After a decade of JavaScript library work, the progressive-enhancement revolution, the advent of polyfills, and the effort to birth the “Web Components” and “Shadow DOM” specifications have taught us surprising lessons: In every period, being able to use features in both high- and low-level forms has always been desirable. HTML is great, until it isn’t. And JavaScript-only has predictable drawbacks. Thinking that there is a “right way” to build new Web features is seductive. Turns out, it’s not that simple.
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Events can be triggered on any part of a document. They don’t just start and end in one place; they flow though the document. This life cycle is what makes DOM events so extensible and useful. As developers, we should understand how DOM events work, so that we can harness their potential and build engaging experiences. In this article, Wilson Page will introduce the basics of working with DOM events, then delve into their inner workings, explaining how you can make use of them to solve common problems.
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If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Therefore we invested eight months conducting a large-scale usability research study on the product-finding experience. We set out to explore how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce websites. Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would abandon websites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise guidelines in a report titled “Homepage & Category Usability.” In this article, we’ll go over seven of the guidelines.
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If you are launching a product, then your aim should be to make your product something that people would be happy to buy. You can then begin to develop additional features based on what customers actually want and need. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains, based on her own experience, how to start with a new product, develop and support it over time. She’ll describe how it is possible to launch with a really small product and grow from those small beginnings by listening to your customers.
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With the release of Ember.js 1.0, it’s just about time to consider giving it a try. This article aims to introduce Ember.js to newcomers who want to learn more about the framework. Users often say that the learning curve is steep, but once you’ve overcome the difficulties, then this framework is tremendous.
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This article is the third part of an article series about improving your design workflow in Adobe Fireworks with some of the best extensions currently available. You may want to check out the first and second parts if you’re not already familiar with them.
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In this article, CJ Gammon talks about the CSS Regions specification, which provides new options for web designing. We are largely constrained by the layout features available to us. Content placed inside a container will often extend the container vertically. If a design requires elements to remain a certain height, then our options are limited. In these cases, we can only add a scroll bar or hide the overflow. Let’s solve this problem!
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In this article, we are honoured to present to you Nice Things a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that Chris Behr came up with while playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. He casually divided a square into a grid and then randomly colored it. Then he combined the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling. Let’s see the results!
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As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration, and we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than usual. We’re very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for November 2013.
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As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support.
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