Back in October of last year Google Apps underwent a fairly extensive redesign. The overall intent of this realignment was to improve the user interface design, which has traditionally seemed to be a stumbling point for Google.

Personally I think the new designs are excellent and really appreciate the fact that they address my need to access my Google Apps from a variety of devices. I also like the fact that they allow me my own preference for the visual density of content within the page.

In fact this is such a killer feature that I reverse engineered it to better understand it. I’ll be looking to use this knowledge in some of my future work. Whilst I wouldn’t really refer to this deconstruction as such, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Unfortunately, due to extensive work commitments, I’ve only just gotten around to writing up my work…

Read more of “User-controlled content density”…

Back in April 2007, I wrote a short article on HTML element identifiers for the .net magazine “Expert Advice” section. I have never republished it online—despite it being 400 words, nicely to the point and suitably succinct—and have long been meaning to reexamine the subject in more detail.

By a total coincidence a discussion in a recent front-end code review and a discussion over the past couple of days on Twitter both relate to the use of HTML element identifiers. The former, a discussion on semantic value and remembering that HTML should not prognosticate styling; the latter, a discussion on the validity of using IDs to target CSS. With both of these considerations I’m going to study the fundamentals of writing good element identifiers within this article.

Read more of “On HTML element identifiers”…

I’m currently involved in a project to write a fairly extensive set of best practices for front-end development. Alongside myself, this project includes input from a fair cross-section of my peers in the front-end development community. These best practices will be implemented alongside a coding standard as standards for development within the organisation I work for, and hopefully many other organisations when they are published.

Of all the standards that a front-end team might want to implement, those that concern the identification and graceful degradation of cross-browser feature sets can be the hardest to define.

With that in mind, I’ve been poking around the front-end community looking for possible solutions. By far the most common approach—and one that gains an astounding level of attention in the community—is to implement Modernizr, a JavaScript feature sniffer created by Faruk Ate?, Paul Irish and Alex Sexton.

Unfortunately, despite my respect for the developers involved, I just can’t advocate Modernizr as a solution. Let me explain why; but first, let’s revisit some concepts that are going to be quite relevant…

Read more of “Sniff my browser: The Modernizr inadequacy”…