November 30th, 2011 is Blue Beanie Day. It’s a (quite literal) hat tip to Jeffrey Zeldman, his book Designing with Web Standards, and a show of support for web standards.
I regret to say that I’ve never participated in this before. But I’m totally in this year, and I’ll tell you why.
Tab Atkins (Twitter) is a member of the CSS working group and contributor to several other working groups in the W3C. He works for Google on the Google Chrome Team. Browsers and specs are the bones and blood of our industry so that makes Tab, uhm, a orthopedic surgeon, or something. I ask Tab about all that stuff, and more, below.
I’ve heard a number of people make statements lately like: “If you’re using Lorem Ipsum text, just stop it.” Or similar. That argument, expanded, goes something like this. Design exists to serve content. Lorem ipsum is fake content. If you’re already designing, and you are using fake content, you are not serving the content and thus not doing your job as a designer correctly.
I was recently putting together some CSS for columns. There was a few pre-determined widths that the columns needed to accommodate. For whatever reason (maybe because every grid framework in the world is this way) my mind went right to trying to find a common building block size. All columns are either the size of one building block or a multiple of a building block with gutter widths added.
Lea is a front end web developer from Greece. You have likely heard of her, as ever since she started blogging in English (read more about that below), she’s had quite a boom in popularity. Or perhaps you’ve seen some of her work. She’s created a number of one-page sites that either show off amazing things CSS can do or help you with a difficult/tedious task.
I asked Lea some questions about critical reaction to her work,…
In which I take a real example of somewhere I knew using sprites would be a good idea, create the sprite by hand in Photoshop (my preferred method), and then use SpriteCow to help with the exact position values needed to use the individual images. Pseudo elements are also used to help maintain accessibility.
Links from the video:
Henri Sivonen:
I think vendor prefixes are hurting the Web. They are hurting Web authors. They are hurting users of browsers. They are hurting competition in the Web browser space.
I'm tempted to raise my fist in disagreement, but you know what, I'm not an oracle. I can't know the future nor know how the world would have turned out if we never used vendor prefixes.
Here's a guess though: if we were to go back in time and influence the decision such that browsers agreed to never use vendor prefixes, we would be worse off. Less browser innovation, less of the spec implemented, and more serious cross-browser problems when some browsers jump the gun and implement specs prematurely.
Vendor prefixes, while being an eyesore and requiring maintenance, have saved us from a dystopian present (maybe).
Bret Victor:
Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?
I bet there is a couple things in this slide deck from Lea Verou that you didn't know about CSS3.
