Dispatches From The Internets

A recent study in of the UK came to the conclusion that over 90% of newspaper reading is still taking place in print. Their findings are based on a survey of 12 UK newspapers during the period of 2007–2011, examining National Readership Survey data, circulation audits from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and Neilsen data regarding web-based engagement.

When you’ve been evangelizing progressive enhancement for as long as we have, you invariably come across skeptics. Take this comment on Tim Kadlec’s recent (and well-argued) post about designing experiences that work without JavaScript:

This is all fine and dandy, but not very real world. A cost-benefit analysis has to happen — what does that next user/visitor cost, and more importantly earn you? This idealistic approach would leave most broke if they had to consider “every user” when building a site. That’s why clothes come in small, medium, large, and extra large. Most of us have to buy them that way because not everyone can afford a tailor made suit, much less an entire wardrobe. Your approach only works for those who can see the return.

A while back I came across a link to Sebastiano Armeli-Battana’s jQuery Asynchronous Image Loader (JAIL) and filed it away to revisit when I had some time. I finally made some time this weekend.

A little over a month ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was my second time speaking (and attending) the conference and I can honestly say it’s easily one of my favorites. Marc Thiele does an amazing job organizing the event and the speaker roster was nothing short of amazing.

Earlier today, Brad Frost posted a great piece touting the usefulness of interface inventories. I’ll give him the floor to explain:

An interface inventory is similar to a content inventory, only instead of sifting through and categorizing content, you’re taking stock and categorizing the components making up your website, app, intranet, hoobadyboop, or whatever (it doesn’t matter). An interface inventory is a comprehensive collection of the bits and pieces that make up your interface.

I’ll admit it: I never really got Siri.

Last week was a bit of a whirlwind: Kelly and I flew to Orlando, co-hosted a vegan chili cook-off with the Filament Group and lost the coveted trophy Kelly so lovingly created, launched a refresh of the website for the Registrar’s Office at Sewanee University, and I delivered a new talk and workshop at Breaking Development.

As you’ve probably heard, Opera has announced that they are abandoning their Presto rendering engine in favor of Webkit. CTO Håkon Wium Lie (you know, one of the guys who invented CSS) has stated that this will allow Opera’s resources to assist with the continued development and improvement of Webkit:

“It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”

A few smart folks have already put together their thoughts on responsive tables and, while I think the proposed methods are pretty good, I think there might be room for improvement. As such, I’ve been tinkering for a while and came up with the following strategy when it comes to tables.

Today, I have the honor of introducing you to the newest Easy team member: Jeff Bridgforth. Jeff comes to us from Bonnier, where he built websites for Popular Science, Popular Photography, Saveur, and Parenting. Being a former publishing guy myself, I’m delighted to be bringing someone on who has a solid grounding in content-rich websites.