Now that the (Western, my favorite) holiday season is upon us, the tradition of advent calendars whose chocolate is replaced with web-related tips and articles is back. This year’s crop is missing some from last year, but there’s still good stuff to be found. If you know of any others,…
We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook’s CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less). Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook’s…
I have been working on a slow and plodding redesign of my personal site and am playing around with some navigation ideas. I wanted to create a JavaScript-free and image-free radial menu, an idea I toyed with a couple years ago and abandoned due to the lack of CSS support…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
Stuck for ideas for an article? Did you hear that Facebook’s IPO isn’t netting them enough billions of dollars and so is referred to as a failure? Have you heard about the hot new technique for making generic sites mobile-friendly? Need to get people to click through to your article…
Many organizations don’t have the budget to guide them through a full translation / localization project, and some don’t even know where to start. In late 2009 I wrote about low/no-cost options from Google (machine translation) and Facebook (human-powered): Facebook and Google Want to Translate Your Site A new option…
On Wednesday news broke that Opera was going to support some Webkit CSS vendor prefixes. On its surface I thought this wasn’t exactly big news. There was a good deal of hubbub about this back in February (Browser Makers Caving to Vendor Prefix Misuse) when word got out that Mozilla,…
StatCounter released data on Wednesday showing that the screen resolution of 1,366 x 768 has surpassed 1,024 x 768 as the most common screen resolution. If you’ve paid attention to the drive for widescreen displays on newer machines, this may not come as much of a surprise to you. I…
The graphic above (and its lengthy alt) is a parody based on a rather neat utility called the HTML5 Please API. You can drop the code onto your cutting edge demo site and it will indicate to a user what browsers support the features within. The code stays current by…
The latest article that uses absolutes and broad generalizations to imply an otherwise non-existent struggle between Flash and HTML5 is from UX Booth, “What the Demise of Flash Means for the User Experience.” To be fair to this article, I see regular missives on Flash vs. HTML5 and this particular…