Dispatches From The Internets

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with CSS3 transforms these days, but I often struggle with explaining the importance of function order when I am training people on how to use them. Transformation functions are a visual thing, so they require a visual tool to fully understand them and the implications of your function order decisions.

If you know me, you know I am a pretty indecisive guy. It is not uncommon for Kelly and I to spend 15 minutes or more just trying to figure out where we want to grab a meal.

One of the biggest headaches of responsive design has been dealing with images. Thankfully our work on the Responsive Images Issues Community Group has resulted in a rock-solid set of elements and attributes to address all of your adaptive image needs. My company, Easy Designs, recently redesigned Nichols College’s website and that project just happened to coincide adaptive images landing in Blink (the rendering engine that powers Chrome and Opera). Naturally, we jumped at the opportunity to use them.

While I am really happy with my choice to move away from a dynamic website/blog to a static one—powered by Octopress, hosted for free on Github—it’s been pretty limiting when it comes to integrating comments and other more necessarily dynamic components.

My good friend Jeremy is incredibly excited about the Indie Web movement and I am right there with him. I love the idea of owning your content and then syndicating it out to social networks, photo sites, and the like. It makes complete sense… Web-based services have a habit of disappearing, so we shouldn’t rely on them. The only Web that is permanent is the one we control.

I gave this speech as the closing keynote at A11yQC, a conference on Web accessibility, on 14 October 2014 in Québec City, Canada. I have published my script here as the slides can’t really convey its message on their own. We, as an industry, tend to have a pretty myopic view of experience. Those of us who work day-to-day in accessibility probably have a broader perspective than most, but I would argue that even we all fall short now and again when it comes to seeing the Web as others do.

Last night, while we were enjoying a cool evening and a few drinks outside after day 1 of BDConf, Jeremy asked me for some clarification on the ARIA attributes I had demoed as part of my forms presentation earlier in the afternoon. In particular, he was confused by how aria-labelledby and aria-describedby differ.

I’ll level with you: I used to think I wanted variables in CSS. As a programmer, I love the idea of being able to abstract reusable bits like colors, border widths, font sizes, and the like to obviously named variables. It’s a far more DRY approach and makes maintenance far easier.

In case you missed it, yesterday Pierre Far updated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In his post, Pierre lays out their case for progressive enhancement:
> Just like modern browsers, our rendering engine might not support all of the technologies a page uses. Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement as this helps our systems (and a wider range of browsers) see usable content and basic functionality when certain web design features are not yet supported.