewports but for content – “we need to build on what we do know: content.” In order to do this, we must share the same content across all devices and focus on how best to display and represent content through design system components.
The practical: core visual components
Typography first
When you work with a lot of text content, typography is the easiest way to set the visual tone of the design across all viewport widths. It’s likely that you’ll choose one or two typefaces to use across the whole system, but you might change the most legible font size, balanced with the most comfortable measure, as the viewport width changes.
Where typography meets layout
The unit on which you choose to base the grid and layout design, font sizes and leading could be based on the typeface, an optimal reading size, or something more arbitrary. Sometimes I’ll choose a unit based on multiples of ten because it makes the maths in the CSS easier. Tim Brown suggests trying a modular scale. Chris Armstrong suggests basing it on your ideal measure, or the width of a fixed item of content such as an ad unit.
Grids and layouts
Sensible grid design can be a flexible yet solid foundation for your design system layout component. But you must be wary in responsive design that a grid might not work across all widths: even four columns could make for very cramped content and one-word measures on smaller screens.
Maybe the grid columns are something you differentiate across widths, but you can keep the concept of the grid consistent. If the content has blocks in groups of three, you might decide on a three-column grid which folds down to one column for narrow viewports. If the grid focuses on the idea of symmetry and has a four-column grid on larger viewports, it might fold down to two columns for narrower viewports. These consistencies may seem subtle, not at all obvious to many except the designer, but it’s all these little constants and patterns across the whole of the design system that makes design decisions easier to make (as they adhere to the guiding concepts of your system), and give the product a uniform feel no matter what the device.
Shape or form
The shape or form components are concepts you already use in fixed-width web design for a strong, consistent look and feel.
Since CSS border-radius became widely supported by browsers, a lot of designs feature circle themes. These are very distinctive and can be used across viewport widths giving them the same united feel, even if they’re not used in the same way. This could also apply to border styles, consistent shadows and any number of decorative details and textures. These are the elements that make up the shape or form of a design system.
Colour
Colour is the most basic way to reinforce a brand and unite experiences across viewports. The same hex colour used system-wide is instantly recognisable, no matter what the viewport width.
The process
While using a design system isn’t necessarily attached to any particular process, it does lend itself to some process ideals.
Detaching design considerations from viewport widths
A design system allows you to focus separately on the components that make up the system, disconnecting the look and feel from the layout. This helps prevent us getting stuck in the rut of the Apple breakpoints (brilliantly coined by Simon Foster) of mobile, tablet and desktop. It also forces us to design for variation in viewport experiences side by side, not one after the other.
Design in the browser
I can’t start off designing in the browser – it just doesn’t seem to bring out my creative side (and I’m incredibly envious of you if you can; I just have to start on paper) – but static mock-ups aren’t the only alternative. Style guides and style tiles are perfect for expressing the concepts of your design system. Pattern libraries could also work well.
Mock-ups and breakpoints
At some point, whether it’s to test your system ideas, or because a client needs help visualising how your system might work, you may end up producing some static mock-ups. It’s not the end of the world, but you must ensure that these consider all the viewports, not just those of the iDevices, or even the devices currently on the market. You need to decide the breakpoints where the states of your design change. The blocks within your content will always have optimum points for their display (based on their hierarchy, density, width, or type of interaction) and so your breakpoints should be based around these points.
These are probably the ideal points at which to produce static mockups; treat them as snapshots. They’re not necessarily mock-ups, so much as a way of capturing how your design system would be interpreted when frozen at that particular viewport width.
The future
Creating design systems will give us the flexibility we need for working with the unknown devices of the future. It may be a change in process, but it shouldn’t be too much of a difference in thinking. The pioneers in responsive design have a hard job. Some of these problems may have already been solved in other technologies or industries, but it’s up to the pioneers to find those connections and help us formulate solutions and standards that will make responsive design the best it can possibly be. We need to keep experimenting and communicating, particularly in the area of design, as good user experiences are the true sign of whether our products are a success.",2012,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/,design
95,Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout,"Browser support for many of the modules that are part of CSS3 have enabled us to use CSS for many of the things we used to have to use images for. The rise of mobile browsers and the concept of responsive web design has given us a whole new way of looking at design for the web. However, when it comes to layout, we haven’t moved very far at all. We have talked for years about separating our content and source order from the presentation of that content, yet most of us have had to make decisions on source order in order to get a certain visual layout.
Owing to some interesting specifications making their way through the W3C process at the moment, though, there is hope of change on the horizon. In this article I’m going to look at one CSS module, the CSS3 grid layout module, that enables us to define a grid and place elements on to it. This article comprises a practical demonstration of the basics of grid layout, and also a discussion of one way in which we can start thinking of content in a more adaptive way.
Before we get started, it is important to note that, at the time of writing, these examples work only in Internet Explorer 10. CSS3 grid layout is a module created by Microsoft, and implemented using the -ms prefix in IE10. My examples will all use the -ms prefix, and not include other prefixes simply because this is such an early stage specification, and by the time there are implementations in other browsers there may be inconsistencies. The implementation I describe today may well change, but is also there for your feedback.
If you don’t have access to IE10, then one way to view and test these examples is by signing up for an account with Browserstack – the free trial would give you time to have a look. I have also included screenshots of all relevant stages in creating the examples.
What is CSS3 grid layout?
CSS3 grid layout aims to let developers divide up a design into a grid and place content on to that grid. Rather than trying to fabricate a grid from floats, you can declare an actual grid on a container element and then use that to position the elements inside. Most importantly, the source order of those elements does not matter.
Declaring a grid
We declare a grid using a new value for the display property: display: grid. As we are using the IE10 implementation here, we need to prefix that value: display: -ms-grid;.
Once we have declared our grid, we set up the columns and rows using the grid-columns and grid-rows properties.
.wrapper {
display: -ms-grid;
-ms-grid-columns: 200px 20px auto 20px 200px;
-ms-grid-rows: auto 1fr;
}
In the above example, I have declared a grid on the .wrapper element. I have used the grid-columns property to create a grid with a 200 pixel-wide column, a 20 pixel gutter, a flexible width auto column that will stretch to fill the available space, another 20 pixel-wide gutter and a final 200 pixel sidebar: a flexible width layout with two fixed width sidebars. Using the grid-rows property I have created two rows: the first is set to auto so it will stretch to fill whatever I put into it; the second row is set to 1fr, a new value used in grids that means one fraction unit. In this case, one fraction unit of the available space, effectively whatever space is left.
Positioning items on the grid
Now I have a simple grid, I can pop items on to it. If I have a
with a class of .main that I want to place into the second row, and the flexible column set to auto I would use the following CSS:
.content {
-ms-grid-column: 3;
-ms-grid-row: 2;
-ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}
If you are old-school, you may already have realised that we are essentially creating an HTML table-like layout structure using CSS. I found the concept of a table the most helpful way to think about the grid layout module when trying to work out how to place elements.
Creating grid systems
As soon as I started to play with CSS3 grid layout, I wanted to see if I could use it to replicate a flexible grid system like this fluid 16-column 960 grid system.
I started out by defining a grid on my wrapper element, using fractions to make this grid fluid.
.wrapper {
width: 90%;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
display: -ms-grid;
-ms-grid-columns: 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16];
-ms-grid-rows: (auto 20px)[24];
}
Like the 960 grid system I was using as an example, my grid starts with a gutter, followed by the first actual column, plus another gutter repeated sixteen times. What this means is that if I want to span two columns, as far as the grid layout module is concerned that is actually three columns: two wide columns, plus one gutter. So this needs to be accounted for when positioning items.
I created a CSS class for each positioning option: column position; rows position; and column span. For example:
.grid1 {-ms-grid-column: 2;} /* applying this class positions an item in the first column (the gutter is column 1) */
.grid2 {-ms-grid-column: 4;} /* 2nd column - gutter|column 1|gutter */
.grid3 {-ms-grid-column: 6;} /* 3rd column - gutter|column 1|gutter|column2|gutter */
.row1 {-ms-grid-row:1;}
.row2 {-ms-grid-row:3;}
.row3 {-ms-grid-row:5;}
.colspan1 {-ms-grid-column-span:1;}
.colspan2 {-ms-grid-column-span:3;}
.colspan3 {-ms-grid-column-span:5;}
I could then add multiple classes to each element to set the position on on the grid.
This then gives me a replica of the fluid grid using CSS3 grid layout. To see this working fire up IE10 and view Example 1.
This works, but…
This worked, but isn’t ideal. I considered not showing this stage of my experiment – however, I think it clearly shows how the grid layout module works and is a useful starting point. That said, it’s not an approach I would take in production. First, we have to add classes to our markup that tie an element to a position on the grid. This might not be too much of a problem if we are always going to maintain the sixteen-column grid, though, as I will show you that the real power of the grid layout module appears once you start to redefine the grid, using different grids based on media queries. If you drop to a six-column layout for small screens, positioning items into column 16 makes no sense any more.
Calculating grid position using LESS
As we’ve seen, if you want to use a grid with main columns and gutters, you have to take into account the spacing between columns as well as the actual columns. This means we have to do some calculating every time we place an item on the grid. In my example above I got around this by creating a CSS class for each position, allowing me to think in sixteen rather than thirty-two columns. But by using a CSS preprocessor, I can avoid using all the classes yet still think in main columns.
I’m using LESS for my example. My simple grid framework consists of one simple mixin.
.position(@column,@row,@colspan,@rowspan) {
-ms-grid-column: @column*2;
-ms-grid-row: @row*2-1;
-ms-grid-column-span: @colspan*2-1;
-ms-grid-row-span: @rowspan*2-1;
}
My mixin takes four parameters: column; row; colspan; and rowspan. So if I wanted to place an item on column four, row three, spanning two columns and one row, I would write the following CSS:
.box {
.position(4,3,2,1);
}
The mixin would return:
.box {
-ms-grid-column: 8;
-ms-grid-row: 5;
-ms-grid-column-span: 3;
-ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}
This saves me some typing and some maths. I could also add other prefixed values into my mixin as other browsers started to add support.
We can see this in action creating a new grid. Instead of adding multiple classes to each element, I can add one class; that class uses the mixin to create the position. I have also played around with row spans using my mixin and you can see we end up with a quite complicated arrangement of boxes. Have a look at example two in IE10. I’ve used the JavaScript LESS parser so that you can view the actual LESS that I use. Note that I have needed to escape the -ms prefixed properties with ~"""" to get LESS to accept them.
This is looking better. I don’t have direct positioning information on each element in the markup, just a class name – I’ve used grid(x), but it could be something far more semantic. We can now take the example a step further and redefine the grid based on screen width.
Media queries and the grid
This example uses exactly the same markup as the previous example. However, we are now using media queries to detect screen width and redefine the grid using a different number of columns depending on that width.
I start out with a six-column grid, defining that on .wrapper, then setting where the different items sit on this grid:
.wrapper {
width: 90%;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
display: ~""-ms-grid""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
-ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[6]""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
-ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[40]""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... see example for all declarations ... */
Using media queries, I redefine the grid to nine columns when we hit a minimum width of 700 pixels.
@media only screen and (min-width: 700px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[9]"";
-ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[50]"";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... */
}
Finally, we redefine the grid for 960 pixels, back to the sixteen-column grid we started out with.
@media only screen and (min-width: 940px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns:~"" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]"";
-ms-grid-rows:~"" (auto 20px)[24]"";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); }
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); }
/* ... */
}
If you view example three in Internet Explorer 10 you can see how the items reflow to fit the window size. You can also see, looking at the final set of blocks, that source order doesn’t matter. You can pick up a block from anywhere and place it in any position on the grid.
Laying out a simple website
So far, like a toddler on Christmas Day, we’ve been playing with boxes rather than thinking about what might be in them. So let’s take a quick look at a more realistic layout, in order to see why the CSS3 grid layout module can be really useful. At this time of year, I am very excited to get out of storage my collection of odd nativity sets, prompting my family to suggest I might want to open a museum. Should I ever do so, I’ll need a website, and here is an example layout.
As I am using CSS3 grid layout, I can order my source in a logical manner. In this example my document is as follows, though these elements could be in any order I please:
For wide viewports I can use grid layout to create a sidebar, with the important information about opening times on the top righ,t with the ads displayed below it. This creates the layout shown in the screenshot above.
@media only screen and (min-width: 940px) {
.wrapper {
-ms-grid-columns:~"" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]"";
-ms-grid-rows:~"" (auto 20px)[24]"";
}
.welcome {
.position(1,1,12,1);
padding: 0 5% 0 0;
}
.info {
.position(13,1,4,1);
border: 0;
padding:0;
}
.main {
.position(1,2,12,1);
padding: 0 5% 0 0;
}
.ads {
.position(13,2,4,1);
display: block;
margin-left: 0;
}
}
In a floated layout, a sidebar like this often ends up being placed under the main content at smaller screen widths. For my situation this is less than ideal. I want the important information about opening times to end up above the main article, and to push the ads below it. With grid layout I can easily achieve this at the smallest width .info ends up in row two and .ads in row five with the article between.
.wrapper {
display: ~""-ms-grid"";
-ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[4]"";
-ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[40]"";
}
.welcome {
.position(1,1,4,1);
}
.info {
.position(1,2,4,1);
border: 4px solid #fff;
padding: 10px;
}
.content {
.position(1,3,4,5);
}
.main {
.position(1,3,4,1);
}
.ads {
.position(1,4,4,1);
}
Finally, as an extra tweak I add in a breakpoint at 600 pixels and nest a second grid on the ads area, arranging those three images into a row when they sit below the article at a screen width wider than the very narrow mobile width but still too narrow to support a sidebar.
@media only screen and (min-width: 600px) {
.ads {
display: ~""-ms-grid"";
-ms-grid-columns: ~""20px 1fr 20px 1fr 20px 1fr"";
-ms-grid-rows: ~""1fr"";
margin-left: -20px;
}
.ad:nth-child(1) {
.position(1,1,1,1);
}
.ad:nth-child(2) {
.position(2,1,1,1);
}
.ad:nth-child(3) {
.position(3,1,1,1);
}
}
View example four in Internet Explorer 10.
This is a very simple example to show how we can use CSS grid layout without needing to add a lot of classes to our document. It also demonstrates how we can mainpulate the content depending on the context in which the user is viewing it.
Layout, source order and the idea of content priority
CSS3 grid layout isn’t the only module that starts to move us away from the issue of visual layout being linked to source order. However, with good support in Internet Explorer 10, it is a nice way to start looking at how this might work. If you look at the grid layout module as something to be used in conjunction with the flexible box layout module and the very interesting CSS regions and exclusions specifications, we have, tantalizingly on the horizon, a powerful set of tools for layout.
I am particularly keen on the potential separation of source order from layout as it dovetails rather neatly into something I spend a lot of time thinking about. As a CMS developer, working on larger scale projects as well as our CMS product Perch, I am interested in how we better enable content editors to create content for the web. In particular, I search for better ways to help them create adaptive content; content that will work in a variety of contexts rather than being tied to one representation of that content.
If the concept of adaptive content is new to you, then Karen McGrane’s presentation Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content is the place to start. Karen talks about needing to think of content as chunks, that might be used in many different places, displayed differently depending on context.
I absolutely agree with Karen’s approach to content. We have always attempted to move content editors away from thinking about creating a page and previewing it on the desktop. However at some point content does need to be published as a page, or a collection of content if you prefer, and bits of that content have priority. Particularly in a small screen context, content gets linearized, we can only show so much at a time, and we need to make sure important content rises to the top. In the case of my example, I wanted to ensure that the address information was clearly visible without scrolling around too much. Dropping it with the entire sidebar to the bottom of the page would not have been so helpful, though neither would moving the whole sidebar to the top of the screen so a visitor had to scroll past advertising to get to the article.
If our layout is linked to our source order, then enabling the content editor to make decisions about priority is really hard. Only a system that can do some regeneration of the source order on the server-side – perhaps by way of multiple templates – can allow those kinds of decisions to be made. For larger systems this might be a possibility; for smaller ones, or when using an off-the-shelf CMS, it is less likely to be. Fortunately, any system that allows some form of custom field type can be used to pop a class on to an element, and with CSS grid layout that is all that is needed to be able to target that element and drop it into the right place when the content is viewed, be that on a desktop or a mobile device.
This approach can move us away from forcing editors to think visually. At the moment, I might have to explain to an editor that if a certain piece of content needs to come first when viewed on a mobile device, it needs to be placed in the sidebar area, tying it to a particular layout and design. I have to do this because we have to enforce fairly strict rules around source order to make the mechanics of the responsive design work. If I can instead advise an editor to flag important content as high priority in the CMS, then I can make decisions elsewhere as to how that is displayed, and we can maintain the visual hierarchy across all the different ways content might be rendered.
Why frustrate ourselves with specifications we can’t yet use in production?
The CSS3 grid layout specification is listed under the Exploring section of the list of current work of the CSS Working Group. While discussing a module at this stage might seem a bit pointless if we can’t use it in production work, there is a very real reason for doing so. If those of us who will ultimately be developing sites with these tools find out about them early enough, then we can start to give our feedback to the people responsible for the specification. There is information on the same page about how to get involved with the disussions.
So, if you have a bit of time this holiday season, why not have a play with the CSS3 grid layout module? I have outlined here some of my thoughts on how grid layout and other modules that separate layout from source order can be used in the work that I do. Likewise, wherever in the stack you work, playing with and thinking about new specifications means you can think about how you would use them to enhance your work. Spot a problem? Think that a change to the specification would improve things for a specific use case? Then you have something you could post to www-style to add to the discussion around this module.
All the examples are on CodePen so feel free to play around and fork them.",2012,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/css3-grid-layout/,code
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).
Xbox 3602005120/50032%A browser for the Xbox (IE9) was only recently released in October 2012. The Kinect provides voice and gesture support. There’s also SmartGlass, a second-screen app for platforms including Android and iOS.
The Wii U browser is Nintendo’s fifth attempt at a console browser. Based on these tests, it’s already looking promising.
Why console browsers used to suck
It takes a lot of system memory to run a good browser, and the problem of older consoles is that they don’t have much memory available. The original Nintendo DS needs a memory expansion pack just to run the browser, because the 4MB it has on board isn’t enough. I noticed that even on newer devices, some sites fail to load because the system runs out of memory.
The Wii came out six years ago with an Opera browser. Still being used today and with such low resources available, the latest browser features can’t reasonably be supported. There’s also pressure to add features such as tabs, and enable gamers to use the browser while a game is paused. Nintendo’s browser team have the advantage of higher specs to play with on their new console (1GB of memory dedicated to games, 1GB for the system), which makes it easier to support the latest standards. But it’s still a challenge to fit everything in.
…even though we have more memory, the amount of memory we can use for the browser is limited compared to a PC, so we’ve worked in ways that efficiently allocates the available memory per tab. To work on this, the experience working on the browser for the Nintendo 3DS system under a limited memory constraint helped us greatly.
Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com
In the box
The Wii U consists of a console unit which plugs into a TV (the first to support HD), and a wireless controller known as a gamepad. The gamepad is a lot bigger than typical TV console controllers, and it has a touchscreen on the front. The touchscreen is resistive, responding to pressure rather than electrical current. It’s intended to be used with a stylus (provided) but fingers can be used.
It might look a bit like one, but the gamepad isn’t a portable console designed to be taken out like the PS Vita. The gamepad can be used as a standalone screen with the TV switched off, as long as it’s within range of the console unit – it basically piggybacks off it.
It’s surprisingly lightweight for its size. It has a wealth of detectors including 9-axis control. Sensors wake the device from sleep when it’s picked up. There’s also a camera on the front, and a headphone port and speakers, with audio coming through both the TV and the gamepad giving a surround sound feel.
Up to six tabs can be opened at once, and the browser can be used while games are paused. There’s a really nice little feature here – the current game’s name is saved as a search option, so it’s really quick to look up contextual content such as walk-throughs.
Controls
Only one gamepad can be used to control the browser, but if there are Wiimotes connected, they can be used as pointers. This doesn’t let the user do anything except point (they each get a little hand icon with a number on it displayed on the screen), but it’s interesting that multiple people can be interacting with a site at once.
See a bigger version
The gamepad can also be used as a simple TV remote control, with basic functions such as bringing up the programme guide, adjusting volume and changing channel. I found the simplified interface much more usable than a full-featured remote control.
I’m used to scrolling being sluggish on consoles, but the Wii U feels almost as snappy as a desktop browser. Sites load considerably faster compared with others I’ve tested.
Tilt-scroll
Holding down ZL and ZR while tilting the screen activates an Instapaper-style tilt to scroll for going up and down the page quickly, useful for navigating very long pages.
Second screen
The TV mirrors most of what’s on the gamepad, although the TV screen just displays the contents of the browser window, while the gamepad displays the site along with the browser toolbar.
When the user with the gamepad is typing, the keyboard is hidden from the TV screen – there’s just a bit of text at the top indicating what’s happening on the gamepad.
Pressing X draws an on-screen curtain over the TV, hiding the content that’s on the gamepad from the TV. Pressing X again opens the curtains, revealing what’s on the gamepad. Holding the button down plays a drumroll before it’s released and the curtains are opened. I can imagine this being used in meetings as a fun presentation tool.
In a sense, browsing is a personal activity, but you get the idea that people will be coming and going through the room. When I first saw the curtain function, it made a huge impression on me. I walked around with it all over the company saying, “They’ve really come up with something amazing!”
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com
Text
Writing text
Unlike the capacitive screens on smartphones, the Wii U’s resistive screen needs to be pressed harder than you’re probably used to for registering a touch event. The gamepad screen is big, which makes it much easier to type on this device than other handheld consoles, even without the stylus. It’s still more fiddly than a full-sized keyboard though. When you’re designing forms, consider the extra difficulty console users experience.
Although TV screens are physically big, they are typically viewed from further away than desktop screens. This makes readability an issue, so Nintendo have provided not one, but four ways to zoom in and out:
Double-tapping on the screen.
Tapping the on-screen zoom icons in the browser toolbar.
Pressing the + and - buttons on the device.
Moving the right analogue stick up and down.
As well as making it easy to zoom in and out, Nintendo have done a few other things to improve the reading experience on the TV.
System font
One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that the browser lacks all the fonts we’re used to falling back to. Serif fonts are replaced with the system’s sans-serif font. I couldn’t get Typekit’s font loading method to work but Fontdeck, which works slightly differently, does display custom fonts.
The system font has been optimised for reading at a distance and is easy to distinguish because the lowercase e has a quirky little tilt.
Don’t lose :focus
Using the D-pad to navigate is similar to using a keyboard. Individual links are focused on, with a blue outline drawn around them.
The recently redesigned An Event Apart site is an example that improves the experience for keyboard and D-pad users. They’ve added a yellow background colour to links on focus. It feels nicer than the default blue outline on its own.
Media
This year, television overtook PCs as the primary way to watch online video content. TV is the natural environment for video, and 42% of online TVs in the US are connected to the internet via a console. Unfortunately, the
tag isn’t supported in most console browsers, and those that have Flash installed often have such an old version that the video won’t play.
I suspect this has been a big driver in getting console browsers to support web standards. The Wii U is designed with video content in mind. It doesn’t support Flash but it does support the HTML5 tag.
Some video formats can’t be played, but those that are supported bring up an optimised interface with a custom scrub bar. This is where the device switches from mirroring the TV to being a second screen. The full-screen video is displayed on the TV, and the interface on the gamepad.
The really clever bit is that while a video is playing, the gamepad user can keep the video playing on the TV screen while searching for another video or browsing the web. This is the same for images too.
On the left, the video is being shown full-screen on the TV and gamepad. Only the gamepad gets the scrub bar. Clicking the slide up/down button (circled) lets the gamepad user browse the web while the video on the TV continues to play full-screen, as shown in the image on the right.
There’s support for SVG images, and they look great on a high-definition TV screen. However, there’s currently no way to save or download files.
Preparing for console users
I wasn’t expecting to be quite as impressed as I am by this browser. It’s encouraging to see console makers investing time into improving the experience as well as the standards support. In the same way there was an explosion in mobile browser use as the experience got better, I’m sure we’ll see the same with console browsers as the experience improves.
The value of detection
Consoles offer a range of inputs including gesture, voice and controller buttons. That means we have to think about more diverse methods of input than just touch and click.
This is where I could tell you to add some detection methods such as user agent string sniffing to target a different experience for console users. But the majority of the time, that really isn’t necessary. TV console browsers are getting a lot better at compensating for the living room environment, and they’re designed to work with websites that haven’t been optimised for this context.
Rather than tighten our grip on optimising experiences for every device out there, we’ve got to be pragmatic. There are so many new devices coming out every week, our designs need to be future-proof rather than fixed to a particular device in time.
Even fuzzy device detection isn’t reliable – the PS Vita declares itself to be mobile, a mobile device and a Kindle Fire tablet, while the two DS devices state they’re neither mobile nor mobile phones nor tablets, but computers. They’re weird outliers, but they’re still important devices to consider.
Thinking broadly about how our designs will be interacted with and viewed on a TV screen can help improve that experience for everyone. This is about accessibility. Considering how someone uses a site with a D-pad, we can improve the experience for keyboard users. When we think about colour contrast and text legibility on TV screens, we can apply that for anyone who reads content on the web. So why just offer this to the TV users?
Playing with the browser
…we want to prove to them through this Wii U Internet Browser that browsing itself can be an entertainment.
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com
Although I’m cautious about designing experiences for specific devices, it’s fun to experiment with the technology available. Nintendo have promised web developers access to the Wii U’s buttons and sensors. There’s already some JavaScript documentation, and a demo for you to try.
If you’re interested in making your own games, thanks to web standards, a lot of HTML5 games work already on the device. Matt Hackett wrote up his experience of testing the game he built, and he talks about some of features the browser lacks. There’s certainly an incentive there for console manufacturers to improve their HTML5 support so more games can be played in their browser.
What excites me about consoles is that it’s like looking at what might be available to us in future browsers. As well as thinking about how our sites work on small screens, we should also consider big screens. We’re already figuring out how images should work at different screen widths and connection speeds, but we’ve also got some interesting challenges ahead of us catering for second screen experiences and 3D-enabled devices.
So, this Christmas, if you’re huddled round the game console or a smart TV, give the browser in it a try.",2012,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2012-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/unwrapping-the-wii-u-browser/,ux
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, developer, content alchemist, user experience discombobulator, or whatever you call yourself, you’re often wrestling with a wealth of material, a huge number of features, and numerous objectives. In many cases, much of that stuff is extraneous, and goes in the dustbin. However, it can be just as likely that there’s a truckload of suggested features and content because it all needs to be there. Don’t be afraid of that weight.
In the right hands, less can indeed mean more, but it’s just as likely that less can very often lead to, well… less.
Complexity is powerful
Simple is the ability to offer a powerful experience without overwhelming the audience or inducing information anxiety. Giving them everything they need, without having them ferret off all over a site to get things done, is important.
It’s useful to ask throughout a site’s lifespan, “does the user have everything they need?” It’s so easy to let our designer egos get in the way and chop stuff out, reduce down to only the things we want to see. That benefits us in the short term, but compromises the audience long-term.
The trick is not to be afraid of complexity in itself, but to avoid creating the perception of complexity. Give a user a flight simulator and they’ll crash the plane or jump out. Give them everything they need and more, but make it feel simple, and you’re building a relationship, empowering people.
This can be achieved carefully with what some call gradual engagement, and often the sensible thing might be to unleash complexity in carefully orchestrated phases, initially setting manageable levels of engagement and interaction, gradually increasing the inherent power of the product and fostering an empowered community.
The design aesthetic
Here’s a familiar scenario: the client or project lead gets overexcited and skips most of the important decision-making, instead barrelling straight into a bout of creative direction Tourette’s. Visually, the design needs to be minimal, white, crisp, full of white space, have big buttons, and quite likely be “clean”. Of course, we all like our websites to be clean as that’s more hygienic.
But what do these words even mean, really? Early in a project they’re abstract distractions, unnecessary constraints. This premature narrowing forces us to think much more about throwing stuff out rather than acknowledging that what we’re building is complex, and many of the components perhaps necessary.
Simple is not a formula. It cannot be achieved just by using a white background, by throwing things away, or by breathing a bellowsful of air in between every element and having it all float around in space. Simple is not a design treatment. Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.
Recognizing this helps us empathize a little more with those most vocal of UX practitioners. They usually appreciate that our successes depend on a thorough understanding of the user’s mental models and expected outcomes. I personally still consider UX people to be web designers like the rest of us (mainly to wind them up), but they’re web designers that design every decision, and by putting the user experience at the heart of their process, they have a greater chance of finding simplicity in complexity. The visual design aesthetic — the façade — is only a part of that.
Divide and conquer
I’m currently working on an app that’s complex in architecture, and complex in ambition. We’ll be releasing in carefully orchestrated private phases, gradually introducing more complexity in line with the unavoidably complex nature of the objective, but my job is to design the whole, the complete system as it will be when it’s out of beta and beyond.
I’ve noticed that I’m not throwing much out; most of it needs to be there. Therefore, my responsibility is to consider interesting and appropriate methods of navigation and bring everything together logically.
I’m using things like smart defaults, graphical timelines and colour keys to make sense of the complexity, techniques that are sympathetic to the content. They act as familiar points of navigation and reference, yet are malleable enough to change subtly to remain relevant to the information they connect. It’s really OK to have a lot of stuff, so long as we make each component work smartly.
It’s a divide and conquer approach. By finding simplicity and logic in each content bucket, I’ve made more sense of the whole, allowing me to create key layouts where most of the simplified buckets are collated and sometimes combined, providing everything the user needs and expects in the appropriate places.
I’m also making sure I don’t reduce the app’s power. I need to reflect the scale of opportunity, and provide access to or knowledge of the more advanced tools and features for everyone: a window into what they can do and how they can help. I know it’s the minority who will be actively building the content, but the power is in providing those opportunities for all.
Much of this will be familiar to the responsible practitioners who build websites for government, local authorities, utility companies, newspapers, magazines, banking, and we-sell-everything-ever-made online shops. Across the web, there are sites and tools that thrive on complexity.
Alas, the majority of such sites have done little to make navigation intuitive, or empower audiences. Where we can make a difference is by striving to make our UIs feel simple, look wonderful, not intimidating — even if they’re mind-meltingly complex behind that façade.
Embrace, empathize and tame
So, there are loads of ways to exploit complexity, and make it seem simple. I’ve hinted at some methods above, and we’ve already looked at gradual engagement as a way to make sense of complexity, so that’s a big thumbs-up for a release cycle that increases audience power.
Prior to each and every release, it’s also useful to rest on the finished thing for a while and use it yourself, even if you’re itching to release. ‘Ready’ often isn’t, and ‘finished’ never is, and the more time you spend browsing around the sites you build, the more you learn what to question, where to add, or subtract. It’s definitely worth building in some contingency time for sitting on your work, so to speak.
One thing I always do is squint at my layouts. By squinting, I get a sort of abstract idea of the overall composition, and general feel for the thing. It makes my face look stupid, but helps me see how various buckets fit together, and how simple or complex the site feels overall.
I mentioned the need to put our design egos to one side and not throw out anything useful, and I think that’s vital. I’m a big believer in economy, reduction, and removing the extraneous, but I’m usually referring to decoration, bells and whistles, and fluff. I wouldn’t ever advocate the complete removal of powerful content from a project roadmap.
Above all, don’t fear complexity. Embrace and tame it. Work hard to empathize with audience needs, and you can create elegant, playful, risky, surprising, emotive, delightful, and ultimately simple things.",2011,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/,ux
268,Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics,"Something a bit different for today’s 24 ways article. For starters, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m an evil man who sells things to people on the internet. Second, this article will likely be a little more nebulous than you’re used to, since it covers quite a number of points in a relatively short space.
This isn’t going to be the complete Google Analytics Conversion University IQ course compressed into a single article, obviously. What it will be, however, is a primer on setting up and using Google Analytics in real life, and a great deal of what I’ve learned using Google Analytics nearly every working day for the past six (crikey!) years.
Also, to be clear, I’ll be referencing new Google Analytics here; old Google Analytics is for loooosers (and those who want reliable e-commerce conversion data per site search term, natch).
You may have been running your Analytics account for several years now, dipping in and out, checking traffic levels, seeing what’s popular… and that’s about it. Google Analytics provides so much more than that, but the number of reports available can often intimidate users, and documentation and case studies on their use are minimal at best.
Let’s start! Setting up your Analytics profile
Before we plough on, I just want to run through a quick checklist that some basic settings have been enabled for your profile. If you haven’t clicked it, click the big cog on the top-right of Google Analytics and we’ll have a poke about.
If you have an e-commerce site, e-commerce tracking has been enabled
If your site has a search function, site search tracking has been enabled.
Query string parameters that you do not want tracked as separate pages have been excluded (for example, any parameters needed for your platform to function, otherwise you’ll get multiple entries for the same page appearing in your reports)
Filters have been enabled on your main profile to exclude your office IP address and any IPs of people who frequently access the site for work purposes. In decent numbers they tend to throw data off a tad.
You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segments. For example, at Lovehoney we have seventeen separate profiles that allow me quick access to certain countries, devices and traffic sources without having to segment first. You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles that only include, say, mobile visits, or UK visitors, so you can quickly analyse important segments.
Matt, what’s a segment?
A segment is a subsection of your visitor base, which you define and then call on in reports to see specific data for that subsection. For example, in this report I’ve defined two segments, the first for IE6 users and the second for IE7.
Segments are easily created by clicking the Advanced Segments tabs at the top of any report and clicking +New Custom Segment.
What does your site do?
Understanding the goals of your site is an oft-covered topic, but it’s necessary not just to form a better understand of your business and prioritize your time. Understanding what you wish visitors to do on your site translates well into a goal-driven analytics package like Google Analytics.
Every site exists essentially to sell something, either financially through e-commerce, or to sell an idea or impart information, get people to download a CV or enquire about service, or to sell space on that website to advertisers. If the site did not provide a positive benefit to its owners, it would not have a reason for being.
Once you have understood the reason why you have a site, you can map that reason on to one of the three goal types Google Analytics provides.
E-commerce
This conversion type registers transactions as part of a sales process which requires a monetary value, what products have been bought, an SKU (stock keeping unit), affiliation (if you’re then attributing the sale to a third party or franchise) and so on.
