Tagged “html”

Responsive design for tables is tricky. Sure, you can just make the table’s container horizontally scrollable but that’s more a developer convenience than a great user experience. And if you instead try to do something more clever, you can run into challenges as I did in the past. Still, we should strive to design good narrow screen user experiences for tables, alongside feasible technical solutions to achieve them.

Here’s an important update on native modal dialogues. TL;DR – it’s now OK to use dialog.

People have used the HTML title attribute to achieve a native “tooltip” effect for many years. However accessibility experts have recommended that we should avoid this practice, and here I summarise my research on the topic.

Whether I’m thinking about inclusive hiding, hamburger menus or web components one UI pattern I keep revisiting is the disclosure widget. Perhaps it’s because you can use this small pattern to bring together so many other wider aspects of good web development. So for future reference, here’s a braindump of my knowledge and resources on the subject.

At work there are plans afoot to reconcile various differing Autocomplete implementations into a single, reusable component. So far there’s been a written audit presenting all instances and how they differ in functional and technical respects. There’s also been design work to identify visual commonalities and avoid future inconsistencies. I’d now like to add another perspective: an investigation into which HTML materials and (if necessary) ARIA supplements are appropriate to ensure we build something accessible and resilient.

Our Design System team has recently received “new component requests” for some custom filtering controls. These look like custom-styled <select>s however their “options” appear more like checkboxes and radio buttons. I think the inspiration was Carbon Design System’s Dropdown component and the idea is to bring consistency to filtering controls in forms. Although it’s not yet time to fully explore this and make a yay/nay decision on the request, I’ve been doing some initial thinking.

I’ve started trialling different HTML and technologies for the “simple” responsive images (i.e. not art-directed per breakpoint) used in blog articles on this site. I’m continuing to lean on Cloudinary as my free image host, CDN and format-conversion service. But at the HTML level I’ve moved from a complicated <img srcset> based approach which included many resized versions of the same image. I now use a simpler <picture> and <source> based pattern that keeps the number of images and breakpoints low, leaning instead into the performance gains offered by the newer image formats avif and webp.

My team will soon be refactoring our modal dialogue component. Ours has a few deficiencies, needs better developer experience and documentation, is not built to our Design System component standards, and could use a resilience boost from some progressive enhancement.

At work I have to think about complex HTML tables a lot. The challenge with doing tables well is that 99% of online table tutorials use fairly simple examples… whereas in reality design and product teams often want to squeeze in lots more. It’s really hard to balance those needs against accessibility, systemisation, styling and responsiveness.

Heads up: I’ve published this post early while it’s still a work in progress because it’s better for me to have it available for reference than languishing in drafts and forgotten. Apologies if you read it in a temporarily rough state.

I recorded a talk on “Hiding elements on the web” for @freeagent’s tech blog. It’s a tricky #FrontEnd & #a11y topic so I try to cover some good practices and responsible choices. Hope it helps someone. (Also it’s my first video. Lots of room to improve!)

After a couple of years of reading about web components (and a lot of head-scratching), I’ve finally got around to properly creating one… or at least a rough first draft!

“Dark mode” has been a buzz-phrase in web development since around 2019. It refers to the ability provided by modern operating systems to set the user interface’s appearance to either light or dark. Web browsers and technologies support this by allowing developers to detect whether or not the OS provides such settings, and if so which mode the user prefers. Developers can create alternate light and dark themes for their websites and switch between these intelligently (responsively?) to fit with the user’s system preference.

I’ve been meaning to do some work on this front for a while and finally got around to it. (You might even be reading this post with your computer’s dark colour scheme enabled and seeing the fruits of my labour.) Here’s how I set things up and the lessons I learned along the way.

Great tutorial (with accompanying video) from Adam Argyle which starts with a useful definition of what a Toast is and is not:

Toasts are non-interactive, passive, and asynchronous short messages for users. Generally they are used as an interface feedback pattern for informing the user about the results of an action. Toasts are unlike notifications, alerts and prompts because they're not interactive; they're not meant to be dismissed or persist. Notifications are for more important information, synchronous messaging that requires interaction, or system level messages (as opposed to page level). Toasts are more passive than other notice strategies.

Here’s an interesting development in the block link saga: GOV.UK have introduced one (named .chevron-card) on their Homepage, citing how it’ll improve accessibility by increasing mobile touch targets. It’s not yet been added to their Design System while they’re monitoring it to see if it is successful. They’ve chosen the approach which starts with a standard, single, non-wrapping anchor then “stretches” it across the whole card via some pseudo elements and absolute positioning magic. I’m slightly surprised at this choice because it breaks the user’s ability to select text within the link. Really interested to see how it pans out!

