Today’s Readings

An impressive-looking, responsive grid system: CSSWizardry Grids.

And speaking of responsive grid systems, I don not even want to think about the maths that went into making jQuery Nested work… But resizing my browser and clicking the various device icons at the top of the page sure is fun…

Touch, Mouse, or Pointer? Who cares. Hand.js rolls `em all into one.

These “what stuff do you use?” lists are always fun to scroll through, and I found a couple new Google Chrome Extensions for me to play with!

For those that have already switched to Sublime Text comes a Web Inspector that allows you debug JavaScript right in the editor!

An interesting approach to making an existing desktop site work responsively with very minimal code change.

Add resize events to your HTML elements. Very nice!

Pull quotes are a great typographical feature: bigger words on the page/screen/whatever, hoping to entice the reader into reading all the smaller words on the page/screen/whatever. They’re used all over the place, but they usually really annoy me in web content, because I often read via RSS feeds, and what happens is content appears twice, so I end up reading it twice. Well, if every web publisher would simply read this article, this wouldn’t happen anymore… :-)

I know most web developers are still so bogged-down thinking about phones and tablets that they have not given a single iota of thought to TVs, but they’re just across the horizon, so it might be best to start thinking now. Luckily, BBC has already kicked-off the conversation with TAL: TV Application Layer.

How often do you add keyboard access to your sites? Yeah, me too. And after reading this article, you just might never want to…

Why do I feel like every other week there is some new “get to know Chrome Dev Tools” video? I guess it might be because they keep chocking so much cool shit in there, that they need to keep making them… :-)

Cool jQuery plugin to add zoom and pan to page elements, not the entire page…

Okay, maybe you won’t be using any of these SVG background patterns on your next client project, but the fact that they are all SVG, and data-URI SVGs, no less, is impressive, and should be inspiring…

One-finger zoom in/out on mobile Google Maps (article title says iPhone, but works on my Android as well). “Handy”… Heh, get it??

I love when Nicholas Zakas researches something… This time up: Making accessible icon buttons.

Okay, can we skip the geek-talk for a couple seconds? What if I promise to tell you about an automated vacuum that has dual headlights & sensor arrays, goes into low-rider-mode to sneak under the sofa, and into monster-truck-mode to climb stairs, and, oh, it powers itself on all the bacteria it cleans from your floors… Meet Limbo. (Okay, maybe that was just a smidge geeky after all…)

Finally, an airline starts charging based on their actual costs! Been saying this for a long, long time…

Maybe I’m just not imaginative enough, but I can’t think of a really good use-case for clip-path, and none of these examples really inspire me either… Anyone got anything better?

So what do you do if your clients says “we already have our website, it cost us a lot of money and we like it, but we need something that works on all devices, and we can’t afford another website?” Converting an existing site to be responsive can be as large of a task as building a new site, but Ben Callahan walks you through some possible steps, starting with some basic concepts, then getting into more advanced ideas. Hopefully this helps!

Ah, whitespace text-nodes… What an annoying little pest you are for DOM traversal… We all know you can you can dodge them with item.nodeType != 1, but what if we could skip that altogether? Soon, young Padawan, soon

Laura Kalbag writes an extremely long, and beautifully thorough synopsis of the Responsive Day Out, 2013. It is well-worth the full read, but also a fairly easy scan. She did a great job of grouping topics, regardless of who-said-what-where-and-when.

Hey… you got your breakpoints in my SVGTwo great tastes that taste great together!

I recently wrote a brief bit about adding those little font icons in the upper-right corner of my site. Which works great if someone has already created exactly the font icon that you want. But what if you have your own glyph that want to use? Well here’s a quick tutorial on just how to do that!

Wow, need more to read? And I mean like a lot more to read?? Well Nettuts+ just cracked open Tuts+Hub, a tremendous source of articles, tutorials, and more. So, go get your read on!

And speaking of a great collection of knowledge, Superhero.js is now here with everything they can find regarding “creating, testing and maintaining large JavaScript applications”… Have fun!

An incredibly depressing presentation from Steve Souders regarding the “State of the Web (Speed)“. Year-after-year, as connection speeds continue to increase, so does our page size and transfer amounts, while adoptions of best practices like caching and compression see no real increase… Bad, bad, developers… Now you go stand in the corner and think about what you just did!

Now onto somewhat better news, Darcy Clarke and Addy Osmani want to make your Chrome Dev Tools experience more personal, and a little easier on the eyes.

And finally, as if we needed a further sign that a certain percentage of Americans have gone completely and thoroughly off the deep-end, one can now 3D-print guns… So, now I guess I’m going to have to check my 3D printer before boarding a flight??

Happy reading,
Atg

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