The benefit of e-commerce tracking is not only assigning non-arbitrary monetary value to behaviour of visitors on your site, as well as being able to see ancillary costs such as shipping, but seeing product-level information, like which products are preferred from various channels, popular categories, and so on.
However, I find the e-commerce tracking options also useful for non-e-commerce sites. For example, if you’re offering downloads or subscriptions and having an email address or user’s details is worth something to you, you can set up e-commerce tracking to understand how much value your site is bringing. For example, an email address might be worth 20p to you, but if it also includes a name it’s worth 50p. A contact telephone number is worth £2, and so on.
Page goals
Page goals, unsurprisingly, track a visit to a page (often with a sequence of pages leading up to that page). This is what’s referred to as a goal funnel, and is generally used to track how visitors behave in a multistep checkout.
Interestingly, the page doesn’t have to actually exist. For example, if you have a single page checkout, you can register virtual page views using trackPageview() when a visitor clicks into a particular section of the checkout or other form. If your site is geared towards getting someone to a particular page, but where there isn’t a transaction (for example, a subscription page) this is for you.
There are also behavioural goals, such as time on site and number of pages viewed, which are geared towards sites that make money from advertising.
But, going back to the page goals, these can be abstracted using regular expressions, meaning that you can define a funnel based on page type rather than having to set individual folders.
In this example, I’ve created regexes for the main page types on my site, so I can create a wide funnel that captures visitors from where they enter through to checkout.
Events
Event tracking registers a predefined event, such as playing a video, or some interaction that can trigger JavaScript, such as a Tweet This button. Events can then be triggered using the trackEvent() call. If you want someone to complete watching a video, you would code your player to fire trackEvent() upon completion.
While I don’t use events as goals, I use events elsewhere to see how well a video play aids to conversion. This not only helps me justify the additional spend on creating video content, but also quickly highlights which videos are underperforming as sales tools.
What a visitor can tell you
Now you have some proper goals set up, we can start to see how changes in content (on-site and external) affect those goals.
Ultimately, when a visitor comes to your site, they bring information with them:
where they came from (a search engine – including: keyword searched for; a referral; direct; affiliate; or ad campaign)
demographics (country; whether they’re new or returning, within thirty days)
technical information (browser; screen size; device; bandwidth)
site-specific information (landing page; next click; previous values assigned to them as custom variables*)
* A note about custom variables. There’s no hope in hell that I can cover custom variables in this article. Go research them. Custom variables are the single best way to hack Google Analytics and bend it to your will. Custom variables allow you to record anything you want about a visitor, which that visitor will then carry around with them between visits. It’s also great for plugging other services into Google Analytics (as shown by the marvelous way Visual Website Optimizer allows you to track and segment tests within the GA interface). Just make sure not to breach the terms of service, eh?
CSI your website
Police procedural TV shows are all the same: the investigators are called to a crime and come across a clue; there’s then an autopsy; new evidence leads them to a new location; they find a new clue; they put two and two together; they solve the mystery.
This is your life now. Exciting!
So, now you’re gathering a wealth of information about what sort of people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and what eventually gets them to drive value to you. It’s now your job to investigate all these little clues to see which types of people drive the most value, and what you can change to improve it.
Maybe not that exciting.
However, Google Analytics comes pre-armed with extensive reports for you to delve into. As an e-commerce guy (as opposed to a page goal guy) my day pretty much follows the pattern below.
Look at e-commerce conversion rate by traffic source compared to the same day in the previous week and previous month. As ours is an e-commerce site, we have weekly and monthly trends. A big spike on Sundays and Mondays, and payday towards the end of the month is always good; on the third week of a month there tends to be a lull. Spend time letting your Google Analytics data brew, understand your own trends and patterns, and you’ll start to get a feel for when something isn’t quite right.
Traffic Sources → Sources → All Traffic
Look at the conversion rate by landing page for any traffic source that feels significantly different to what’s expected. Check bounce rates, drill down to likely landing pages and check search keyword or referral site to see if it’s a particular subset of visitor. You can do this by clicking Secondary Dimension and choosing Keyword or Source. If it’s direct, choose Visitor Type to break down by new or returning visitor.
Content → Site Content → Landing Pages
I then tend to flip into Content Drilldown to see what the next clicks were from those landing pages, and whether they changed significantly to the date I’m comparing with. If they have, that’s usually an indicator of changed content (or its relevancy). Remember, if a bunch of people have found their way to your page via a method you’re not expecting (such as a mention on a Spanish radio station – this actually happened to me once), while the content hasn’t changed, the relevancy of it to the audience may have.
Content → Site Content → Content Drilldown
Once I have an idea of what content was consumed, and whether it was relevant to the user, I then look at the visitor specifics, such as browser or demographic data, to see again whether the change was limited to a specific subset. Site speed, for example, is normally a good factor towards bounce rate, so compare that with previous data as well.
Now, to be investigating at this level you still need a serious amount of data, in order to tell what’s a significant change or not. If you’re struggling with a small number of visitors, you might find reporting on a weekly or fortnightly basis more appropriate.
However, once you’ve looked into the basics of why changes happen to the value of your site, you’ll soon find yourself limited by the reports offered in Standard Reporting. So, it’s time to build your own. Hooray!
Custom reporting
Google Analytics provides the tools to build reports specific to the types of investigations you frequently perform.
Welcome to my world.
Custom reports are quite simple to build: first, you determine the metric you want the report to cover (number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on), then choose a set of dimensions that you’d like to segment the report by (say, the source of the traffic, and whether they were new or returning users). You can filter the report, including or excluding particular dimension values, and you can assign the report to any of the profiles you created earlier.
In the example below, I’ve created a report that shows me visits and conversion rate for any Google traffic that landed directly only on a product page. I can then drill down on each product page to see the complete phrases use to search. I can use this information in two ways:
I can see which products aren’t converting, which shows me where I need to work harder on merchandising.
I can give this information to my content team, showing them the actual phrases visitors used to reach our product content, helping them write better targeted product descriptions.
The possibilities here are nearly endless, but here are a few examples of reports I find useful:
Non-brand inbound search
By creating a report that shows inbound search traffic which doesn’t include your brand, you can see more clearly the behaviour of visitors most likely to be unfamiliar with your site and brand values, without having to rely on the clumsy new or returning demographic date.
Traffic/conversion/sales by hour
This is pure stats porn, but actually more useful than real-time data. By seeing this data broken down at an hourly level, you can not only compare the current day to previous days, but also see the best performing times for email broadcasts and tweets.
Visits, load time, conversion and sales by page and browser
Page speed can often kill conversion rates, but it’s difficult to prove the value of focusing on speed in monetary terms. Having this report to hand helps me drive Operation Greenbelt, our effort to get into the sub-1.5 second band in Google Webmaster Tools.
Useful things you can’t do in custom reporting
If you have a search function on your website, then Conversion Rate and Products Bought by Site Search Term is an incredibly useful report that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine at returning products and content related to the search term used. By including the products actually bought by visitors who searched for each term, you can use this information to better searchandise these results, escalating high propensity and high value products to the top of the results.
However, it’s not possible to get this information out of new Google Analytics.
Try it, select the following in the report builder:
Metrics: total unique searches; e-commerce or goal conversion rate
Dimensions: search term; product
You’ll see that the data returned is a little nonsensical, though a 2,000% conversion rate would be nice. However, you can get more accurate information using advanced segments. By creating individual segments to define users who have searched for a particular term, you can run the sales performance and product performance reports as normal. It’s laborious, but it teaches a good lesson: data that seems inaccessible can normally be found another way!
Reporting infrastructure
Now that you have a series of reports that you can refer to on a daily or weekly basis, it’s time to put together a regular reporting infrastructure.
Even if you’re not reporting to someone, having a set of key performance indicators that you can use to see how your performance is improving over time allows you to set yourself business goals on a monthly and annual basis.
For my own reporting, I take some high-level metrics (such as visitors, conversion rate and average order value), and segment them by traffic source and, separately, landing page. These statistics I record weekly and report:
current week compared with previous week
same week previous year (if available)
4 week average
13 week average
52 week average (if available)
This takes into account weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual trends, and gives you a much clearer view of your performance.
Getting data in other ways
If you’re using Google Analytics frequently, with any large site you’ll come to a couple of conclusions:
Doing any kind of practical comparative analysis is unwieldy.
Boy, Google Analytics is slow!
As you work with bigger datasets and put together more complex queries, you’ll see the loading graphic more than you’ll see actual data. So when you reach that level, there are ways to completely bypass the Google Analytics interface altogether, and get data into your own spreadsheet application for manipulation.
Data Feed Query Explorer
If you just want to pull down some quick statistics but still use complex filters and exotic metric and dimension combinations, the Data Feed Query Explorer is the quickest way of doing so. Authenticate with your Google Analytics account, select a profile, and you can start selecting metrics and dimensions to be generated in a handy, selectable tabulated format.
Google Analytics API
If you’re feeling clever, you can bypass having to copy and paste data by pulling in directly into Excel, Google Docs or your own application using the Google Analytics API. There are several scripts and plugins available to do this. I use Automate Analytics Google Docs code (there’s also a paid version that simplifies setup and creates some handy reports for you).
New shiny things
Well, now that that’s over, I can show you some cool stuff. Well, at least it’s cool to me. Google Analytics is being constantly improved and new functionality is introduced nearly every month. Here are a couple of my favourites.
Multichannel attribution
Not every visitor converts on your site on the first visit. They may not even do so on the second visit, or third. If they convert on the fourth visit, but each time they visit they do so via a different channel (for example, Search PPC, Search Organic, Direct, Email), which channel do you attribute the conversion to? The last channel, or the first? Dilemma!
Google now has a Multichannel Attribution report, available in the Conversion category, which shows how each channel assists in converting, the overlap between channels, and where in the process that channel was important.
For example, you may have analysed your blog traffic from Twitter and become disheartened that not many people were subscribing after visiting from Twitter links, but instead your high-value subscribers were coming from natural search. On the face of it, you’d spend less time tweeting, but a multichannel report may tell you that visitors first arrived via a Twitter link and didn’t subscribe, but then came back later after searching for your blog name on Google, after which they did. Don’t pack Twitter in yet!
Visitor and goal flow
Visitor and goal flow are amazing reports that help you visualize the flow of traffic through your site and, ultimately, into your checkout funnel or similar goal path. Flow reports are perfect for understanding drop-off points in your process, as well as what the big draws are on each page.
Previously, if you wanted to visualize this data you had to set up several abstracted microgoals and chain them together in custom reports. Frankly, it was a pain in the arse and burned through your precious and limited goal allocation.
Visitor flow bypasses all that and produces the report in an interactive flow diagram. While it doesn’t show you the holy grail of conversion likelihood by each path, you can segment visitor flow so that you can see very specifically how different segments of your visitor base behave.
Go play with it now!",2011,Matt Curry,mattcurry,2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/,business
275,Context First: Web Strategy in Four Handy Ws,"Many, many years ago, before web design became my proper job, I trained and worked as a journalist. I studied publishing in London and spent three fun years learning how to take a few little nuggets of information and turn them into a story. I learned a bunch of stuff that has all been a huge help to my design career. Flatplanning, layout, typographic theory. All of these disciplines have since translated really well to web design, but without doubt the most useful thing I learned was how to ask difficult questions.
Pretty much from day one of journalism school they hammer into you the importance of the Five Ws. Five disarmingly simple lines of enquiry that eloquently manage to provide the meat of any decent story. And with alliteration thrown in too. For a young journo, it’s almost too good to be true.
Who? What? Where? When? Why? It seems so obvious to almost be trite but, fundamentally, any story that manages to answer those questions for the reader is doing a pretty good job. You’ll probably have noticed feeling underwhelmed by certain news pieces in the past – disappointed, like something was missing. Some irritating oversight that really lets the story down. No doubt it was one of the Ws – those innocuous little suckers are generally only noticeable by their absence, but they sure get missed when they’re not there.
Question everything
I’ve always been curious. An inveterate tinkerer with things and asker of dopey questions, often to the point of abject annoyance for anyone unfortunate enough to have ended up in my line of fire. So, naturally, the Five Ws started drifting into other areas of my life. I’d scrutinize everything, trying to justify or explain my rationale using these Ws, but I’d also find myself ripping apart the stuff that clearly couldn’t justify itself against the same criteria.
So when I started working as a designer I applied the same logic and, sure enough, the Ws pretty much mapped to the exact same needs we had for gathering requirements at the start of a project. It seemed so obvious, such a simple way to establish the purpose of a product. What was it for? Why we were making it? And, of course, who were we making it for? It forced clients to stop and think, when really what they wanted was to get going and see something shiny. Sometimes that was a tricky conversation to have, but it’s no coincidence that those who got it also understood the value of strategy and went on to have good solid products, while those that didn’t often ended up with arrogantly insular and very shiny but ultimately unsatisfying and expendable products. Empty vessels make the most noise and all that…
Content first
I was both surprised and pleased when the whole content first idea started to rear its head a couple of years back. Pleased, because without doubt it’s absolutely the right way to work. And surprised, because personally it’s always been the way I’ve done it – I wasn’t aware there was even an alternative way. Content in some form or another is the whole reason we were making the things we were making. I can’t even imagine how you’d start figuring out what a site needs to do, how it should be structured, or how it should look without a really good idea of what that content might be. It baffles me still that this was somehow news to a lot of people. What on earth were they doing? Design without purpose is just folly, surely?
It’s great to see the idea gaining momentum but, having watched it unfold, it occurred to me recently that although it’s fantastic to see a tangible shift in thinking – away from those bleak times, where making things up was somehow deemed an appropriate way to do things – there’s now a new bad guy in town.
With any buzzword solution of the moment, there’s always a catch, and it seems like some have taken the content first approach a little too literally. By which I mean, it’s literally the first thing they do. The project starts, there’s a very cursory nod towards gathering requirements, and off they go, cranking content. Writing copy, making video, commissioning illustrations.
All that’s happened is that the ‘making stuff up’ part has shifted along the line, away from layout and UI, back to the content.
Starting is too easy
I can’t remember where I first heard that phrase, but it’s a great sentiment which applies to so much of what we do on the web. The medium is so accessible and to an extent disposable; throwing things together quickly carries far less burden than in any other industry. We’re used to tweaking as we go, changing bits, iterating things into shape. The ubiquitous beta tag has become the ultimate caveat, and has made the unfinished and unpolished acceptable. Of course, that can work brilliantly in some circumstances. Occasionally, a product offers such a paradigm shift it’s beyond the level of deep planning and prelaunch finessing we’d ideally like. But, in the main, for most client sites we work on, there really is no excuse not to do things properly. To ask the tricky questions, to challenge preconceptions and really understand the Ws behind the products we’re making before we even start.
The four Ws
For product definition, only four of the five Ws really apply, although there’s a lot of discussion around the idea of when being an influencing factor. For example, the context of a user’s engagement with your product is something you can make a call on depending on the specifics of the project.
So, here’s my take on the four essential Ws. I’ll point out here that, of course, these are not intended to be autocratic dictums. Your needs may differ, your clients’ needs may differ, but these four starting points will get you pretty close to where you need to be.
Who
It’s surprising just how many projects start without a real understanding of the intended audience. Many clients think they have an idea, but without really knowing – it’s presumptive at best, and we all know what presumption is the mother of, right? Of course, we can’t know our audiences in the same way a small shop owner might know their customers. But we can at least strive to find out what type of people are likely to be using the product. I’m not talking about deep user research. That should come later.
These are the absolute basics. What’s the context for their visit? How informed are they? What’s their level of comprehension? Are they able to self-identify and relate to categories you have created? I could go on, and it changes on a per-project basis. You’ll only find this out by speaking to them, if not in person, then indirectly through surveys, questionnaires or polls. The mechanism is less important than actually reaching out and engaging with them, because without that understanding it’s impossible to start to design with any empathy.
What
Once you become deeply involved directly with a product or service, it’s notoriously difficult to see things as an outsider would. You learn the thing inside and out, you develop shortcuts and internal phraseology. Colloquialisms creep in. You become too close. So it’s no surprise when clients sometimes struggle to explain what it is their product actually does in a way that others can understand.
Often products are complex but, really, the core reasons behind someone wanting to use that product are very simple. There’s a value proposition for the customer and, if they choose to engage with it, there’s a value exchange. If that proposition or exchange isn’t transparent, then people become confused and will likely go elsewhere. Make sure both your client and you really understand what that proposition is and, in turn, what the expected exchange should be. In a nutshell: what is the intended outcome of that engagement? Often the best way to do this is strip everything back to nothing. Verbosity is rife on the web. Just because it’s easy to create content, that shouldn’t be a reason to do so. Figure out what the value proposition is and then reintroduce content elements that genuinely help explain or present that to a level that is appropriate for the audience.
Why
In advertising, they talk about the truths behind a product or service. Truths can be both tangible or abstract, but the most important part is the resonance those truths hit with a customer. In a digital product or service those truths are often exposed as benefits. Why is this what I need? Why will it work for me? Why should I trust you? The why is one of the more fluffy Ws, yet it’s such an important one to nail. Clients can get prickly when you ask them to justify the why behind their product, but it’s a fantastic way to make sure the value proposition is clear, realistic and meets with the expectations of both client and customer.
It’s our job as designers to question things: we’re not just a pair of hands for clients. Just recently I spoke to a potential client about a site for his business. I asked him why people would use his product and also why his product seemed so fractured in its direction. He couldnt answer that question so, instead of ploughing on regardless, he went back to his directors and is now re-evaluating that business. It was awkward but he thanked me and hopefully he’ll have a better product as a result.
Where
In this instance, where is not so much a geographical thing, although in some cases that level of context may indeed become a influencing factor… The where we’re talking about here is the position of the product in relation to others around it. By looking at competitors or similar services around the one you are designing, you can start to get a sense for many of the things that are otherwise hard to pin down or have yet to be defined. For example, in a collection of sites all selling cars, where does yours fit most closely? Where are the overlaps? How are they communicating to their customers? How is the product range presented or categorized?
It’s good to look around and see how others are doing it. Not in a quest for homogeneity but more to reference or to avoid certain patterns that may or may not make sense for your own particular product. Clients often strive to be different for the sake of it. They feel they need to provide distinction by going against the flow a bit. We know different. We know users love convention. They embrace familiar mental models. They’re comfortable with things that they’ve experienced elsewhere. By showing your client that position is a vital part of their strategy, you can help shape their product into something great.
To conclude
So there we have it – the four Ws. Each part tells a different and vital part of the story you need to be able to make a really good product. It might sound like a lot of work, particularly when the client is breathing down your neck expecting to see things, but without those pieces in place, the story you’re building your product on, and the content that you’re creating to form that product can only ever fit into one genre. Fiction.",2011,Alex Morris,alexmorris,2011-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/context-first/,content
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 glance, appear nearly identical. For instance, consider these two ways of selecting all paragraph tags inside a with an ID.
$(""#id p"");
$(""#id"").find(""p"");
Would it surprise you to learn that the second way can be more than twice as fast as the first? Knowing which selectors outperform others (and why) is a pretty key building block in making sure your code runs well and doesn’t frustrate your users waiting for things to happen.
There are many different ways to select elements using jQuery, but the most common ways can be basically broken down into five different methods. In order, roughly, from fastest to slowest, these are:
$(""#id"");
This is without a doubt the fastest selector jQuery provides because it maps directly to the native document.getElementbyId() JavaScript method. If possible, the selectors listed below should be prefaced with an ID selector in conjunction with jQuery’s .find() method to limit the scope of the page that has to be searched (as in the $(""#id"").find(""p"") example shown above).
$(""p"");, $(""input"");, $(""form""); and so on
Selecting elements by tag name is also fast, since it maps directly to the native document.getElementsByTagname() method.
$("".class"");
Selecting by class name is a little trickier. While still performing very well in modern browsers, it can cause some pretty significant slowdowns in IE8 and below. Why? IE9 was the first IE version to support the native document.getElementsByClassName() JavaScript method. Older browsers have to resort to using much slower DOM-scraping methods that can really impact performance.
$(""[attribute=value]"");
There is no native JavaScript method for this selector to use, so the only way that jQuery can perform the search is by crawling the entire DOM looking for matches. Modern browsers that support the querySelectorAll() method will perform better in certain cases (Opera, especially, runs these searches much faster than any other browser) but, generally speaking, this type of selector is Slowey McSlowersons.
$("":hidden"");
Like attribute selectors, there is no native JavaScript method for this one to use. Pseudo-selectors can be painfully slow since the selector has to be run against every element in your search space. Again, modern browsers with querySelectorAll() will perform slightly better here, but try to avoid these if at all possible. If you must use one, try to limit the search space to a specific portion of the page: $(""#list"").find("":hidden"");
But, hey, proof is in the performance testing, right? It just so happens that said proof is sitting right here. Be sure to notice the class selector numbers beside IE7 and 8 compared to other browsers and then wonder how the people on the IE team at Microsoft manage to sleep at night. Yikes.
Chaining
Almost all jQuery methods return a jQuery object. This means that when a method is run, its results are returned and you can continue executing more methods on them. Rather than writing out the same selector multiple times over, just making a selection once allows multiple actions to be run on it.
Without chaining
$(""#object"").addClass(""active"");
$(""#object"").css(""color"",""#f0f"");
$(""#object"").height(300);
With chaining
$(""#object"").addClass(""active"").css(""color"", ""#f0f"").height(300);
This has the dual effect of making your code shorter and faster. Chained methods will be slightly faster than multiple methods made on a cached selector, and both ways will be much faster than multiple methods made on non-cached selectors. Wait… “cached selector”? What is this new devilry?
Caching
Another easy way to speed up your code that seems to be a mystery to developers is the idea of caching your selectors. Think of how many times you end up writing the same selector over and over again in any project. Every $("".element"") selector has to search the entire DOM each time, regardless of whether or not that selector had been previously run. Running the selection once and then storing the results in a variable means that the DOM only has to be searched once. Once the results of a selector have been cached, you can do anything with them.
First, run your search (here we’re selecting all of the
elements inside ):
var blocks = $(""#blocks"").find(""li"");
Now, you can use the blocks variable wherever you want without having to search the DOM every time.
$(""#hideBlocks"").click(function() {
blocks.fadeOut();
});
$(""#showBlocks"").click(function() {
blocks.fadeIn();
});
My advice? Any selector that gets run more than once should be cached. This jsperf test shows just how much faster a cached selector runs compared to a non-cached one (and even throws some chaining love in to boot).
Event delegation
Event listeners cost memory. In complex websites and apps it’s not uncommon to have a lot of event listeners floating around, and thankfully jQuery provides some really easy methods for handling event listeners efficiently through delegation.
In a bit of an extreme example, imagine a situation where a 10×10 cell table needs to have an event listener on each cell; let’s say that clicking on a cell adds or removes a class that defines the cell’s background color. A typical way that this might be written (and something I’ve often seen during code reviews) is like so:
$('table').find('td').click(function() {
$(this).toggleClass('active');
});
jQuery 1.7 has provided us with a new event listener method, .on(). It acts as a utility that wraps all of jQuery’s previous event listeners into one convenient method, and the way you write it determines how it behaves. To rewrite the above .click() example using .on(), we’d simply do the following:
$('table').find('td').on('click',function() {
$(this).toggleClass('active');
});
Simple enough, right? Sure, but the problem here is that we’re still binding one hundred event listeners to our page, one to each individual table cell. A far better way to do things is to create one event listener on the table itself that listens for events inside it. Since the majority of events bubble up the DOM tree, we can bind a single event listener to one element (in this case, the ) and wait for events to bubble up from its children. The way to do this using the .on() method requires only one change from our code above:
$('table').on('click','td',function() {
$(this).toggleClass('active');
});
All we’ve done is moved the td selector to an argument inside the .on() method. Providing a selector to .on() switches it into delegation mode, and the event is only fired for descendants of the bound element (table) that match the selector (td). With that one simple change, we’ve gone from having to bind one hundred event listeners to just one. You might think that the browser having to do one hundred times less work would be a good thing and you’d be completely right. The difference between the two examples above is staggering.
(Note that if your site is using a version of jQuery earlier than 1.7, you can accomplish the very same thing using the .delegate() method. The syntax of how you write the function differs slightly; if you’ve never used it before, it’s worth checking the API docs for that page to see how it works.)
DOM manipulation
jQuery makes it very easy to manipulate the DOM. It’s trivial to create new nodes, insert them, remove other ones, move things around, and so on. While the code to do this is simple to write, every time the DOM is manipulated, the browser has to repaint and reflow content which can be extremely costly. This is no more evident than in a long loop, whether it be a standard for() loop, while() loop, or jQuery $.each() loop.
In this case, let’s say we’ve just received an array full of image URLs from a database or Ajax call or wherever, and we want to put all of those images in an unordered list. Commonly, you’ll see code like this to pull this off:
var arr = [reallyLongArrayOfImageURLs];
$.each(arr, function(count, item) {
var newImg = ' to the DOM. Each of those insertions is going to be costly, and if our array is quite large then this could lead to a massive slowdown or even the dreaded ‘A script is causing this page to run slowly’ warning.
var arr = [reallyLongArrayOfImageURLs],
tmp = '';
$.each(arr, function(count, item) {
tmp += ' is added to as it’s created. Once our loop has finished iterating, that tmp variable will contain all of our list items in memory, and can be appended to our all in one go. Browsers work much faster when working with objects in memory rather than on screen, so this is a much faster, more CPU-cycle-friendly method of building a list.
Wrapping up
These are far from being the only ways to make your jQuery code run better, but they are among the simplest ones to implement. Though each individual change may only make a few milliseconds of difference, it doesn’t take long for those milliseconds to add up. Studies have shown that the human eye can discern delays of as few as 100ms, so simply making a few changes sprinkled throughout your code can very easily have a noticeable effect on how well your website or app performs. Do you have other jQuery optimization tips to share? Leave them in the comments and help make us all better.
Now go forth and make awesome!",2011,Scott Kosman,scottkosman,2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/your-jquery-now-with-less-suck/,code
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 commonly overlooked case: progress activity.
A user moves their cursor over a hyperlink or button, which is clearly defined as one by the visual language of your content. Upon doing so, they trigger the :hover state to confirm this element is indeed interactive. So far, so good. What happens next is where it starts to fall apart: the user hits this link, presumably triggering an :active state, which is then returned to the normal state upon release. And then what?
From this point on, your user is in limbo. The link has fallen back to either its regular or :visited state. You’ve effectively abandoned them and are relying entirely on the browser they’re using to communicate that something is happening. This poses quite a few problems:
The user may lose focus of what they were doing.
There is little consistency between progress indication in browsers.
The user may not even notice that their action has been acknowledged.
How many times have one or more of these events happened to you due to a lack of communication from the interface?
Think about the differences between Safari and Chrome in this area — two browsers that, when compared to each other, are relatively similar in nature, though this basic feature differs in execution.
Like all aspects of designing the user experience, there is no one true way to fix this problem, but we can introduce details that many users will unconsciously appreciate.
Consider the basic loading indicator. It’s nothing new — in fact, some would argue it’s quite a cliché. However, whether using a spinning wheel or a progress bar, a gif or JavaScript, or something more sophisticated, these simple tools create an illusion of movement, progress and activity. Depending on the implementation, progress indication graphics can significantly increase a user’s perception of the speed in which an event is taking place. Combine this with a cursor change and a lock over the element to prevent double-clicking or reloading, and your chances of keeping your user’s valuable attention have significantly increased.
Demo: Progress activity and the post-active state
This same logic applies to all aspects of defaulting in a browser, from micro-elements like this up to something as simple as a 404 page. The difference in a user’s reaction to hitting the default Apache 404 and a hand-crafted, branded page are phenomenal and there are no prizes for guessing which one they’re more likely to exit from.
Pseudo-class preloading
Another detail that it pays well to look after is the use and abuse of the :hover element and, more importantly, the content revealed by it. Chances are you’re using the :hover pseudo-class somewhere in almost every screen you create. If content is being revealed on :hover and that content takes some time to load, there will inevitably be a delay the first time it is initiated. It appears tacky and half-finished when a tooltip or drop-down loads instantly, only to have its background or supporting elements follow through a second or two later. So, let’s preload the elements we know we’ll need.
A very simple application of this would be to load each file into the default state of a visible element and offset them by a large number. This ensures our elements have loaded and are ready if and when they need to be displayed.
element {
background: url(path/to/image.jpg) -9999em -9999em no-repeat;
}
element .tooltip {
display: none;
}
element:hover .tooltip {
display: block;
background: url(path/to/image.jpg) 0 0;
}
Background images are just one example. Of course, the same logic can apply to any form of revealed content. Using a sprite graphic can also be a clever — albeit tedious — method for achieving the same goal, so if you’re using a sprite, preloading in this way may not be necessary
The differences between preloading and not can only be visualized properly with an actual demonstration.
Demo: Preloading revealed content
Buttons and their (mis)behaviour
Almost all of the time, a button serves just one purpose: to be clicked (or tapped). When a button’s pressed, therefore, if anything other than triggering the desired event occurs, a user naturally becomes frustrated. I often get funny looks when talking about this, but designing the details of a button is something I consider essential.
It goes without saying that a button should always visually recognise :hover and :active states. We can take that one step further and disable some actions that get in the way of pressing the button.
It’s rare that a user would ever want to select and use the text on a button, so let’s cleanly disable it:
element {
-moz-user-select: -moz-none;
-webkit-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}
If the button is image-based or contains an image, we could also disable user dragging to make sure the image element stays locked to the button:
element {
-moz-user-drag: -moz-none;
-webkit-user-drag: none;
user-drag: none;
}
Demo: A more usable button
Disabling global features like this should be done with utmost caution as it’s very easy to cross the line between enhancement and friction. Cases where this is acceptable are very rare, but it’s a good trick to keep in mind nevertheless. Both Apple’s iCloud and Metalab’s Flow applications use these tools appropriately and to great extent.
You could argue that the visual feedback of having the text selected or image dragged when a user mis-hits the button is actually a positive effect, informing the user that their desired action did not work. However, covering for human error should be a designer’s job, not that of our users. We can (almost) ensure it does work for them by accommodating for errors like this in most cases.
Final thoughts
Designing to this level of detail can seem obsessive, but as a designer and user of many interfaces and applications, I believe it can be the difference between a good user experience and a great one.
The samples you’ve just seen are only a fraction of the detail we can design for. Keep in mind that the demonstrations, code and methods above outline just one way to do this. You may not agree with all of these processes or have the time and desire to consider them, but one fact remains: it’s not the technology, or the way it’s done that’s important — it’s the logic and the concept of designing everything.",2011,Chris Sealey,chrissealey,2011-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/subliminal-user-experience/,ux
285,"Composing the New Canon: Music, Harmony, Proportion","Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrtum
—Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Götzen-Dämmerung, Sprüche und Pfeile 33, 1889
Somehow, music is hardcoded in human beings. It is something we understand and respond to without prior knowledge. Music exercises the emotions and our imaginative reflex, not just our hearing. It behaves so much like our emotions that music can seem to symbolize them, to bear them from one person to another. Not surprisingly, it conjures memories: the word music derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), art of the Muses, whose mythological mother was Mnemosyne, memory. But it can also summon up the blood, console the bereaved, inspire fanaticism, bolster governments and dissenters alike, help us learn, and make web designers dance. And what would Christmas be without music?
Music moves us, often in ways we can’t explain. By some kind of alchemy, music frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inadequacy of words. Across the world and throughout recorded history – and no doubt well before that – people have listened and made (and made out to) music.
[I]t appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.
—Charles DARWIN, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871
It’s so integral to humankind, we’ve sent it into space as a totem for who we are. (Who knows? It might be important.) Music is essential, a universal compulsion; as Nietzsche wrote, without music life would be a mistake.
Music, design and web design
There are some obvious and notable similarities between music and visual design. Both can convey mood and evoke emotion but, even under close scrutiny, how they do that remains to a great extent mysterious. Each has formal qualities or parts that can be abstracted, analysed and discussed, often using the same terminology: composition, harmony, rhythm, repetition, form, theme; even colour, texture and tone.
A possible reason for these shared aspects is that both visual design and music are means to connect with people in deep and lasting ways. Furthermore, I believe the connections to be made can complement direct emotional appeal. Certain aesthetic qualities in music work on an unconscious and, it could be argued, universal level. Using musical principles in our designs, then, can help provide the connectedness between content, device and user that we now seek as web designers.
Yet, when we talk about music and web design, the conversation is almost always about the music designers listen to while working, a theme finding its apotheosis in Designers.MX. Sometimes, articles in that dreary list format seek inspiration from music industry websites. There’s even a service offering pre-templated web designs for bands, and at least one book surveyed the landscape back in 2006. Occasionally, discussions broaden somewhat into whether and how different kinds of music can inspire and influence the design work we produce.
Such enquiries, it seems to me, are beside the point. Do I really design differently when I listen to Bach rather than Bacharach? Will the barely restrained energy of Count Basie’s The Kid from Red Bank mean I choose a lively colour palette, and rural, autumnal shades when inspired by Fleet Foxes? Mahler means a thirteen-column layout? Gillian Welch leads to distressed black and white photography? While reflecting the importance we place in music and how it seems to help us in our work, surveys on musical taste and lists of favourite artists fail to recognize that some of the fundamental aesthetic characteristics of music can be adapted and incorporated into modern web design.
Antiphonal geometry
Over recent years, web designers have embraced grid systems as powerful tools to help create good-looking and intuitive user experiences. With the advent of responsive design, these grids and their contents must adapt to the different screen sizes and properties of all kinds of user devices. Finding and using grid values that can scale well and retain or enhance their proportions and relationships while making the user experience meaningful in several different contexts is more important than ever.
In print, this challenge has always started with the dimensions and proportions of the page. Content can thereby be made to belong inside the page and be bound to it. And music has been used for centuries to further this aim. As Robert Bringhurst says in The Elements of Typographical Style:
Indeed, one of the simplest of all systems of page proportions is based on the familiar intervals of the diatonic scale. Pages that embody these basic musical proportions have been in common use in Europe for more than a thousand years.
Very well. But while he goes on to list (from the full chromatic scale, rather than just diatonic) the proportions and the musical intervals they’re based on, Bringhurst fails to mention what they’re ratios of or their potential effects. Shame. In his favour, however, he later touches on how proportions in print might be considered to work:
The page is a piece of paper. It is also a visible and tangible proportion, silently sounding the thoroughbass of the book. On it lies the textblock, which must answer to the page. The two together – page and textblock – produce an antiphonal geometry. That geometry alone can bond the reader to the book. Or conversely, it can put the reader to sleep, or put the reader’s nerves on edge, or drive the reader away.