Just taking a moment for some musings on which way the front-end wind is blowing (from my perspective at least) and how that might practically impact my approach on the next small-ish website that I code.

Jeremy Keith’s new course for Google’s web.dev learning platform is fantastic and covers a variety of aspects of responsive design including layout (macro and micro), images, icons and typography.

A designer colleague recently asked me what course or resources I would recommend for learning front-end web development. She mentioned React at the beginning but I suggested that it’d be better to start by learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As for React: it’s a subset or offshoot of JavaScript so it makes sense to understand vanilla JS first.

For future reference, here are my tips.

On the web buttons and links are fundamentally different materials. However some design and development practices have led to them becoming conceptually “bundled together” and misunderstood. Practitioners can fall into the trap of seeing the surface-level commonality that “you click the thing, then something happens” and mistakenly thinking the two elements are interchangeable. Some might even consider them as a single “button component” without considering the distinctions underneath. However this mentality causes our users problems and is harmful for effective web development. In this post I’ll address why buttons and links are different and exist separately, and when to use each.

Here’s a great new presentation by Dave Rupert (of the Shop Talk show) in which he makes a compelling case for adopting Web Components. Not only do they provide the same benefits of encapsulation and reusability as components in proprietary JavaScript frameworks, but they also bring the reliability and portability of web standards, work without build tools, are suited to progressive enhancement, and may pave the way for a better web.

Harry Roberts (who created ITCSS for organising CSS at scale but these days focuses on performance) has just given a presentation about the importance of getting the content, order and optimisation of the <head> element right, including lots of measurement data to back up his claims. Check out the slides: Get your Head Straight

In this journal entry, Jeremy Keith argues that when it comes to accessibility testing it’s not just about finding issues—it’s about finding the issues at the right time.

Here’s a smart and comprehensive tutorial from Andy Bell on how to create a progressively enhanced narrow-screen navigation solution using a custom element. Andy also uses Proxy for “enabled” and “open” state management, ResizeObserver on the custom element’s containing header for a Container Query like solution, and puts some serious effort into accessible focus management.

Astro looks very interesting. It’s in part a static site builder (a bit like Eleventy) but it also comes with a modern (revolutionary?) developer experience which lets you author components as web components or in a JS framework of your choice but then renders those to static HTML for optimal performance. Oh, and as far as I can tell theres no build pipeline!

Astro lets you use any framework you want (or none at all). And if most sites only have islands of interactivity, shouldn’t our tools optimize for that?

Lean, hackable, extensible slide deck framework

I’ve been on the lookout for a lightweight, web standards based slide deck solution for a while and this one from Lea Verou could well be perfect.

Max’s demo is really clever and features lots of interesting web component related techniques.

I came up with this demo of a book store. Each of the books is draggable and can be moved to one of three sections, with varying available space. Depending on where it is placed, different styles will be applied to the book.

Scott Jehl’s experimental take on a container/element query aimed at letting us set responsive styles for our elements based on their immediate context rather than that of the viewport.

I made a quick and minimal take on approximating Container/Element Queries using a web component and basic CSS selectors.

This is why, over years of building for the web, I have learned that I can significantly cut down on the entropy my future self will have to face by authoring web projects in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS. I like to ask myself questions like:

• Could this be done with native ES modules instead of using a bundler?
• Could I do this with DOM scripting instead of using a JS framework?
• Could I author this in CSS instead of choosing a preprocessor?

In order to code modern component designs we often need to hide then reveal elements. At other times we want to provide content to one type of user but hide it from another because it’s not relevant to their mode of browsing. In all cases accessibility should be front and centre in our thoughts. Here’s my approach, heavily inspired by Scott O’Hara’s definitive guide Inclusively Hidden.

I’ve just read The A11Y Project’s page on alt text.

As most of us know, the HTML alt attribute is for providing “alternate text” descriptions of images to help ensure people do not miss out on information conveyed by graphics. This can help people using assistive technology such as screen readers, and in situations where images are slow or fail to load.

The article made some interesting points and even though I’ve been using the alt attribute for years I found three common cases where I could improve how I do things.

Hidde de Vries explains why an HTML heading should never be immediately followed by another.

When you use a heading element, you set the expectation of content.

