Resource types - Article

A Guide To The State Of Print Stylesheets In 2018

We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine. In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today.

Nutrition Cards for Accessible Components

A11Y Nutrition Cards is an attempt to digest and simplify the accessibility expectations when it comes to component authoring. Based on the WAI ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.

URL Validation in WordPress

If your WordPress website/theme/plugin allows users to submit URLs, and you’re not sanitizing them properly, you could have a whole host of security problems. On the flipside, if you’re removing too much, you might not be allowing valid URLs either.

On Designing and Building Toggle Switches

Yesterday I was working on creating the slides and accompanying demos for my upcoming Web Directions Code talk next week. One of the demos I’m creating is a basic proof of concept for a simple switch that is used to switch the theme of a UI from light to dark and vice versa. I liked, and was inspired, by the theme switch in the Medium app.

Detecting autofilled fields in Javascript

One of my colleagues is transitioning to the front-end team that I used to be a part of. To prepare him mentally for his journey into front-end development, I’ve been sending him a newsletter I call Front-End Hack of the Day. I’m posting them to Medium now for the world to enjoy.

UX And HTML5: Let’s Help Users Fill In Your Mobile Form (Part 1)

Do you test your forms on real users and real devices? If not, you should. Let’s take a look at some of the techniques that can help you take your forms to the next level and help users fill them in.

UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages

Streamline users’ path to products by providing clear, differentiating product information at all levels — from the homepage to product listing pages.

The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing

Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can’t automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process.

How do you mark up an accordion?

I made a poll on Twitter the other day asking the #lazyweb how they would mark up an FAQ section — or a list of questions and their corresponding answers. I specifically asked for markup suggestions. Turns out, people mark questions and answers up differently.

Internationalization techniques: Authoring HTML & CSS

This page lists links to resources on the W3C Internationalization Activity site and elsewhere that help you author HTML and CSS for internationalization. It is one of several techniques pages. You can see a list of updates to this document. You can also raise an issue about this page.

The font loading checklist

When I look back at the last four years that I’ve spent learning everything I could about web fonts and how web fonts load, I can distill it all down to a small checklist of ideals that I continue to chase.

Creating meaningful micro-interactions

While design solves universal problems, micro-interactions are the delightful moments your users have while using the product.

How I remember CSS Grid properties

The syntax for CSS Grid is foreign and hard to remember. But if you can’t remember CSS Grid’s syntax, you won’t be confident when you use CSS Grid. To wield CSS Grid effectively, you need to remember its properties and values.

17 top CSS animation examples

You’ve probably noticed the number of CSS animation examples featuring on websites has been on the rise lately. Animation is one of the key web design trends of 2018. All over the web, designers are getting creative and using CSS animations to bring personality to their sites, explain complex ideas quickly and easily, and guide their users’ actions.

10 steps to great UX testing

Evaluating the success of user experience strategies in a project requires a deep understanding of why decisions were made and what core goals motivated the project in the first place. Purpose is what provides context to data. Without that context, the data you review is always going to be clouded with your own personal bias and assumptions.

Being Shot Down Because of Accessibility Needs is Not Something Anyone Should Expect

Being deaf/hard of hearing means there is certain information I struggle to access. At a Contributor Day in Glasgow in September 2018 (an event where you get to contribute directly to WordPress, e.g. core software, theme support, privacy, translations, etc.), I have decided to get involved with the Accessibility team.

Responsive, accessible tables

This approach is different from others you may have seen in that it uses a valid <table> (and child elements) and acknowledges that screen readers no longer consider <table>s to be tables when you start messing with their display properties.

Offline POSTs with Progressive Web Apps

PWAs are web apps that look and feel like native apps — they’re installable, they load quickly, they can deliver push notifications, and they work offline. Caching POST requests is, at the time of this writing, an open issue in the Service Worker spec.

Which status code should I be using?

What could be simpler than returning HTTP status codes? Did the page render? Great, return 200. Does the page not exist? That’s a 404. Do I want to redirect the user to another page? 302, or maybe 301.

Redefining Lazy Loading: A smashing magazine review of Lazy Load XT

Why we should and shouldn’t use Lazy Load, and how to implement it. Images make up over 60% of an average page’s size, according to HTTP Archive. Images on a web page would be rendered once they are available.

The Specificity Graph

As we all (should) probably know by now, specificity is is one of CSS’ most troublesome features, and is an area that soon becomes hard to manage on projects of any reasonable size. Specificity is a trait best avoided, which is why we don’t use IDs in CSS, and we don’t nest selectors unless absolutely necessary.