So what does Bringhurst mean by antiphonal geometry, a phrase that marries the musical to the spatial? By stating that the textblock “must answer to the page”, the implication is that the relationship between the proportions of the page and the shape of the textblock printed on it embodies a spatial (geometrical) call-and-response (antiphony) that can be appealing or not.
Boulton’s new canon
But, as Mark Boulton has pointed out, on the web “there are no edges. There are no ‘pages’. We’ve made them up.” So, what is to be done? In January 2011 at the New Adventures in Web Design conference, Boulton presented his vision of a new canon of web design, a set of principles to guide us as we design the web. There are three overlapping tenets:
design from the content out
create connectedness between the different content elements
bind the content to the web device
Rather than design from the edges in, we need to design layout systems from the content out. To this end, Boulton asserts that grid system design should begin with a constraint, and he suggests we use the size of a fixed content element, such as an advertising unit or image, as a starting point for online grid calculations. Khoi Vinh advocates the same approach in his book, Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.
Boulton’s second and third tenets, however, are more complex and overlap significantly with each other. Connecting the different parts of the content and binding the content to the device share many characteristics and solutions:
adopting ems and percentages as units of size for layout elements
altering text size, line length and line height for different viewport dimensions
providing higher resolution images for devices with greater pixel densities
fluid layout grids, flexible images and responsive design
All can help relate the presentation of the content to its delivery in a certain context.
But how do we determine the relationship between one element of a layout and another? How can we avoid making arbitrary decisions about the relative sizes of parts of our designs? What can we use to connect the parts of our design to one another, and how can we bind the presentation of the content to the user’s device?
Tim Brown’s application of modular typographic scales hints at an answer. In the very useful tool he created for calculating such scales, Brown includes two musical ratios: the perfect fifth (2:3); and the perfect fourth (3:4). Why? Where do they come from? And what do they mean?
Harmonies musical and visual
Fundamental to music are rhythm and harmony.
As any drummer will tell you, without rhythm there is no music. Even when there’s no regular beat, any tune follows a rhythm, however irregular, simply because a change of note is a point of change in the music. Although rhythm, timing and pacing are all relevant to interaction design, right now it’s harmony we’re interested in.
Sometimes harmony is called the vertical aspect of music, and melody the horizontal. But this conceit overlooks the fact that harmony is both vertical and horizontal. A single melodic line, as it is played, implies various sets of harmonies on which it is grounded, whether or not those harmonies are played. So, harmony doesn’t just sit vertically beneath the horizontal melody, but moves horizontally as well, through harmonic progression.
To stretch this arrangement pixel-thin, we could argue that in onscreen design melody is the content, and the layout and arrangement of the content is the harmony. We sometimes say a design is harmonious when the interplay of different elements of a design is pleasing or balanced or in proportion, and the content (the melody) is set off or conveyed well by or appropriate to the design.
We seem to know instinctively whether a layout is harmonious…
In the design of The Great Discontent, the relationships between different elements combine to form a balanced whole.
…or not.
There’s no harmony in the Department for Education’s website because the different parts of the content don’t feel related to one another.
What is it that makes one design harmonious and another dissonant? It’s not just whether things line up, though that’s a start. I believe there are much deeper aesthetic forces at work, forces we can tap into in our onscreen designs. Now, I’m not going start a difficult discussion about aesthetics. For our purposes, we just need to know that it’s the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, and the creation and perception of beauty. And among the key components in the perception of beauty are harmony and proportion. These have been part of traditional western aesthetics since Plato (about 2,500 years).
One of the ways we appreciate the beauty of music is through the harmonic intervals we hear. A musical interval is a combination of two notes and it describes the distance between the two pitches. For example, the distance between C and the G above it (if we take C as the tonic or root) is called a perfect fifth.
Left: C to G, a perfect fifth. Right: C and G, not a perfect fifth.
And, to get superficially scientific for a moment, each musical interval can be expressed as a ratio of the wavelength frequencies of the notes; for our perfect fifth, with every two wavelengths of C, there are three of G. And what is a ratio, if not a proportion of one thing to another?
So, simple musical harmony (using what’s known as just intonation1) affords us a set of proportions, expressed as ratios. Where better to apply these ideas of harmony and proportion from music in web design, than grid systems?
A digression: whither φ?
Quite often in our discussions of pure design and aesthetics, we mention the golden ratio and regurgitate the same justifications for its use: roots in antiquity; embodied in classical and Renaissance architecture and art; occurrence in nature; the New Twitter, and so forth (oh, really?).
Yet the ratios of musical intervals from just intonation are equally venerable and much more widespread: described by Pythagorus; employed in Palladian architecture, and printing, books and art from the Renaissance onwards; in modern times, film and television dimensions; standard international paper sizes (ISO 216, the A and B series); and, again and again, screen dimensions – chances are that screen you’re probably looking at right now has the proportions 2:3 (iPhone and iPod Touch), 3:4 (iPad and Kindle), 3:5 (many smartphones), 5:8 or 16:9 (many widescreen monitors), all ratios of musical intervals.
Back to our theme…
Musical interval ratios
Let’s take a look at most of the ratios within a couple of octaves and crunch some numbers to generate some percentages and other values that we can use in our designs. First, the intervals and their ratios in just intonation and expressed as ratios of one:
Name
Interval in C
Ratio
Ratio (1:x)
unison
C→C
1:1
1:1
minor second
C→D♭
15:16
1:1.067
major second
C→D
8:9
1:1.125
minor third
C→E♭
5:6
1:1.2
major third
C→E
4:5
1:1.25
perfect fourth
C→F
3:4
1:1.333
augmented fourth
or diminished fifth
C→F♯/G♭
1:√2
1:1.414
perfect fifth
C→G
2:3
1:1.5
minor sixth
C→A♭
5:8
1:1.6
major sixth
C→A
3:5
1:1.667
minor seventh
C→B♭
9:16
1:1.778
major seventh
C→B
8:15
1:1.875
octave
C→C↑
1:2
1:2
major tenth
C→E↑
2:5
1:2.5
major eleventh
C→F↑
3:8
1:2.667
major twelfth
C→G↑
1:3
1:3
double octave
C→C↑
1:4
1:4
Name
Interval in C
Ratio
Ratio (1:x)
And now as percentages, of both the larger and smaller values in the ratios:
Name
Ratio
% of larger value
% of smaller value
unison
1:1
100%
100%
minor second
15:16
93.75%
106.667%
major second
8:9
88.889%
112.5%
minor third
5:6
83.333%
120%
major third
4:5
80%
125%
perfect fourth
3:4
75%
133.333%
augmented fourth
or diminished fifth
1:√2
70.711%
141.421%
perfect fifth
2:3
66.667%
150%
minor sixth
5:8
62.5%
160%
major sixth
3:5
60%
166.667%
minor seventh
9:16
56.25%
177.778%
major seventh
8:15
53.333%
187.5%
octave
1:2
50%
200%
major tenth
2:5
40%
250%
major eleventh
3:8
37.5%
266.667%
major twelfth
1:3
33.333%
300%
double octave
1:4
25%
400%
Name
Ratio
% of larger value
% of smaller value
As you can see, the simple musical intervals are expressed as ratios of small whole numbers (integers). We can then normalize them as ratios of one, as well as derive percentage values, both in terms of the smaller value to the larger, and vice versa. These are the numbers we can incorporate into our designs. If you’ve ever written something like body { font: 100%/1.5 ""Museo Sans"", Helvetica, sans-serif; } in your CSS, you’re already using a musical ratio: the perfect fifth.
Modular scales allow us to generate a set of numbers based on a musical interval that can be used for all kinds of typographic and layout decisions to create harmony in a visual design for the web. As Tim Brown said at the 2010 Build conference:
I think that from that most atomic unit – type – whole experiences can resonate, whole experiences can be harmonious. And whole experiences can have a purpose suited to our design intentions.
Once more, with feeling: connectedness
As well as modular scales, there are other methods of incorporating musical interval ratios into our work. Setting the ratio of font size to line height in CSS is one such example. We could also create a typographic hierarchy using the same principle and combining several ratios that we know harmonize well musically in a chord:
body { font-size: 75%; } /* =12px = base size or tonic */
h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2.667rem; }
/* =32px = 3:8 = major eleventh (C→F↑) */
h2 { font-size: 24px; font-size: 2rem; }
/* =24px = 1:2 = octave (C→C↑) */
h3 { font-size: 20px; font-size: 1.667rem; }
/* =20px = 3:5 = major sixth (C→A) */
figcaption, small { font-size: 9px; font-size : 0.75rem }
/* =9px = 3:4 = perfect fourth (C→F) */
Whoa! Hold your reindeer, Santa! How can we know what interval combinations work well together to form chords? Well, I’m a classically trained musician, so perhaps I have an advantage. To avoid a long, technically complex digression into musical harmony, here are a few basic combinations of intervals that are harmonious in one way or another:
unison; major third; perfect fifth; octave
unison; perfect fourth; major sixth; octave
unison; minor third; minor sixth; octave
unison; minor third; diminished fifth; major sixth; octave
This isn’t to say that other combinations can’t be used to interesting effect and particular purpose – they surely can – but I have to make sure there’s something left for you to experiment with in the wee small hours over the holiday. Bear in mind, though, were I to play you two notes from the same scale to form a minor second, for example, you’d probably say it was dissonant and maybe that quality of the 15:16 ratio would be translated to the design.
In the typographic hierarchy above, you’ll notice I used an interval in the higher octave, which affords a broader range of ratios while retaining the harmony. Thus, a perfect fifth (2:3) becomes a major twelfth (1:3), or a major sixth (3:5) becomes a major thirteenth (3:10).
The harmonic ratios can obviously be used as proportions for layout as well, in several different ways:
image width and height (for example, 450×800px = 9:16 = minor seventh)
main content to page width (67%:100% = 2:3 = perfect fifth)
page width to viewport width (80%:100% = 4:5 = major third)
One great benefit of using such ratios in web design work is that they can be applied in responsive web design. Proportional values, based on percentages or equivalent em units, will scale with changing viewports, so your layout and image proportions can be maintained or deliberately changed, as we’re about to find out, across devices.
Small speakers, tall speakers: binding to the device
The musical interval ratios also provide an opportunity, not only to create connectedness between the parts of a layout, but to bind the content to a device – that elusive antiphonal geometry. Just as a textblock and page resonate together, so too can web content and the screen. Earlier, I mentioned that several common screen aspect ratios match musical interval ratios. It would seem, then, that we have a set of proportions that we can use in different ways to establish and retain a sense of harmony that can be based on and change with those contexts. Using musical interval ratios, we can bind the display of our content to the device it’s displayed on.
If you haven’t met already, let me introduce you to the device-aspect-ratio property of CSS media queries.
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 3/4) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 480/640) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 600/800) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 768/1024) { }
Regardless of the precise pixel values, each of these media queries would apply to devices whose display area has an aspect ratio of 3:4. It works by comparing the device-width with the device-height. (It’s not to be confused with aspect-ratio, which is defined by the width and height of the browser within the device.) The values in the media query are always presented as width/height, with portrait being the default orientation for smartphones and tablets; that is, to match an iPhone screen, you’d use device-aspect-ratio: 2/3, not 3/2, which won’t work.
Here’s a table of the musical intervals with their corresponding screens.
Name
device-aspect-ratio
Screens
Common resolutions (pixels)
major third
5/4
TFT LCD computer screens
1,280×1,024
perfect fourth
3/4 or 4/3
iPad, Kindle and other tablets, PDAs
320×240, 768×1,024
perfect fifth
2/3
iPhone, iPod Touch
320×480, 640×960
minor sixth
8/5 (16/10)
Many widescreens
1,152×720, 1,440×900, 1,920×1,200
major sixth
3/5
Many smartphones
240×400, 480×800
minor seventh
16/9 or 9/16
Many widescreens and some smartphones
720×1,280, 1,366×768, 1,920×1,080, 2,560×1,440
[You might argue that I’m playing fast and loose with the ratios. I suppose, mathematically speaking, 9:16 is not the same as 16:9: I’m no expert. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, particularly at Christmas.]
With this in mind, we can begin to write media queries that will influence various typographic and layout values in line with the aspect ratios of specific screens and in combination with em-based min-width queries that work from smaller, mobile screens to larger, desktop screens.
Here’s a very simple demo page with only some text, an image with a caption and a little basic layout: no seasonal overindulgence here.
Demo: Sample page using device-aspect-ratio media queries based on musical interval ratios
Our initial styles for all devices are based on the perfect fifth, with the major third and octave rounding things out into a harmonious whole, whether or not media queries are supported. For example:
html { font-size: 100%; line-height: 1.5; }
/* font-size:line-height = 16:24 = 2:3 = perfect fifth */
h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1.25; }
/* font-size:line-height = 32:40 = 4:5 = major third
body:h1 = 16:32 = 1:2 = octave */
While we should really consider methods of delivering images appropriate to the screen size, let’s just stick to a single image for all devices. But why don’t we change its aspect ratio from 4:3 to 3:2, to fit with our harmonic scheme? It’s easy enough to do with overflow:hidden on the element to hide a part of the image, and a negative margin fudge:
figure img { margin: -8.5% 0 0 0; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; }
Our first break point targets devices 320 pixels wide with an aspect ratio of 2:3, namely the iPhone and iPod Touch:
/* 320px = 20×16 */
@media only screen and (min-width: 20em) and (device-aspect-ratio: 2/3) { }
We’re actually already there, of course, as the intervals we’ve chosen resonate with this aspect ratio – the content is already bound to the device.
Our next media query, then, will make some changes to match a different ratio, the major sixth (3:5), which is same as that of many smartphones:
/* 480px = 30×16 */
@media only screen and (min-width: 30em) and (device-aspect-ratio: 3/5) { }
A different aspect ratio might require a change in harmony. For devices with these proportions, we’ll now use the perfect fourth (3:4) and the major sixth (3:5) along with the octave we already have to create a new resonating harmony. For instance, a slightly wider screen means we can increase the line-height to aid the legibility of longer lines:
html { line-height: 1.667; }
/* font-size:line-height = 16:26.672 = 3:5 = major sixth */
h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1.667; }
/* font-size:line-height = 32:53.333 = 3:5 = major sixth
body:h1 = 16:32 = 1:2 = octave */
and we can remove the negative margin to display our 4:3 image in its entirety.
Each screen displays content styled using relationships related to its own proportions. On the left, an iPhone 4 (2:3); on the right, a Samsung Nexus S (3:5). Your mileage may vary.
Another device, another media query. At 768 pixels, screens are wide enough to add columns. The ratios we’ve used for the 3:5 screens include the perfect fourth (3:4) so we don’t need to change any of the font measurements, but we can base the proportions of the columns on the major sixth interval:
article { float: left; width: 56%; }
/* width of main column 3:5 (60% of 100%, major sixth)
incorporating gutter width */
aside { float : right; width : 36%; }
On devices with a 3:4 aspect ratio, this works even better in landscape orientation.
While not every screen over 768 pixels wide will have 3:4 proportions, the range of intervals informing the design ensure harmonious relationships between the different parts of the layout.
For wide screens proper (break point at 1,280 pixels) we can employ a new set of harmonious intervals. Many laptop and desktop screens have a 16:10 aspect ratio, which boils down to 8:5, equivalent to the minor sixth (5:8). Combined with a minor third (5:6) and the octave (1:2), this creates a new harmony appropriate to these devices. Let’s increase the font size and change the image’s aspect ratio to match:
html { font-size: 120%; line-height: 1.6; }
/* font-size increased for wider screens from 16px to 19.2px
(5:6 = minor third)
font-size:line-height = 19.2:30.72 = 5:8 = minor sixth */
figure img { margin: -12.5% 0 0 ; }
/* using -ve margin combined with overflow:hidden
on the figure element
to crop the image from 4:3 to 8:5 = minor sixth */
A wide screen with a 8:5 (16:10) aspect ratio and an image to match.
With more pixels at our disposal, we can also now use the musical interval ratios to determine the width of the layout, and change the column proportions as well:
section { margin: 0 auto; width: 83.333%; }
/* content width:screen width = 5:6 = minor third */
article { width: 60%; }
/* width of main column 5:8 (62.5% of 100%, minor sixth)
incorporating gutter width */
aside { width: 35%; }
With some carefully targeted media queries, we can begin to reach towards fulfilling the second and third tenets of Boulton’s new canon for web design: connecting the parts of content through relationships embodied in the layout design; and binding the content to the devices people use to access it.
Coda
Musical interval ratios and screen aspect ratios reveal more than convenient correspondence. These proportions work on a deep aesthetic level. Much is claimed for the golden ratio φ, but none of the screens pervading our lives use it. Perhaps that’s an accident of technology, but can making screens to φ’s proportions be more difficult or expensive than 2:3 or 3:4 or 16:10? Here, then, is not just one but a set of proportions with a uniquely human focus, originating in nature, recognized in antiquity, fundamental still.
We find music to be an art steeped with meaning, yet, unlike literary and representational arts, purely instrumental music has no obvious semantic content. It boasts an ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense, which makes it very like design. These days, we’re rightly encouraged to design for emotion, to make our users’ experience meaningful, seductive, delightful. Using musical ideas and principles in our designs can help achieve those ends.
Let’s not be naïve, of course; designing web pages is even less like composing music than it’s like designing for print. In visual design, the eye will always be sovereign to the ear; following these principles will only get us so far. We cannot truly claim that a carefully composed web page layout will have the same qualities and effect as any musical patterns that inform it. In music, a set of intervals is always harmonious in relation to other sets of intervals: music rarely stands still. What aspect ratios will future screens take? Already today there is great variation in devices and support for media queries (and within that, support for device-aspect-ratio). And what of non-western musical traditions? Or rhythm, form, tempo and dynamics? What I’ve demonstrated above is only a suggestion, a tentative exploration of one possible way forward.
But as our discipline matures and we become more articulate about what we do, we must look longer and deeper into areas of human endeavour already rich with value. Music is a fertile ground to explore and has the potential to yield up new approaches for web design.
Footnotes
Just intonation is a system of tuning that uses small integers to describe the musical intervals, based initially on the perfect fifth, that most consonant of intervals. Simple instruments such as vibrating strings and natural horns, as well as unaccompanied voices, tend to fall into just intonation naturally.",2011,Owen Gregory,owengregory,2011-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/composing-the-new-canon/,design
287,Extracting the Content,"As we throw away our canvas in approaches and yearn for a content-out process, there remains a pain point: the Content. It is spoken of in the hushed tones usually reserved for Lord Voldemort. The-thing-that-someone-else-is-responsible-for-that-must-not-be-named.
Designers and developers have been burned before by not knowing what the Content is, how long it is, what style it is and when the hell it’s actually going to be delivered, in internet eons past. Warily, they ask clients for it. But clients don’t know what to make, or what is good, because no one taught them this in business school. Designers struggle to describe what they need and when, so the conversation gets put off until it’s almost too late, and then everyone is relieved that they can take the cop-out of putting up a blog and maybe some product descriptions from the brochure.
The Content in content out.
I’m guessing, as a smart, sophisticated, and, may I say, nicely-scented reader of the honourable and venerable tradition of 24 ways, that you sense something better is out there. Bunches of boxes to fill in just don’t cut it any more in a responsive web design world. The first question is, how are you going to design something to ensure users have the easiest access to the best Content, if you haven’t defined at the beginning what that Content is? Of course, it’s more than possible that your clients have done lots of user research before approaching you to start this project, and have a plethora of finely tuned Content for you to design with.
Have you finished laughing yet? Alright then. Let’s just assume that, for whatever reason of gross oversight, this hasn’t happened. What next?
Bringing up Content for the first time with a client is like discussing contraception when you’re in a new relationship. It might be awkward and either party would probably rather be doing something else, but it needs to be broached before any action happens (that, and it’s disastrous to assume the other party has the matter in hand). If we can’t talk about it, how can we expect people to be doing it right and not making stupid mistakes? That being the case, how do we talk about Content? Let’s start by finding a way to talk about it without blushing and scuffing our shoes. And there’s a reason I’ve been treating Content as a Proper Noun.
The first step, and I mean really-first-step-way-back-at-the-beginning-of-the-project-while-you-are-still-scoping-out-what-the-hell-you-might-do-for-each-other-and-it’s-still-all-a-bit-awkward-like-a-first-date, is for you to explain to the client how important it is that you, together, work out what is important to your users as part of the user experience design, so that your users get the best user experience. The trouble is that, in most cases, this would lead to blank stares, possibly followed by a light cough and a query about using Comic Sans because it seems friendly.
Let’s start by ensuring your clients understand the task ahead. You see, all the time we talk about the Content we do our clients a big disservice. Content is poorly defined. It looms over a project completion point like an unscalable (in the sense of a dozen stacked Kilimanjaros), seething, massive, singular entity. The Content.
Defining the problem.
We should really be thinking of the Content as ‘contents’; as many parts that come together to form a mighty experience, like hit 90s kids’ TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers*.
*For those of you who might have missed the Power Rangers, they were five teenagers with attitude, each given crazy mad individual skillz and a coloured lycra suit from an alien overlord. In return, they had to fight a new monster of the week using their abilities and weaponry in sync (even if the audio was not) and then, finally, in thrilling combination as a Humongous Mechanoid Machine of Awesome. They literally joined their individual selves, accessories and vehicles into a big robot. It was a toy manufacturer’s wet dream.
So, why do I say Content is like the Power Rangers? Because Content is not just a humongous mecha. It is a combination of well-crafted pieces of contents that come together to form a well-crafted humongous mecha. Of Content.
The Red Power Ranger was always the leader. You can imagine your text contents, found on about pages, product descriptions, blog articles, and so on, as being your Red Power Ranger.
Maybe your pictures are your Yellow Power Ranger; video is Blue (not used as much as the others, but really impressive when given a good storyline); maybe Pink is your infographics (it’s wrong to find it sexier than the other equally important Rangers, but you kind of do anyway). And so on.
These bits of content – Red Text Ranger, Yellow Picture Ranger and others – often join together on a page, like they are teaming up to fight the bad guy in an action scene, and when they all come together (your standard workaday huge mecha) in a launched site, that’s when Content becomes an entity.
While you might have a vision for the whole site, Content rarely works that way. Of course, you keep your eye on the bigger prize, the completion of your mega robot, but to get there you need to assemble your working parts, the cogs and springs of contents that will mesh together to finally create your Humongous Mecha of Content. You create parts and join them to form a whole. (It’s rarely seamless; often we need to adjust as we go, but we can create our Mecha’s blueprint by making sure we have all the requisite parts.)
The point here is the order these parts were created. No alien overlord plans a Humongous Mechanoid and then thinks, “Gee, how can I split this into smaller fighting units powered by teenagers in snazzy shiny suits?” No toy manufacturer goes into production of a mega robot, made up of model mecha vehicles with detachable arsenal, without thinking how they will easily fit back together to form the ‘Buy all five now to create the mega robot’ set. No good contents are created as a singular entity and chunked up to be slotted in to place any which way, into the body of a site.
Think contents, not the Content. Think of contents as smaller units, or as a plural. The Content is what you have at the end. The contents are what you are creating and they are easy to break down. You are no longer scaling the unscalable. You can draw the map and plot the path, page by page, section by section.
The page table is your friend
To do this, I use a page table. A page table is a simple table template you can create in the word processor of your choice, that you use to tell you everything about the contents of a page – everything except the contents itself.
Here’s a page table I created for an employee’s guide to redundancy in the alpha.gov.uk website:
Guide to redundancy for employees
Page objective: Provide specific information for employees who are facing redundancy about the process, their options and next steps.
Source content: directgov page on Redundancy.
Scope: In scope
Page title
An employee’s guide to redundancy
Priority content
Message: You have rights as an employee facing redundancy
Method: A guide written in plain English, with links to appropriate additional content.
A video guide (out of scope).
Covers the stages of redundancy and rights for those in trade unions and not in trade unions. Glossary of unfamiliar terms.
Call to action: Read full guide, act to explore redundancy actions, benefits or new employment.
Assets: link to redundancy calculator.
Secondary
Related items, or popular additional links.
Additional tools, such as search and suggestions.
location set v not set states
microcopy encouraging location set where location may make a difference to the content – ie, Scotland/Northern Ireland.
Tertiary
Footer and standard links.
Content creation: Content exists but was created within the constraints of the previous CMS. Review, correct and edit where necessary.
Maintenance: should be flagged for review upon advice from Department of Work and Pensions, and annually.
Technology/Publishing/Policy implications: Should be reviewed once the glossary styles have been decided. No video guide in scope at this time, so languages should be simple and screen reader friendly.
Reliance on third parties: None, all content and source exists in house.
Outstanding questions: None.
Download a copy of this page table
This particular page table template owes a lot to Brain Traffic’s version found in Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web. With smaller clients than, say, the government, I might use something a bit more casual. With clients who like timescales and deadlines, I might turn it into a covering sheet, with signatures and agreements from two departments who have to work together to get the piece done on time.
I use page tables, and the process of working through them, to reassure clients that I understand the task they face and that I can help them break it down section by section, page stack to page, down to product descriptions and interaction copy. About 80% of my clients break into relieved smiles. Most clients want to work with you to produce something good, they just don’t understand how, and they want you to show them the mountain path on the map. With page tables, clients can understand that with baby steps they can break down their content requirements and commission content they need in time for the designers to work with it (as opposed to around it). If I was Santa, these clients would be on my nice list for sure.
My own special brand of Voldemort-content-evilness comes in how I wield my page tables for the other 20%. Page tables are not always thrilling, I’ll admit. Sometimes they get ignored in favour of other things, yet they are crucial to the continual growth and maintenance of a truly content-led site. For these naughty list clients who, even when given the gift of the page table, continually say “Ooh, yes. Content. Right”, I have a special gift. I have a stack of recycled paper under my desk and a cheap black and white laser printer. And I print a blank page table for every conceivable page I can find on the planned redesign. If I’m feeling extra nice, I hole punch them and put them in a fat binder.
There is nothing like saying, “This is all the contents you need to have in hand for launch”, and the satisfying thud the binder makes as it hits the table top, to galvanize even the naughtiest clients to start working with you to create the content you need to really create in a content-out way.",2011,Relly Annett-Baker,rellyannettbaker,2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/extracting-the-content/,content
288,Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes,"Traditionally, bitmap formats such as PNG have been the standard way of delivering iconography on websites. They’re quick and easy, and it also ensures they’re as pixel crisp as possible. Bitmaps have two drawbacks, however: multiple HTTP requests, affecting the page’s loading performance; and a lack of scalability, noticeable when the page is zoomed or viewed on a screen with a high pixel density, such as the iPhone 4 and 4S.
The requests problem is normally solved by using CSS sprites, combining the icon set into one (physically) large image file and showing the relevant portion via background-position. While this works well, it can get a bit fiddly to specify all the positions. In particular, scalability is still an issue. A vector-based format such as SVG sounds ideal to solve this, but browser support is still patchy.
The rise and adoption of web fonts have given us another alternative. By their very nature, they’re not only scalable, but resolution-independent too. No need to specify higher resolution graphics for high resolution screens!
That’s not all though:
Browser support: Unlike a lot of new shiny techniques, they have been supported by Internet Explorer since version 4, and, of course, by all modern browsers. We do need several different formats, however!
Design on the fly: The font contains the basic graphic, which can then be coloured easily with CSS – changing colours for themes or :hover and :focus styles is done with one line of CSS, rather than requiring a new graphic. You can also use CSS3 properties such as text-shadow to add further effects. Using -webkit-background-clip: text;, it’s possible to use gradient and inset shadow effects, although this creates a bitmap mask which spoils the scalability.
Small file size: specially designed icon fonts, such as Drew Wilson’s Pictos font, can be as little as 12Kb for the .woff font. This is because they contain fewer characters than a fully fledged font. You can see Pictos being used in the wild on sites like Garrett Murray’s Maniacal Rage.
As with all formats though, it’s not without its disadvantages:
Icons can only be rendered in monochrome or with a gradient fill in browsers that are capable of rendering CSS3 gradients. Specific parts of the icon can’t be a different colour.
It’s only appropriate when there is an accompanying text to provide meaning. This can be alleviated by wrapping the text label in a tag (I like to use rather than , due to the fact that it’s smaller and isn’ t being used elsewhere) and then hiding it from view with text-indent:-999em.
Creating an icon font can be a complex and time-consuming process. While font editors can carry out hinting automatically, the best results are achieved manually.
Unless you’re adept at creating your own fonts, you’re restricted to what is available in the font. However, fonts like Pictos will cover the most common needs, and icons are most effective when they’re using familiar conventions.
The main complaint about using fonts for icons is that it can mean adding a meaningless character to our markup. The good news is that we can overcome this by using one of two methods – CSS generated content or the data-icon attribute – in combination with the :before and :after pseudo-selectors, to keep our markup minimal and meaningful.
Our simple markup looks like this:
View Basket
Note the multiple class attributes. Next, we’ll import the Pictos font using the @font-face web fonts property in CSS:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Pictos';
src: url('pictos-web.eot');
src: local('☺'),
url('pictos-web.woff') format('woff'),
url('pictos-web.ttf') format('truetype'),
url('pictos-web.svg#webfontIyfZbseF') format('svg');
}
This rather complicated looking set of rules is (at the time of writing) the most bulletproof way of ensuring as many browsers as possible load the font we want. We’ll now use the content property applied to the :before pseudo-class selector to generate our icon. Once again, we’ll use those multiple class attribute values to set common icon styles, then specific styles for .basket. This helps us avoid repeating styles:
.icon {
font-family: 'Pictos';
font-size: 22px:
}
.basket:before {
content: ""$"";
}
What does the :before pseudo-class do? It generates the dollar character in a browser, even when it’s not present in the markup. Using the generated content approach means our markup stays simple, but we’ll need a new line of CSS, defining what letter to apply to each class attribute for every icon we add.
data-icon is a new alternative approach that uses the HTML5 data- attribute in combination with CSS attribute selectors. This new attribute lets us add our own metadata to elements, as long as its prefixed by data- and doesn’t contain any uppercase letters. In this case, we want to use it to provide the letter value for the icon. Look closely at this markup and you’ll see the data-icon attribute.
View Basket
We could add others, in fact as many as we like.
Favourites
History
Location
Then, we need just one CSS attribute selector to style all our icons in one go:
.icon:before {
content: attr(data-icon);
/* Insert your fancy colours here */
}
By placing our custom attribute data-icon in the selector in this way, we can enable CSS to read the value of that attribute and display it before the element (in this case, the anchor tag). It saves writing a lot of CSS rules. I can imagine that some may not like the extra attribute, but it does keep it out of the actual content – generated or not.
This could be used for all manner of tasks, including a media player and large simple illustrations. See the demo for live examples. Go ahead and zoom the page, and the icons will be crisp, with the exception of the examples that use -webkit-background-clip: text as mentioned earlier.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that with both generated content and the data-icon method, the letter will be announced to people using screen readers. For example, with the shopping basket icon above, the reader will say “dollar sign view basket”. As accessibility issues go, it’s not exactly the worst, but could be confusing. You would need to decide whether this method is appropriate for the audience. Despite the disadvantages, icon fonts have huge potential.",2011,Jon Hicks,jonhicks,2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/displaying-icons-with-fonts-and-data-attributes/,code
217,Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design,"It was just over three years ago when I embarked on becoming a web designer, and the first opinion piece about the state of web design I came across was a conference talk by Elliot Jay Stocks called ‘Destroy the Web 2.0 Look’. Elliot’s presentation was a call to arms, a plea to web designers the world over to stop the endless reproductions of the so called ‘Web 2.0 look’.
Three and a half years on from Elliot’s talk, what has changed? Well, from an aesthetic standpoint, not a whole lot. The Web 2.0 look has evolved, but it’s still with us and much of the web remains filled with cookie cutter websites that bear a striking resemblance to one another. This wouldn’t matter so much if these websites were selling comparable services or products, but they’re not. They look similar, they follow the same web design trends; their aesthetic style sends out a very similar message, yet they’re selling completely different services or products. How can you be communicating effectively with your users when your online book store is visually indistinguishable from an online cosmetic store? This just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t want to belittle the current version of the Web 2.0 look for the sake of it. I want to talk about the opportunity we have as web designers to create more meaningful experiences for the people using our websites. Using design wisely gives us the ability to communicate messages, ideas and attitudes that our users will understand and connect with.
Being human
As human beings we respond emotionally to everything around us – people, objects, posters, packaging or websites. We also respond in different ways to different kinds of aesthetic design and style. We care about style and aesthetics deeply, whether we realise it or not. Aesthetic design has the power to attract or repel. We often make decisions based purely on aesthetics and style – and don’t retailers the world over know it! We connect attitudes and strongly held beliefs to style. Individuals will proudly associate themselves with a certain style or aesthetic because it’s an expression of who they are. You know that old phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’? Well, the problem is that people do, so it’s important we get the cover right.
Much is made of how to structure web pages, how to create a logical information hierarchy, how to use layout and typography to clearly communicate with your users. It’s important, however, not to mistake clarity of information or legibility with getting your message across. Few users actually read websites word by word: it’s far more likely they’ll just scan the page. If the page is copy-heavy and nothing grabs their attention, they may well just move on. This is why it’s so important to create a visual experience that actually means something to the user.
Meaningful design
When we view a poster or website, we make split-second assessments and judgements of what is in front of us. Our first impressions of what a website does or who it is aimed at are provoked by the style and aesthetic of the website. For example, with clever use of colour, typography, graphic design and imagery we can communicate to users that an organisation is friendly, edgy, compassionate, fun or environmentally conscious.
Using a certain aesthetic we can convey the personality of that organisation, target age ranges, different sexes or cultural groups, communicate brand attributes, and more. We can make our users feel like they’re part of something and, perhaps even more importantly, we can make new users want to be a part of something. And we can achieve all this before the user has read a single word.
By establishing a website’s aesthetic and creating a meaningful visual language, a design is no longer just a random collection of pretty gradients that have been plucked out of thin air. There can be a logic behind the design decisions we make. So, before you slap another generic piece of ribbon or an ultra shiny icon into the top-left corner of your website, think about why you are doing it. If you can’t come up with a reason better than “I saw it on another website”, it’s probably a poor application of style.
