Responsive Design News

Keep up with the latest news and developments around responsive design and the new direcitons that web designa and development are taking.

Going Offline

I’ve already read the first chapter (and potentially a few more chapters in a pre-release… it’s so good) and for me this is the best ABA book since the release of Edition 4 (RWD by Ethan). This article is the extract of that chapter which explains what Service Workers are and how they relate to […]

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A Quick Way to Remember the Difference Between `justify-content` and `align-items`

I’m the same as Robin and use to always forget these. My way of remembering which one is which is going back to left align, right align, or justifying text. When you justify text it stretches it across the horizontal axis. Robin’s approach is different, but what ever works for you (and stops the inevitable […]

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Cutting the Mustard with CSS Media Queries

In the past we’ve used a javascript check to define the types of things we might load onto a page. The idea is that certain modern browsers support new things, and if those new things are supported you could reasonably expect the browser was new enough to do all the fancy stuff you wanted… so […]

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Measuring the Hard-to-Measure

Have you ever wondered how many people are printing out your web pages? Me neither, but if you did want to know who was printing your web pages it might be difficult to work that out. In this tutorial, Harry Roberts shows you how you can do that with tracking pixels.

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Google and HTTP

I’m a big fan of moving over to HTTPS in favour of staying on HTTP. This mainly comes down to two reasons: I want to run on http2 and it requires https; and I want to use Service Workers and have an offline progressive web ap… which also requires HTTPS. I’d never thought of the […]

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Minimal viable service worker

Jeremy, with the help of Jake, has developed a MVP for the service worker. It allows HTML to always be requested from the server, and if there’s an issue it goes to the cache (and adds a new version to the cache each time it visits the network version). It does the same for files, […]

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Create a visual AMP story

Google has increased the capabilities of their proprietary AMP webpage format and are now competing with Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat for the creation of stories. For me this is where Google have put a stake in the ground to no longer be all about making faster expereinces for users, and instead are building a technology […]

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The Two Faces of AMP

Tim looks at the two sides of AMP. Is it a tool for the open web, or is it a tool for Google Search? My favourite part is “If AMP makes performance better, that’s fantastic! Let’s incentivize good performance in the rankings. Let’s incentivize the goal, not the tool.”

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HTTPS or bust: Chrome’s plan to label sites as “Not Secure”

If you’re running a website and not using HTTPS the time to do something about it is NOW. Google is, as of July 2018, going to mark non-https sites as “Not Secure”. This provides a big doubt in your users minds that you are a trustworthy service and will have a significant impact upon your […]

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Everything Easy is Hard Again

A wonderful essay from Frank Chimero based on a recent talk he gave around the current state of the web. As always, Frank gets to the heart of an issue and covers it in an informative, captive, and witty way.

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CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2

Although the CSS Grid has only just (relatively speaking) hit browsers they’re already well on the way to working out what the CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2 should contain. If you’ve started building with Grid, and I highly recommend you should, then head along to this link they voice any opinions you might have […]

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How to Scope Work

This is a great article by Dan around the best approach to scoping a website build (or anything for that matter). Breaking it down logically into chunks allows us to see the components, and down further and further until you can see if you’re able to get it done within the time (if not, increase […]

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Introducing the new Small Multiples website

If you’re redesigning your site and thinking about the potential move to a new platform then this article on the review of static site generators is a great read. Big sites, like Smashing Magazine, have moved over to the static approach and it’s interesting to see how different sites deal with different teething problems.

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Now You See Me: How To Defer, Lazy-Load And Act With IntersectionObserver

There’s not a lot more I can include in addition to the article title…. but IntersectionObserver is definitely going to be a big thing this year as the support picks up.

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Circularity and Container Queries

This is fundamentally why it is taking so long to get to container queries. Aside from the recursion issue, it’s actually really expensive for the browser (from a performance/rendering point of view) to incorporate it at this point.

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GDPR and Google Analytics

I think this is a really interesting point from Jeremy. The whole point of GDPR is to get a users consent to track any information about them, and with Google Analytics setting tracking cookies for all visitors cross site will we need to gain consent for that as well? If so, who’s responsible… is it […]

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360° videos

If you’re adding 360 videos to your site using the <video> tag then you should also drop in the ‘dimension’ attribute as well.

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Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2017 refresh

A couple of weeks ago we featured lynnandtonic.com with its 21 different layouts and brilliant use of CSS Grid Layout. While I was preparing a review of the site and trying to reverse engineer how it was put together, Lynn has written an overview of the process herself. Thanks Lynn!

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Mental Illness in the Web Industry

I lost my best friend to mental illness a few years ago. It was, and still is, a tragedy and one which I’m not sure I’ll ever fully get over. Mental Health/Illness is a very serious issue, both in and outside of the web industry. If you ever struggle with mental health please know that […]

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A Pinterest Progressive Web App Performance Case Study

Pinterest’s new mobile web experience is a Progressive Web App. In this post we’ll cover some of their work to load fast on mobile hardware by keeping JavaScript bundles lean and adopting Service Workers for network resilience.

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