Introducing EnhanceJS: A smarter, safer way to apply progressive enhancement. Posted by Scott on 02/09/2010 Topics: accessibility announcements dwpe book javascript progressive enhancement usability As we discuss in our new book, Designing with Progressive Enhancement, and in previous articles and presentations, building with progressive enhancement is essential to ensuring a usable experience for all. Introducing EnhanceJS, a JavaScript framework designed specifically to deliver a usable experience to the widest possible audience, by testing the browser to determine whether it is capable of correctly supporting a range of essential CSS and JavaScript properties, and delivering features only to those that pass the test. We're releasing EnhanceJS as an open source (MIT license) project to allow everyone to start building sites with test-driven progressive enhancement. What is EnhanceJS? EnhanceJS is written with plain old JavaScript, so it has no dependencies, and works alongside other JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, Prototype and Dojo.
How does it work? Sweet! Graceful degredation versus progressive enhancement - W3C Wiki. Introduction In this part of the Web Standards Curriculum we discuss the difference between two development approaches: graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. Putting things simply, here are working definitions: Graceful degradation Providing an alternative version of your functionality or making the user aware of shortcomings of a product as a safety measure to ensure that the product is usable. Progressive enhancement Starting with a baseline of usable functionality, then increasing the richness of the user experience step by step by testing for support for enhancements before applying them. We’ll start by explaining the need for these techniques.
“Mobilis in mobile” — moving in a constantly changing environment Just like Captain Nemo from “20,000 Leagues under the Sea”, web developers find themselves in a constantly changing and fluctuating environment that can be pretty hostile to what we try to achieve. We work in the unknown and we need to find a way to make it work. The orientation media query. Page last changed today Right now Jason Grigsby’s excellent summary of the orientation media query is making the round of blogs and tweets, and that’s well deserved.
Media queries will become extremely important in the near future, when we have to build websites that work on any device resolution from 300px to 1280px or more. Still, there’s one tiny nitpick I’d like to make, so that you fully understand when to use orientation and when to use device-width. orientation is supported by Android 2, Bolt, MicroB, and Firefox. And now, apparently, by the iPad. I’ve often discussed media queries with Vodafone in Düsseldorf, and in the end the consensus was that orientation is relatively useless, and that we should use device-width instead. First of all, device-width is vastly better supported. Secondly, device-width tells you what you need to know, while orientation doesn’t. That’s exactly what device-width tells you.
There’s no way you can figure that out with only orientation. Concluding: Foreground images that scale with the layout. This tutorial is slightly adapted from Chapter 9 of my book, Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS. You can download most of Chapter 9 for free as a PDF at the Flexible Web Design companion site, as well as download the HTML, CSS and image files that go along with this tutorial. Since the area available for an image to display within a flexible layout changes on the fly, your images may need to as well.
While fixed-width images can work within flexible layouts—as long as they’re not too large, or you have matching minimum widths in place—there are lots of ways you can dynamically change the screen area that an image takes up. One way to dynamically alter the footprint of an image is to make it literally scale, based on either the text size or the changing dimensions of its parent element. Notice that this img element has no width or height attributes, as it normally would. For a liquid image, create a CSS rule to set the image’s width to a percentage value: 35 Responsive Web Design and Development Tutorials. These days, everyone is using a different device, browser and screen size when browsing the web. Whether it’s large format displays and multiple monitors, or tablets and smart phones, keeping track of all the possible sizes your website could be viewed at is almost impossible. Responsive website design can be the answer in many cases. A responsive website means quite literally that it responds properly to all devices and screen sizes.
It is done by scaling down or re-organizing content on the page using some CSS and HTML trickery, in order to create the best possible user experience on your site. Responsive design and development are still a bit new, even among the web guru community. Howeever customers start asking for it and good news is that there are some great tutorials, guides and responsive tools out there, that I’ve gathered up here for you. Advertisement Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It Okay, so what is responsive design and how do I use it? Fluid Images. Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It. Advertisement Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website.
It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices. Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.
The Concept Of Responsive Web Design Ethan Marcotte1 wrote an introductory article about the approach, “Responsive Web Design992,” for A List Apart. Transplant this discipline onto Web design, and we have a similar yet whole new idea. Adjusting Screen Resolution Flexible Images (al) (vf) Mattkersley/Responsive-Menu. How to Create a Responsive Navigation. One of the trickiest parts to be responsified on a website is “the Navigation”, this part is really important for the website accessibility, as this is one of the ways visitors jump over the web pages. There are actually many ways to create responsive web site navigation and even some jQuery plugins are available to do it in a second. However, rather than applying an instant solution, in this post, we are going to walk you through on how to build a simple navigation from the ground and using the CSS3 media queries and a little jQuery to display it in a small screen size like the smartphones properly.