Design and style
There are a number of reasons why the web suffers from a lack meaningful design. Firstly, there are too many preconceptions of what a website should look like. It’s too easy for designers to borrow styles from other websites, thereby limiting the range of website designs we see on the web. Secondly, many web designers think of aesthetic design as of secondary importance, which shouldn’t be the case. Designing websites that are accessible and easy to use is, of course, very important but this is the very least a web designer should be delivering. Easy to use websites should come as standard – it’s equally important to create meaningful, compelling and beautiful experiences for everyone who uses our websites. The aesthetics of your site are part of the design, and to ignore this and play down the role of aesthetic design is just a wasted opportunity.
No compromise necessary
Easy to use, accessible websites and beautiful, meaningful aesthetics are not mutually exclusive. The key is to apply style and aesthetic design appropriately. We need to think about who and what we’re designing for and ask ourselves why we’re applying a certain kind of aesthetic style to our design. If you do this, there’s no reason why effective, functional design should come at the expense of jaw-dropping, meaningful aesthetics.
Web designers need to understand the differences between functional design and aesthetic design but, even more importantly, they need to know how to make them work together. It’s combining these elements of design successfully that makes for the best web design in the world.",2010,Mike Kus,mikekus,2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/beyond-web-mechanics-creating-meaningful-web-design/,design
218,Put Yourself in a Corner,"Some backstory, and a shameful confession
For the first couple years of high school I was one of those jerks who made only the minimal required effort in school. Strangely enough, how badly I behaved in a class was always in direct proportion to how skilled I was in the subject matter. In the subjects where I was confident that I could pass without trying too hard, I would give myself added freedom to goof off in class.
Because I was a closeted lit-nerd, I was most skilled in English class. I’d devour and annotate required reading over the weekend, I knew my biblical and mythological allusions up and down, and I could give you a postmodern interpretation of a text like nobody’s business. But in class, I’d sit in the back and gossip with my friends, nap, or scribble patterns in the margins of my textbooks. I was nonchalant during discussion, I pretended not to listen during lectures. I secretly knew my stuff, so I did well enough on tests, quizzes, and essays. But I acted like an ass, and wasn’t getting the most I could out of my education.
The day of humiliation, but also epiphany
One day in Ms. Kaney’s AP English Lit class, I was sitting in the back doodling. An earbud was dangling under my sweater hood, attached to the CD player (remember those?) sitting in my desk. Because of this auditory distraction, the first time Ms. Kaney called my name, I barely noticed. I definitely heard her the second time, when she didn’t call my name so much as roar it. I can still remember her five feet frame stomping across the room and grabbing an empty desk. It screamed across the worn tile as she slammed it next to hers. She said, “This is where you sit now.” My face gets hot just thinking about it.
I gathered my things, including the CD player (which was now impossible to conceal), and made my way up to the newly appointed Seat of Shame. There I sat, with my back to the class, eye-to-eye with Ms. Kaney. From my new vantage point I couldn’t see my friends, or the clock, or the window. All I saw were Ms. Kaney’s eyes, peering at me over her reading glasses while I worked. In addition to this punishment, I was told that from now on, not only would I participate in class discussions, but I would serve detention with her once a week until an undetermined point in the future.
During these detentions, Ms. Kaney would give me new books to read, outside the curriculum, and added on to my normal homework. They ranged from classics to modern novels, and she read over my notes on each book. We’d discuss them at length after class, and I grew to value not only our private discussions, but the ones in class as well. After a few weeks, there wasn’t even a question of this being punishment. It was heaven, and I was more productive than ever.
To the point
Please excuse this sentimental story. It’s not just about honoring a teacher who cared enough to change my life, it’s really about sharing a lesson. The most valuable education Ms. Kaney gave me had nothing to do with literature. She taught me that I (and perhaps other people who share my special brand of crazy) need to be put in a corner to flourish. When we have physical and mental constraints applied, we accomplish our best work.
For those of you still reading, now seems like a good time to insert a pre-emptive word of mediation. Many of you, maybe all of you, are self-disciplined enough that you don’t require the rigorous restrictions I use to maximize productivity. Also, I know many people who operate best in a stimulating and open environment. I would advise everyone to seek and execute techniques that work best for them. But, for those of you who share my inclination towards daydreams and digressions, perhaps you’ll find something useful in the advice to follow.
In which I pretend to be Special Agent Olivia Dunham
Now that I’m an adult, and no longer have Ms. Kaney to reign me in, I have to find ways to put myself in the corner. By rejecting distraction and shaping an environment designed for intense focus, I’m able to achieve improved productivity.
Lately I’ve been obsessed with the TV show Fringe, a sci-fi series about an FBI agent and her team of genius scientists who save the world (no, YOU’RE a nerd). There’s a scene in the show where the primary character has to delve into her subconscious to do extraordinary things, and she accomplishes this by immersing herself in a sensory deprivation tank. The premise is this: when enclosed in a space devoid of sound, smell, or light, she will enter a new plane of consciousness wherein she can tap into new levels of perception.
This might sound a little nuts, but to me this premise has some real-world application. When I am isolated from distraction, and limited to only the task at hand, I’m able to be productive on a whole new level. Since I can’t actually work in an airtight iron enclosure devoid of input, I find practical ways to create an interruption-free environment.
Since I work from home, many of my methods for coping with distractions wouldn’t be necessary for my office-bound counterpart. However for some of you 9-to-5-ers, the principles will still apply.
Consider your visual input
First, I have to limit my scope to the world I can (and need to) affect. In the largest sense, this means closing my curtains to the chaotic scene of traffic, birds, the post office, a convenience store, and generally lovely weather that waits outside my window. When the curtains are drawn and I’m no longer surrounded by this view, my sphere is reduced to my desk, my TV, and my cat. Sometimes this step alone is enough to allow me to focus.
But, my visual input can be whittled down further still. For example, the desk where I usually keep my laptop is littered with twelve owl figurines, a globe, four books, a three-pound weight, and various nerdy paraphernalia (hard drives, Wacom tablets, unnecessary bluetooth accessories, and so on). It’s not so much a desk as a dumping ground for wacky flea market finds and impulse technology buys. Therefore, in addition to this Official Desk, I have an adult version of Ms. Kaney’s Seat of Shame. It’s a rusty old student’s desk I picked up at the Salvation Army, almost an exact replica of the model Ms. Kaney dragged across the classroom all those years ago. This tiny reproduction Seat of Shame is literally in a corner, where my only view is a blank wall. When I truly need to focus, this is where I take refuge, with only a notebook and a pencil (and occasionally an iPad).
Find out what works for your ears
Even from my limited sample size of two people, I know there are lots of different ways to cope with auditory distraction. I prefer silence when focused on independent work, and usually employ some form of a white noise generator. I’ve yet to opt for the fancy ‘real’ white noise machines; instead, I use a desktop fan or our allergy filter machine. This is usually sufficient to block out the sounds of the dishwasher and the cat, which allows me to think only about the task of hand.
My boyfriend, the other half of my extensive survey, swears by another method. He calls it The Wall of Sound, and it’s basically an intense blast of raucous music streamed directly into his head. The outcome of his technique is really the same as mine; he’s blocking out unexpected auditory input. If you can handle the grating sounds of noisy music while working, I suggest you give The Wall of Sound a try.
Don’t count the minutes
When I sat in the original Seat of Shame in lit class, I could no longer see the big classroom clock slowly ticking away the seconds until lunch. Without the marker of time, the class period often flew by. The same is true now when I work; the less aware of time I am, the less it feels like time is passing too quickly or slowly, and the more I can focus on the task (not how long it takes).
Nowadays, to assist in my effort to forget the passing of time, I sometimes put a sticky note over the clock on my monitor. If I’m writing, I’ll use an app like WriteRoom, which blocks out everything but a simple text editor.
There are situations when it’s not advisable to completely lose track of time. If I’m working on a project with an hourly rate and a tight scope, or if I need to be on time to a meeting or call, I don’t want to lose myself in the expanse of the day. In these cases, I’ll set an alarm that lets me know it’s time to reign myself back in (or on some days, take a shower).
Put yourself in a mental corner, too
When Ms. Kaney took action and forced me to step up my game, she had the insight to not just change things physically, but to challenge me mentally as well. She assigned me reading material outside the normal coursework, then upped the pressure by requiring detailed reports of the material. While this additional stress was sometimes uncomfortable, it pushed me to work harder than I would have had there been less of a demand. Just as there can be freedom in the limitations of a distraction-free environment, I’d argue there is liberty in added mental constraints as well.
Deadlines as a constraint
Much has been written about the role of deadlines in the creative process, and they seem to serve different functions in different cases. I find that deadlines usually act as an important constraint and, without them, it would be nearly impossible for me to ever consider a project finished. There are usually limitless ways to improve upon the work I do and, if there’s no imperative for me to be done at a certain point, I will revise ad infinitum. (Hence, the personal site redesign that will never end – Coming Soon, Forever!). But if I have a clear deadline in mind, there’s a point when the obsessive tweaking has to stop. I reach a stage where I have to gather up the nerve to launch the thing.
Putting the pro in procrastination
Sometimes I’ve found that my tendency to procrastinate can help my productivity. (Ducks, as half the internet throws things at her.) I understand the reasons why procrastination can be harmful, and why it’s usually a good idea to work diligently and evenly towards a goal. I try to divide my projects up in a practical way, and sometimes I even pull it off. But for those tasks where you work aimlessly and no focus comes, or you find that every other to-do item is more appealing, sometimes you’re forced to bring it together at the last moment. And sometimes, this environment of stress is a formula for magic. Often when I’m down to the wire and have no choice but to produce, my mind shifts towards a new level of clarity. There’s no time to endlessly browse for inspiration, or experiment with convoluted solutions that lead nowhere.
Obviously a life lived perpetually on the edge of a deadline would be a rather stressful one, so it’s not a state of being I’d advocate for everyone, all the time. But every now and then, the work done when I’m down to the wire is my best.
Keep one toe outside your comfort zone
When I’m choosing new projects to take on, I often seek out work that involves an element of challenge. Whether it’s a design problem that will require some creative thinking, or a coding project that lends itself to using new technology like HTML5, I find a manageable level of difficulty to be an added bonus. The tension that comes from learning a new skill or rethinking an old standby is a useful constraint, as it keeps the work interesting, and ensures that I continue learning.
There you have it
Well, I think I’ve spilled most of my crazy secrets for forcing my easily distracted brain to focus. As with everything we web workers do, there are an infinite number of ways to encourage productivity. I hope you’ve found a few of these to be helpful, and please share your personal techniques in the comments. Have a happy and productive new year!",2010,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/put-yourself-in-a-corner/,process
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 , and 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.
and 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 plugins from programs like RealPlayer and QuickTime eventually helped to fill the in-page audio/video gap, handling and markup which pointed to .wav, .avi, .rm or .mov files. Suffice it to say, the experience was inconsistent at best and, on the standards side of the fence right now, so is HTML5 in terms of audio and video.
: the theory
As far as HTML goes, the code for is simple and logical. Just as with
Download mysong.ogg ;
Ah, if only it were that simple. The first problem is that the OGG audio format, while ‘free’, is not supported by some browsers. Conversely, nor is MP3, despite being a de facto standard used in all kinds of desktop software (and hardware). In fact, as of November 2010, no single audio format is commonly supported across all major HTML5-enabled browsers.
What you end up writing, then, is something like this:
mysong.ogg or mysong.mp3
Keep in mind, this is only a ‘first class’ experience for the HTML5 case; also, for non-supported browsers, you may want to look at another inline player (object/embed, or a JavaScript plus Flash API) to have inline audio. You can imagine the added code complexity in the case of supporting ‘first class’ experiences for older browsers, too.
: the caveats
With today reflects a very different – read: business-aware – environment in 2010. (Further subtext: There’s a lot of [potential] money involved.) Regrettably, this is a collision of free and commercial interests, where the casualty is ultimately the user. Second up in the casualty list is you, the developer, who has to write additional code around this fragmented support.
The HTML5 audio API as implemented in JavaScript has one of the most un-computer-like responses I’ve ever seen, and inspired the title of this post. Calling new Audio().canPlayType('audio/mp3'), which queries the system for format support according to a MIME type, is supposed to return one of “probably”, “maybe”, or “no”. Sometimes, you’ll just get a null or empty string, which is also fun. A “maybe” response does not guarantee that a format will be supported; sometimes audio/mp3 gives “maybe,” but then audio/mpeg; codecs=""mp3"" will give a more-solid “probably” response. This can vary by browser or platform, too, depending on native support – and finally, the user may also be able to install codecs, extending support to include other formats. (Are you excited yet?)
Damn you, warring formats!
New market and business opportunities go hand-in-hand with technology developments. What we have here is certainly not failure to communicate; rather, we have competing parties shouting loudly in public in attempts to influence mindshare towards a de facto standard for audio and video. Unfortunately, the current situation means that at least two formats are effectively required to serve the majority of users correctly.
As it currently stands, we have the free and open source software camp of OGG Vorbis/WebM and its proponents (notably, Mozilla, Google and Opera in terms of browser makers), up against the non-free, proprietary and ‘closed’ camp of MP3 and MPEG4/HE-AAC/H.264 – which is where you’ll find commitments from Apple and Microsoft, among others. Apple is likely in with H.264 for the long haul, given its use of the format for its iTunes music store and video offerings.
It is generally held that H.264 is a technically superior format in terms of file size versus quality, but it involves intellectual property and, in many use cases, requires licensing fees. To be fair, there is a business model with H.264 and much has been invested in its development, but this approach is not often the kind that wins over the web. On that front, OGG/WebM may eventually win for being a ‘free’ format that does not involve a licensing scheme.
Closed software and tools ideologically clash with the open nature of the web, which exists largely thanks to free and open technology. Because of philosophical and business reasons, support for audio and video is fragmented across browsers adopting HTML5 features. It does not help that a large amount of audio and video currently exists in non-free MP3 and MPEG-4 formats. Adoption of and may be slowed, since it is more complex than or the preferred format you may choose (for example, MP3). In either event, Flash or other plugins can be used as done traditionally within HTML4 documents to embed and play the relevant audio.
The SoundManager 2 page player demo in action.
Ideally, HTML5 audio should be used whenever possible with Flash as the backup option. A few JavaScript/Flash-based audio player projects exist which balance the two; in attempting to tackle this problem, I develop and maintain SoundManager 2, a JavaScript sound API which transparently uses HTML5 Audio() and, if needed, Flash for playing audio files. The internals can get somewhat ugly, but the transition between HTML4 and HTML5 is going to be just that – and even with HTML5, you will need some form of format fall-back in addition to graceful degradation.
It may be safest to fall back to MP3/MP4 formats for inline playback at this time, given wide support via Flash, some HTML5-based browsers and mobile devices. Considering the amount of MP3/MP4 media currently available, it is wiser to try these before falling through to a traditional file download process.
Early findings
Here is a brief list of behavioural notes, annoyances, bugs, quirks and general weirdness I have found while playing with HTML5-based audio at time of writing (November 2010):
Apple iPad/iPhone (iOS 4, iPad 3.2+)
Only one sound can be played at a time. If a second sound starts, the first is stopped.
No auto-play allowed. Sounds follow the pop-up window security model and can only be started from within a user event handler such as onclick/touch, and so on. Otherwise, playback attempts silently fail.
Once started, a sequence of sounds can be created or played via the ‘finish’ event of the previous sound (for example, advancing through a playlist without interaction after first track starts).
iPad, iOS 3.2: Occasional ‘infinite loop’ bug seen where audio does not complete and stop at a sound’s logical end – instead, it plays again from the beginning. Might be specific to example file format (HE-AAC) encoded from iTunes.
Apple Safari, OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5
Critical bug: Safari 4 and 5 intermittently fail to load or play HTML5 audio on Snow Leopard due to bug(s) in QuickTime X and/or other underlying frameworks. Known Apple ‘radar’ bug: bugs.webkit.org #32159 (see also, test case.) Amusing side note: Safari on Windows is fine.
Apple Safari, Windows
Food for thought: if you download “Safari” alone on Windows, you will not get HTML5 audio/video support (tested in WinXP). You need to download “Safari + QuickTime” to get HTML5 audio/video support within Safari. (As far as I’m aware, Chrome, Firefox and Opera either include decoders or use system libraries accordingly. Presumably IE 9 will use OS-level APIs.)
General Quirks
Seeking and loading, ‘progress’ events, and calculating bytes loaded versus bytes total should not be expected to be linear, as users can arbitrarily seek within a sound. It appears that some support for HTTP ranges exists, which adds a bit of logic to UI code. Browsers seem to vary slightly in their current implementations of these features.
The onload event of a sound may be of little relevance, if non-linear loading is involved (see above note re: seeking).
Interestingly (perhaps I missed it), the current spec does not seem to specify a panning or left/right channel mix option.
The preload attribute values may vary slightly between browsers at this time.
Upcoming shiny: HTML5 Audio Data API
With access to audio data, you can incorporate waveform and spectrum elements that make your designs react to music.
The HTML5 audio spec does a good job covering the basics of playback, but did not initially get into manipulation or generation of audio on-the-fly, something Flash has had for a number of years now. What if JavaScript could create, monitor and change audio dynamically, like a sort of audio element? With that kind of capability, many dynamic audio processing features become feasible and, when combined with other media, can make for some impressive demos.
What started as a small idea among a small group of audio and programming enthusiasts grew to inspire a W3C audio incubator group, and continued to establish the Mozilla Audio Data API. Contributors wrote a patch for Firefox which was reviewed and revised, and is now slated to be in the public release of Firefox 4. Some background and demos are also detailed in an article from the BBC R&D blog.
There are plenty of live demos to see, which give an impression of the new creative ideas this API enables. Many concepts are not new in themselves, but it is exciting to see this sort of thing happening within the native browser context.
Mozilla is not alone in this effort; the WebKit folks are also working on a JavaScriptAudioNode interface, which implements similar audio buffering and sample elements.
The future?
It is my hope that we’ll see a common format emerge in terms of support across the major browsers for both audio and video; otherwise, support will continue to be fragmented and mildly frustrating to develop for, and that can impede growth of the feature. It’s a big call, but if ; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms!
Rationale
Like a beautiful jewel, 3-D transforms can be dazzling, a true spectacle to behold. But before we start tacking 3-D diamonds and rubies to our compositions like Liberace‘s tailor, we owe it to our users to ask how they can benefit from this awesome feature.
An entire application should not take advantage of 3-D transforms. CSS was built to style documents, not generate explorable environments. I fail to find a benefit to completing a web form that can be accessed by swivelling my viewport to the Sign-Up Room (although there have been proposals to make the web just that). Nevertheless, there are plenty of opportunities to use 3-D transforms in between interactions with the interface, via transitions.
Take, for instance, the Weather App on the iPhone. The application uses two views: a details view; and an options view. Switching between these two views is done with a 3-D flip transition. This informs the user that the interface has two – and only two – views, as they can exist only on either side of the same plane.
Flipping from details view to options view via a 3-D transition
Also, consider slide shows. When you’re looking at the last slide, what cues tip you off that advancing will restart the cycle at the first slide? A better paradigm might be achieved with a 3-D transform, placing the slides side-by-side in a circle (carousel) in three-dimensional space; in that arrangement, the last slide obviously comes before the first.
3-D transforms are more than just eye candy. We can also use them to solve dilemmas and make our applications more intuitive.
Current support
The CSS 3D Transforms module has been out in the wild for over a year now. Currently, only Safari supports the specification – which includes Safari on Mac OS X and Mobile Safari on iOS.
The support roadmap for other browsers varies. The Mozilla team has taken some initial steps towards implementing the module. Mike Taylor tells me that the Opera team is keeping a close eye on CSS transforms, and is waiting until the specification is fleshed out. And our best friend Internet Explorer still needs to catch up to 2-D transforms before we can talk about the 3-D variety.
To make matters more perplexing, Safari’s WebKit cousin Chrome currently accepts 3-D transform declarations, but renders them in 2-D space. Chrome team member Paul Irish, says that 3-D transforms are on the horizon, perhaps in one of the next 8.0 releases.
This all adds up to a bit of a challenge for those of us excited by 3-D transforms. I’ll give it to you straight: missing the dimension of depth can make degradation a bit ungraceful. Unless the transform is relatively simple and holds up in non-3D-supporting browsers, you’ll most likely have to design another solution. But what’s another hurdle in a steeplechase? We web folk have had our mettle tested for years. We’re prepared to devise multiple solutions.
Here’s the part of the article where I mention Modernizr, and you brush over it because you’ve read this part of an article hundreds of times before. But seriously, it’s the best way to test for CSS 3-D transform support. Use it.
Even with these difficulties mounting up, trying out 3-D transforms today is the right move. The CSS 3-D transforms module was developed by the same team at Apple that produced the CSS 2D Transforms and Animation modules. Both specifications have since been adopted by Mozilla and Opera. Transforming in three-dimensions now will guarantee you’ll be ahead of the game when the other browsers catch up.
The choice is yours. You can make excuses and pooh-pooh 3-D transforms because they’re too hard and only snobby Apple fans will see them today. Or, with a tip of the fedora to Mr Andy Clarke, you can get hard-boiled and start designing with the best features out there right this instant.
So, I bid you, in the words of the eternal Optimus Prime…
Transform and roll out.
Let’s get coding.
Perspective
To activate 3-D space, an element needs perspective. This can be applied in two ways: using the transform property, with the perspective as a functional notation:
-webkit-transform: perspective(600);
or using the perspective property:
-webkit-perspective: 600;
See example: Perspective 1.
The red element on the left uses transform: perspective() functional notation; the blue element on the right uses the perspective property
These two formats both trigger a 3-D space, but there is a difference. The first, functional notation is convenient for directly applying a 3-D transform on a single element (in the previous example, I use it in conjunction with a rotateY transform). But when used on multiple elements, the transformed elements don’t line up as expected. If you use the same transform across elements with different positions, each element will have its own vanishing point. To remedy this, use the perspective property on a parent element, so each child shares the same 3-D space.
See Example: Perspective 2.
Each red box on the left has its own vanishing point within the parent container; the blue boxes on the right share the vanishing point of the parent container
The value of perspective determines the intensity of the 3-D effect. Think of it as a distance from the viewer to the object. The greater the value, the further the distance, so the less intense the visual effect. perspective: 2000; yields a subtle 3-D effect, as if we were viewing an object from far away. perspective: 100; produces a tremendous 3-D effect, like a tiny insect viewing a massive object.
By default, the vanishing point for a 3-D space is positioned at its centre. You can change the position of the vanishing point with perspective-origin property.
-webkit-perspective-origin: 25% 75%;
See Example: Perspective 3.
3-D transform functions
As a web designer, you’re probably well acquainted with working in two dimensions, X and Y, positioning items horizontally and vertically. With a 3-D space initialised with perspective, we can now transform elements in all three glorious spatial dimensions, including the third Z dimension, depth.
3-D transforms use the same transform property used for 2-D transforms. If you’re familiar with 2-D transforms, you’ll find the basic 3D transform functions fairly similar.
rotateX(angle)
rotateY(angle)
rotateZ(angle)
translateZ(tz)
scaleZ(sz)
Whereas translateX() positions an element along the horizontal X-axis, translateZ() positions it along the Z-axis, which runs front to back in 3-D space. Positive values position the element closer to the viewer, negative values further away.
The rotate functions rotate the element around the corresponding axis. This is somewhat counter-intuitive at first, as you might imagine that rotateX will spin an object left to right. Instead, using rotateX(45deg) rotates an element around the horizontal X-axis, so the top of the element angles back and away, and the bottom gets closer to the viewer.
See Example: Transforms 1.
3-D rotate() and translate() functions around each axis
There are also several shorthand transform functions that require values for all three dimensions:
translate3d(tx,ty,tz)
scale3d(sx,sy,sz)
rotate3d(rx,ry,rz,angle)
Pro-tip: These foo3d() transform functions also have the benefit of triggering hardware acceleration in Safari. Dean Jackson, CSS 3-D transform spec author and main WebKit dude, writes (to Thomas Fuchs):
In essence, any transform that has a 3D operation as one of its functions will trigger hardware compositing, even when the actual transform is 2D, or not doing anything at all (such as translate3d(0,0,0)). Note this is just current behaviour, and could change in the future (which is why we don’t document or encourage it). But it is very helpful in some situations and can significantly improve redraw performance.
For the sake of simplicity, my demos will use the basic transform functions, but if you’re writing production-ready CSS for iOS or Safari-only, make sure to use the foo3d() functions to get the best rendering performance.
Card flip
We now have all the tools to start making 3-D objects. Let’s get started with something simple: flipping a card.
Here’s the basic markup we’ll need:
The .container will house the 3-D space. The #card acts as a wrapper for the 3-D object. Each face of the card has a separate element: .front; and .back. Even for such a simple object, I recommend using this same pattern for any 3-D transform. Keeping the 3-D space element and the object element(s) separate establishes a pattern that is simple to understand and easier to style.
We’re ready for some 3-D stylin’. First, apply the necessary perspective to the parent 3-D space, along with any size or positioning styles.
.container {
width: 200px;
height: 260px;
position: relative;
-webkit-perspective: 800;
}
Now the #card element can be transformed in its parent’s 3-D space. We’re combining absolute and relative positioning so the 3-D object is removed from the flow of the document. We’ll also add width: 100%; and height: 100%;. This ensures the object’s transform-origin will occur in the centre of .container. More on transform-origin later.
Let’s add a CSS3 transition so users can see the transform take effect.
#card {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
}
The .container’s perspective only applies to direct descendant children, in this case #card. In order for subsequent children to inherit a parent’s perspective, and live in the same 3-D space, the parent can pass along its perspective with transform-style: preserve-3d. Without 3-D transform-style, the faces of the card would be flattened with its parents and the back face’s rotation would be nullified.
To position the faces in 3-D space, we’ll need to reset their positions in 2-D with position: absolute. In order to hide the reverse sides of the faces when they are faced away from the viewer, we use backface-visibility: hidden.
#card figure {
display: block;
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}
To flip the .back face, we add a basic 3-D transform of rotateY(180deg).
#card .front {
background: red;
}
#card .back {
background: blue;
-webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg);
}
With the faces in place, the #card requires a corresponding style for when it is flipped.
#card.flipped {
-webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg);
}
Now we have a working 3-D object. To flip the card, we can toggle the flipped class. When .flipped, the #card will rotate 180 degrees, thus exposing the .back face.
See Example: Card 1.
Flipping a card in three dimensions
Slide-flip
Take another look at the Weather App 3-D transition. You’ll notice that it’s not quite the same effect as our previous demo. If you follow the right edge of the card, you’ll find that its corners stay within the container. Instead of pivoting from the horizontal centre, it pivots on that right edge. But the transition is not just a rotation – the edge moves horizontally from right to left. We can reproduce this transition just by modifying a couple of lines of CSS from our original card flip demo.
The pivot point for the rotation occurs at the right side of the card. By default, the transform-origin of an element is at its horizontal and vertical centre (50% 50% or center center). Let’s change it to the right side:
#card { -webkit-transform-origin: right center; }
That flip now needs some horizontal movement with translateX. We’ll set the rotation to -180deg so it flips right side out.
#card.flipped {
-webkit-transform: translateX(-100%) rotateY(-180deg);
}
See Example: Card 2.
Creating a slide-flip from the right edge of the card
Cube
Creating 3-D card objects is a good way to get started with 3-D transforms. But once you’ve mastered them, you’ll be hungry to push it further and create some true 3-D objects: prisms. We’ll start out by making a cube.
The markup for the cube is similar to the card. This time, however, we need six child elements for all six faces of the cube:
Basic position and size styles set the six faces on top of one another in the container.
.container {
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
position: relative;
-webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#cube {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}
#cube figure {
width: 196px;
height: 196px;
display: block;
position: absolute;
border: 2px solid black;
}
With the card, we only had to rotate its back face. The cube, however, requires that five of the six faces to be rotated. Faces 1 and 2 will be the front and back. Faces 3 and 4 will be the sides. Faces 5 and 6 will be the top and bottom.
#cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); }
#cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg); }
#cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg); }
#cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg); }
#cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg); }
#cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg); }
We could remove the first #cube .front style declaration, as this transform has no effect, but let’s leave it in to keep our code consistent.
Now each face is rotated, and only the front face is visible. The four side faces are all perpendicular to the viewer, so they appear invisible. To push them out to their appropriate sides, they need to be translated out from the centre of their positions. Each side of the cube is 200 pixels wide. From the cube’s centre they’ll need to be translated out half that distance, 100px.
#cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }
Note here that the translateZ function comes after the rotate. The order of transform functions is important. Take a moment and soak this up. Each face is first rotated towards its position, then translated outward in a separate vector.
We have a working cube, but we’re not done yet.
Returning to the Z-axis origin
For the sake of our users, our 3-D transforms should not distort the interface when the active panel is at its resting position. But once we start pushing elements off their Z-axis origin, distortion is inevitable.
In order to keep 3-D transforms snappy, Safari composites the element, then applies the transform. Consequently, anti-aliasing on text will remain whatever it was before the transform was applied. When transformed forward in 3-D space, significant pixelation can occur.
See Example: Transforms 2.
Looking back at the Perspective 3 demo, note that no matter how small the perspective value is, or wherever the transform-origin may be, the panel number 1 always returns to its original position, as if all those funky 3-D transforms didn’t even matter.
To resolve the distortion and restore pixel perfection to our #cube, we can push the 3-D object back, so that the front face will be positioned back to the Z-axis origin.
#cube { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px); }
See Example: Cube 1.
Restoring the front face to the original position on the Z-axis
Rotating the cube
To expose any face of the cube, we’ll need a style that rotates the cube to expose any face. The transform values are the opposite of those for the corresponding face. We toggle the necessary class on the #box to apply the appropriate transform.
#cube.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(0deg); }
#cube.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-180deg); }
#cube.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(-90deg); }
#cube.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(90deg); }
#cube.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); }
#cube.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); }
Notice how the order of the transform functions has reversed. First, we push the object back with translateZ, then we rotate it.
Finishing up, we can add a transition to animate the rotation between states.
#cube { -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s; }
See Example: Cube 2.
Rotating the cube with a CSS transition
Rectangular prism
Cubes are easy enough to generate, as we only have to worry about one measurement. But how would we handle a non-regular rectangular prism? Let’s try to make one that’s 300 pixels wide, 200 pixels high, and 100 pixels deep.
The markup remains the same as the #cube, but we’ll switch the cube id for #box. The container styles remain mostly the same:
.container {
width: 300px;
height: 200px;
position: relative;
-webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#box {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}
Now to position the faces. Each set of faces will need their own sizes. The smaller faces (left, right, top and bottom) need to be positioned in the centre of the container, where they can be easily rotated and then shifted outward. The thinner left and right faces get positioned left: 100px ((300 − 100) ÷ 2), The stouter top and bottom faces get positioned top: 50px ((200 − 100) ÷ 2).
#box figure {
display: block;
position: absolute;
border: 2px solid black;
}
#box .front,
#box .back {
width: 296px;
height: 196px;
}
#box .right,
#box .left {
width: 96px;
height: 196px;
left: 100px;
}
#box .top,
#box .bottom {
width: 296px;
height: 96px;
top: 50px;
}
The rotate values can all remain the same as the cube example, but for this rectangular prism, the translate values do differ. The front and back faces are each shifted out 50 pixels since the #box is 100 pixels deep. The translate value for the left and right faces is 150 pixels for their 300 pixels width. Top and bottom panels take 100 pixels for their 200 pixels height:
#box .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(50px); }
#box .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(50px); }
#box .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(150px); }
#box .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(150px); }
#box .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#box .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }
See Example: Box 1.
Just like the cube example, to expose a face, the #box needs to have a style to reverse that face’s transform. Both the translateZ and rotate values are the opposites of the corresponding face.
#box.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateY(0deg); }
#box.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateX(-180deg); }
#box.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(-90deg); }
#box.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(90deg); }
#box.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); }
#box.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); }
See Example: Box 2.
Rotating the rectangular box with a CSS transition
Carousel
Front-end developers have a myriad of choices when it comes to content carousels. Now that we have 3-D capabilities in our browsers, why not take a shot at creating an actual 3-D carousel?
The markup for this demo takes the same form as the box, cube and card. Let’s make it interesting and have a carousel with nine panels.
Now, apply basic layout styles. Let’s give each panel of the #carousel 20 pixel gaps between one another, done here with left: 10px; and top: 10px;. The effective width of each panel is 210 pixels.
.container {
width: 210px;
height: 140px;
position: relative;
-webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#carousel {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}
#carousel figure {
display: block;
position: absolute;
width: 186px;
height: 116px;
left: 10px;
top: 10px;
border: 2px solid black;
}
Next up: rotating the faces. This #carousel has nine panels. If each panel gets an equal distribution on the carousel, each panel would be rotated forty degrees from its neighbour (360 ÷ 9).
#carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg); }
Now, the outward shift. Back when we were creating the cube and box, the translate value was simple to calculate, as it was equal to one half the width, height or depth of the object. With this carousel, there is no size we can automatically use as a reference. We’ll have to calculate the distance of the shift by other means.
Drawing a diagram of the carousel, we can see that we know only two things: the width of each panel is 210 pixels; and the each panel is rotated forty degrees from the next. If we split one of these segments down its centre, we get a right-angled triangle, perfect for some trigonometry.
We can determine the length of r in this diagram with a basic tangent equation:
There you have it: the panels need to be translated 288 pixels in 3-D space.
#carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg) translateZ(288px); }
If we decide to change the width of the panel or the number of panels, we only need to plug in those two variables into our equation to get the appropriate translateZ value. In JavaScript terms, that equation would be:
var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) /
Math.tan( ( ( Math.PI * 2 ) / numberOfPanels ) / 2 ) );
// or simplified to
var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) /
Math.tan( Math.PI / numberOfPanels ) );
Just like our previous 3-D objects, to show any one panel we need only apply the reverse transform on the carousel. Here’s the style to show the fifth panel:
-webkit-transform: translateZ(-288px) rotateY(-160deg);
See Example: Carousel 1.
By now, you probably have two thoughts:
Rewriting transform styles for each panel looks tedious.