In general this is a decent article on non-JavaScript-based mobile navigation options, but what I found most interesting is the idea of having a separate page for your navigation menu (at the URL /menu, for example).

Who said navigation has to be in the header of every page? If your front end is extremely lightweight or if you have a long list of menu items to display in your navigation, the most practical method might be to create a separate page to list them all.

We’re not going to try to replicate everything that the browser does by default with a native select element. We’re going to literally use a select element when any assistive tech is used. But when a mouse is being used, we’ll show the styled version and make it function as a select element.

Here’s a neat trick. You can use an emoji as a favicon! I’ve written previously about how to do favicons properly, but for a short-lived hack project you tend to just need something quick and dirty. Chris Coyier has also shared a nice lil’ Codepen website showing the technique in action.

Here’s a handy resource providing BEM-based naming suggestions for some of the most common web components.

Documentation for the BEM component and CSS class-naming notation

methodology BEM was invented at Yandex to develop sites which should be launched fast and supported for a long time. It helps to create extendable and reusable interface components.

Here’s Chris Ferdinandi with a list of resources to help those who are new to web development get started. I’m keeping this one handy so I can share it with any friends who’re thinking of getting into this game.

In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic.

In this post we have seen that with just a sprinkling of HTML attributes we can improve the login experience for our users, particularly on mobile devices.

Here’s Dave Rupert, frustratedly rounding up the accessibility shortfalls in browser implementations of native HTML elements.

I’ve always abided in the idea that “HTML is accessible by default and then we come along and mess it up”. But that’s not always the case. There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems.

The BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) Technical Guides are a series of framework-agnostic, code-centric recommendations and examples for building GEL design patterns in websites. They illustrate how to create websites that comply with all BBC guidelines and industry best practice, giving special emphasis to accessibility.

I wanted to see if it was possible to create SVG charts that would work without JS. Well, it is. I've also created an experimental Svelte component library called Pancake to make these techniques easier to use.

Every now and then something comes along in the world of web design that represents a substantial shift. The launch of Every Layout, a new project from Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell, feels like one such moment.

When it comes to webfonts, if you want to serve an accessible and high performance experience across device types it’s not as straightforward as just specifying your fonts in CSS then hoping for the best.

A collection of resources for finding that curly quote or em dash character quickly.

Knowing how best to serve, size and format favicons and other icons for the many different device types and operating systems can be a minefield. My current best practice approach is to create a 260px × 260px (or larger) source icon then upload it to Real Favicon Generator.

This slider/carousel certainly looks nice, and I like author David DeSandro’s work, having taken inspiration from his 3d Card Flip tutorial for a recent project. I’d just like to dig into it a little further to see how it fares in terms of accessibility before using it in the wild.

Sliders (or carousels) are a fairly common practical requirement in web projects. Here, Chris Coyier shows us how far we can get in 2019 with HTML and CSS alone.

I previously noted Keith J Grant’s article on the HTML dialog element which promised a native means of handling popups and modal dialogues. I’ve not yet used dialog in production, partly because of spotty browser support (although there is a polyfill) but also partly because—for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on after reading the spec—it just didn’t feel like the finished article.

The fairly-recently added <details> element is a great, native HTML way to toggle content visibility.

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>
<details>

<summary>System Requirements</summary>

<p>Requires a computer running an operating system. The computer

must have some memory and ideally some kind of long-term storage.</p>

</details>
<p class="end">Remember: built-in beats bolt-on, bigly!</p>
<!--

<details> is great but there are a few gotchas:

Not totally flexible design-wise
Unsuitable for accordions with multiple sibling elements unless you add some JS
Unsupported in IE 11 (but content is still available)

-->

:root {
font-size: 110%;
font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial,
  sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji";


}
input,

button {

font-size: inherit;

}
.end {

margin-top: 2rem;

}

In all my years of spinning up “HTML Typographic Elements” lists or pages as a reference for designers, I didn’t realise that the W3C provide the very thing I needed in their HTML Element Sampler. These pages provide comprehensive dummy content covering all the main typographic elements which is really handy when designing a website’s typographic styles and pattern library.

Recently, we’d seen some articles suggest that things haven’t changed a great deal with select's styling limitations, but I decided to return to the problem and tinker with it myself to be sure. As it turns out, a reasonable set of styles can create a consistent and attractive select across new browsers, while remaining just fine in older ones too.

Introducing dialog: a new, easier, standards-based means of rendering a popup or modal dialogue.