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Popular tags in this category: CSS, CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Techniques, Essentials, Tools.
We know how hard it is to find good useful tools that all of your developers and designers out there spend hours searching for. And for that reason, we're regularly collecting useful online web services, tools and resources — little time-savers that can boost every designer's workflow and save time that would otherwise be required for mundane tasks.
You might have seen some of these tools in our Twitter stream or on our Facebook page, but certainly not all of them. We've prepared the most useful ones (yet not necessarily the most beautiful ones) in this handy overview for your convenience. Please share any further tools with us and our readers in the comments to this post. As usual, we express sincere gratitude to all designers and developers out there who create, maintain and improve these tools as their little side projects. You really make the difference, guys. Thank you.
Read more...Adding interactivity and animations to a design doesn't have to be complicated or make the website inaccessible when you use modern Web standards. In this article, we’ll explore several examples and theories that employ CSS, HTML, SVG, the canvas element and JavaScript. Some of these techniques you'll know, others you may not have considered. Let's start with the basics.
Manipulating HTML with JavaScript is the most common method of adding interactivity to a website. But before you start using JavaScript, having a strong understanding of the CSS visual formatting model and box model is important. They are vital to making sense of how HTML elements can be manipulated visually. When you dynamically change the style of an HTML element, it will flow with and react to the rest of the document. Learning to anticipate and control what is affected can be difficult.
Read more...I've lost count of the number of posts that have been written about the big features of HTML5: amongst the most anticipated being rich media (video, audio, canvas) and JavaScript APIs. However, call me a woman of simple tastes, but this is not the sort of thing that gets me swooning. What does? The small additions to the spec that will make the world of difference to the way I code day-in, day-out. This is the stuff fairy tales are made of.
HTML has had a troubled past. It was never really designed for what we are now accomplishing with it. This is in part a testimony to its flexibility and adaptability, but there have been inevitable growing pains.
So what was it originally intended for? Well it’s there in the name: Hyper-Text Markup Language. Yes, text; hyper-text to be more exact. Not layout, or images, or video, or fonts, or menus — or any of the other frippery that it now incorporates.
Read more...Oops, we used the word "organized" in the title. Time to switch off — is probably what many would think. Being organized is a somewhat dull, though important, subject. Perhaps it would help to give it a bit of context.
Let's keep it classy, and imagine we're building a website for a trendy restaurant / café called "bEat", catering to the arts community. It's an atmospheric place with 1920's art on its interior brick walls, live jazz, and rich patrons. But they don't have a great website, so they've called you in to save the day. As a talented designer, you're confident you'll be able to pull a fantastic design together that they'll love, but they've got a lot of clever ideas about the website's functionality, and you're not quite so confident about how to organize all the files that your website will need.
Read more...Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course.
In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices. For many websites, creating a website version for each resolution and new device would be impossible, or at least impractical. Should we just suffer the consequences of losing visitors from one device, for the benefit of gaining visitors from another? Or is there another option?
Read more...In my last article, I spoke about several common mistakes that show up in web applications. Of these, the one that causes the most trouble is insufficient input validation/sanitization. In this article, I'm joined by my colleague Peter (evilops) Ellehauge in looking at input filtering in more depth while picking on a few real examples that we've seen around the web. As you'll see from the examples below, insufficient input validation can result in various kinds of code injection including XSS, and in some cases can be used to phish user credentials or spread malware.
To start with, we'll take an example[1] from one of the most discussed websites today. This example is from a site that hosts WikiLeaks material. Note that the back end code presented is not the actual code, but what we think it might be based on how the exploit works. The HTML was taken from their website. We think it's fair to assume that it's written in PHP as the form's action is index.php.
Read more...Delivering great presentations is an art, and preparing the slides for them very much so, too. But we’re not going to talk about that. We’re also not going to get into the debate about whether to use open or closed technologies to create slide decks — this is something you need to hash out yourself, and there are some interesting discussions going on.
What I will talk about is how I (and you, of course) can use the Web to find content for your talks, record them, share them with others and save them for future audiences. I’ll also explain how to share it all for free and how to convert closed formats into open ones by using the Web.
In 2010 I delivered a boatload of talks that people attended, downloaded, commented on and remixed for their own training sessions and presentations. I love to share my research and information, because when you set them free they can inspire and help others to get their own voices heard. Here’s how I did it.
Read more...Building a beautiful design is a great experience. Seeing the design break apart when people start putting in real content, though, is painful. That's why testing it as soon as possible with real information to see how it fares is so important. To this end, Web services provide us with a lot of information with which to fill our products. In recent years, this has been a specialist's job, but the sheer amount of information available and the number of systems to consume it makes it easier and easier to use Web services, even for people with not much development experience.
The problem with APIs is that access to them varies in simplicity, from just having to load data from a URL all the way up to having to authenticate with the server and give all kinds of information about the application you want to build before getting your first chunk of information.
Read more...Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: "Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We'll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye." The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by "Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue." That's your boss calling the hosting company's 24 hour "technical support" line.
An important website has gone down, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned "Linux" on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here's what to do.
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