Why bother doing high school maths? Aren’t robots supposed to be doing all this work for us?
And you’re absolutely right. The repetitive nature of 3-D objects lends itself to scripting. We can offload all the monotonous transform styles to our dynamic script, which, if done correctly, will be more flexible than the hard-coded version.
See Example: Carousel 2.
Conclusion
3-D transforms change the way we think about the blank canvas of web design. Better yet, they change the canvas itself, trading in the flat surface for voluminous depth.
My hope is that you took at least one peak at a demo and were intrigued. We web designers, who have rejoiced for border-radius, box-shadow and background gradients, now have an incredible tool at our disposal in 3-D transforms. They deserve just the same enthusiasm, research and experimentation we have seen on other CSS3 features. Now is the perfect time to take the plunge and start thinking about how to use three dimensions to elevate our craft. I’m breathless waiting for what’s to come.
See you on the flip side.",2010,David DeSandro,daviddesandro,2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/intro-to-css-3d-transforms/,code
236,Extreme Design,"Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access.
Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias
Wait, no internet?
Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set.
We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org
The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before.
The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly.
What it’s like inside the fort
/dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptions‚ but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a ‘hack first, design later (if at all)’ attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building.
While the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went.
What made this design process work?
A golden ratio of teams
My personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can ‘do everything’ will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface.
More importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don’t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person.
While it’s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers.
photo by Ben Firshman
Equality inside the fortress walls
Something magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods.
Being equal doesn’t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort.
Create a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it’s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial.
photo by Ben Firshman
Hang your heraldry from the rafters
Forts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It’s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see.
Ryan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no “Ah, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y” or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy.
Put a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don’t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference.
Plan more, download less
While internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn’t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets – “loo roll; Tom Stafford photo“.
This changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too.
The path to the internet
For the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process.
Try it at home: unplug once you’ve got the things you need. As an artist, it’s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you’re not looking at other people’s work while creating.
Social design
Finally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly.
At a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over – this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we’d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back.
Put the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it’s better to have your personal headspace.
Gavin called this ‘social design’. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I’d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work – but there’s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That’s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the ‘driver’ and ‘observer’ roles is a key aspect to pairing.
Tackle the forest collectively and the trees individually – it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win.
The return home
Grateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be.
You just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next.",2010,Hannah Donovan,hannahdonovan,2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/,process
238,Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t),"Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.
Still, despite their widespread use (or is it overuse?), the smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. There’s always been a tension between the inherently two-dimensional nature of our medium, and our desire for more intensity, more depth in our designs. And a gradient can evoke so much: the splay of light across your desk, the slow decrease in volume toward the end of your favorite song, the sunset after a long day. When properly applied, graded colors bring a much needed softness to our work.
Of course, that whole ‘proper application’ thing is the tricky bit.
But given their place in our toolkit and their prominence online, it really is heartening to see we can create gradients directly with CSS. They’re part of the draft images module, and implemented in two of the major rendering engines.
Still, I’ve always found CSS gradients to be one of the more confusing aspects of CSS3. So if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser.
Gradient theory 101 (I hope that’s not really a thing)
Right. So before we dive into the code, let’s cover a few basics. Every gradient, no matter how complex, shares a few common characteristics. Here’s a straightforward one:
I spent seconds hours designing this gradient. I hope you like it.
At either end of our image, we have a final color value, or color stop: on the left, our stop is white; on the right, black. And more color-rich gradients are no different:
(Don’t ever really do this. Please. I beg you.)
It’s visually more intricate, sure. But at the heart of it, we have just seven color stops (red, orange, yellow, and so on), making for a fantastic gradient all the way.
Now, color stops alone do not a gradient make. Between each is a transition point, the fail-over point between the two stops. Now, the transition point doesn’t need to fall exactly between stops: it can be brought closer to one stop or the other, influencing the overall shape of the gradient.
A tale of two syntaxes
Armed with our new vocabulary, let’s look at a CSS gradient in the wild. Behold, the simple input button:
There’s a simple linear gradient applied vertically across the button, moving from a bright sunflowerish hue (#FAA51A, for you hex nuts in the audience) to a much richer orange (#F47A20). And here’s the CSS that makes it happen:
input[type=submit] {
background-color: #F47A20;
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
color-stop(1, #F47A20)
);
}
I’ve borrowed David DeSandro’s most excellent formatting suggestions for gradients to make this snippet a bit more legible but, still, the code above might have turned your stomach a bit. And that’s perfectly understandable—heck, it sort of turned mine. But let’s step through the CSS slowly, and see if we can’t make it a little less terrifying.
Verbose WebKit is verbose
Here’s the syntax for our little gradient on WebKit:
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
color-stop(1, #F47A20)
);
Woof. Quite a mouthful, no? Well, here’s what we’re looking at:
WebKit has a single -webkit-gradient property, which can be used to create either linear or radial gradients.
The next two values are the starting and ending positions for our gradient (0 0 and 0 100%, respectively). Linear gradients are simply drawn along the path between those two points, which allows us to change the direction of our gradient simply by altering its start and end points.
Afterward, we specify our color stops with the oh-so-aptly named color-stop parameter, which takes the stop’s position on the gradient (0 being the beginning, and 100% or 1 being the end) and the color itself.
For a simple two-color gradient like this, -webkit-gradient has a bit of shorthand notation to offer us:
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
from(#FAA51A),
to(#FAA51A)
);
from(#FAA51A) is equivalent to writing color-stop(0, #FAA51A), and to(#FAA51A) is the same as color-stop(1, #FAA51A) or color-stop(100%, #FAA51A)—in both cases, we’re simply declaring the first and last color stops in our gradient.
Terse Gecko is terse
WebKit proposed its syntax back in 2008, heavily inspired by the way gradients are drawn in the canvas specification. However, a different, leaner syntax came to the fore, eventually appearing in a draft module specification in CSS3.
Naturally, because nothing on the web was meant to be easy, this is the one that Mozilla has implemented.
Here’s how we get gradient-y in Gecko:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
Wait, what? Done already? That’s right. By default, -moz-linear-gradient assumes you’re trying to create a vertical gradient, starting from the top of your element and moving to the bottom. And, if that’s the case, then you simply need to specify your color stops, delimited with a few commas.
I know: that was almost… painless. But the W3C/Mozilla syntax also affords us a fair amount of flexibility and control, by introducing features as we need them.
We can specify an origin point for our gradient:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%,
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
As well as an angle, to give it a direction:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#F47A20
);
And we can specify multiple stops, simply by adding to our comma-delimited list:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#FCC,
#F47A20
);
By adding a percentage after a given color value, we can determine its position along the gradient path:
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
#FAA51A,
#FCC 20%,
#F47A20
);
So that’s some of the flexibility implicit in the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax.
Now, I should note that both syntaxes have their respective fans. I will say that the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax makes much more sense to me, and lines up with how I think about creating gradients. But I can totally understand why some might prefer WebKit’s more verbose approach to the, well, looseness behind the -moz syntax. À chacun son gradient syntax.
Still, as the language gets refined by the W3C, I really hope some consensus is reached by the browser vendors. And with Opera signaling that it will support the W3C syntax, I suppose it falls on WebKit to do the same.
Reusing color stops for fun and profit
But CSS gradients aren’t all simple colors and shapes and whatnot: by getting inventive with individual color stops, you can create some really complex, compelling effects.
Tim Van Damme, whose brain, I believe, should be posthumously donated to science, has a particularly clever application of gradients on The Box, a site dedicated to his occasional podcast series. Now, there are a fair number of gradients applied throughout the UI, but it’s the feature image that really catches the eye.
You see, there’s nothing that says you can’t reuse color stops. And Tim’s exploited that perfectly.
He’s created a linear gradient, angled at forty-five degrees from the top left corner of the photo, starting with a fully transparent white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)). At the halfway mark, he’s established another color stop at an only slightly more opaque white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1)), making for that incredibly gradual brightening toward the middle of the photo.
But then he has set another color stop immediately on top of it, bringing it back down to rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) again. This creates that fantastically hard edge that diagonally bisects the photo, giving the image that subtle gloss.
And his final color stop ends at the same fully transparent white, completing the effect. Hot? I do believe so.
Rocking the radials
We’ve been looking at linear gradients pretty exclusively. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention radial gradients as a viable option, including a modest one as a link accent on a navigation bar:
And here’s the relevant CSS:
background: -moz-radial-gradient(50% 100%, farthest-side,
rgb(204, 255, 255) 1%,
rgb(85, 85, 85) 15%,
rgba(85, 85, 85, 0)
);
background: -webkit-gradient(radial, 50% 100%, 0, 50% 100%, 15,
from(rgb(204, 255, 255)),
to(rgba(85, 85, 85, 0))
);
Now, the syntax builds on what we’ve already learned about linear gradients, so much of it might be familiar to you, picking out color stops and transition points, as well as the two syntaxes’ reliance on either a separate property (-moz-radial-gradient) or parameter (-webkit-gradient(radial, …)) to shift into circular mode.
Mozilla introduces another stand-alone property (-moz-radial-gradient), and accepts a starting point (50% 100%) from which the circle radiates. There’s also a size constant defined (farthest-side), which determines the reach and shape of our gradient.
WebKit is again the more verbose of the two syntaxes, requiring both starting and ending points (50% 100% in both cases). Each also accepts a radius in pixels, allowing you to control the skew and breadth of the circle.
Again, this is a fairly modest little radial gradient. Time and article length (and, let’s be honest, your author’s completely inadequate grasp of geometry) prevent me from covering radial gradients in much more detail, because they are incredibly powerful. For those interested in learning more, I can’t recommend the references at Mozilla and Apple strongly enough.
Leave no browser behind
But no matter the kind of gradients you’re working with, there is a large swathe of browsers that simply don’t support gradients. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to declare a sensible fallback—it just depends on the kind of fallback you’d like. Essentially, gradient-blind browsers will disregard any properties containing references to either -moz-linear-gradient, -moz-radial-gradient, or -webkit-gradient, so you simply need to keep your fallback isolated from those properties.
For example: if you’d like to fall back to a flat color, simply declare a separate background-color:
.nav {
background-color: #000;
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
Or perhaps just create three separate background properties.
.nav {
background: #000;
background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
We can even build on this to fall back to a non-gradient image:
.nav {
background: #000 url(""faux-gradient-lol.png"") repeat-x ;
background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}
No matter the approach you feel most appropriate to your design, it’s really just a matter of keeping your fallback design quarantined from its CSS3-ified siblings.
(If you’re feeling especially masochistic, there’s even a way to get simple linear gradients working in IE via Microsoft’s proprietary filters. Of course, those come with considerable performance penalties that even Microsoft is quick to point out, so I’d recommend avoiding those.
And don’t tell Andy Clarke I told you, or he’ll probably unload his Derringer at me. Or something.)
Go forth and, um, gradientify!
It’s entirely possible your head’s spinning. Heck, mine is, but that might be the effects of the ’nog. But maybe you’re wondering why you should care about CSS gradients. After all, images are here right now, and work just fine.
Well, there are some quick benefits that spring to mind: fewer HTTP requests are needed; CSS3 gradients are easily made scalable, making them ideal for variable widths and heights; and finally, they’re easily modifiable by tweaking a few CSS properties. Because, let’s face it, less time spent yelling at Photoshop is a very, very good thing.
Of course, CSS-generated gradients are not without their drawbacks. The syntax can be confusing, and it’s still under development at the W3C. As we’ve seen, browser support is still very much in flux. And it’s possible that gradients themselves have some real performance drawbacks—so test thoroughly, and gradient carefully.
But still, as syntaxes converge, and support improves, I think generated gradients can make a compelling tool in our collective belts. The tasteful design is, of course, entirely up to you.
So have fun, and get gradientin’.",2010,Ethan Marcotte,ethanmarcotte,2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients/,code
240,My CSS Wish List,"I love Christmas. I love walking around the streets of London, looking at the beautifully decorated windows, seeing the shiny lights that hang above Oxford Street and listening to Christmas songs.
I’m not going to lie though. Not only do I like buying presents, I love receiving them too. I remember making long lists that I would send to Father Christmas with all of the Lego sets I wanted to get. I knew I could only get one a year, but I would spend days writing the perfect list.
The years have gone by, but I still enjoy making wish lists. And I’ll tell you a little secret: my mum still asks me to send her my Christmas list every year.
This time I’ve made my CSS wish list. As before, I’d be happy with just one present.
Before I begin…
… this list includes:
things that don’t exist in the CSS specification (if they do, please let me know in the comments – I may have missed them);
others that are in the spec, but it’s incomplete or lacks use cases and examples (which usually means that properties haven’t been implemented by even the most recent browsers).
Like with any other wish list, the further down I go, the more unrealistic my expectations – but that doesn’t mean I can’t wish. Some of the things we wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago have been implemented and our wishes fulfilled (think multiple backgrounds, gradients and transformations, for example).
The list
Cross-browser implementation of font-size-adjust
When one of the fall-back fonts from your font stack is used, rather than the preferred (first) one, you can retain the aspect ratio by using this very useful property. It is incredibly helpful when the fall-back fonts are smaller or larger than the initial one, which can make layouts look less polished.
What font-size-adjust does is divide the original font-size of the fall-back fonts by the font-size-adjust value. This preserves the x-height of the preferred font in the fall-back fonts. Here’s a simple example:
p {
font-family: Calibri, ""Lucida Sans"", Verdana, sans-serif;
font-size-adjust: 0.47;
}
In this case, if the user doesn’t have Calibri installed, both Lucida Sans and Verdana will keep Calibri’s aspect ratio, based on the font’s x-height. This property is a personal favourite and one I keep pointing to.
Firefox supported this property from version three. So far, it’s the only browser that does. Fontdeck provides the font-size-adjust value along with its fonts, and has a handy tool for calculating it.
More control over overflowing text
The text-overflow property lets you control text that overflows its container. The most common use for it is to show an ellipsis to indicate that there is more text than what is shown. To be able to use it, the container should have overflow set to something other than visible, and white-space: nowrap:
div {
white-space: nowrap;
width: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
This, however, only works for blocks of text on a single line. In the wish list of many CSS authors (and in mine) is a way of defining text-overflow: ellipsis on a block of multiple text lines. Opera has taken the first step and added support for the -o-ellipsis-lastline property, which can be used instead of ellipsis. This property is not part of the CSS3 spec, but we could certainly make good use of it if it were…
WebKit has -webkit-line-clamp to specify how many lines to show before cutting with an ellipsis, but support is patchy at best and there is no control over where the ellipsis shows in the text. Many people have spent time wrangling JavaScript to do this for us, but the methods used are very processor intensive, and introduce a JavaScript dependency.
Indentation and hanging punctuation properties
You might notice a trend here: almost half of the items in this list relate to typography. The lack of fine-grained control over typographical detail is a general concern among designers and CSS authors. Indentation and hanging punctuation fall into this category.
The CSS3 specification introduces two new possible values for the text-indent property: each-line; and hanging. each-line would indent the first line of the block container and each line after a forced line break; hanging would invert which lines are affected by the indentation.
The proposed hanging-punctuation property would allow us to specify whether opening and closing brackets and quotes should hang outside the edge of the first and last lines. The specification is still incomplete, though, and asks for more examples and use cases.
Text alignment and hyphenation properties
Following the typographic trend of this list, I’d like to add better control over text alignment and hyphenation properties. The CSS3 module on Generated Content for Paged Media already specifies five new hyphenation-related properties (namely: hyphenate-dictionary; hyphenate-before and hyphenate-after; hyphenate-lines; and hyphenate-character), but it is still being developed and lacks examples.
In the text alignment realm, the new text-align-last property allows you to define how the last line of a block (or a line just before a forced break) is aligned, if your text is set to justify. Its value can be: start; end; left; right; center; and justify. The text-justify property should also allow you to have more control over text set to text-align: justify but, for now, only Internet Explorer supports this.
calc()
This is probably my favourite item in the list: the calc() function. This function is part of the CSS3 Values and Units module, but it has only been implemented by Firefox (4.0). To take advantage of it now you need to use the Mozilla vendor code, -moz-calc().
Imagine you have a fluid two-column layout where the sidebar column has a fixed width of 240 pixels, and the main content area fills the rest of the width available. This is how you could create that using -moz-calc():
#main {
width: -moz-calc(100% - 240px);
}
Can you imagine how many hacks and headaches we could avoid were this function available in more browsers? Transitions and animations are really nice and lovely but, for me, it’s the ability to do the things that calc() allows you to that deserves the spotlight and to be pushed for implementation.
Selector grouping with -moz-any()
The -moz-any() selector grouping has been introduced by Mozilla but it’s not part of any CSS specification (yet?); it’s currently only available on Firefox 4.
This would be especially useful with the way HTML5 outlines documents, where we can have any number of variations of several levels of headings within numerous types of containers (think sections within articles within sections…).
Here is a quick example (copied from the Mozilla blog post about the article) of how -moz-any() works. Instead of writing:
section section h1, section article h1, section aside h1,
section nav h1, article section h1, article article h1,
article aside h1, article nav h1, aside section h1,
aside article h1, aside aside h1, aside nav h1, nav section h1,
nav article h1, nav aside h1, nav nav h1, {
font-size: 24px;
}
You could simply write:
-moz-any(section, article, aside, nav)
-moz-any(section, article, aside, nav) h1 {
font-size: 24px;
}
Nice, huh?
More control over styling form elements
Some are of the opinion that form elements shouldn’t be styled at all, since a user might not recognise them as such if they don’t match the operating system’s controls. I partially agree: I’d rather put the choice in the hands of designers and expect them to be capable of deciding whether their particular design hampers or improves usability.
I would say the same idea applies to font-face: while some fear designers might go crazy and litter their web pages with dozens of different fonts, most welcome the freedom to use something other than Arial or Verdana.
There will always be someone who will take this freedom too far, but it would be useful if we could, for example, style the default Opera date picker:
tags
*
* @tags (optional)
*/
CSSDOC includes a standard for documenting bug fixes and hacks, colours, versioning and copyright information, amongst other important bits of data.
I know this isn’t a CSS feature request per se; rather, it’s just me pointing you at something that is usually overlooked but that could contribute towards keeping style sheets easier to maintain and to hand over to new developers.
Final notes
I understand that if even some of these were implemented in browsers now, it would be a long time until all vendors were up to speed. But if we don’t talk about them and experiment with what’s available, then it will definitely never happen.
Why haven’t I mentioned better browser support for existing CSS3 properties? Because that would be the same as adding chocolate to your Christmas wish list – you don’t need to ask, everyone knows you want it.
The list could go on. There are dozens of other things I would love to see integrated in CSS or further developed. These are my personal favourites: some might be less useful than others, but I’ve wished for all of them at some point.
Part of the research I did while writing this article was asking some friends what they would add to their lists; other than a couple of items I already had in mine, everything else was different. I’m sure your list would be different too. So tell me, what’s on your CSS wish list?",2010,Inayaili de León Persson,inayailideleon,2010-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/my-css-wish-list/,code
171,Rock Solid HTML Emails,"At some stage in your career, it’s likely you’ll be asked by a client to design a HTML email. Before you rush to explain that all the cool kids are using social media, keep in mind that when done correctly, email is still one of the best ways to promote you and your clients online. In fact, a recent survey showed that every dollar spent on email marketing this year generated more than $40 in return. That’s more than any other marketing channel, including the cool ones.
There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Permission, relevance, timeliness and engaging content are all important. Even so, the biggest challenge for designers still remains building an email that renders well across all the popular email clients.
Same same, but different
Before getting into the details, there are some uncomfortable facts that those new to HTML email should be aware of. Building an email is not like building for the web. While web browsers continue their onward march towards standards, many email clients have stubbornly stayed put. Some have even gone backwards. In 2007, Microsoft switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. Yes, as in the word processor. Add to this the quirks of the major web-based email clients like Gmail and Hotmail, sprinkle in a little Lotus Notes and you’ll soon realize how different the email game is.
While it’s not without its challenges, rest assured it can be done. In my experience the key is to focus on three things. First, you should keep it simple. The more complex your email design, the more likely is it to choke on one of the popular clients with poor standards support. Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade. That often means nesting tables, bringing CSS inline and following the coding guidelines I’ll outline below. Finally, you need to test your designs regularly. Just because a template looks nice in Hotmail now, doesn’t mean it will next week.
Setting your lowest common denominator
To maintain your sanity, it’s a good idea to decide exactly which email clients you plan on supporting when building a HTML email. While general research is helpful, the email clients your subscribers are using can vary significantly from list to list. If you have the time there are a number of tools that can tell you specifically which email clients your subscribers are using. Trust me, if the testing shows almost none of them are using a client like Lotus Notes, save yourself some frustration and ignore it altogether.
Knowing which email clients you’re targeting not only makes the building process easier, it can save you lots of time in the testing phase too. For the purpose of this article, I’ll be sharing techniques that give the best results across all of the popular clients, including the notorious ones like Gmail, Lotus Notes 6 and Outlook 2007. Just remember that pixel perfection in all email clients is a pipe dream.
Let’s get started.
Use tables for layout
Because clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 have poor support for float, margin and padding, you’ll need to use tables as the framework of your email. While nested tables are widely supported, consistent treatment of width, margin and padding within table cells is not. For the best results, keep the following in mind when coding your table structure.
Set the width in each cell, not the table
When you combine table widths, td widths, td padding and CSS padding into an email, the final result is different in almost every email client. The most reliable way to set the width of your table is to set a width for each cell, not for the table itself.
Never assume that if you don’t specify a cell width the email client will figure it out. It won’t. Also avoid using percentage based widths. Clients like Outlook 2007 don’t respect them, especially for nested tables. Stick to pixels. If you want to add padding to each cell, use either the cellpadding attribute of the table or CSS padding for each cell, but never combine the two.
Err toward nesting
Table nesting is far more reliable than setting left and right margins or padding for table cells. If you can achieve the same effect by table nesting, that will always give you the best result across the buggier email clients.
Use a container table for body background colors
Many email clients ignore background colors specified in your CSS or the tag. To work around this, wrap your entire email with a 100% width table and give that a background color.
Your email code goes here.
You can use the same approach for background images too. Just remember that some email clients don’t support them, so always provide a fallback color.
Avoid unnecessary whitespace in table cells
Where possible, avoid whitespace between your tags. Some email clients (ahem, Yahoo! and Hotmail) can add additional padding above or below the cell contents in some scenarios, breaking your design for no apparent reason.
CSS and general font formatting
While some email designers do their best to avoid CSS altogether and rely on the dreaded tag, the truth is many CSS properties are well supported by most email clients. See this comprehensive list of CSS support across the major clients for a good idea of the safe properties and those that should be avoided.
Always move your CSS inline
Gmail is the culprit for this one. By stripping the CSS from the and of any email, we’re left with no choice but to move all CSS inline. The good news is this is something you can almost completely automate. Free services like Premailer will move all CSS inline with the click of a button. I recommend leaving this step to the end of your build process so you can utilize all the benefits of CSS.
Avoid shorthand for fonts and hex notation
A number of email clients reject CSS shorthand for the font property. For example, never set your font styles like this.
p {
font:bold 1em/1.2em georgia,times,serif;
}
Instead, declare the properties individually like this.
p {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1.2em;
font-family: georgia,times,serif;
}
While we’re on the topic of fonts, I recently tested every conceivable variation of @font-face across the major email clients. The results were dismal, so unfortunately it’s web-safe fonts in email for the foreseeable future.
When declaring the color property in your CSS, some email clients don’t support shorthand hexadecimal colors like color:#f60; instead of color:#ff6600;. Stick to the longhand approach for the best results.
Paragraphs
Just like table cell spacing, paragraph spacing can be tricky to get a consistent result across the board. I’ve seen many designers revert to using double your height sensitive text
Links
Some email clients will overwrite your link colors with their defaults, and you can avoid this by taking two steps. First, set a default color for each link inline like so:
this is a link
Next, add a redundant span inside the a tag.
this is a link and tags, however, only time will tell if this is to become a reality.
Although not the most compliant (or fashionable) medium, the results speak for themselves – email is, and will continue to be one of the most successful and targeted marketing channels available to you. As a designer with HTML email design skills in your arsenal, you have the opportunity to not only broaden your service offering, but gain a unique appreciation of how vital standards are.
Next steps
Ready to get started? There are a number of HTML email design galleries to provide ideas and inspiration for your own designs.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/
http://htmlemailgallery.com/
http://inboxaward.com/
Enjoy!",2009,David Greiner,davidgreiner,2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/rock-solid-html-emails/,code
177,"HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa?","It would lead to unseasonal arguments to discuss the title of this piece here, and the arguments are as indigestible as the fourth turkey curry of the season, so we’ll restrict our article to the practical rather than the philosophical: what HTML5 can you reasonably expect to be able to use reliably cross-browser in the early months of 2010?
The answer is that you can use more than you might think, due to the seasonal tinsel of feature-detection and using the sparkly pixie-dust of IE-only VML (but used in a way that won’t damage your Elf).
Canvas
canvas is a 2D drawing API that defines a blank area of the screen of arbitrary size, and allows you to draw on it using JavaScript. The pictures can be animated, such as in this canvas mashup of Wolfenstein 3D and Flickr. (The difference between canvas and SVG is that SVG uses vector graphics, so is infinitely scalable. It also keeps a DOM, whereas canvas is just pixels so you have to do all your own book-keeping yourself in JavaScript if you want to know where aliens are on screen, or do collision detection.)
Previously, you needed to do this using Adobe Flash or Java applets, requiring plugins and potentially compromising keyboard accessibility. Canvas drawing is supported now in Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The reindeer in the corner is, of course, Internet Explorer, which currently has zero support for canvas (or SVG, come to that).
Now, don’t pull a face like all you’ve found in your Yuletide stocking is a mouldy satsuma and a couple of nuts—that’s not the end of the story. Canvas was originally an Apple proprietary technology, and Internet Explorer had a similar one called Vector Markup Language which was submitted to the W3C for standardisation in 1998 but which, unlike canvas, was not blessed with retrospective standardisation.
What you need, then, is some way for Internet Explorer to translate canvas to VML on-the-fly, while leaving the other, more standards-compliant browsers to use the HTML5. And such a way exists—it’s a JavaScript library called excanvas. It’s downloadable from http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/ and it’s simple to include it via a conditional comment in the head for IE:
Simply include this, and your canvas will be natively supported in the modern browsers (and the library won’t even be downloaded) whereas IE will suddenly render your canvas using its own VML engine. Be sure, however, to check it carefully, as the IE JavaScript engine isn’t so fast and you’ll need to be sure that performance isn’t too degraded to use.
Forms
Since the beginning of the Web, developers have been coding forms, and then writing JavaScript to check whether an input is a correctly formed email address, URL, credit card number or conforms to some other pattern. The cumulative labour of the world’s developers over the last 15 years makes whizzing round in a sleigh and delivering presents seem like popping to the corner shop in comparison.
With HTML5, that’s all about to change. As Yaili began to explore on Day 3, a host of new attributes to the input element provide built-in validation for email address formats (input type=email), URLs (input type=url), any pattern that can be expressed with a JavaScript-syntax regex (pattern=""[0-9][A-Z]{3}"") and the like. New attributes such as required, autofocus, input type=number min=3 max=50 remove much of the tedious JavaScript from form validation.
Other, really exciting input types are available (see all input types). The datalist is reminiscent of a select box, but allows the user to enter their own text if they don’t want to choose one of the pre-defined options. input type=range is rendered as a slider, while input type=date pops up a date picker, all natively in the browser with no JavaScript required at all.
Currently, support is most complete in an experimental implementation in Opera and a number of the new attributes in Webkit-based browsers. But don’t let that stop you! The clever thing about the specification of the new Web Forms is that all the new input types are attributes (rather than elements). input defaults to input type=text, so if a browser doesn’t understand a new HTML5 type, it gracefully degrades to a plain text input.
So where does that leave validation in those browsers that don’t support Web Forms? The answer is that you don’t retire your pre-existing JavaScript validation just yet, but you leave it as a fallback after doing some feature detection. To detect whether (say) input type=email is supported, you make a new input type=email with JavaScript but don’t add it to the page. Then, you interrogate your new element to find out what its type attribute is. If it’s reported back as “email”, then the browser supports the new feature, so let it do its work and don’t bring in any JavaScript validation. If it’s reported back as “text”, it’s fallen back to the default, indicating that it’s not supported, so your code should branch to your old validation routines. Alternatively, use the small (7K) Modernizr library which will do this work for you and give you JavaScript booleans like Modernizr.inputtypes[email] set to true or false.
So what does this buy you? Well, first and foremost, you’re future-proofing your code for that time when all browsers support these hugely useful additions to forms. Secondly, you buy a usability and accessibility win. Although it’s tempting to style the stuffing out of your form fields (which can, incidentally, lead to madness), whatever your branding people say, it’s better to leave forms as close to the browser defaults as possible. A browser’s slider and date pickers will be the same across different sites, making it much more comprehensible to users. And, by using native controls rather than faking sliders and date pickers with JavaScript, your forms are much more likely to be accessible to users of assistive technology.
HTML5 DOCTYPE
You can use the new DOCTYPE !doctype html now and – hey presto – you’re writing HTML5, as it’s pretty much a superset of HTML4. There are some useful advantages to doing this. The first is that the HTML5 validator (I use http://html5.validator.nu) also validates ARIA information, whereas the HTML4 validator doesn’t, as ARIA is a new spec developed after HTML4. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it doesn’t validate your ARIA attributes, but it doesn’t automatically report them as an error.)
Another advantage is that HTML5 allows tabindex as a global attribute (that is, on any element). Although originally designed as an accessibility bolt-on, I ordinarily advise you don’t use it; a well-structured page should provide a logical tab order through links and form fields already.
However, tabindex=""-1"" is a legal value in HTML5 as it allows for the element to be programmatically focussable by JavaScript. It’s also very useful for correcting a bug in Internet Explorer when used with a keyboard; in-page links go nowhere if the destination doesn’t have a proprietary property called hasLayout set or a tabindex of -1.
So, whether it is the tool of Satan or yule of Santa, HTML5 is just around the corner. Some you can use now, and by the end of 2010 I predict you’ll be able to use a whole lot more as new browser versions are released.",2009,Bruce Lawson,brucelawson,2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/html5-tool-of-satan-or-yule-of-santa/,code
182,Breaking Out The Edges of The Browser,"HTML5 contains more than just the new entities for a more meaningful document, it also contains an arsenal of JavaScript APIs. So many in fact, that some APIs have outgrown the HTML5 spec’s backyard and have been sent away to grow up all on their own and been given the prestigious honour of being specs in their own right.
So when I refer to (bendy finger quote) “HTML5”, I mean the HTML5 specification and a handful of other specifications that help us authors build web applications.
Examples of those specs I would include in the umbrella term would be: geolocation, web storage, web databases, web sockets and web workers, to name a few.
For all you guys and gals, on this special 2009 series of 24 ways, I’m just going to focus on data storage and offline applications: boldly taking your browser where no browser has gone before!
Web Storage
The Web Storage API is basically cookies on steroids, a unhealthy dosage of steroids. Cookies are always a pain to work with. First of all you have the problem of setting, changing and deleting them. Typically solved by Googling and blindly relying on PPK’s solution. If that wasn’t enough, there’s the 4Kb limit that some of you have hit when you really don’t want to.
The Web Storage API gets around all of the hoops you have to jump through with cookies. Storage supports around 5Mb of data per domain (the spec’s recommendation, but it’s open to the browsers to implement anything they like) and splits in to two types of storage objects:
sessionStorage – available to all pages on that domain while the window remains open
localStorage – available on the domain until manually removed
Support
Ignoring beta browsers for our support list, below is a list of the major browsers and their support for the Web Storage API:
Latest: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (desktop & mobile/iPhone)
Partial: Google Chrome (only supports localStorage)
Not supported: Opera (as of 10.10)
Usage
Both sessionStorage and localStorage support the same interface for accessing their contents, so for these examples I’ll use localStorage.
The storage interface includes the following methods:
setItem(key, value)
getItem(key)
key(index)
removeItem(key)
clear()
In the simple example below, we’ll use setItem and getItem to store and retrieve data:
localStorage.setItem('name', 'Remy');
alert( localStorage.getItem('name') );
Using alert boxes can be a pretty lame way of debugging. Conveniently Safari (and Chrome) include database tab in their debugging tools (cmd+alt+i), so you can get a visual handle on the state of your data:
Viewing localStorage
As far as I know only Safari has this view on stored data natively in the browser. There may be a Firefox plugin (but I’ve not found it yet!) and IE… well that’s just IE.
Even though we’ve used setItem and getItem, there’s also a few other ways you can set and access the data.
In the example below, we’re accessing the stored value directly using an expando and equally, you can also set values this way:
localStorage.name = ""Remy"";
alert( localStorage.name ); // shows ""Remy""
The Web Storage API also has a key method, which is zero based, and returns the key in which data has been stored. This should also be in the same order that you set the keys, for example:
alert( localStorage.getItem(localStorage.key(0)) );
// shows ""Remy""
I mention the key() method because it’s not an unlikely name for a stored value. This can cause serious problems though.
When selecting the names for your keys, you need to be sure you don’t take one of the method names that are already on the storage object, like key, clear, etc. As there are no warnings when you try to overwrite the methods, it means when you come to access the key() method, the call breaks as key is a string value and not a function.
You can try this yourself by creating a new stored value using localStorage.key = ""foo"" and you’ll see that the Safari debugger breaks because it relies on the key() method to enumerate each of the stored values.
Usage Notes
Currently all browsers only support storing strings. This also means if you store a numeric, it will get converted to a string:
localStorage.setItem('count', 31);
alert(typeof localStorage.getItem('count'));
// shows ""string""
This also means you can’t store more complicated objects natively with the storage objects. To get around this, you can use Douglas Crockford’s JSON parser (though Firefox 3.5 has JSON parsing support baked in to the browser – yay!) json2.js to convert the object to a stringified JSON object:
var person = {
name: 'Remy',
height: 'short',
location: 'Brighton, UK'
};
localStorage.setItem('person', JSON.stringify(person));
alert( JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('person')).name );
// shows ""Remy""
Alternatives
There are a few solutions out there that provide storage solutions that detect the Web Storage API, and if it’s not available, fall back to different technologies (for instance, using a flash object to store data). One comprehensive version of this is Dojo’s storage library. I’m personally more of a fan of libraries that plug missing functionality under the same namespace, just as Crockford’s JSON parser does (above).