So, let’s just get started. First of all, let’s add the meta viewport inside the head tag. This meta viewport tag is required for our page to scale properly inside any screen size, particularly in the mobile viewport. …and then add the following snippet as the navigation markup inside the body tag. As you can see above, we have six primary menu links and added one more link after them. Styles. 35 Responsive Web Design and Development Tutorials. 30 Useful Responsive Web Design Tutorials. So we’ve reached the end of our “Responsive Web Design week”, tonight’s post will be the last of the series.
We are going all out to help you hone your skills in manipulating those codes to respond at will when displayed on different devices. And to do this, we are featuring 30 Responsive Web Design Tutorials found online. This list is not meant to be an exhaustive one but it will get you started on understanding the basics of designing an adaptive website that will cater to all sorts of screen sizes.
We’ll start off with introductory tutorials in ‘Breaking the Ice’, something like an RWD: 101 class you should attend to get the hang of the concept before we move on to ‘Start Building’ exercises. Lastly we’ll end with a ‘Do More’ section in which we’ll feature tutorials that play with horizontal layouts, ‘elastic’ videos, drop-down menus and slide-to-top accordion navigations, thumbnails and the sticky issue with tables.
But first… Responsive website Navigation Responsive Resume Fluid Grids. 7 Essential Books on Responsive Web Design You Do Not Want to Miss. For those of you who want to depeen your knowledge and development of Responsive Design technique, we recommend a selection of 7 reference books about it, which you can purchase via the Internet. Of course, the first one we would like to emphasize is the origin of Ethan Marcotte, "Responsive Web Design", published by A List Apart. Smashing Magazine has also undertaken, as always, a great job of editing and reporting with its fantastic collection of books on responsive design techniques.
Finally, also noteworthy is Cristian Darie's guide to developing this technique for mobile applications with AJAX and PHP. Responsive Web Design From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting your sites from an increasing array of devices and browsers. Are your designs ready? Learn how to think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs. Responsive Web Design. The English architect Christopher Wren once quipped that his chosen field “aims for Eternity,” and there’s something appealing about that formula: Unlike the web, which often feels like aiming for next week, architecture is a discipline very much defined by its permanence. Article Continues Below A building’s foundation defines its footprint, which defines its frame, which shapes the facade. Each phase of the architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the last. Creative decisions quite literally shape a physical space, defining the way in which people move through its confines for decades or even centuries.
Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. Our work is defined by its transience, often refined or replaced within a year or two. But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. In recent years, I’ve been meeting with more companies that request “an iPhone website” as part of their project. A flexible foundation#section1 . Home - schema.org. The orientation media query. Responsive Web Design Techniques, Tools and Design Strategies.
Advertisement Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. Hardcover, 312 pages. Get the book now! Back in January, we published an article on responsive design, Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How to Use It1. Responsive design continues to get a lot of attention, but considering how different it is from the “traditional” way of designing websites, it can be a bit overwhelming for those designers who have yet to try it. To that end, we’ve compiled this round-up of resources for creating responsive website designs.
Further Reading on SmashingMag: Link Responsive Design Techniques Link CSS Transitions and Media Queries5 Elliot Jay Stocks provides insight into the combination of CSS media queries and CSS transitions. Responsive Images, Responsive Videos Link Resizeable Images (At Full Resolution!) Last Click Link. Coding a Responsive Resume in HTML5/CSS3. Almost everybody in the business section has created a resume at some point. When working as a freelancer you are always vying to land new projects. Because of this transitory work cycle it helps to offer potential clients a brief peek into your past experience. And what a better opportunity than offering your professional resume online? In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can build a responsive single-page resume layout.
Building the Document I’m starting the webpage with an HTML5 doctype and standard meta elements. The meta viewport tag is crucial for getting the responsive technique to work on smartphones. I have also setup a small IE conditional which includes some open source scripts for legacy browsers. Main Content Blocks The whole document is wrapped in a div with many various block sections inside. As you resize the page these block elements fall beneath each other gracefully. Before we jump into detailed CSS I want to explain more about the use of microdata.