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 Their original purpose of visually conveying otherwise complex information has been superseded by their current use as marketing drek with “quirky” illustrations, blocks of prose, and the occasional useful factoid.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…
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…
It’s old news by this Thursday morning, but in case you had not heard, Google is forking WebKit to make its own rendering engine, Blink. Opera will be using the Blink fork of WebKit as its rendering engine. A combination of people who are far smarter, far more well connected,…
A few months ago I had the pleasure of writing a piece for .net Magazine about print styles (Make your website printable with CSS). It was posted to .net’s web site last month and received an overwhelming one comment. That comment, however, summed up something I hear all the time:…
Web developers have been looking to call everything the new Internet Explorer for a while now. With Opera’s recent move to WebKit as its rendering engine (replacing Presto), even more developers are suggesting that WebKit is becoming the new IE. I think they are right, but for the wrong reasons.…
For those of us who put together print styles for our sites, we’ve probably tossed around the idea of embedding QR codes so that users can quickly get back to a page they have printed. In the hardcopy version of my article for .net Magazine, “Make your website printable with…
Opera is replacing its Presto rendering engine with WebKit (Chromium, really, when you factor in the V8 JavaScript rendering engine). Big news as of this morning. If you’ve been paying attention, it’s not really that big or news. About a month ago a video was leaked showing Opera using WebKit…
Last week I spent my Friday afternoon trying to get my head around how to apply ARIA properly to a tabbed interface. I even got so far as to map it out on my whiteboard and snap a photo so I could mull it over during the weekend. And then…