For those interested it what that might look like, I’ve mocked together a simple implementation of sessionStorage. Note that it’s incomplete (because it’s missing the key method), and it could be refactored to not using the JSON stringify (but you would need to ensure that the values were properly and safely encoded):
// requires json2.js for all browsers other than Firefox 3.5
if (!window.sessionStorage && JSON) {
window.sessionStorage = (function () {
// window.top.name ensures top level, and supports around 2Mb
var data = window.top.name ? JSON.parse(window.top.name) : {};
return {
setItem: function (key, value) {
data[key] = value+""""; // force to string
window.top.name = JSON.stringify(data);
},
removeItem: function (key) {
delete data[key];
window.top.name = JSON.stringify(data);
},
getItem: function (key) {
return data[key] || null;
},
clear: function () {
data = {};
window.top.name = '';
}
};
})();
}
Now that we’ve cracked the cookie jar with our oversized Web Storage API, let’s have a look at how we take our applications offline entirely.
Offline Applications
Offline applications is (still) part of the HTML5 specification. It allows developers to build a web app and have it still function without an internet connection. The app is access via the same URL as it would be if the user were online, but the contents (or what the developer specifies) is served up to the browser from a local cache. From there it’s just an everyday stroll through open web technologies, i.e. you still have access to the Web Storage API and anything else you can do without a web connection.
For this section, I’ll refer you to a prototype demo I wrote recently of a contrived Rubik’s cube (contrived because it doesn’t work and it only works in Safari because I’m using 3D transforms).
Offline Rubik’s cube
Support
Support for offline applications is still fairly limited, but the possibilities of offline applications is pretty exciting, particularly as we’re seeing mobile support and support in applications such as Fluid (and I would expect other render engine wrapping apps).
Support currently, is as follows:
Latest: Safari (desktop & mobile/iPhone)
Sort of: Firefox‡
Not supported: Internet Explorer, Opera, Google Chrome
‡ Firefox 3.5 was released to include offline support, but in fact has bugs where it doesn’t work properly (certainly on the Mac), Minefield (Firefox beta) has resolved the bug.
Usage
The status of the application’s cache can be tested from the window.applicationCache object. However, we’ll first look at how to enable your app for offline access.
You need to create a manifest file, which will tell the browser what to cache, and then we point our web page to that cache:
For the manifest to be properly read by the browser, your server needs to serve the .manifest files as text/manifest by adding the following to your mime.types:
text/cache-manifest manifest
Next we need to populate our manifest file so the browser can read it:
CACHE MANIFEST
/demo/rubiks/index.html
/demo/rubiks/style.css
/demo/rubiks/jquery.min.js
/demo/rubiks/rubiks.js
# version 15
The first line of the manifest must read CACHE MANIFEST. Then subsequent lines tell the browser what to cache.
The HTML5 spec recommends that you include the calling web page (in my case index.html), but it’s not required. If I didn’t include index.html, the browser would cache it as part of the offline resources.
These resources are implicitly under the CACHE namespace (which you can specify any number of times if you want to).
In addition, there are two further namespaces: NETWORK and FALLBACK.
NETWORK is a whitelist namespace that tells the browser not to cache this resource and always try to request it through the network.
FALLBACK tells the browser that whilst in offline mode, if the resource isn’t available, it should return the fallback resource.
Finally, in my example I’ve included a comment with a version number. This is because once you include a manifest, the only way you can tell the browser to reload the resources is if the manifest contents changes. So I’ve included a version number in the manifest which I can change forcing the browser to reload all of the assets.
How it works
If you’re building an app that makes use of the offline cache, I would strongly recommend that you add the manifest last. The browser implementations are very new, so can sometimes get a bit tricky to debug since once the resources are cached, they really stick in the browser.
These are the steps that happen during a request for an app with a manifest:
Browser: sends request for your app.html
Server: serves all associated resources with app.html – as normal
Browser: notices that app.html has a manifest, it re-request the assets in the manifest
Server: serves the requested manifest assets (again)
Browser: window.applicationCache has a status of UPDATEREADY
Browser: reloads
Browser: only request manifest file (which doesn’t show on the net requests panel)
Server: responds with 304 Not Modified on the manifest file
Browser: serves all the cached resources locally
What might also add confusion to this process, is that the way the browsers work (currently) is if there is a cache already in place, it will use this first over updated resources. So if your manifest has changed, the browser will have already loaded the offline cache, so the user will only see the updated on the next reload.
This may seem a bit convoluted, but you can also trigger some of this manually through the applicationCache methods which can ease some of this pain.
If you bind to the online event you can manually try to update the offline cache. If the cache has then updated, swap the updated resources in to the cache and the next time the app loads it will be up to date. You could also prompt your user to reload the app (which is just a refresh) if there’s an update available.
For example (though this is just pseudo code):
addEvent(applicationCache, 'updateready', function () {
applicationCache.swapCache();
tellUserToRefresh();
});
addEvent(window, 'online', function () {
applicationCache.update();
});
Breaking out of the Browser
So that’s two different technologies that you can use to break out of the traditional browser/web page model and get your apps working in a more application-ny way.
There’s loads more in the HTML5 and non-HTML5 APIs to play with, so take your Christmas break to check them out!",2009,Remy Sharp,remysharp,2009-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/breaking-out-the-edges-of-the-browser/,code
185,Make Your Mockup in Markup,"We aren’t designing copies of web pages, we’re designing web pages.
Andy Clarke, via Quotes on Design
The old way
I used to think the best place to design a website was in an image editor. I’d create a pixel-perfect PSD filled with generic content, send it off to the client, go through several rounds of revisions, and eventually create the markup.
Does this process sound familiar? You’re not alone. In a very scientific and official survey I conducted, close to 90% of respondents said they design in Photoshop before the browser.
That process is whack, yo!
Recently, thanks in large part to the influence of design hero Dan Cederholm, I’ve come to the conclusion that a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser.
Die Photoshop, die
Some of you may be wondering, “what’s so bad about using Photoshop for the bulk of my design?” Well, any seasoned designer will tell you that working in Photoshop is akin to working in a minefield: you never know when it’s going to blow up in your face.
The application Adobe Photoshop CS4 has unexpectedly ruined your day.
Photoshop’s propensity to crash at crucial moments is a running joke in the industry, as is its barely usable interface. And don’t even get me started on the hot, steaming pile of crap that is text rendering.
Text rendered in Photoshop (left) versus Safari (right).
Crashing and text rendering issues suck, but we’ve learned to live with them. The real issue with using Photoshop for mockups is the expectations you’re setting for a client. When you send the client a static image of the design, you’re not giving them the whole picture — they can’t see how a fluid grid would function, how the design will look in a variety of browsers, basic interactions like :hover effects, or JavaScript behaviors. For more on the disadvantages to showing clients designs as images rather than websites, check out Andy Clarke’s Time to stop showing clients static design visuals.
A necessary evil?
In the past we’ve put up with Photoshop because it was vital to achieving our beloved rounded corners, drop shadows, outer glows, and gradients. However, with the recent adaptation of CSS3 in major browsers, and the slow, joyous death of IE6, browsers can render mockups that are just as beautiful as those created in an image editor. With the power of RGBA, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-radius, transparent PNGs, and @font-face combined, you can create a prototype that radiates shiny awesomeness right in the browser. If you can see this epic article through to the end, I’ll show you step by step how to create a gorgeous mockup using mostly markup.
Get started by getting naked
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
Jeffrey Zeldman
In the beginning, don’t even think about style. Instead, start with the foundation: the content. Lay the groundwork for your markup order, and ensure that your design will be useable with styles and images turned off. This is great for prioritizing the content, and puts you on the right path for accessibility and search engine optimization. Not a bad place to start, amirite?
An example of unstyled content, in all its naked glory. View it large.
Flush out the layout
The next step is to structure the content in a usable way. With CSS, making basic layout changes is as easy as switching up a float, so experiment to see what structure suits the content best.
The mockup with basic layout work done.
Got your grids covered
There are a variety of tools that allow you to layer a grid over your browser window. For Mac users I recommend using Slammer, and PC users can check out one of the bookmarklets that are available, such as 960 Gridder.
The mockup with a grid applied using Slammer.
Once you’ve found a layout that works well for the content, pass it along to the client for review. This keeps them involved in the design process, and gives them an idea of how the site will be structured when it’s live.
Start your styling
Now for the fun part: begin applying the presentation layer. Let usability considerations drive your decisions about color and typography; use highlighted colors and contrasting typefaces on elements you wish to emphasize.
RGBA? More like RGByay!
Introducing color is easy with RGBA. I like to start with the page’s main color, then use white at varying opacities to empasize content sections.
In the example mockup the body background is set to rgba(203,111,21), the content containers are set to rgba(255,255,255,0.7), and a few elements are highlighted with rgba(255,255,255,0.1) If you’re not sure how RGBA works, check out Drew McLellan’s super helpful 24ways article.
Laying down type
Just like with color, you can use typography to evoke a feeling and direct a user’s attention. Have contrasting typefaces (like serif headlines and sans-serif body text) to group the content into meaningful sections.
In a recent A List Apart article, the Master of Web Typography™ Jason Santa Maria offers excellent advice on how to choose your typefaces:
Write down a general description of the qualities of the message you are trying to convey, and then look for typefaces that embody those qualities.
Sounds pretty straightforward. I wanted to give my design a classic feel with a hint of nostalgia, so I used Georgia for the headlines, and incorporated the ornate ampersand from Baskerville into the header.
A closeup on the site’s header.
Let’s get sexy
The design doesn’t look too bad as it is, but it’s still pretty flat. We can do better, and after mixing in some CSS3 and a couple of PNGs, it’s going to get downright steamy in here.
Give it some glow
Objects in the natural world reflect light, so to make your design feel tangible and organic, give it some glow. In the example design I achieved this by creating two white to transparent gradients of varying opacities. Both have a solid white border across their top, which gives edges a double border effect and makes them look sharper. Using CSS3’s text-shadow on headlines and box-shadow on content modules is another quick way to add depth.
A wide and closeup view of the design with gradients, text-shadow and box-shadow added. For information on how to implement text-shadow and box-shadow using RGBA, check out the article I wrote on it last week.
37 pieces of flair
Okay, maybe you don’t need that much flair, but it couldn’t hurt to add a little; it’s the details that will set your design apart. Work in imagery and texture, using PNGs with an alpha channel so you can layer images and still tweak the color later on.
The design with grungy textures, a noisy diagonal stripe pattern, and some old transportation images layered behind the text. Because the colors are rendered using RGBA, these images bleed through the content, giving the design a layered feel. Best viewed large.
Send it off
Hey, look at that. You’ve got a detailed, well structured mockup for the client to review. Best of all, your markup is complete too. If the client approves the design at this stage, your template is practically finished. Bust out the party hats!
Not so fast, Buster!
So I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a design past the client’s keen eye for criticism on the first go. Let’s review some hypothetical feedback (none of which is too outlandish, in my experience), and see how we’d make the requested changes in the browser.
Updating the typography
My ex-girlfriend loved Georgia, so I never want to see it again. Can we get rid of it? I want to use a font that’s chunky and loud, just like my stupid ex-girlfriend.
Fakey McClient
Yikes! Thankfully with CSS, removing Georgia is as easy as running a find and replace on the stylesheet. In my revised mockup, I used @font-face and League Gothic on the headlines to give the typography the, um, unique feel the client is looking for.
The same mockup, using @font-face on the headlines. If you’re unfamiliar with implementing @font-face, check out Nice Web Type‘s helpful article.
Adding rounded corners
I’m not sure if I’ll like it, but I want to see what it’d look like with rounded corners. My cousin, a Web 2.0 marketing guru, says they’re trendy right now.
Fakey McClient
Switching to rounded corners is a nightmare if you’re doing your mockup in Photoshop, since it means recreating most of the shapes and UI elements in the design. Thankfully, with CSS border-radius comes to our rescue! By applying this gem of a style to a handful of classes, you’ll be rounded out in no time.
The mockup with rounded corners, created using border-radius. If you’re not sure how to implement border-radius, check out CSS3.info‘s quick how-to.
Making changes to the color
The design is too dark, it’s depressing! They call it ‘the blues’ for a reason, dummy. Can you try using a brighter color? I want orange, like Zeldman uses.
Fakey McClient
Making color changes is another groan-inducing task when working in Photoshop. Finding and updating every background layer, every drop shadow, and every link can take forever in a complex PSD. However, if you’ve done your mockup in markup with RGBA and semi-transparent PNGs, making changes to your color is as easy as updating the body background and a few font colors.
The mockup with an orange color scheme. Best viewed large.
Ahem, what about Internet Explorer?
Gee, thanks for reminding me, buzzkill. Several of the CSS features I’ve suggested you use, such as RGBA, text-shadow and box-shadow, and border-radius, are not supported in Internet Explorer. I know, it makes me sad too. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t try these techniques out in your markup based mockups. The point here is to get your mockups done as efficiently as possible, and to keep the emphasis on markup from the very beginning.
Once the design is approved, you and the client have to decide if you can live with the design looking different in different browsers. Is it so bad if some users get to see drop shadows and some don’t? Or if the rounded corners are missing for a portion of your audience? The design won’t be broken for IE people, they’re just missing out on a few visual treats that other users will see.
The idea of rewarding users who choose modern browsers is not a new concept; Dan covers it thoroughly in Handcrafted CSS, and it’s been written about in the past by Aaron Gustafson and Andy Clarke on several occasions. I believe we shouldn’t have to design for the lowest common denominator (cough, IE6 users, cough); instead we should create designs that are beautiful in modern browsers, but still degrade nicely for the other guy. However, some clients just aren’t that progressive, and in that case you can always use background images for drop shadows and rounded corners, as you have in the past.
Closing thoughts
With the advent of CSS3, browsers are just as capable of giving us beautiful, detailed mockups as Photoshop, and in half the time. I’m not the only one to make an argument for this revised process; in his article Time to stop showing clients static design visuals, and in his presentation Walls Come Tumbling Down, Andy Clarke makes a fantastic case for creating your mockups in markup.
So I guess my challenge to you for 2010 is to get out of Photoshop and into the code. Even if the arguments for designing in the browser aren’t enough to make you change your process permanently, it’s worthwhile to give it a try. Look at the New Year as a time to experiment; applying constraints and evaluating old processes can do wonders for improving your efficiency and creativity.",2009,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2009-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup/,process
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 in Flickr photos, blog posts, Videos from YouTube and latest bookmarks from Delicious.
Check out the demo and get the source code on GitHub.
query->results->results;
/* YouTube output */
$youtube = '';
foreach($results[0]->item as $r){
$cleanHTML = undoYouTubeMarkupCrimes($r->description);
$youtube .= ''.$cleanHTML.' ';
}
$youtube .= ' ';
/* Flickr output */
$flickr = '';
/* Delicious output */
$delicious = '';
/* Blog output */
$blog = '';
function undoYouTubeMarkupCrimes($str){
$cleaner = preg_replace('/555px/','100%',$str);
$cleaner = preg_replace('/width=""[^""]+""/','',$cleaner);
$cleaner = preg_replace('//',' ',$cleaner);
return $cleaner;
}
?>
What we are doing here is create a few different YQL statements and queue them together with the query.multi table. Each of these can be run inside YQL itself. Check out the YouTube, Flickr, Delicious and Blog example in the console if you don’t believe me. The benefit of using this table is that we don’t make individual requests for each query but we get all the data in one single request – which means a much better performing solution as the YQL server farm is faster on the web than our servers.
We point the query to the YQL web service end point and get the resulting data using cURL. All that we need to do then is to convert the returned data to HTML lists that can be printed out inside an HTML template.
Mixing, matching and using HTML as a data source
This was a simple example of what YQL can do for you. Where it gets really powerful however is by mixing and matching different APIs. YQL is also a good tool to get information from HTML documents. By using the html table you can load the content of an HTML document (which gets fixed automatically by HTMLTidy) and use XPATH to filter down results to what you need. Take the following example which takes headlines from the news.bbc.co.uk homepage and runs the results through Yahoo’s Term Extractor API to give you a list of currently hot topics.
select * from search.termextract where context in (
select content from html where url=""http://news.bbc.co.uk"" and xpath=""//table[@width=800]//a""
)
Try it out in the console or see the results here. In English, this means:
Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk and get me the HTML
Run it through HTML Tidy to clean it up.
Get me only the links inside the table with an attribute of width and the value 800
Get only the content of the link and for each of the links
Take the content and send it as context to the Yahoo Term Extractor API
If we choose JSON-P as the output format we can use the outcome directly in JavaScript (see this demo or see its source):
Using JSON, we can also use PHP which means the demo works for everybody – not only those with JavaScript enabled (see this demo or see its source):
query->results->Result);
echo join(' ',$topics);
?>
Striping every other row - using classes
Name
Cards sent
Cards received
Cards written but not sent
Ann
40
28
4
Joe
2
27
29
Paul
5
35
2
Louise
65
65
0
View Example 1
This situation is something I deal with on almost every project, and apart from being an extra thing to do, it just isn’t ideal having the server-side code squirt classes into the markup for purely presentational reasons. This is where the nth-child pseudo-class selector comes in. The server-side code creates a valid HTML table for the data, and the CSS then selects the odd rows with the following selector:
tr:nth-child(odd) td {
background-color: #86B486;
}
View Example 2
The odd and even keywords are very handy in this situation – however you can also use a multiplier here. 2n would be equivalent to the keyword ‘odd’ 3n would select every third row and so on.
Browser support
Sadly, nth-child has pretty poor browser support. It is not supported in Internet Explorer 8 and has somewhat buggy support in some other browsers. Firefox 3.5 does have support. In some situations however, you might want to consider using JavaScript to add this support to browsers that don’t have it. This can be very useful if you are dealing with a Content Management System where you have no ability to change the server-side code to add classes into the markup.
I’m going to use jQuery in these examples as it is very simple to use the same CSS selector used in the CSS to target elements with jQuery – however you could use any library or write your own function to do the same job. In the CSS I have added the original class selector to the nth-child selector:
tr:nth-child(odd) td, tr.odd td {
background-color: #86B486;
}
Then I am adding some jQuery to add a class to the markup once the document has loaded – using the very same nth-child selector that works for browsers that support it.
View Example 3
We could just add a background colour to the element using jQuery, however I prefer not to mix that information into the JavaScript as if we change the colour on our table rows I would need to remember to change it both in the CSS and in the JavaScript.
Doing something different with the last element
So here’s another thing that we often deal with. You have a list of items all floated left with a right hand margin on each element constrained within a fixed width layout. If each element has the right margin applied the margin on the final element will cause the set to become too wide forcing that last item down to the next row as shown in the below example where I have used a grey border to indicate the fixed width.
Currently we have two ways to deal with this. We can put a negative right margin on the list, the same width as the space between the elements. This means that the extra margin on the final element fills that space and the item doesn’t drop down.
The last item is different
View Example 4
The other solution will be to put a class on the final element and in the CSS remove the margin for this class.
ul.gallery li.last {
margin-right: 0;
}
This second solution may not be easy if the content is generated from server-side code that you don’t have access to change.
It could all be so different. In CSS3 we have marvellously common-sense selectors such as last-child, meaning that we can simply add rules for the last list item.
ul.gallery li:last-child {
margin-right: 0;
}
View Example 5
This removed the margin on the li which is the last-child of the ul with a class of gallery. No messing about sticking classes on the last item, or pushing the width of the item out wit a negative margin.
If this list of items repeated ad infinitum then you could also use nth-child for this task. Creating a rule that makes every 3rd element margin-less.
ul.gallery li:nth-child(3n) {
margin-right: 0;
}
View Example 6
A similar example is where the designer has added borders to the bottom of each element – but the last item does not have a border or is in some other way different. Again, only a class added to the last element will save you here if you cannot rely on using the last-child selector.
Browser support for last-child
The situation for last-child is similar to that of nth-child, in that there is no support in Internet Explorer 8. However, once again it is very simple to replicate the functionality using jQuery. Adding our .last class to the last list item.
$(""ul.gallery li:last-child"").addClass(""last"");
We could also use the nth-child selector to add the .last class to every third list item.
$(""ul.gallery li:nth-child(3n)"").addClass(""last"");
View Example 7
Fun with forms
Styling forms can be a bit of a trial, made difficult by the fact that any CSS applied to the input element will effect text fields, submit buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons. As developers we are left adding classes to our form fields to differentiate them. In most builds all of my text fields have a simple class of text whereas I wouldn’t dream of adding a class of para to every paragraph element in a document.
Syling form fields
Send your Christmas list to Santa
View Example 8
Attribute selectors provide a way of targeting elements by looking at the attributes of those elements. Unlike the other examples in this article which are CSS3 selectors, the attribute selector is actually a CSS2.1 selector – it just doesn’t get much use because of lack of support in Internet Explorer 6. Using attribute selectors we can write rules for text inputs and form buttons without needing to add any classes to the markup. For example after removing the text and button classes from my text and submit button input elements I can use the following rules to target them:
form input[type=""text""] {
border: 1px solid #333;
padding: 0.2em;
width: 400px;
}
form input[type=""submit""]{
border: 1px solid #333;
background-color: #eee;
color: #000;
padding: 0.1em;
}
View Example 9
Another problem that I encounter with forms is where I am using CSS to position my labels and form elements by floating the labels. This works fine as long as I want all of my labels to be floated, however sometimes we get a set of radio buttons or a checkbox, and I don’t want the label field to be floated. As you can see in the below example the label for the checkbox is squashed up into the space used for the other labels, yet it makes more sense for the checkbox to display after the text.
I could use a class on this label element however CSS3 lets me to target the label attribute directly by looking at the value of the for attribute.
label[for=""fOptIn""] {
float: none;
width: auto;
}
Being able to precisely target attributes in this way is incredibly useful, and once IE6 is no longer an issue this will really help to clean up our markup and save us from having to create all kinds of special cases when generating this markup on the server-side.
Browser support
The news for attribute selectors is actually pretty good with Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 2+ and all other modern browsers all having support. As I have already mentioned this is a CSS2.1 selector and so we really should expect to be able to use it as we head into 2010! Internet Explorer 7 has slightly buggy support and will fail on the label example shown above however I discovered a workaround in the Sitepoint CSS reference comments. Adding the selector label[htmlFor=""fOptIn""] to the correct selector will create a match for IE7.
IE6 does not support these selector but, once again, you can use jQuery to plug the holes in IE6 support. The following jQuery will add the text and button classes to your fields and also add a checks class to the label for the checkbox, which you can use to remove the float and width for this element.
$('form input[type=""submit""]').addClass(""button"");
$('form input[type=""text""]').addClass(""text"");
$('label[for=""fOptIn""]').addClass(""checks"");
View Example 10
The selectors I’ve used in this article are easy to overlook as we do have ways to achieve these things currently. As developers – especially when we have frameworks and existing code that cope with these situations – it is easy to carry on as we always have done.
I think that the time has come to start to clean up our front and backend code and replace our reliance on classes with these more advanced selectors. With the help of a little JavaScript almost all users will still get the full effect and, where we are dealing with purely visual effects, there is definitely a case to be made for not worrying about the very small percentage of people with old browsers and no JavaScript. They will still receive a readable website, it may just be missing some of the finesse offered to the modern browsing experience.",2009,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2009-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/cleaner-code-with-css3-selectors/,code
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:
The Google equivalent is:
In any case make sure to use the ID term for the search term and site for the site, as this is what we are going to use for the script. To make things easier, also have an ID called customsearch on the form.
To use BOSS, you should get your own developer API for BOSS and replace the one in the demo code. There is click tracking on the search results to see how successful your app is, so you should make it your own.
Adding the BOSS magic
BOSS is a REST API, meaning you can use it in any HTTP request or in a browser by simply adding the right parameters to a URL. Say for example you want to search “bbc.co.uk” for “christmas” all you need to do is open the following URL:
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/christmas?sites=bbc.co.uk&format=xml&appid=YOUR-APPLICATION-ID
Try it out and click it to see the results in XML. We don’t want XML though, which is why we get rid of the format=xml parameter which gives us the same information in JSON:
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/christmas?sites=bbc.co.uk&appid=YOUR-APPLICATION-ID
JSON makes most sense when you can send the output to a function and immediately use it. For this to happen all you need is to add a callback parameter and the JSON will be wrapped in a function call. Say for example we want to call SITESEARCH.found() when the data was retrieved we can do it this way:
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/christmas?sites=bbc.co.uk&callback=SITESEARCH.found&appid=YOUR-APPLICATION-ID
You can use this immediately in a script node if you want to. The following code would display the total amount of search results for the term christmas on bbc.co.uk as an alert:
However, for our example, we need to be a bit more clever with this.
Enhancing the search form
Here’s the script that enhances a search form to show results below it.
SITESEARCH = function(){
var config = {
IDs:{
searchForm:'customsearch',
term:'term',
site:'site'
},
loading:'Loading results...',
noresults:'No results found.',
appID:'YOUR-APP-ID',
results:20
};
var form;
var out;
function init(){
if(config.appID === 'YOUR-APP-ID'){
alert('Please get a real application ID!');
} else {
form = document.getElementById(config.IDs.searchForm);
if(form){
form.onsubmit = function(){
var site = document.getElementById(config.IDs.site).value;
var term = document.getElementById(config.IDs.term).value;
if(typeof site === 'string' && typeof term === 'string'){
if(typeof out !== 'undefined'){
out.parentNode.removeChild(out);
}
out = document.createElement('p');
out.appendChild(document.createTextNode(config.loading));
form.appendChild(out);
var APIurl = 'http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/' +
term + '?callback=SITESEARCH.found&sites=' +
site + '&count=' + config.results +
'&appid=' + config.appID;
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('src',APIurl);
s.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
return false;
}
};
}
}
};
function found(o){
var list = document.createElement('ul');
var results = o.ysearchresponse.resultset_web;
if(results){
var item,link,description;
for(var i=0,j=results.length;i
Search this site:
Where to go from here
This is just a very simple example of what you can do with BOSS. You can define languages and regions, retrieve and display images and news and mix the results with other data sources before displaying them. One very cool feature is that by adding a view=keyterms parameter to the URL you can get the keywords of each of the results to drill deeper into the search. An example for this written in PHP is available on the YDN blog. For JavaScript solutions there is a handy wrapper called yboss available to help you go nuts.",2008,Christian Heilmann,chrisheilmann,2008-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/sitewide-search-on-a-shoestring/,code
106,Checking Out: Progress Meters,"It’s the holiday season, so you know what that means: online shopping! When I started developing Web sites back in the 90s, many of my first clients were small local shops wanting to sell their goods online, so I developed many a checkout system. And because of slow dial-up speeds back then, informing the user about where they were in the checkout process was pretty important.
Even though we’re (mostly) beyond the dial-up days, informing users about where they are in a flow is still important. In usability tests at the companies I’ve worked at, I’ve seen time and time again how not adequately informing the user about their state can cause real frustration. This is especially true for two sets of users: mobile users and users of assistive devices, in particular, screen readers.
The progress meter is a very common design solution used to indicate to the user’s state within a flow. On the design side, much effort may go in to crafting a solution that is as visually informative as possible. On the development side, however, solutions range widely. I’ve checked out the checkouts at a number of sites and here’s what I’ve found when it comes to progress meters: they’re sometimes inaccessible and often confusing or unhelpful — all because of the way in which they’re coded. For those who use assistive devices or text-only browsers, there must be a better way to code the progress meter — and there is.
(Note: All code samples are from live sites but have been tweaked to hide the culprits’ identities.)
How not to make progress
A number of sites assemble their progress meters using non- or semi-semantic markup and images with no alternate text. On text-only browsers (like my mobile phone) and to screen readers, this looks and reads like chunks of content with no context given.
Shipping information
Payment information
Place your order
In the above example, the third state, “Place your order”, is the current state. But a screen reader may not know that, and my cell phone only displays ""Shipping informationPayment informationPlace your order"". Not good.
Is this progress?
Other sites present the entire progress meter as a graphic, like the following:
Now, I have no problem with using a graphic to render a very stylish progress meter (my sample above is probably not the most stylish example, of course, but you understand my point). What becomes important in this case is the use of appropriate alternate text to describe the image. Disappointingly, sites today have a wide range of solutions, including using no alternate text. Check out these code samples which call progress meter images.
shipping information
payment information
place your order
Without CSS enabled, the above is rendered as follows:
Progress at last
We all know that semantic markup makes for the best foundation, so we’ll start with the markup found above. In order to make the state information accessible, let’s add some additional text in paragraph and span elements.
There are three steps in this checkout process.
Enter your shipping informationEnter your payment informationReview details and place your order
Add on some simple CSS to hide the paragraph and spans, and arrange the list items on a single line with a background image to represent the large number, and this is what you’ll get:
There are three steps in this checkout process.
Enter your shipping information
Enter your payment information
Review details and place your order
To display and describe a state as active, add the class “current” to one of the list items. Then change the hidden content such that it better describes the state to the user.
There are three steps in this checkout process.
You are currently entering your shipping informationIn the next step, you will enter your payment informationIn the last step, you will review the details and place your order
The end result is an attractive progress meter that gives much greater semantic and contextual information.
There are three steps in this checkout process.
You are currently entering your shipping information
In the next step, you will enter your payment information
In the last step, you will review the details and place your order
For example, the above example renders in a text-only browser as follows:
There are three steps in this checkout process.
You are currently entering your shipping information
In the next step, you will enter your payment information
In the last step, you will review the details and place your order
And the screen reader I use for testing announces the following:
There are three steps in this checkout process. List of three items. You are currently entering your shipping information. In the next step, you will enter your payment information. In the last step, you will review the details and place your order. List end.
Here’s a sample code page that summarises this approach.
Happy frustration-free online shopping with this improved progress meter!",2008,Kimberly Blessing,kimberlyblessing,2008-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/checking-out-progress-meters/,ux
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 more than a name — for your project. Make sure it consists only of lowercase letters and numbers. For this article I’ll use 24ways2008, but you can choose anything you like.
On your computer, create a folder named after your application id. This folder can be anywhere you want: your desktop, your documents folder, or wherever you usually keep your web files. Within your new folder, create a folder called assets, and within that folder create three folders called images, css, and javascript. These three folders are the ones you’ll fill with files and serve from your content delivery network. You can have other folders too, if you like.
That will leave you with a folder structure like this:
24ways2008/
assets/
css/
images/
javascript/
Now you need to put a few files in these folders, so we can later see our CDN in action. You can put anything you want in these folders, but for this example we’ll include an HTML file, a style sheet, an image, and a Javascript library.
In the top-level folder (the one I’ve called 24ways2008), create a file called index.html. Fill this with any content you want. In the assets/css folder, create a file named core.css and throw in a couple of CSS rules for good measure. In the assets/images directory save any image that takes your fancy — I’ve used the silver badge from the App Engine download page. Finally, to fill the JavaScript folder, add in this jQuery library file. If you’ve got the time and the inclination, you can build a page that uses all these elements.
So now we should have a set of files and folders that look something like this:
24ways2008/
assets/
index.html
css/
core.css
images/
appengine-silver-120x30.gif
javascript/
jquery-1.2.6.min.js
Which leaves us with one last file to create. This is the important one: it tells App Engine what to do with your files. It’s named app.yaml, it sits at the top-level (inside the folder I’ve named 24ways2008), and it needs to include these lines:
application: 24ways2008
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1
handlers:
- url: /
static_files: assets/index.html
upload: assets/index.html
- url: /
static_dir: assets
You need to make sure you change 24ways2008 on the first line to whatever you chose as your application id, but otherwise the content of your app.yaml file should be identical. And with that, you’ve created your first App Engine project. If you want it, you can download a zip file containing my project.
Testing your project
As it stands, your project is ready to be uploaded to App Engine. But we couldn’t call ourselves professionals if we didn’t test it, could we? So, let’s put that downloaded SDK to good use and run the project from your own computer.
One of the files you’ll find App Engine installed is named dev_appserver.py, a Python script used to simulate App Engine on your computer. You’ll find lots of information on how to do this in the documentation on the development web server, but it boils down to running the script like so (the space and the dot at the end are important):
dev_appserver.py .
You’ll need to run this from the command-line: Mac users can run the Terminal application, Linux users can run their favourite shell, and Windows users will need to run it via the Command Prompt (open the Start menu, choose ‘Run…’, type ‘cmd‘, and click ‘OK’). Before you run the script you’ll need to make sure you’re in the project folder — in my case, as I saved it to my desktop I can go there by typing
cd ~/Desktop/24ways2008
in my Mac’s Terminal app; if you’re using Windows you can type
cd ""C:\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop\24ways2008""
If that’s successful, you’ll see a few lines of output, the last looking something like this:
INFO 2008-11-22 14:35:00,830 dev_appserver_main.py] Running application 24ways2008 on port 8080: http://localhost:8080
Now you can power up your favourite browser, point it to http://localhost:8080/, and you’ll see the page you saved as index.html. You’ll also find your CSS file at http://localhost:8080/css/core.css. In fact, anything you put inside the assets folder in the project will be accessible from this domain. You’re running our own App Engine web server!
Note that no-one else will be able to see your files: localhost is a special domain that you can only see from your computer — and once you stop the development server (by pressing Control–C) you’ll not be able to see the files in your browser until you start it again.
You might notice a new file has turned up in your project: index.yaml. App Engine creates this file when you run the development server, and it’s for internal App Engine use only. If you delete it there are no ill effects, but it will reappear when you next run the development server. If you’re using version control (e.g. Subversion) there’s no need to keep a copy in your repository.
So you’ve tested your project and you’ve seen it working on your own machine; now all you need to do is upload your project and the world will be able to see your files too.
Uploading your project
If you don’t have a Google account, create one and then sign in to App Engine. Tell Google about your new project by clicking on the ‘Create an Application’ button. Enter your application id, give the application a name, and agree to the terms and conditions. That’s it. All we need do now is upload the files.
Open your Mac OS X Terminal, Windows Command Prompt, or Linux shell window again, move to the project folder, and type (again, the space and the dot at the end are important):
appcfg.py update .
