Christmas time is the time to relax and think about all the stuff that happened in the last year. We see the rise of HTML5, it is now virtually everywhere, and that’s a good thing. We see responsive web design on more and more large scale projects and that is a good thing, too. …

Do as much as you can directly. Then it’s off of your mind, and you can relax and do something else. Next time you feel overwhelmed, don’t waste your strength on that feeling, or, at times, not even getting an overview of the situation. — Robert Nyman Very good article about …

Good tips for designing presentations by Idan Gazit. I tend to do my presentation in a similar way, and I think it’s important to emphasize the speak part instead of slides. They have to be well done, but they are just the underlying theme of the presentation. From the article: …

[In the film Matrix,] Morpheus alludes to the fact that the reality that Neo is accustomed to is a lie and that Morpheus can show him the truth. He is asked to make a choice between two pills, red and blue. The blue pill will cause him to “wake up in [his] bed and believe …

Speaking at the FronteersJam for the third time this year was really a blast again. Instead of talking about accessibility again like in 2010 and 2011, I opted for a more general theme: Defaults. Or making choices beforehand, so your life gets easier because you already know …

Jason Santa Maria about the reasons why baseline grids are not native to the web and should be avoided: It’s incredibly difficult to maintain a baseline grid in a medium as inconsistent and fluid as a web page. Images, form elements, rendering differences between browsers and …

Matthias Pfefferle collected some specifications which are gone by now: - MicroID POSHFormats MicroJSON Portability Policy Microsyntax AXSchema.org Monkeyformats.org Bioformats The problem is not that they weren’t adopted, but that there are no traces of the thought process that …

As you may or may not have noticed, there is activity again on this blog. The reason is easy: I want to twitter less, taking stuff back into my own hands. Of course Twitter’s recent moves toward a secret-service protected walled garden with laser guns on the door helped to make …

I think Thomas Baekdal is exactly right: They think they found the best design, now they need only to realign and tweak. If you expect Apple to come out with a completely new design, you haven’t been paying attention to what Apple has done for the past 7 years. They don’t …

During a standoff between the W3C groups responsible for HTML and ARIA, Sam Ruby (Co-Chair of the HTML WG) suggested that the entirety of ARIA be removed from the HTML5 spec until sometime in the future when Issue-30 could be amicably resolved. This is absurd! It’s like throwing …

A List Apart is out with a fantastic overview of game console’s browsers, by Anna Debenham. Installing a browser on a game console really opens up your mind about the futurefriendly web, as they are capable of almost nothing modern browsers can do, yet often have surprisingly …

SlidesI held a similar talk to the one at FrontendUnited at “beyond tellerrand — play!” in Cologne the same week. It went quite well and @marcthiele was an awesome host. Learned a lot about Flash techniques and general playing with technologies at that conference, so a really …

SlidesThanks to @mortendk for asking me to speak at this nice conference in Amsterdam. It was really nice to see so many frontend people discussing over the future of Drupal. A sign that we chose the right system. Here’s what Morten had to say about my talk: > the …

… says Andy Budd, and I think he is somewhat right. The browser itself is no design tool, you don’t have that much possibilities to be creative efficiently. But it depends on the definition of what “designing in the browser” actually is. For me, the PSD I get is almost every …

Just quickly announcing AccessifyHTML5.js is now online in version 1.0. Biggest feature: Documentation! ;-) You’re now able to add role=“main” to your main content and the script stops changing your HTML role attributes if there are some present.

Really looking forward to all those OpenType font features in Browsers. I wonder how long it takes until we can chose stylistic sets in font services like Fontdeck. Another question is how much weight they add to the font file. Web designers have had access to OpenType features …

I’ve just pimped my RSS feed to directly include links and some fancy UTF-8 icons to indicate if it is a link or article. You can now click directly on the title of a link post (like this one) and you won’t be redirected through my site. Please note that I’ve abandoned …

For what it’s worth, it’s stuff like [vertical media queries] that gets me excited about the future of web design. We’re leaping past any point where the word webpage makes any sense, and into a a world where what is seen at any one screen size (or Photoshop comp) only captures …

Please note: There is a follow-up to this article, which provides a much simpler and cleaner solution than anything noted in this article, which still provides some good points regarding before and after and Screen Readers: “The best way to use icon fonts”. There are some …

Wonderful video about hearing dogs and how they help deaf people in their homes: