The Best Of The Internets

A great post from Chris Coyier:

I’m starting to think empathy really is one of the most valuable skills (if you can call it a skill) that you can have. If you can put yourself in another persons shoes, you can imagine what it’s like to use the things you make. That gives you mad UX skills. It means you can write a damn fine support email. You can make a meeting worth having. You can communicate clearly, because you can imagine what it’s like to receive that communication.

Empathy is where it’s at. Check out his list for ways to increase your “devvy” empathy.

Another fantastic resource from Adrian Roselli. This is a collection of diagnostic tools that

• Restore Link Underlines,
• Restore Focus Outlines,
• Find Inline Styles,
• Find Duplicate ARIA Roles, and
• Find Missing Alt Attributes.

If this sounds cool, you may also like his Accessibility Bookmarklets and Tools.

Matt offers us a nice round-up of new selectors that will likely be a part of the CSS 4 Selectors Module. Notable additions:

• :has - select an element based on children it contains,
• :matches - a more compact way to select elements via alternate selector paths,
• :not() in a stack - lets you combine multiple selectors not to match, using commas.
• Column selection

Adrian has put together a great overview of why lang is important and how many sites are using it. Here are a few takeaways:

1. VoiceOver on iOS uses the attribute to auto-switch voices.
2. VoiceOver can speak a particular language using a different accent when specified.
3. Leaving out the `lang` attribute may require the user to manually switch to the correct language for proper pronunciation.
4. JAWS uses it to load the correct phonetic engine/phonologic dictionary — Handy for sites with multiple languages.
5. NVDA (Windows) uses it in the same way as VoiceOver and JAWS.
6. When used in HTML that is used to form an ePub or Apple iBooks document, it affects how VoiceOver will read the book.
7. Firefox, IE10, and Safari (as of a year ago) only support CSS `hyphens: auto` when the `lang` attribute is set.

Thanks for putting this together Adrian!

Jeremy perfectly captures my feelings on most client-side MVC frameworks:

Angular is for making (possibly enterprise) applications that happen to be on the web, but are not of the web.

It is possible to have your cake and eat it too if you go the isomorphic JavaScript route though.

Jason Weber, Group Program Manager of Internet Explorer, provides a little more insight into “Project Spartan” and how Microsoft plans to balance consumer and enterprise needs.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words:

Christian Heilmann’s take on yesterday’s IE announcement, including a bit of historical context and a look toward the future of browsers killing stand-alone apps.

For me, however, the whole thing was a bit of an epiphany about browsers. I’ve always seen browsers as my main playground and got frustrated by lack of standards support across them. I got annoyed by users not upgrading to new ones or companies making that hard. And I was disappointed by developers having their pet browsers to support and demand people to use the same. What I missed out on was how amazing browsers themselves have become as tools for end users.