Enter your email address and password when prompted, and let App Engine do it’s thing. It’ll take no more than a few seconds, but in that time App Engine will have done the equivalent of logging in to an FTP server and copying files across. It’s fairly understated, but you now have your own project up and running. You can see mine at http://24ways2008.appspot.com/, and everyone can see yours at http://your-application-id.appspot.com/. Your files are being served up over Google’s content delivery network, at no cost to you!
Benefits of using Google App Engine
The benefits of App Engine as a CDN are obvious: your own server doesn’t suck up the bandwidth, while your visitors will appreciate a faster site. But there are also less obvious benefits.
First, once you’ve set up your site, updating it is an absolute breeze. Each time you update a file (or a batch of files) you need only run appcfg.py to see the changes appear on your site. To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, a good web site must be able to be updated in a single step. Many designers and developers can’t make that claim, but with App Engine, you can.
App Engine also allows multiple people to work on one application. If you want a friend to be able to upload files to your site you can let him do so without giving him usernames and passwords — all he needs is his own Google account. App Engine also gives you a log of all actions taken by collaborators, so you can see who’s made updates, and when.
Another bonus is the simple version control App Engine offers. Do you remember the file named app.yaml you created a while back? The second line looked like this:
version: 1
If you change the version number to 2 (or 3, or 4, etc), App Engine will keep a copy of the last version you uploaded. If anything goes wrong with your latest version, you can tell App Engine to revert back to that last saved version. It’s no proper version control system, but it could get you out of a sticky situation.
One last thing to note: if you’re not happy using your-application-id.appspot.com as your domain, App Engine will quite happily use any domain you own.
The weak points of Google App Engine
In the right circumstances, App Engine can be a real boon. I run my own site using the method I’ve discussed above, and I’m very happy with it. But App Engine does have its disadvantages, most notably those discussed by Aral Balkan in his post ‘Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it‘.
Aral found the biggest problems while using App Engine as a web application platform; I wouldn’t recommend using it as such either (at least for now) but for our purposes as a CDN for static files, it’s much more worthy. Still, App Engine has two shortcomings you should be aware of.
The first is that you can’t host a file larger than one megabyte. If you want to use App Engine to host that 4.3MB download for your latest-and-greatest desktop software, you’re out of luck. The only solution is to stick to smaller files.
The second problem is the quota system. Google’s own documentation says you’re allowed 650,000 requests a day and 10,000 megabytes of bandwidth in and out (20,000 megabytes in total), which should be plenty for most sites. But people have seen sites shut down temporarily for breaching quotas — in some cases after inexplicable jumps in Google’s server CPU usage. Aral, who’s seen it happen to his own sites, seemed genuinely frustrated by this, and if you measure your hits in the hundreds of thousands and don’t want to worry about uptime, App Engine isn’t for you.
That said, for most of us, App Engine offers a fantastic resource: the ability to host files on Google’s own content delivery network, at no charge.
Conclusion
If you’ve come this far, you’ve seen how to create a Google App Engine project and host your own files on Google’s CDN. You’ve seen the great advantages App Engine offers — an excellent content delivery network, the ability to update your site with a single command, multiple authors, simple version control, and the use of your own domain — and you’ve come across some of its weaknesses — most importantly the limit on file sizes and the quota system. All that’s left to do is upload those applications — but not before you’ve finished your Christmas shopping.",2008,Matt Riggott,mattriggott,2008-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn/,process
109,Geotag Everywhere with Fire Eagle,"A note from the editors: Since this article was written Yahoo! has retired the Fire Eagle service.
Location, they say, is everywhere. Everyone has one, all of the time. But on the web, it’s taken until this year to see the emergence of location in the applications we use and build.
The possibilities are broad. Increasingly, mobile phones provide SDKs to approximate your location wherever you are, browser extensions such as Loki and Mozilla’s Geode provide browser-level APIs to establish your location from the proximity of wireless networks to your laptop. Yahoo’s Brickhouse group launched Fire Eagle, an ambitious location broker enabling people to take their location from any of these devices or sources, and provide it to a plethora of web services. It enables you to take the location information that only your iPhone knows about and use it anywhere on the web.
That said, this is still a time of location as an emerging technology. Fire Eagle stores your location on the web (protected by application-specific access controls), but to try and give an idea of how useful and powerful your location can be — regardless of the services you use now — today’s 24ways is going to build a bookmarklet to call up your location on demand, in any web application.
Location Support on the Web
Over the past year, the number of applications implementing location features has increased dramatically. Plazes and Brightkite are both full featured social networks based around where you are, whilst Pownce rolled in Fire Eagle support to allow geotagging of all the content you post to their microblogging service. Dipity’s beautiful timeline shows for you moving from place to place and Six Apart’s activity stream for Movable Type started exposing your movements.
The number of services that hook into Fire Eagle will increase as location awareness spreads through the developer community, but you can use your location on other sites indirectly too.
Consider Flickr. Now world renowned for their incredible mapping and places features, geotagging on Flickr started out as a grassroots extension of regular tagging. That same technique can be used to start rolling geotagging in any publishing platform you come across, for any kind of content. Machine-tags (geo:lat= and geo:lon=) and the adr and geo microformats can be used to enhance anything you write with location information.
A crash course in avian inflammability
Fire Eagle is a location store. A broker between services and devices which provide location and those which consume it. It’s a switchboard that controls which pieces of your location different applications can see and use, and keeps hidden anything you want kept private. A blog widget that displays your current location in public can be restricted to display just your current city, whilst a service that provides you with a list of the nearest ATMs will operate better with a precise street address.
Even if your iPhone tells Fire Eagle exactly where you are, consuming applications only see what you want them to see. That’s important for users to realise that they’re in control, but also important for application developers to remember that you cannot rely on having super-accurate information available all the time. You need to build location aware applications which degrade gracefully, because users will provide fuzzier information — either through choice, or through less accurate sources.
Application specific permissions are controlled through an OAuth API. Each application has a unique key, used to request a second, user-specific key that permits access to that user’s information. You store that user key and it remains valid until such a time as the user revokes your application’s access. Unlike with passwords, these keys are unique per application, so revoking the access rights of one application doesn’t break all the others.
Building your first Fire Eagle app; Geomarklet
Fire Eagle’s developer documentation can take you through examples of writing simple applications using server side technologies (PHP, Python). Here, we’re going to write a client-side bookmarklet to make your location available in every site you use. It’s designed to fast-track the experience of having location available everywhere on web, and show you how that can be really handy. Hopefully, this will set you thinking about how location can enhance the new applications you build in 2009.
An oddity of bookmarklets
Bookmarklets (or ‘favlets’, for those of an MSIE persuasion) are a strange environment to program in. Critically, you have no persistent storage available. As such, using token-auth APIs in a static environment requires you to build you application in a slightly strange way; authing yourself in advance and then hardcoding the keys into your script.
Get started
Before you do anything else, go to http://fireeagle.com and log in, get set up if you need to and by all means take a look around. Take a look at the mobile updaters section of the application gallery and perhaps pick out an app that will update Fire Eagle from your phone or laptop.
Once that’s done, you need to register for an application key in the developer section. Head straight to /developer/create and complete the form. Since you’re building a standalone application, choose ‘Auth for desktop applications’ (rather than web applications), and select that you’ll be ‘accessing location’, not updating.
At the end of this process, you’ll have two application keys, a ‘Consumer Key’ and a ‘Consumer Secret’, which look like these:
Consumer Key
luKrM9U1pMnu
Consumer Secret
ZZl9YXXoJX5KLiKyVrMZffNEaBnxnd6M
These keys combined allow your application to make requests to Fire Eagle.
Next up, you need to auth yourself; granting your new application permission to use your location. Because bookmarklets don’t have local storage, you can’t integrate the auth process into the bookmarklet itself — it would have no way of storing the returned key. Instead, I’ve put together a simple web frontend through which you can auth with your application.
Head to Auth me, Amadeus!, enter the application keys you just generated and hit ‘Authorize with Fire Eagle’. You’ll be taken to the Fire Eagle website, just as in regular Fire Eagle applications, and after granting access to your app, be redirected back to Amadeus which will provide you your user tokens. These tokens are used in subsequent requests to read your location.
And, skip to the end…
The process of building the bookmarklet, making requests to Fire Eagle, rendering it to the page and so forth follows, but if you’re the impatient type, you might like to try this out right now. Take your four API keys from above, and drag the following link to your Bookmarks Toolbar; it contains all the code described below. Before you can use it, you need to edit in your own API keys. Open your browser’s bookmark editor and where you find text like ‘YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY_HERE’, swap in the corresponding key you just generated.
Get Location
Bookmarklet Basics
To start on the bookmarklet code, set out a basic JavaScript module-pattern structure:
var Geomarklet = function() {
return ({
callback: function(json) {},
run: function() {}
});
};
Geomarklet.run();
Next we’ll add the keys obtained in the setup step, and also some basic Fire Eagle support objects:
var Geomarklet = function() {
var Keys = {
consumer_key: 'IuKrJUHU1pMnu',
consumer_secret: 'ZZl9YXXoJX5KLiKyVEERTfNEaBnxnd6M',
user_token: 'xxxxxxxxxxxx',
user_secret: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
};
var LocationDetail = {
EXACT: 0,
POSTAL: 1,
NEIGHBORHOOD: 2,
CITY: 3,
REGION: 4,
STATE: 5,
COUNTRY: 6
};
var index_offset;
return ({
callback: function(json) {},
run: function() {}
});
};
Geomarklet.run();
The Location Hierarchy
A successful Fire Eagle query returns an object called the ‘location hierarchy’. Depending on the level of detail shared, the index of a particular piece of information in the array will vary. The LocationDetail object maps the array indices of each level in the hierarchy to something comprehensible, whilst the index_offset variable is an adjustment based on the detail of the result returned.
The location hierarchy object looks like this, providing a granular breakdown of a location, in human consumable and machine-friendly forms.
""user"": {
""location_hierarchy"": [{
""level"": 0,
""level_name"": ""exact"",
""name"": ""707 19th St, San Francisco, CA"",
""normal_name"": ""94123"",
""geometry"": {
""type"": ""Point"",
""coordinates"": [ - 0.2347530752, 67.232323]
},
""label"": null,
""best_guess"": true,
""id"": ,
""located_at"": ""2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00"",
""query"": ""q=707%2019th%20Street,%20Sf""
},
{
""level"": 1,
""level_name"": ""postal"",
""name"": ""San Francisco, CA 94114"",
""normal_name"": ""12345"",
""woeid"": ,
""place_id"": """",
""geometry"": {
""type"": ""Polygon"",
""coordinates"": [],
""bbox"": []
},
""label"": null,
""best_guess"": false,
""id"": 59358791,
""located_at"": ""2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00""
},
{
""level"": 2,
""level_name"": ""neighborhood"",
""name"": ""The Mission, San Francisco, CA"",
""normal_name"": ""The Mission"",
""woeid"": 23512048,
""place_id"": ""Y12JWsKbApmnSQpbQg"",
""geometry"": {
""type"": ""Polygon"",
""coordinates"": [],
""bbox"": []
},
""label"": null,
""best_guess"": false,
""id"": 59358801,
""located_at"": ""2008-12-18T00:49:58-08:00""
},
}
In this case the first object has a level of 0, so the index_offset is also 0.
Prerequisites
To query Fire Eagle we call in some existing libraries to handle the OAuth layer and the Fire Eagle API call. Your bookmarklet will need to add the following scripts into the page:
The SHA1 encryption algorithm
The OAuth wrapper
An extension for the OAuth wrapper
The Fire Eagle wrapper itself
When the bookmarklet is first run, we’ll insert these scripts into the document. We’re also inserting a stylesheet to dress up the UI that will be generated.
If you want to follow along any of the more mundane parts of the bookmarklet, you can download the full source code.
Rendering
This bookmarklet can be extended to support any formatting of your location you like, but for sake of example I’m going to build three common formatters that you’ll find useful for common location scenarios: Sites which already ask for your location; and in publishing systems that accept tags or HTML mark-up.
All the rendering functions are items in a renderers object, so they can be iterated through easily, making it trivial to add new formatting functions as your find new use cases (just add another function to the object).
var renderers = {
geotag: function(user) {
if(LocationDetail.EXACT !== index_offset) {
return false;
}
else {
var coords =
user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.EXACT].geometry.coordinates;
return ""geo:lat="" + coords[0] + "", geo:lon="" + coords[1];
}
},
city: function(user) {
if(LocationDetail.CITY < index_offset) {
return false;
}
else {
return user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.CITY - index_offset].name;
}
}
You should always fail gracefully, and in line with catering to users who choose not to share their location precisely, always check that the location has been returned at the level you require. Geotags are expected to be precise, so if an exact location is unavailable, returning false will tell the rendering aspect of the bookmarklet to ignore the function altogether.
These first two are quite simple, geotag returns geo:lat=-0.2347530752, geo:lon=67.232323 and city returns San Francisco, CA.
This final renderer creates a chunk of HTML using the adr and geo microformats, using all available aspects of the location hierarchy, and can be used to geotag any content you write on your blog or in comments:
html: function(user) {
var geostring = '';
var adrstring = '';
var adr = [];
adr.push('');
// city
if(LocationDetail.CITY >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n '
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.CITY-index_offset].normal_name
+ ' ,'
);
}
// county
if(LocationDetail.REGION >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n '
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.REGION-index_offset].normal_name
+ ' ,'
);
}
// locality
if(LocationDetail.STATE >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n '
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.STATE-index_offset].normal_name
+ ' ,'
);
}
// country
if(LocationDetail.COUNTRY >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n '
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.COUNTRY-index_offset].normal_name
+ ' '
);
}
// postal
if(LocationDetail.POSTAL >= index_offset) {
adr.push(
'\n '
+ user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.POSTAL-index_offset].normal_name
+ ' ,'
);
}
adr.push('\n
\n');
adrstring = adr.join('');
if(LocationDetail.EXACT === index_offset) {
var coords =
user.location_hierarchy[LocationDetail.EXACT].geometry.coordinates;
geostring = ''
+'\n '
+ coords[0]
+ ' ;'
+ '\n '
+ coords[1]
+ ' \n
\n';
}
return (adrstring + geostring);
}
Here we check the availability of every level of location and build it into the adr and geo patterns as appropriate. Just as for the geotag function, if there’s no exact location the geo markup won’t be returned.
Finally, there’s a rendering method which creates a container for all this data, renders all the applicable location formats and then displays them in the page for a user to copy and paste. You can throw this together with DOM methods and some simple styling, or roll in some components from YUI or JQuery to handle drawing full featured overlays.
You can see this simple implementation for rendering in the full source code.
Make the call
With a framework in place to render Fire Eagle’s location hierarchy, the only thing that remains is to actually request your location. Having already authed through Amadeus earlier, that’s as simple as instantiating the Fire Eagle JavaScript wrapper and making a single function call. It’s a big deal that whilst a lot of new technologies like OAuth add some complexity and require new knowledge to work with, APIs like Fire Eagle are really very simple indeed.
return {
run: function() {
insert_prerequisites();
setTimeout(
function() {
var fe = new FireEagle(
Keys.consumer_key,
Keys.consumer_secret,
Keys.user_token,
Keys.user_secret
);
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = fe.getUserUrl(
FireEagle.RESPONSE_FORMAT.json,
'Geomarklet.callback'
);
document.body.appendChild(script);
},
2000
);
},
callback: function(json) {
if(json.rsp && 'fail' == json.rsp.stat) {
alert('Error ' + json.rsp.code + "": "" + json.rsp.message);
}
else {
index_offset = json.user.location_hierarchy[0].level;
draw_selector(json);
}
}
};
We first insert the prerequisite scripts required for the Fire Eagle request to function, and to prevent trying to instantiate the FireEagle object before it’s been loaded over the wire, the remaining instantiation and request is wrapped inside a setTimeout delay.
We then create the request URL, referencing the Geomarklet.callback callback function and then append the script to the document body — allowing a cross-domain request.
The callback itself is quite simple. Check for the presence and value of rsp.status to test for errors, and display them as required. If the request is successful set the index_offset — to adjust for the granularity of the location hierarchy — and then pass the object to the renderer.
The result? When Geomarklet.run() is called, your location from Fire Eagle is read, and each renderer displayed on the page in an easily copy and pasteable form, ready to be used however you need.
Deploy
The final step is to convert this code into a long string for use as a bookmarklet. Easiest for Mac users is the JavaScript bundle in TextMate — choose Bundles: JavaScript: Copy as Bookmarklet to Clipboard. Then create a new ‘Get Location’ bookmark in your browser of choice and paste in.
Those without TextMate can shrink their code down into a single line by first running their code through the JSLint tool (to ensure the code is free from errors and has all the required semi-colons) and then use a find-and-replace tool to remove line breaks from your code (or even run your code through JSMin to shrink it down).
With the bookmarklet created and added to your bookmarks bar, you can now call up your location on any page at all. Get a feel for a web where your location is just another reliable part of the browsing experience.
Where next?
So, the Geomarklet you’ve been guided through is a pretty simple premise and pretty simple output. But from this base you can start to extend: Add code that will insert each of the location renderings directly into form fields, perhaps, or how about site-specific handlers to add your location tags into the correct form field in Wordpress or Tumblr? Paste in your current location to Google Maps? Or Flickr?
Geomarklet gives you a base to start experimenting with location on your own pages and the sites you browse daily.
The introduction of consumer accessible geo to the web is an adventure of discovery; not so much discovering new locations, but discovering location itself.",2008,Ben Ward,benward,2008-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/geotag-everywhere-with-fire-eagle/,code
147,Christmas Is In The AIR,"That’s right, Christmas is coming up fast and there’s plenty of things to do. Get the tree and lights up, get the turkey, buy presents and who know what else. And what about Santa? He’s got a list. I’m pretty sure he’s checking it twice.
Sure, we could use an existing list making web site or even a desktop widget. But we’re geeks! What’s the fun in that? Let’s build our own to-do list application and do it with Adobe AIR!
What’s Adobe AIR?
Adobe AIR, formerly codenamed Apollo, is a runtime environment that runs on both Windows and OSX (with Linux support to follow). This runtime environment lets you build desktop applications using Adobe technologies like Flash and Flex. Oh, and HTML. That’s right, you web standards lovin’ maniac. You can build desktop applications that can run cross-platform using the trio of technologies, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
If you’ve tried developing with AIR before, you’ll need to get re-familiarized with the latest beta release as many things have changed since the last one (such as the API and restrictions within the sandbox.)
To get started
To get started in building an AIR application, you’ll need two basic things:
The AIR runtime. The runtime is needed to run any AIR-based application.
The SDK. The software development kit gives you all the pieces to test your application. Unzip the SDK into any folder you wish.
You’ll also want to get your hands on the JavaScript API documentation which you’ll no doubt find yourself getting into before too long. (You can download it, too.)
Also of interest, some development environments have support for AIR built right in. Aptana doesn’t have support for beta 3 yet but I suspect it’ll be available shortly.
Within the SDK, there are two main tools that we’ll use: one to test the application (ADL) and another to build a distributable package of our application (ADT). I’ll get into this some more when we get to that stage of development.
Building our To-do list application
The first step to building an application within AIR is to create an XML file that defines our default application settings. I call mine application.xml, mostly because Aptana does that by default when creating a new AIR project. It makes sense though and I’ve stuck with it. Included in the templates folder of the SDK is an example XML file that you can use.
The first key part to this after specifying things like the application ID, version, and filename, is to specify what the default content should be within the content tags. Enter in the name of the HTML file you wish to load. Within this HTML file will be our application.
ui.html
Create a new HTML document and name it ui.html and place it in the same directory as the application.xml file. The first thing you’ll want to do is copy over the AIRAliases.js file from the frameworks folder of the SDK and add a link to it within your HTML document.
The aliases create shorthand links to all of the Flash-based APIs.
Now is probably a good time to explain how to debug your application.
Debugging our application
So, with our XML file created and HTML file started, let’s try testing our ‘application’. We’ll need the ADL application located in BIN folder of the SDK and tell it to run the application.xml file.
/path/to/adl /path/to/application.xml
You can also just drag the XML file onto ADL and it’ll accomplish the same thing. If you just did that and noticed that your blank application didn’t load, you’d be correct. It’s running but isn’t visible. Which at this point means you’ll have to shut down the ADL process. Sorry about that!
Changing the visibility
You have two ways to make your application visible. You can do it automatically by setting the placing true in the visible tag within the application.xml file.
true
The other way is to do it programmatically from within your application. You’d want to do it this way if you had other startup tasks to perform before showing the interface. To turn the UI on programmatically, simple set the visible property of nativeWindow to true.
Sandbox Security
Now that we have an application that we can see when we start it, it’s time to build the to-do list application. In doing so, you’d probably think that using a JavaScript library is a really good idea — and it can be but there are some limitations within AIR that have to be considered.
An HTML document, by default, runs within the application sandbox. You have full access to the AIR APIs but once the onload event of the window has fired, you’ll have a limited ability to make use of eval and other dynamic script injection approaches. This limits the ability of external sources from gaining access to everything the AIR API offers, such as database and local file system access. You’ll still be able to make use of eval for evaluating JSON responses, which is probably the most important if you wish to consume JSON-based services.
If you wish to create a greater wall of security between AIR and your HTML document loading in external resources, you can create a child sandbox. We won’t need to worry about it for our application so I won’t go any further into it but definitely keep this in mind.
Finally, our application
Getting tired of all this preamble? Let’s actually build our to-do list application. I’ll use jQuery because it’s small and should suit our needs nicely. Let’s begin with some structure:
' + pretty_num(total)
+ ' gold pieces. Thank you.';
document.getElementById('preview').innerHTML = out;
}
function pretty_num(n) {
n += '';
var o = '';
for (i=n.length; i>3; i-=3) {
o = ',' + n.slice(i-3, i) + o;
}
o = n.slice(0, i) + o;
return o;
}
function pluralise(n) {
if (n!=1) return 's';
return '';
}
“Oh, botheration!” cried Dunder. “This is just so complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” said Rudolph, “you just have to think about things in a slightly different way from what you’re used to. As we’re only a simple example, we won’t be able to cover all possibilities, but for starters, we need some way of providing different information to the script dependent on the language. We’ll create a global i18n object, say, and fill it with the correct language information. The first variable we’ll need will be a thousands separator, and then we can change the pretty_num function to use that instead:
function pretty_num(n) {
n += '';
var o = '';
for (i=n.length; i>3; i-=3) {
o = i18n.thousands_sep + n.slice(i-3, i) + o;
}
o = n.slice(0, i) + o;
return o;
}
“The i18n object will also contain our translations, which we will access through a function called _() — that’s just an underscore. Other languages have a function of the same name doing the same thing. It’s very simple:
function _(s) {
if (typeof(i18n)!='undefined' && i18n[s]) {
return i18n[s];
}
return s;
}
“So if a translation is available and provided, we’ll use that; otherwise we’ll default to the string provided — which is helpful if the translation begins to lag behind the site’s text at all, as at least something will be output.”
“Got it,” said Dunder. “ _('Hello Dunder') will print the translation of that string, if one exists, ‘Hello Dunder’ if not.”
“Exactly. Moving on, your plural function breaks even in English if we have a word where the plural doesn’t add an s — like ‘children’.”
“You’re right,” said Dunder. “How did I miss that?”
“No harm done. Better to provide both singular and plural words to the function and let it decide which to use, performing any translation as well:
function pluralise(s, p, n) {
if (n != 1) return _(p);
return _(s);
}
“We’d have to provide different functions for different languages as we employed more elves and got more complicated — for example, in Polish, the word ‘file’ pluralises like this: 1 plik, 2-4 pliki, 5-21 plików, 22-24 pliki, 25-31 plików, and so on.” (More information on plural forms)
“Gosh!”
“Next, as different languages have different word orders, we must stop using concatenation to construct sentences, as it would be impossible for other languages to fit in; we have to keep coherent strings together. Let’s rewrite your update function, and then go through it:
function update_text() {
var hay = getValue('hay');
var carrots = getValue('carrots');
var bells = getValue('bells');
var total = 50 * bells + 30 * hay + 10 * carrots;
hay = sprintf(pluralise('%s bushel of hay', '%s bushels of hay', hay), pretty_num(hay));
carrots = sprintf(pluralise('%s carrot', '%s carrots', carrots), pretty_num(carrots));
bells = sprintf(pluralise('%s shiny bell', '%s shiny bells', bells), pretty_num(bells));
var list = sprintf(_('%s, %s, and %s'), hay, carrots, bells);
var out = sprintf(_('You are ordering %s, at a total cost of %s gold pieces.'),
list, pretty_num(total));
out += ' ';
out += _('Thank you.');
document.getElementById('preview').innerHTML = out;
}
“ sprintf is a function in many other languages that, given a format string and some variables, slots the variables into place within the string. JavaScript doesn’t have such a function, so we’ll write our own. Again, keep it simple for now, only integers and strings; I’m sure more complete ones can be found on the internet.
function sprintf(s) {
var bits = s.split('%');
var out = bits[0];
var re = /^([ds])(.*)$/;
for (var i=1; i%s gold pieces."": '',
""Thank you."": ''
};
“If you implement this across the intranet, you’ll want to investigate the xgettext program, which can automatically extract all strings that need translating from all sorts of code files into a standard .po file (I think Python mode works best for JavaScript). You can then use a different program to take the translated .po file and automatically create the language-specific JavaScript files for us.” (e.g. German .po file for PledgeBank, mySociety’s .po-.js script, example output)
With a flourish, Rudolph finished editing. “And there we go, localised JavaScript in English, French, or German, all using the same main code.”
“Thanks so much, Rudolph!” said Dunder.
“I’m not just a pretty nose!” Rudolph quipped. “Oh, and one last thing — please comment liberally explaining the context of strings you use. Your translator will thank you, probably at the same time as they point out the four hundred places you’ve done something in code that only works in your language and no-one else’s…”
Thanks to Tim Morley and Edmund Grimley Evans for the French and German translations respectively.",2007,Matthew Somerville,matthewsomerville,2007-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/javascript-internationalisation/,code
154,Diagnostic Styling,"We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content.
Note: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I’ll explain why that’s not really a problem near the end of the article — and no, the reason is not “everyone should just ignore IE anyway”.
Basic Diagnostics
To pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles.
font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}
You could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you’ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.)
Not everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don’t affect layout. Eh? Here’s a comparison.
On the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later — which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it.
Okay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no.
Attribution
Let’s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style — that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I’m not going to get anywhere near), as it’s just another side of the same coin of using font: baking the presentation into the document structure instead of putting it somewhere more manageable. So:
*[style], font, center {outline: 5px solid red;}
Adding that attribute selector to the rule’s grouped selector means that we’ll now be outlining any element with a style attribute.
There’s a lot more that attribute selectors will let use diagnose. For example, we can highlight any images that have empty alt or title text.
img[alt=""""] {border: 3px dotted red;}
img[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}
Now, you may wonder why one of these rules calls for a border, and the other for an outline. That’s because I want them to “add together” — that is, if I have an image which possesses both alt and title, and the values of both are empty, then I want it to be doubly marked.
See how the middle image there has both red and fuchsia dots running around it? (And am I the only one who sorely misses the actual circular dots drawn by IE5/Mac?) That’s due to its markup, which we can see here in a fragment showing the whole table row.
empty title
Right, that’s all well and good, but it misses a rather more serious situation: the selector img[alt=""""] won’t match an img element that doesn’t even have an alt attribute. How to tackle this problem?
Not a Problem
Well, if you want to select something based on a negative, you need a negative selector.
img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;}
This is really quite a break from the rest of CSS selection, which is all positive: “select anything that has these characteristics”. With :not(), we have the ability to say (in supporting browsers) “select anything that hasn’t these characteristics”. In the above example, only img elements that do not have an alt attribute will be selected. So we expand our list of image-related rules to read:
img[alt=""""] {border: 3px dotted red;}
img[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;}
img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;}
img:not([title]) {outline: 5px solid fuchsia;}
With the following results:
We could expand this general idea to pick up tables who lack a summary, or have an empty summary attribute.
table[summary=""""] {outline: 3px dotted red;}
table:not([summary]) {outline: 5px solid red;}
When it comes to selecting header cells that lack the proper scope, however, we have a trickier situation. Finding headers with no scope attribute is easy enough, but what about those that have a scope attribute with an incorrect value?
In this case, we actually need to pull an on-off maneuver. This has us setting all th elements to have a highlight style, and then turn it off for the elements that meet our criteria.
th {border: 2px solid red;}
th[scope=""col""], th[scope=""row""] {border: none;}
This was necessary because of the way CSS selectors work. For example, consider this:
th:not([scope=""col""]), th:not([scope=""row""]) {border: 2px solid red;}
That would select…all th elements, regardless of their attrributes. That’s because every th element doesn’t have a scope of col, doesn’t have a scope of row, or doesn’t have either. There’s no escaping this selector o’ doom!
This limitation arises because :not() is limited to containing a single “thing” within its parentheses. You can’t, for example, say “select all elements except those that are images which descend from list items”. Reportedly, this limitation was imposed to make browser implementation of :not() easier.
Still, we can make good use of :not() in the service of further diagnosing. Calling out links in trouble is a breeze:
a[href]:not([title]) {border: 5px solid red;}
a[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted red;}
a[href=""#""] {background: lime;}
a[href=""""] {background: fuchsia;}
Here we have a set that will call our attention to links missing title information, as well as links that have no valid target, whether through a missing URL or a JavaScript-driven page where there are no link fallbacks in the case of missing or disabled JavaScript (href=""#"").
And What About IE?
As I said at the beginning, much of what I covered here doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, most particularly :not() and outline. (Oh, so basically everything? -Ed.)
I can’t do much about the latter. For the former, however, it’s possible to hack your way around the problem by doing some layered on-off stuff. For example, for images, you replace the previously-shown rules with the following:
img {border: 5px solid red;}
img[alt][title] {border-width: 0;}
img[alt] {border-color: fuchsia;}
img[alt], img[title] {border-style: double;}
img[alt=""""][title],
img[alt][title=""""] {border-width: 3px;}
img[alt=""""][title=""""] {border-style: dotted;}
It won’t have exactly the same set of effects, given the inability to use both borders and outlines, but will still highlight troublesome images.
It’s also the case that IE6 and earlier lack support for even attribute selectors, whereas IE7 added pretty much all the attribute selector types there are, so the previous code block won’t have any effect previous to IE7.
In a broader sense, though, these kinds of styles probably aren’t going to be used in the wild, as it were. Diagnostic styles are something only you see as you work on a site, so you can make sure to use a browser that supports outlines and :not() when you’re diagnosing. The fact that IE users won’t see these styles is irrelevant since users of any browser probably won’t be seeing these styles.
Personally, I always develop in Firefox anyway, thanks to its ability to become a full-featured IDE through the addition of extensions like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.
Yeah, About That…
It’s true that much of what I describe in this article is available in the WDT. I feel there are two advantages to writing your own set of diagnostic styles.
When you write your own styles, you can define exactly what the visual results will be, and how they will interact. The WDT doesn’t let you make its outlines thicker or change their colors.
You can combine a bunch of diagnostics into a single set of rules and add it to your site’s style sheet during the diagnostic portion, thus ensuring they persist as you surf around. This can be done in the WDT, but it isn’t as easy (and, at least for me, not as reliable).
It’s also true that a markup validator will catch many of the errors I mentioned, such as missing alt and summary attributes. For some, that’s sufficient. But it won’t catch everything diagnostic styles can, like empty alt values or untargeted links, which are perfectly valid, syntactically speaking.
Diagnosis Complete?
I hope this has been a fun look at the concept of diagnostic styling as well as a quick introduction into possibly new concepts like :not() and outlines. This isn’t all there is to say, of course: there is plenty more that could be added to a diagnostic style sheet. And everyone’s diagnostics will be different, tuned to meet each person’s unique situation.
Mostly, though, I hope this small exploration triggers some creative thinking about the use of CSS to do more than just lay out pages and colorize text. Given the familiarity we acquire with CSS, it only makes sense to use it wherever it might be useful, and setting up visible diagnostic flags is just one more place for it to help us.",2007,Eric Meyer,ericmeyer,2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/diagnostic-styling/,process
156,Mobile 2.0,"Thinking 2.0
As web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that “Web 2.0” has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing.
The 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different.
With that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other.
It’s the Carriers’ world. We just live in it.
Before getting into Mobile 2.0, I thought first I should introduce you to its older brother. You know the kind, the kid with emotional problems that likes to beat up on you and your friends for absolutely no reason. That is the mobile of today.
The mobile ecosystem is a very complicated space often and incorrectly compared to the Web. If the Web was a freewheeling hippie — believing in freedom of information and the unity of man through communities — then Mobile is the cutthroat capitalist — out to pillage and plunder for the sake of the almighty dollar. Where the Web is relatively easy to publish to and ultimately make a buck, Mobile is wrought with layers of complexity, politics and obstacles.
I can think of no better way to summarize these challenges than the testimony of Jason Devitt to the United States Congress in what is now being referred to as the “iPhone Hearing.” Jason is the co-founder and CEO of SkyDeck a new wireless startup and former CEO of Vindigo an early pioneer in mobile content.
As Jason points out, the mobile ecosystem is a closed door environment controlled by the carriers, forcing the independent publisher to compete or succumb to the will of corporate behemoths.
But that is all about to change.
Introducing Mobile 2.0
Mobile 2.0 is term used by the mobile community to describe the current revolution happening in mobile. It describes the convergence of mobile and web services, adding portability, ubiquitous connectivity and location-aware services to add physical context to information found on the Web.
It’s an important term that looks toward the future. Allowing us to imagine the possibilities that mobile technology has long promised but has yet to deliver. It imagines a world where developers can publish mobile content without the current constraints of the mobile ecosystem.
Like the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0, it signifies the shift away from corporate or brand-centered experiences to user-centered experiences. A focus on richer interactions, driven by user goals. Moving away from proprietary technologies to more open and standard ones, more akin to the Web. And most importantly (from our perspective as web geeks) a shift away from kludgy one-off mobile applications toward using the Web as a platform for content and services.
This means the world of the Web and the world of Mobile are coming together faster than you can say ARPU (Average Revenue Per User, a staple mobile term to you webbies). And this couldn’t come at a better time. The importance of understanding and addressing user context is quickly becoming a crucial consideration to every interactive experience as the number of ways we access information on the Web increases.
