#css

With any web site or application, speed is important, but it doesn’t live in a vacuum. If you get someone the content sooner, but it’s moving around so much that they can’t read it or interact with it, is it really worth getting it to them a little faster?

I keep my feet squarely planted in two worlds when it comes to development. One of those is all things front-end, and the other is Ruby (and Rails). With Ruby/Rails, they’re frequently maligned as a not-serious programming language/framework pair…

When it comes to sharing ideas that involve visual elements, source code, and unifying concepts that span disciplines, the friction to include different types of media and information makes technical writing rather tedious, and streamlining that process a bit has helped make it more enjoyable to write.

In our incessant rush to move quickly, everything is ephemeral. Technology moves so quickly that today’s strong favorite is outdated in a matter of years. We slurp up notifications and are fascinated by the next thing before we even fully understand the…

Prior to Sifter, I was a specialist. I needed to keep up with two or three high-level topics in order to stay current and not be left behind. I had a few RSS subscriptions and kept up with a few topics on Twitter. It wasn’t easy, but wasn’t impossible…

The full stack for a web application can be rather overwhelming, but it’s not quite as bad as you might think. If you look at this list knowing only a small portion of the items, it can be incredibly intimidating. Really, though, it’s an incremental…

One of my favorite topics is the influence of business decisions on interface design. It’s an unfortunate truth that the underlying business structure and decisions will invariably affect the interface. It’s important to recognize this fact and work to…

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve found it useful to include a color glossary at the top of CSS files. Think of it as a key for hex colors. Not only does this makes it easier to quickly find the color you’re looking for, but it inevitably helps…

it’s time for the second installment of Trick Your TextMate. We’re going to explore snippets and learn how you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts and tab triggers to cut down on those superfluous keystrokes. One of the features of TextMate…

While back-end technology has become more and more abstracted and powerful with frameworks like .Net, Rails, and their Java counterparts, the possibilities with front-end technology have grown increasingly complex. The web needs more front-end…

After writing about the blending of design and programming the other day, it really got me thinking. I really think web design, and almost everything in the world is just one big balancing act. In politics, for every extreme conservative, there’s…

I’m fascinated by the increasing frequency with which designers are becoming interested in programming. It seems that every day I’ll run across another designer who wants to write code. Now, I’m not talking about hacking a couple spots of code here and…

Is it any less impressive if somebody creates a beautiful CSS site that completely falls apart at a different font size? I sure think so. I’m not saying a site should hold its visual design together if somebody bumps up the text 5 or 6 notches, but if…

Now that “table” has become a bad word and many people have eliminated them from their repertoire, I wanted to shine a little more light on this misunderstood, but well-intentioned, piece of markup. Everybody is familiar with table, tr, and td tags, but…