I don’t care for infographics. Their original purpose of visually conveying otherwise complex information has been superseded by their current use as marketing drek with “quirky” illustrations, blocks of prose, and the occasional useful factoid. The love affair with inforgraphics is confounding to me as a web developer. They are…
I started this post way back in March after reading Brad Frosts’ bit on carousels. Then I let it sit unfinished. With the buzz around ShouldIUseACarousel.com this week, I figured I’d finish it up. The data is old, although I offer updated numbers at the bottom. The Process I looked…
Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do. As an individual you might not care too…
There is a nifty tool at MQtest.io which gives you a breakdown of how your device reports features you might use for media queries. To use the tool’s own explanation: This test isn’t about what media queries your device can or cannot see (but it does show an ‘unsupported’ label…
Yesterday Matt Cutts from Google tweeted that Google search results for users on smartphones may be adjusted based on the kinds of errors a web site produces (of course I was excited): Important: if your website has smartphone errors, we may change rankings for smartphone users: goo.gl/x8R4A #smx— Matt Cutts…
This post isn’t proposing any solutions (although I do toss out a hack). This post is a rant that I hope helps influence browser makers. Background Much of my web work isn’t for public facing web sites. Often it’s for enterprise-level software that is deployed via the web and used…
The image on the left is IE10 in desktop view, on the right is IE10 in Metro view, both on the same device and at the same dimensions and screen resolution. I worked pretty hard on our corporate site to test on as many devices and browsers as possible, trying…
On Friday, May 17 I had the pleasure of speaking for the first time at Stir Trek, a one-day conference in Columbus, Ohio, that drew over 1,200 attendees (and I understand sold out in just a few minutes). Apparently the name is a reference to the MIX developer conference, for…
As of today I am an author over at Web Standards Sherpa. I wrote an article discussing the process of juggling a no-budget, tight-timeframe web site for Buffalo Soccer Club while still trying to adhere to best practices. The article is titled “Balancing Act: Features, Budgets & Timelines.” I get a…
When I say “global,” I don’t necessarily mean the whole world, but really any aggregate pile of numbers for browsers that aren’t culled from your own site or project. With IE6 finally fading (which many developers will claim is a result of their IE6-blocking sites), the ire of developers has…
Twenty years ago, on April 30 1993, CERN announced the World Wide Web project. While the web existed before then, this was the first time that HTML’s specification was opened up to the general public, allowing anyone to learn how to mark up documents. Eight days and twenty years ago,…
20 years ago today (yesterday), NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released (read Marc Andreesson’s announcement on www-talk). Mosaic was the browser that opened the web to the masses, making the web more interesting for people like me. As a college student who used Usenet, FTP sites, struggled with WAIS, Archie and…