Issue 269October 07, 2008
Understanding Progressive Enhancement
by Aaron Gustafson
Concerned with content availability, overall accessibility, and mobile browser capabilities, designers and developers sought a new way to approach web development—a way that focused on the content and did more than just pay lip service to older devices.
Ten Years
by Jeffrey Zeldman
If you don’t like the music on the radio, start a band. If you don’t like the way existing publications are defining your profession, start a magazine. Ten years ago, we did just that.
Issue 268September 23, 2008
Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell
by Molly E. Holzschlag
We do not have an interoperable web. What we have is a glut of proprietary, closed, and protected stuff. While it’s sophisticated and interesting sometimes, it goes against the heart of what we came here to build in the first place: an accessible, interoperable web for all.
Test-Driven Progressive Enhancement
by Scott Jehl
Integrating capabilities testing into our development process allows us to take full advantage of state-of-the-art features without ruining the experience for the users of less capable browsers and devices.
Issue 267September 09, 2008
Look at it Another Way
by Indi Young
Mental models often fall prey to our assumptions and understanding of a field. When creating one, turn off your internal problem-solver and just listen to people. Allow patterns of behavior and motivation to reveal themselves to you.
Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case
by Jessica Enders
Don’t let personal preference, habit, or the (untested) status quo drive your design decisions—go out there and get some user data.
Issue 266August 26, 2008
Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
by Aaron Rester
Since at least Richard Saul Wurman’s 1996 book Information Architects, architecture has been the primary metaphor for how we think about what we do. By adding a new metaphor to our theoretical toolboxes, we can gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of what we create and how our users interact with it.
CSS Sprites2 - It's JavaScript Time
by Dave Shea
Cross-browser functionality is a bit of a freebie; jQuery works across most modern browsers, so everything you see here works in IE6+, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. We’ve also accounted for multiple graceful degradation scenarios.
Issue 265August 12, 2008
Putting Our Hot Heads Together
by Carolyn Wood
How can we transform discussion sections on major sites and online magazines from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration?
Deafness and the User Experience
by Lisa Herrod
Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. It won’t.
