A Dao of Web Design

What Zen was to the 70’s (most famously with motorcycle maintenance), the Tao Te Ching was to the 90’s. From Piglet and Pooh to Physics and back, many have sought sense in applying the Tao Te Ching to something (the Tao of Physics), or something to the Tao Te Ching (the Tao of Pooh). It can be a cheap trick, but lately it has struck me that there is more than a little to be understood about web design by looking through the prism of the Tao. Article Continues Below Daoism is a philosophy, like Buddhism, a way of living, of being in the world, which stems from a text of great antiquity, the Tao Te Ching, whose 81 “chapters” enigmatically sweep across human experience, but with a strong common theme, that of harmony. For the last couple of years, for better or worse, my life has revolved more than a little around style sheets. What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. Same old new medium? Controlling web pages#section2 [The Sage] The Way#section5

Marquee element An example of an HTML marquee displaying the text "Wikipedia" Usability problems[edit] Marquee can be distracting.[1] The human eye is attracted to movement,[2] and marquee text is constantly moving. As with the blink element, because the marquee tagged images or text are not always completely visible, it can make printing such webpages to a paper hard-copy an impossible and inefficient task where the specific printed pages where the messages on screen scroll or blink have to be printed multiple times to capture all the pieces of text that could be displayed at any one given moment in time. Because marquee text moves, links within it are more difficult to click than those in static text, depending on the speed and length of the scrolling. Users only get one chance every time it scrolls past. Attributes[edit] Unlike its blinking counterpart, the marquee element has several attributes that can be used to control and adjust the appearance of the marquee. Align Behavior Bgcolor Direction Width Loop

html5shiv - HTML5 IE enabling script Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses Full original, uncompressed source available here: Source code adds new HTML5 elements (which is simple code), but also supports printing HTML5 elements and includes the default styles for HTML5 elements, like block on article and section. Getting it to work in the browser was easy, @jon_neal and afarkas made IE actually print HTML5 elements - these guys are to take all the credit. Please take a moment to thank them! To use this script, download the html5shiv and roll it in to your own code (ideally minified). Common question: what's the difference between the html5shim and the html5shiv?

Designing CSS Layouts With Flexbox Is As Easy As Pie Advertisement This article is an updated excerpt of the chapter “Restyle, Recode, Reimagine With CSS3″ from our Smashing Book #3, written by Lea Verou and David Storey. — Ed. Flexible box layout (or flexbox) is a new box model optimized for UI layout. As one of the first CSS modules designed for actual layout (floats were really meant mostly for things such as wrapping text around images), it makes a lot of tasks much easier, or even possible at all. Flexbox has lived a storied existence. There are, however, some caveats. When you specify that an element will use the flexbox model, its children are laid out along either the horizontal or vertical axis, depending on the direction specified. Example: Horizontal And Vertical Centering (Or The Holy Grail Of Web Design) <! Nothing special here, not even a wrapper div. I’ve included all of the different prefixed versions in the CSS above, from the very oldest, which is still needed, to the modern and hopefully final syntax. Enabling Flexbox (al)

scottjehl/picturefill Aspects & Reference (speaker website) Box Sizing The "box model" in CSS works like this: width + padding + border = actual visible/rendered width of box height + padding + border = actual visible/rendered height of box It's a little weird, but you get used to it. In IE 6 and earlier, when in "quirks mode," the box model was treated differently. width = actual visible/rendered width of box height = actual visible/rendered height of box The border and padding values moved inward, cutting into the width/height of the box rather than expanding it. It was weird quirk to have to deal with, although the fix was usually as easy as setting a proper DOCTYPE and getting out of quirks mode. The mind bending continues with the modern implementation. If you wanted to ensure the box kissed the edges of the parent, but still use a 100% width declaration, you'd have to set the child divs width to 476px. This <div> pseudo markup only takes us so far, because the answer of course is to not use a 100% width declaration. I would love a different box model!

(slides) Rocking RWD One Site. Every User. Every Device. Who am I? ( Josh Broton! Interactive Design Lead / Front-End Developer at VistaComm in Sioux Falls, SD Freelance: Design, front-end development, UX audits Front-end developer for KidBlog.org Largest educational blog system in the world 3rd largest WP Multisite install in the world (unconfirmed)Largest WP MultiSite with single db in the world Computer & Network Security / Computer Science at DSU joshbroton.com twitter.com/joshbroton Responsive == ? A flexible, grid-based layout Flexible images and media Media queries used to determine layout Why RWD? The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. -John Allsopp in "A Dao of Web Design" Why Do Responsive? What does he mean by "the ebb and flow of things?" How do you access the Internet? Some Stats Desktop vs. Impact?