Tag Archive / web development

• I’m Here…Again.

  I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal.

  James Baldwin – Letter from a Region in My Mind (1962)

  I’m a front-end developer.
  I will never work in an engineering team again.

  @iwilsonjr (3:06 AM · Oct 11, 2022) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/1369817620741033984

• The Last Five Years

  A response I gave to Heydon Pickering‏ (@heydonworks) on Twitter:

  I think about this as "Engineering is about solving problems. Design is about solving the right problems."

  @iwilsonjr (2:24 PM · Dec 12, 2018) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/1072935333329887233

• The State of Front-End Development in 2017 (…well, at least, my version of it…)

  A response I gave to Roger Johansson‏ (@rogerjohansson) on Twitter (please read through the whole thread):

  From my view, it seems that front-end development has split into two camps: one web-focused, one app-focused.

  @iwilsonjr (6:20 PM · Jul 8, 2017) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/883812973730570244

• A Brief Note on Responsive Design and Constraints

  (In response to Adam Silver’s Stop using device breakpoints)

  There are two points that I like to add –

  

  Content

  Content will always affect Constraints (i.e. breakpoints) and vice versa.

  What I do is a) use the familiar set of breakpoints as initial guesses and b) treat them as assumptions that need to be tested and verified.

  If you’re getting more breakpoints, maybe you need to reconsider your initial ones. Some may just need to be:

  1. Moved or
  2. Removed completely

  Experience

  This is probably more a developer than designer problem(?) but depends on your background. It comes down to hands-on knowledge of various devices.

  1. Don’t assume the device you have on hand is the one [definite] solutions. Just because you have an iPhone doesn’t mean everyone else does…sounds sensible but you’ll be surprised how many people don’t follow that advice. I have experience because most of my work involved non-American clients (more likely to see a Samsung than an iPhone).
  2. Comes back to testing on multiple devices – using BrowserStack (or other simulators) helps testing for both iOS/Android devices or just get a few old/borrowed devices on hand.

  The idea here is to get use to the idea of breakpoints as initial guides, not fixed points.

• A Brief Note on Container Queries and RWD

  Well, while making the first steps in writing my next lecture about responsive design, I came upon a Tweeter discussion last week. Ethan Marcotte, author/mastermind behind RWD, talked about container queries and his support for them. Very interesting read.

  Ethan Marcotte “On container queries.”

  I’ve heard about container queries before during the last year or two. But I decided to read this article with much more intent because of topic relevance.

  To describe container queries, you need to think about web apps/sites as a system. Changes via media queries are macro, that is, applied to the whole system. It’s what we been doing for years. We build the base (preferable mobile first but any sort of initial state we want) and apply changes at certain breakpoints. So when we write the following media queries:

  @media (global conditions/breakpoints #1) {

  … some changes here...

  }

  @media (global conditions/breakpoints #2) {

  … some changes here...

  }

  etc..

  what we are doing is

  

  Even though these changes are to certain areas such as footer/header/etc.., these are applied as if the whole app is one big container.

  But with container queries, we are applying changes at the micro level. Instead of the previous example, we are applying changes to local containers. The queries will be influenced by the container conditions, not by the overall viewport. So now instead of the previous model, we have the following:

  

  and with each part

  

  we are applying changes on the local level/containers. These media queries are not global and [could] be different from other containers. You could have a combination of global and local conditions in this system as well (don’t know if this would happen but you never know):

  

  As for the talk/lecture, nothing had really changed. The main focus of the talk is the “why’s” of what we do in terms of RWD. However, it is obviously something to think about further.

• The Secret Life of Forms

  

  Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/IvanWilson3/the-secret-life-of-form-67435952
  Lecture – https://cssdevconf2016.sched.com/event/7Q0d/the-secret-life-of-forms-secretforms

  One of the highlights of the year was lecturing for the first time at a conference. In this case, CSS Dev Conference at San Antonio, TX. Basically, I decided to take some advice and take a chance. After sending my proposal, I was shocked and thrilled to be selected via anonymous vote in July.

  Of course, getting the talk ready was even harder than the waiting. It took months of writing and editing and practice. But I was able to get it together and delivered it a small audience at the conference on October 17, 2016. This talk was about UX, coding, and forms. However, it was peppered with things that I’ve done during the last ten years.

  I also want to thank the other speakers at the conference in helping me not only relax but also giving me advice for speaking not just for the first time but also their experiences in giving lectures as well.

  And finally, I want to thank Christopher Schmitt, Ari Stiles, and Elizabeth Moore in helping me make my first-time experience as a lecturer a wonderful and memorable one. It means so much when for years I was attendee, to be not only speaking but giving back to the community that I respect.

  Thank you all 🙂

  

• The Content Problem

  When did it become acceptable to deny content, based on certain criteria, because it was inconvenient?