Mobile enables the power of the Web, the collective information of millions of people, inherit payment channels and access to just about every other mass media to literally be overlaid on top of the physical world, in context to the person viewing it.
Anyone who can’t imagine how the influence of mobile technology can’t transform how we perform even the simplest of daily tasks needs to get away from their desktop and see the new evolution of information.
The Instigators
But what will make Mobile 2.0 move from idillic concept to a hardened market reality in 2008 will be four key technologies. Its my guess that you know each them already.
1. Opera
Opera is like the little train that could. They have been a driving force on moving the Web as we know it on to mobile handsets. Opera technology has proven itself to be highly adaptable, finding itself preloaded on over 40 million handsets, available on televisions sets through Nintendo Wii or via the Nintendo DS.
2. WebKit
Many were surprised when Apple chose to use KHTML instead of Gecko (the guts of Firefox) to power their Safari rendering engine. But WebKit has quickly evolved to be a powerful and flexible browser in the mobile context. WebKit has been in Nokia smartphones for a few years now, is the technology behind Mobile Safari in the iPhone and the iPod Touch and is the default web technology in Google’s open mobile platform effort, Android.
3. The iPhone
The iPhone has finally brought the concepts and principles of Mobile 2.0 into the forefront of consumers minds and therefore developers’ minds as well. Over 500 web applications have been written specifically for the iPhone since its launch. It’s completely unheard of to see so many applications built for the mobile context in such a short period of time.
4. CSS & Javascript
Web 2.0 could not exist without the rich interactions offered by CSS and Javascript, and Mobile 2.0 is no different. CSS and Javascript support across multiple phones historically has been, well… to put it positively… utter crap.
Javascript finally allows developers to create interesting interactions that support user goals and the mobile context. Specially, AJAX allows us to finally shed the days of bloated Java applications and focus on portable and flexible web applications. While CSS — namely CSS3 — allows us to create designs that are as beautiful as they are economical with bandwidth and load times.
With Leaflets, a collection of iPhone optimized web apps we created, we heavily relied on CSS3 to cache and reuse design elements over and over, minimizing download times while providing an elegant and user-centered design.
In Conclusion
It is the combination of all these instigators that is significantly decreasing the bar to mobile publishing. The market as Jason Devitt describes it, will begin to fade into the background. And maybe the world of mobile will finally start looking more like the Web that we all know and love.
So after the merriment and celebration of the holiday is over and you look toward the new year to refresh and renew, I hope that you take a seriously consider the mobile medium.
By this time next year, it is predicted that one-third of humanity will be using mobile devices to access the Web.",2007,Brian Fling,brianfling,2007-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/mobile-2-0/,business
162,Conditional Love,"“Browser.” The four-letter word of web design.
I mean, let’s face it: on the good days, when things just work in your target browsers, it’s marvelous. The air smells sweeter, birds’ songs sound more melodious, and both your design and your code are looking sharp.
But on the less-than-good days (which is, frankly, most of them), you’re compelled to tie up all your browsers in a sack, heave them into the nearest river, and start designing all-imagemap websites. We all play favorites, after all: some will swear by Firefox, Opera fans are allegedly legion, and others still will frown upon anything less than the latest WebKit nightly.
Thankfully, we do have an out for those little inconsistencies that crop up when dealing with cross-browser testing: CSS patches.
Spare the Rod, Hack the Browser
Before committing browsercide over some rendering bug, a designer will typically reach for a snippet of CSS fix the faulty browser. Historically referred to as “hacks,” I prefer Dan Cederholm’s more client-friendly alternative, “patches”.
But whatever you call them, CSS patches all work along the same principle: supply the proper property value to the good browsers, while giving higher maintenance other browsers an incorrect value that their frustrating idiosyncratic rendering engine can understand.
Traditionally, this has been done either by exploiting incomplete CSS support:
#content {
height: 1%; // Let's force hasLayout for old versions of IE.
line-height: 1.6;
padding: 1em;
}
html>body #content {
height: auto; // Modern browsers get a proper height value.
}
or by exploiting bugs in their rendering engine to deliver alternate style rules:
#content p {
font-size: .8em;
/* Hide from Mac IE5 \*/
font-size: .9em;
/* End hiding from Mac IE5 */
}
We’ve even used these exploits to serve up whole stylesheets altogether:
@import url(""core.css"");
@media tty {
i{content:""\"";/*"" ""*/}} @import 'windows-ie5.css'; /*"";}
}/* */
The list goes on, and on, and on. For every browser, for every bug, there’s a patch available to fix some rendering bug.
But after some time working with standards-based layouts, I’ve found that CSS patches, as we’ve traditionally used them, become increasingly difficult to maintain. As stylesheets are modified over the course of a site’s lifetime, inline fixes we’ve written may become obsolete, making them difficult to find, update, or prune out of our CSS. A good patch requires a constant gardener to ensure that it adds more than just bloat to a stylesheet, and inline patches can be very hard to weed out of a decently sized CSS file.
Giving the Kids Separate Rooms
Since I joined Airbag Industries earlier this year, every project we’ve worked on has this in the head of its templates:
I wish Google could find my keys
CSS:
a:link:after,
a:visited:after,
a:hover:after,
a:active:after {
content: "" <"" attr(href) ""> "";
}
But this is not perfect, in the above example the content of the href is just naively plonked after the link text:
I wish Google "";
}
The output is now what we were looking for (you will need to replace example.com with your own root URL):
I wish Google
Using regular expressions on the attribute selectors, one final thing you can do is to suppress the generated content on mailto: links, if for example you know the link text always reflects the email address. Eg:
HTML:
me@example.com
CSS:
a[href^=""mailto""]:after {
content: """";
}
This example shows the above in action.
Of course with this clever technique, there are the usual browser support issues. While it won’t look as intended in browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (IE6 and IE7) it will not break either and will just degrade gracefully because IE cannot do generated content. To the best of my knowledge Safari 2+ and Opera 9.X support a colour set on generated content whereas Firefox 2 & Camino display this in black regardless of the link or inherited text colour.
5. Jazz your headers for print
This is more of a design consideration, don’t go too nuts though; there are a lot more limitations in print media than on screen. For this example we are going to go for is having a bottom border on h2’s and styling other headings with graduating colors or font sizes.
And here is the example complete with jazzy headers.
6. Build in general hooks
If you are building a large site with many different types of page, you may find it useful to build into your CSS structure, classes that control what is printed (e.g. noprint and printonly). This may not be semantically ideal, but in the past I have found it really useful for maintainability of code across large and varied sites
7. For that extra touch of class
When printing pages from a long URL, even if the option is turned on to show the location of the page in the header, browsers may still display a truncated (and thus useless) version.
Using the above tip (or just simply setting to display:none in screen and display:block in print) you can insert the URL of the page you are currently on for print only, using JavaScript’s window.location.href variable.
function addPrintFooter() {
var p = document.createElement('p');
p.className = 'print-footer';
p.innerHTML = window.location.href;
document.body.appendChild(p);
}
You can then call this function using whichever onload or ondomready handler suits your fancy. Here is our familiar demo to show all the above in action
8. Tabular data across pages
If you are using tabled data in your document there are a number of things you can do to increase usability of long tables over several pages. If you use the element this should repeat your table headers on the next page should your table be split. You will need to set thead {display: table-header-group;} explicitly for IE even though this should be the default value.
Also if you use tr {page-break-inside: avoid;} this should (browser support depending) stop your table row from breaking across two pages. For more information on styling tables for print please see the CSS discuss wiki7.
Gotchas
1. Where did all my content go?
Absolutely the most common mistake I see with print styles is the truncated content bug. The symptom of this is that only the first page of a div’s content will be printed, the rest will look truncated after this.
Floating long columns may still have this affect, as mentioned in Eric Meyer’s article on ‘A List Apart’ article from 20028; though in testing I am no longer able to replicate this. Using overflow:hidden on long content in Firefox however still causes this truncation. Overflow hidden is commonly used to clear floats9.
A simple fix can be applied to resolve this, if the column is floated you can override this with float:none similarly overflow:hidden can be overridden with overflow:visible or the offending rules can be banished to a screen only stylesheet.
Using position:absolute on long columns also has a very similar effect in truncating the content, but can be overridden in print with position:static;
Whilst I only recommend having a print stylesheet for content pages on your site; do at least check other landing pages, section indexes and your homepage. If these are inaccessible in print possibly due to the above gotcha, it might be wise to provide a light dusting of print styles or move the offending overflow / float rules to a screen only stylesheet to fix the issues.
2. Damn those background browser settings
One of the factors of life you now need to accept is that you can’t control the user’s browser settings, no more than you can control whether or not they use IE6. Most browsers by default will not print background colours or images unless explicitly told to by the user.
Naturally this causes a number of problems, for starters you will need to rethink things like branding. At this point it helps if you are doing the print styles early in the project so that you can control the logo not being a background image for example.
Where colour is important to the meaning of the document, for example a status on an invoice, bear in mind that a textural representation will also need to be supplied as the user may be printing in black and white. Borders will print however regardless of setting, so assuming the user is printing in colour you can always use borders to indicate colour.
Check the colour contrast of the text against white, this may need to be altered without backgrounds. You should check how your page looks with backgrounds turned on too, for consistency with the default browser settings you may want to override your background anyway.
One final issue with backgrounds being off is list items. It is relatively common practice to suppress the list-style-type and replace with a background image to finely control the bullet positioning. This technique doesn’t translate to print, you will need to disable this background bullet and re-instate your trusty friend the list-style-type.
3. Using JavaScript in your CSS? … beware IE6
Internet explorer has an issue that when Javascript is used in a stylesheet it applies this to all media types even if only applied to screen. For example, if you happen to be using expressions to set a width for IE, perhaps to mimic min-width, a simple width:100% !important rule can overcome the effects the expression has on your print styles10.
4. De-enhance your Progressive enhancements
Quite a classic “doh” moment is when you realise that, of course paper doesn’t support Javascript. If you have any dynamic elements on the page, for example a document collapsed per section, you really should have been using Progressive enhancement techniques11 and building for browsers without Javascript first, adding in the fancy stuff later.
If this is the case it should be trivial to override your wizzy JS styles in your print stylesheet, to display all your content and make it accessible for print, which is by far the best method of achieving this affect.
And Finally…
I refer you back to the nature of the document in hand, consider the context of your site and the page. Use the tips here to help you add that extra bit of flair to your printed media.
Be careful you don’t get caught out by the common gotchas, keep the design simple, test cross browser and relish in the medium of print.
Further Reading
1 For more information constantly updated, please see the CSS discuss wiki on print stylesheets
2 For more information on media types and ways of including CSS please refer to the CSS discuss wiki on Media Stylesheets
3 Eric Meyer talks to ThinkVitamin about the importance of context when designing your print strategy.
4 Mark Boulton describes how he applies a newspaper like print stylesheet to an article in the Guardian website. Mark also has some persuasive arguments that print should not be left to last
5 Richard Rutter Has a fantastic resource on typography which also applies to print.
6 Aaron Gustafson has a great solution to link problem by creating footnotes at the end of the page.
7 The CSS discuss wiki has more detailed information on printing tables and detailed browser support
8 This ‘A List Apart’ article is dated May 10th 2002 though is still mostly relevant
9 Float clearing technique using ‘overflow:hidden’
10 Autistic Cuckoo describes the interesting insight with regards to expressions specified for screen in IE6 remaining in print
11 Wikipedia has a good article on the definition of progressive enhancement
12 For a really neat trick involving a dynamically generated column to displaying and meanings (as well as somewhere for the user to write notes), try print previewing on Brian Suda’s site",2007,Natalie Downe,nataliedowne,2007-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/back-to-the-future-of-print/,design
121,Hide And Seek in The Head,"If you want your JavaScript-enhanced pages to remain accessible and understandable to scripted and noscript users alike, you have to think before you code. Which functionalities are required (ie. should work without JavaScript)? Which ones are merely nice-to-have (ie. can be scripted)? You should only start creating the site when you’ve taken these decisions.
Special HTML elements
Once you have a clear idea of what will work with and without JavaScript, you’ll likely find that you need a few HTML elements for the noscript version only.
Take this example: A form has a nifty bit of Ajax that automatically and silently sends a request once the user enters something in a form field. However, in order to preserve accessibility, the user should also be able to submit the form normally. So the form should have a submit button in noscript browsers, but not when the browser supports sufficient JavaScript.
Since the button is meant for noscript browsers, it must be hard-coded in the HTML:
. This is also inaccessible because a screenreader will not pause between adjacent links, and in some configurations will not announce the individual links, but rather all of the tags will be read as just one link containing a whole bunch of words. Markup crime number one.
Flickr
Ah, Flickr. The darling photo sharing site of the internet, and the biggest blind spot in every standardista’s vision. Forgive it for having atrocious markup and sometimes confusing UI because it’s just so much damn fun to use. Let’s see what they do.
06
africa
amsterdam
...
Again we have a simple collection of anchors like del.icio.us, only this time in a paragraph. But rather than using a class to represent the size of the tag they use an inline style. An inline style using a pixel-based font size. That’s so far away from the goal of separating style from content, they might as well use a
tag. You could theoretically parse that to extract the information, but you have more work to guess what the pixel sizes represent. Markup crime number two (and extra jail time for using non-breaking spaces purely for visual spacing purposes.)
Technorati
Ah, now. Here, you’d expect something decent. After all, the Overlord of microformats and King of Semantics Tantek Çelik works there. Surely we’ll see something decent here?
Britney Spears Bush Christmas SEO Shopping
Unfortunately it turns out not to be that decent, and stop calling me Shirley. It’s not exactly terrible code. It does recognise that a tag cloud is a list of links. And, since they’re in alphabetical order, that it’s an ordered list of links. That’s nice. However … fifteen nested tags? FIFTEEN? That’s emphasis for you. Yes, it is parse-able, but it’s also something of a strange way of looking at emphasis. The HTML spec states that is emphasis, and is for stronger emphasis. Nesting tags seems counter to the idea that different tags are used for different levels of emphasis. Plus, if you had a screen reader that stressed the voice for emphasis, what would it do? Shout at you? Markup crime number three.
So what should it be?
As del.icio.us tells us, a tag cloud is a list of tags where the size that they are rendered at contains extra information. However, by hiding the extra context purely within the CSS or the HTML tags used, you are denying that context to some users. The basic assumption being made is that all users will be able to see the difference between font sizes, and this is demonstrably false.
A better way to code a tag cloud is to put the context of the cloud within the content, not the markup or CSS alone. As an example, I’m going to take some of my favourite flickr tags and put them into a cloud which communicates the relative frequency of each tag.
To start with a tag cloud in its most basic form is just a list of links. I am going to present them in alphabetical order, so I’ll use an ordered list. Into each list item I add the number of photos I have with that particular tag. The tag itself is linked to the page on flickr which contains those photos. So we end up with this first example. To display this as a traditional tag cloud, we need to alter it in a few ways:
The items need to be displayed next to each other, rather than one-per-line
The context information should be hidden from display (but not from screen readers)
The tag should link to the page of items with that tag
Displaying the items next to each other simply means setting the display of the list elements to inline. The context can be hidden by wrapping it in a and then using the off-left method to hide it. And the link just means adding an anchor (with rel=""tag"" for some extra microformats bonus points). So, now we have a simple collection of links in our second example.
The last stage is to add the sizes. Since we already have context in our content, the size is purely for visual rendering, so we can just use classes to define the different sizes. For my example, I’ll use a range of class names from not-popular through ultra-popular, in order of smallest to largest, and then use CSS to define different font sizes. If you preferred, you could always use less verbose class names such as size1 through size6. Anyway, adding some classes and CSS gives us our final example, a semantic and more accessible tag cloud.",2006,Mark Norman Francis,marknormanfrancis,2006-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud/,code
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 introduction of WAP 2.0, XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML-MP) became the preferred markup language.
XHTML-MP will be familiar to anyone experienced with XHTML Transitional or Strict.
Summary? The mobile web is rapidly becoming an XHTML environment, and thus you and I can apply our existing “desktop web” skills to understand how to develop content for it. With WML on the decline, the learning curve is much smaller today than it was several years ago. I’m generalizing things gratuitously, but the point remains: Get off yo’ lazy butt and begin to take mobile seriously.
I’ll even pass you a few tips for getting started. First, the DOCTYPE for XHTML-MP is as follows:
As for MIME type, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) specifies using the MIME type application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, but ultimately you need to ensure the server delivering your mobile content is configured properly for the MIME type you choose to use, as there are other options (see Setting up WAP Servers).
Once you’ve made it to the body, the XHTML-MP markup is not unlike what you’re already used to. A few resources worth skimming:
Developers Home XHTML-MP Tutorial – An impressively replete resource for all things XHTML-MP
XHTML-MP Tags List – A complete list of XHTML-MP elements and accompanying attributes
And last but certainly not least, CSS. There exists WAP CSS, which is essentially a subset of CSS2 with WAP-specific extensions. For all intents and purposes, much of the CSS you’re already comfortable using will be transferrable to mobile. As for including CSS in your pages, your options are the same as for desktop sites: external, embedded, and inline. Some experts will argue embedded or inline over external in favor of reducing the number of HTTP connections per page request, yet many popular mobilized sites and apps employ external linking without issue.
Stocking stuffers: Flickr Mobile, Fandango Mobile, and Popurls Mobile. A few sites with whom you can do the View Source song and dance for further study.
4. “Cell phone” is so DynaTAC
If you’re a U.S. resident, listen up: You must rid your vocabulary of the term “cell phone”. We’re one of the few economies on the planet to refer to a mobile phone accordingly. If you care to find yourself in any of the worthwhile mobile development circles, begin using terms more widely accepted: “mobile” or “mobile phone” or “handset” or “handy”. If you’re not sure which, go for “mobile”. Such as, “Yo dog, check out my new mobile.”
More importantly, however, is overcoming the mentality that access to the mobile web can be done only with a phone. Instead, “device” encourages us to think phone, handheld computer, watch, Nintendo DS, car, you name it.
Simple enough?",2006,Cameron Moll,cameronmoll,2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/the-mobile-web-simplified/,ux
314,Easy Ajax with Prototype,"There’s little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity.
But it’s really hard, right? It involves all the nasty JavaScript that no one ever does often enough to get really good at, and the browser support is patchy, and urgh it’s just so much damn effort. Well, the good news is that – ta-da – it doesn’t have to be a headache. But man does it still look impressive. Here’s how to amaze your friends.
Introducing prototype.js
Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff.
There’s loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it’s good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is – friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp.
First step is to download the latest Prototype and put it somewhere safe. I suggest underneath the Christmas tree.
Cutting to the chase
Before I go on and set up an example of how to use this, let’s just get to the crux. Here’s how Prototype enables you to make a simple Ajax call and dump the results back to the page:
var url = 'myscript.php';
var pars = 'foo=bar';
var target = 'output-div';
var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars});
This snippet of JavaScript does a GET to myscript.php, with the parameter foo=bar, and when a result is returned, it places it inside the element with the ID output-div on your page.
Knocking up a basic example
So to get this show on the road, there are three files we need to set up in our site alongside prototype.js. Obviously we need a basic HTML page with prototype.js linked in. This is the page the user interacts with. Secondly, we need our own JavaScript file for the glue between the interface and the stuff Prototype is doing. Lastly, we need the page (a PHP script in my case) that the Ajax is going to make its call too.
So, to that basic HTML page for the user to interact with. Here’s one I found whilst out carol singing:
Easy Ajax
As you can see, I’ve linked in prototype.js, and also a file called ajax.js, which is where we’ll be putting our glue. (Careful where you leave your glue, kids.)
Our basic example is just going to take a name and then echo it back in the form of a seasonal greeting. There’s a form with an input field for a name, and crucially a DIV (greeting) for the result of our call. You’ll also notice that the form has a submit button – this is so that it can function as a regular form when no JavaScript is available. It’s important not to get carried away and forget the basics of accessibility.
Meanwhile, back at the server
So we need a script at the server which is going to take input from the Ajax call and return some output. This is normally where you’d hook into a database and do whatever transaction you need to before returning a result. To keep this as simple as possible, all this example here will do is take the name the user has given and add it to a greeting message. Not exactly Web 2-point-HoHoHo, but there you have it.
Here’s a quick PHP script – greeting.php – that Santa brought me early.
Season's Greetings, $the_name!"";
?>
You’ll perhaps want to do something a little more complex within your own projects. Just sayin’.
Gluing it all together
Inside our ajax.js file, we need to hook this all together. We’re going to take advantage of some of the handy listener routines and such that Prototype also makes available. The first task is to attach a listener to set the scene once the window has loaded. He’s how we attach an onload event to the window object and get it to call a function named init():
Event.observe(window, 'load', init, false);
Now we create our init() function to do our evil bidding. Its first job of the day is to hide the submit button for those with JavaScript enabled. After that, it attaches a listener to watch for the user typing in the name field.
function init(){
$('greeting-submit').style.display = 'none';
Event.observe('greeting-name', 'keyup', greet, false);
}
As you can see, this is going to make a call to a function called greet() onkeyup in the greeting-name field. That function looks like this:
function greet(){
var url = 'greeting.php';
var pars = 'greeting-name='+escape($F('greeting-name'));
var target = 'greeting';
var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars});
}
The key points to note here are that any user input needs to be escaped before putting into the parameters so that it’s URL-ready. The target is the ID of the element on the page (a DIV in our case) which will be the recipient of the output from the Ajax call.
That’s it
No, seriously. That’s everything. Try the example. Amaze your friends with your 1337 Ajax sk1llz.",2005,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2005-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/easy-ajax-with-prototype/,code
315,Edit-in-Place with Ajax,"Back on day one we looked at using the Prototype library to take all the hard work out of making a simple Ajax call. While that was fun and all, it didn’t go that far towards implementing something really practical. We dipped our toes in, but haven’t learned to swim yet.
So here is swimming lesson number one. Anyone who’s used Flickr to publish their photos will be familiar with the edit-in-place system used for quickly amending titles and descriptions on photographs. Hovering over an item turns its background yellow to indicate it is editable. A simple click loads the text into an edit box, right there on the page.
Prototype includes all sorts of useful methods to help reproduce something like this for our own projects. As well as the simple Ajax GETs we learned how to do last time, we can also do POSTs (which we’ll need here) and a whole bunch of manipulations to the user interface – all through simple library calls. Here’s what we’re building, so let’s do it.
Getting Started
There are two major components to this process; the user interface manipulation and the Ajax call itself. Our set-up is much the same as last time (you may wish to read the first article if you’ve not already done so). We have a basic HTML page which links in the prototype.js file and our own editinplace.js. Here’s what Santa dropped down my chimney:
Edit-in-Place with Ajax
Edit-in-place
Dashing through the snow on a one horse open sleigh.
So that’s our page. The editable item is going to be the called desc. The process goes something like this:
Highlight the area onMouseOver
Clear the highlight onMouseOut
If the user clicks, hide the area and replace with a ';
var button = '
, which is not a fat lot of use. You can modify saveChanges() to post back whatever information your app needs to know in order to process the update.
You should also check the user’s credentials to make sure they have permission to edit whatever it is they’re editing. Basically the same rules apply as with any script in your application.
Limitations
There are a few bits and bobs that in an ideal world I would tidy up. The first is the error handling, as I’ve already mentioned. The second is that from an idealistic standpoint, I’d rather not be using innerHTML. However, the reality is that it’s presently the most efficient way of making large changes to the document. If you’re serving as XML, remember that you’ll need to replace these with proper DOM nodes.
It’s also important to note that it’s quite difficult to make something like this universally accessible. Whenever you start updating large chunks of a document based on user interaction, a lot of non-traditional devices don’t cope well. The benefit of this technique, though, is that if JavaScript is unavailable none of the functionality gets implemented at all – it fails silently. It is for this reason that this shouldn’t be used as a complete replacement for a traditional, universally accessible edit form. It’s a great time-saver for those with the ability to use it, but it’s no replacement.
See it in action
I’ve put together an example page using the inert PHP script above. That is to say, your edits aren’t committed to a database, so the example is reset when the page is reloaded.",2005,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2005-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/edit-in-place-with-ajax/,code
320,DOM Scripting Your Way to Better Blockquotes,"Block quotes are great. I don’t mean they’re great for indenting content – that would be an abuse of the browser’s default styling. I mean they’re great for semantically marking up a chunk of text that is being quoted verbatim. They’re especially useful in blog posts.
Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design,
was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations
for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
Notice that you can’t just put the quoted text directly between the
tags. In order for your markup to be valid, block quotes may only contain block-level elements such as paragraphs.
There is an optional cite attribute that you can place in the opening tag. This should contain a URL containing the original text you are quoting:
Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design,
was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations
for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
Great! Except… the default behavior in most browsers is to completely ignore the cite attribute. Even though it contains important and useful information, the URL in the cite attribute is hidden.
You could simply duplicate the information with a hyperlink at the end of the quoted text:
Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design,
was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations
for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
source
But somehow it feels wrong to have to write out the same URL twice every time you want to quote something. It could also get very tedious if you have a lot of quotes.
Well, “tedious” is no problem to a programming language, so why not use a sprinkling of DOM Scripting? Here’s a plan for generating an attribution link for every block quote with a cite attribute:
Write a function called prepareBlockquotes.
Begin by making sure the browser understands the methods you will be using.
Get all the blockquote elements in the document.
Start looping through each one.
Get the value of the cite attribute.
If the value is empty, continue on to the next iteration of the loop.
Create a paragraph.
Create a link.
Give the paragraph a class of “attribution”.
Give the link an href attribute with the value from the cite attribute.
Place the text “source” inside the link.
Place the link inside the paragraph.
Place the paragraph inside the block quote.
Close the for loop.
Close the function.
Here’s how that translates to JavaScript:
function prepareBlockquotes() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName || !document.createElement || !document.appendChild) return;
var quotes = document.getElementsByTagName(""blockquote"");
for (var i=0; i tags.
You can style the attribution link using CSS. It might look good aligned to the right with a smaller font size.
If you’re looking for something to do to keep you busy this Christmas, I’m sure that this function could be greatly improved. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Should the text inside the generated link be the URL itself?
If the block quote has a title attribute, how would you take its value and use it as the text inside the generated link?
Should the attribution paragraph be placed outside the block quote? If so, how would you that (remember, there is an insertBefore method but no insertAfter)?
Can you think of other instances of useful information that’s locked away inside attributes? Access keys? Abbreviations?",2005,Jeremy Keith,jeremykeith,2005-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/dom-scripting-your-way-to-better-blockquotes/,code
326,Don't be eval(),"JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design.
Common mistakes
Here’s the classic misuse of eval(). You have a JavaScript object, foo, and you want to access a property on it – but you don’t know the name of the property until runtime. Here’s how NOT to do it:
var property = 'bar';
var value = eval('foo.' + property);
Yes it will work, but every time that piece of code runs JavaScript will have to kick back in to interpreter mode, slowing down your app. It’s also dirt ugly.
Here’s the right way of doing the above:
var property = 'bar';
var value = foo[property];
In JavaScript, square brackets act as an alternative to lookups using a dot. The only difference is that square bracket syntax expects a string.
Security issues
In any programming language you should be extremely cautious of executing code from an untrusted source. The same is true for JavaScript – you should be extremely cautious of running eval() against any code that may have been tampered with – for example, strings taken from the page query string. Executing untrusted code can leave you vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.
What’s it good for?
Some programmers say that eval() is B.A.D. – Broken As Designed – and should be removed from the language. However, there are some places in which it can dramatically simplify your code. A great example is for use with XMLHttpRequest, a component of the set of tools more popularly known as Ajax. XMLHttpRequest lets you make a call back to the server from JavaScript without refreshing the whole page. A simple way of using this is to have the server return JavaScript code which is then passed to eval(). Here is a simple function for doing exactly that – it takes the URL to some JavaScript code (or a server-side script that produces JavaScript) and loads and executes that code using XMLHttpRequest and eval().
function evalRequest(url) {
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200) {
eval(xmlhttp.responseText);
}
}
xmlhttp.open(""GET"", url, true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}
If you want this to work with Internet Explorer you’ll need to include this compatibility patch.",2005,Simon Willison,simonwillison,2005-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/dont-be-eval/,code
327,Improving Form Accessibility with DOM Scripting,"The form label element is an incredibly useful little element – it lets you link the form field unquestionably with the descriptive label text that sits alongside or above it. This is a very useful feature for people using screen readers, but there are some problems with this element.
What happens if you have one piece of data that, for various reasons (validation, the way your data is collected/stored etc), needs to be collected using several form elements?
The classic example is date of birth – ideally, you’ll ask for the date of birth once but you may have three inputs, one each for day, month and year, that you also need to provide hints about the format required. The problem is that to be truly accessible you need to label each field. So you end up needing something to say “this is a date of birth”, “this is the day field”, “this is the month field” and “this is the day field”. Seems like overkill, doesn’t it? And it can uglify a form no end.
There are various ways that you can approach it (and I think I’ve seen them all). Some people omit the label and rely on the title attribute to help the user through; others put text in a label but make the text 1 pixel high and merging in to the background so that screen readers can still get that information. The most common method, though, is simply to set the label to not display at all using the CSS display:none property/value pairing (a technique which, for the time being, seems to work on most screen readers). But perhaps we can do more with this?
The technique I am suggesting as another alternative is as follows (here comes the pseudo-code):
Start with a totally valid and accessible form
Ensure that each form input has a label that is linked to its related form control
Apply a class to any label that you don’t want to be visible (for example superfluous)
Then, through the magic of unobtrusive JavaScript/the DOM, manipulate the page as follows once the page has loaded:
Find all the label elements that are marked as superfluous and hide them
Find out what input element each of these label elements is related to
Then apply a hint about formatting required for input (gleaned from the original, now-hidden label text) – add it to the form input as default text
Finally, add in a behaviour that clears or selects the default text (as you choose)
So, here’s the theory put into practice – a date of birth, grouped using a fieldset, and with the behaviours added in using DOM, and here’s the JavaScript that does the heavy lifting.
But why not just use display:none? As demonstrated at Juicy Studio, display:none seems to work quite well for hiding label elements. So why use a sledge hammer to crack a nut? In all honesty, this is something of an experiment, but consider the following:
Using the DOM, you can add extra levels of help, potentially across a whole form – or even range of forms – without necessarily increasing your markup (it goes beyond simply hiding labels)
Screen readers today may identify a label that is set not to display, but they may not in the future – this might provide a way around
By expanding this technique above, it might be possible to visually change the parent container that groups these items – in this case, a fieldset and legend, which are notoriously difficult to style consistently across different browsers – while still retaining the underlying semantic/logical structure
Well, it’s an idea to think about at least. How is it for you? How else might you use DOM scripting to improve the accessiblity or usability of your forms?",2005,Ian Lloyd,ianlloyd,2005-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/improving-form-accessibility-with-dom-scripting/,code
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 example) to make an impression, but that sure makes for a big character space.
Prepare the curlies
Firstly, remove the opening “ from the quote. Replace it with the opening curly quote character entity “. Then replace the closing “ with the entity reference for that, which is ”. Now at least the curlies will look nice and swooshy.
Add the hooks
Two reasons why we aren’t using :first-letter pseudo class to manipulate the curlies. Firstly, only CSS2-friendly browsers would get what we’re doing, and secondly we need to affect the last “letter” of our text also – the closing curly quote.
So, add a span around the opening curly, and a second span around the closing curly, giving complete control of the characters:
“ Speech marks. Curly quotes. That annoying thing cool people do with their fingers to emphasize a buzzword, shortly before you hit them.”
Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.
div.error {
background: #ffcccc url(../images/error_small.png) no-repeat 5px 4px;
color: #900;
border-top: 1px solid #c00;
border-bottom: 1px solid #c00;
padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 2.5em;
font-weight: bold;
}
Using this approach also makes it very easy to create a div.success and div.warning CSS rules meaning we have less to change in our HTML.
Nice, right?
No. Naughty.
Visual design communicates
The CSS is being used to convey very specific information. The choice of icon, the choice of background colour and borders tell us visually that there is something wrong.
With the icon as a background image – there is no way to specify any alt text for the icon, and significant meaning is lost. A screen reader user, for example, misses the fact that it is an “error.”
The solution? Ask yourself: what is the bare minimum needed to indicate there was an error? Currently in the absence of CSS there will be no icon – which (I’m hoping you agree) is critical to communicating there was an error.
The icon should be considered content and not simply presentational.
The borders and background colour are certainly much less critical – they belong in the CSS.
Lets change the code to place the image directly in the HTML and using appropriate alt text to better communicate the meaning of the icon to all users:
Your postal/zip code was not in the correct format.
div.bettererror {
background-color: #ffcccc;
color: #900;
border-top: 1px solid #c00;
border-bottom: 1px solid #c00;
padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 2.5em;
font-weight: bold;
position: relative;
min-height: 1.25em;
}
div.bettererror img {
display: block;
position: absolute;
left: 0.25em;
top: 0.25em;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
div.bettererror p {
position: absolute;
left: 2.5em;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
Compare these two examples of transactional messages
Status of a Record
This example is pretty straightforward. Consider the following: a real estate listing on a web site. There are three “states” for a listing: new, normal, and sold. Here’s how they look:
Example of a New Listing
Example of A Sold Listing
If we (forgive the pun) blindly apply the “use a CSS background image” technique we clearly run into problems with the new and sold images – they actually contain content with no way to specify an alternative when placed in the CSS.
In this case of the “new” image, we can use the same strategy as we used in the first example (the transaction result). The “new” image should be considered content and is placed in the HTML as part of the ... that identifies the listing.
However when considering the “sold” listing, there are less changes to be made to keep the same look by leaving the “SOLD” image as a background image and providing the equivalent information elsewhere in the listing – namely, right in the heading.
For those that can’t see the background image, the status is communicated clearly and right away. A screen reader user that is navigating by heading or viewing a listing will know right away that a particular property is sold.
Of note here is that in both cases (new and sold) placing the status near the beginning of the record helps with a zoom layout as well.
Better Example of A Sold Listing
Summary
Remember: in the holiday season, its what you give that counts!! Using CSS background images is easy and saves time for you but think of the children. And everyone else for that matter…
CSS background images should only be used for presentational images, not for those that contain content (unless that content is already represented and readily available elsewhere).",2005,Derek Featherstone,derekfeatherstone,2005-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/naughty-or-nice-css-background-images/,code