Multi-column layout works great with long articles on paper. It's a bit harder to get it right design-wise on the web but it is possible. Technically it is very hard to get it right, explains Stephen Hay in this thorough article about how CSS columns work and how they should work. A great read.

The Twitter website was probably one of the worst websites around, from a performance and durability perspective, but things are changing. Dan Webb explains why the site was built like it was and what is about to change. A great read about real performance, about percieved performance, about ttft, and much more. Yes, you should read it, especially you JavaScript-only nerds out there.

Here's a nice idea by Paul Scrivens: he combines the term minimum viable product and one of Zeno's paradoxes and applies them to design. What comes out is an early form of design that can be shipped, that makes the content accessible and readable. The design can then be later refined (or bloated, as happend from 75% onwards in the examples). Nice idea which is pretty practical in an agile workflow.

There's a rumour that Facebook is planning to buy Opera, the company that makes a browser (among other things). Peter-Paul Koch wrote this excellent, thorough analysis of why Facebook would want its own browser. You should definitely read it if you care about the future of the web (and you lazy developers who never tested on Opera, you made a mistake).

We're really going to need something smarter than a new element. via @andreascon 5" 440ppi display by LG coming in 2012

Wrote some tests for named entities in HTML: Found bugs in IE and WebKit:

New post: How do you personalize a glowing rectangle? -

Kristina Halvorson: "July Is Content Strategy Meetup Month!"

Many people have a hard time understanding and getting used to git. This site tries to help these people in the best possible way: git code is illustrated with animated gifs of animals.

Zeg, xs4all en ziggo abonnees, werkt deze link voor jullie? vul bij "zim" je zoekwoord in. 200=video, 100=audio

New blog post: Testing the Firefox browser on mobile websites: Are you game?

A few weeks ago there was this row about responsive images, about two competing proposals that somehow clashed. Jason Grigsby takes another look at both these proposals from the viewpoint of the lookahead pre-parser and concludes that they both conflict with this idea and that they are a maintenance nightmare. He concludes with the fact that this issue should be solved from within the image itself, and he's right about that. We'll just have to wait a while. Anybody at Adobe listening?

For the first time this millenium Internet Explorer is not the biggest browser anymore, according to Statcounter. Yes, this is incredible news. Of course these statistics vary greatly from region to region (just check the stats for China or South-Korea for instance) and from site to site (on my own site IE is marginal, around 4%), but It's an important milestone.

Cyrille Rentier en Dagmar Tolenaar zijn naar het pretcongresintensieve congresUX Lx geweest. Om dit uitje nog enige waarde te gevenOmdat helaas niet iedereen mee konhebben ze van alle drie de dagen uitgebreid verslag gedaan op Frankwatching. Elke user experience nerd die er niet bij was doet er goed aan om de verlagen te lezen. Hier is dag twee te vinden en hier staat dag drie. Doe er mooie dingen mee!

Heh heh, awesome

Are the links I provided not enough? Do you need more to read? Here are the weekly links by the Mozilla Developer Engagement team. Always good, and this week with some hilarious stuff as well.

<sigh> the naive interpretation of this article is going to be deafening (Smartphone app usages soars)

If you're as old as I am you'll remember that suddenly we weren't allowed to use the and elements because they were purely presentational. And now suddenly we are allowed to use them again because their meaning changed. In this article Oli Studholme explains that not only and changed, the meaning of and has changed too!

Some people promote a fixed set of predefined mediaqueries based on common screen sizes. You should never listen to them and this article explains why: there are no common screen sizes. Just use break points when the content (or layout) breaks and you should do just fine.

De boekenbranche in het algemeen en in het bijzonder die in nederland snapt er echt geen ene reet van. Boeken worden niet verkocht in de iTunes store, niet op Amazon, als je een beetje mazzel hebt kan je een enkel boekje kopen in een obscuur digitaal formaatje voor een nóg obscuurdere ereader met een vijandig DRM systeem er op. Als het aan de boekenbranche lag dan bestond dat hele verrekte internet met die rare typmachines met een beeldscherm niet. Boeken zijn van papier en daarmee basta. Ik word al gefrustreerd van zo veel domheid, Bas Vermond heeft jarenlang geprobeerd de boekenbranche in nederland te veranderen en hij heeft opgegeven. Zijn relaas staat hier. Erg treurig.

Number 4 in the series! This time I’m covering stylesets for accessing stylistic alternates: This time, view in FF!

From the Filament Group Lab: Device & browser quirks: tracking the weirdness

Having re-read earlier today, I was amused by the footer on

Everything you need to know about design on the web -

Great thinking about the future of news from #RichardGingras, head of Google News via @timoreilly

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers - by the awesome @tomscott

Everybody is always looking for success stories about interface changes that somehow caused enormous growth. Here's one nice little story by Joshua Gross about a new interface for paying in New York City cabs which resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips per year.

I like simple little learning examples like this one. Click CSS selectors to see what it will select.

You should never just link to scripts hosted on other domains, the possible advantages – caching, gzip – are not always enabled. This gets explained in detail in this excellent article. Yes, you should definitely read it.

Wow. @HBehrens created the very cool cam holder he is using and released the software and info. /ht @twtomcat #mobilism

Mozilla Cares About Your Privacy, Even In Apps:
"…pretty fantastic, and other app distributors…should take notice." -

My father always scribbles annotations in the margins of his paper books. He's probably been doing this for more than 50 years now and if somehow we could collect these annotations it would be an incredibly intersting and useful database. But as it is, it's pretty useless. Allen Tan writes about this and more in this article about modern, digital reading.

Jeremy Keith started an open, local mobile device lab in Brighton and he urges you to do the same in your home town.

New post: A framework for discussing responsive images solutions

There are a few use cases where's we'd love to use physical units (like cm and in) but unfortunately these units don't work as expected in CSS. Boris Smus wrote an extensive article about these units, how they should work, why we want them and why they work the way they work.

New blog post: Privacy policy guidelines and Template for web apps

Is The Smashing Daily not enough and do you need more to read? Here's another list with links, provided by the Mozilla Developer Engagement team.

I have the feeling that web development is getting easier now that we don't need to fully support IE6 and IE7 (that is, if you don't have to support them). But occasionally you still encounter a weird bug or some strange cross browser inconsistencies. Nicolle Sullivan wrote is excellent article on cross browser debugging. Even if you consider yourself to be a CSS pro you still should read this.

Sometimes you'd like your typography to be somewhat related to the viewport size. In the near future you could use some new units just for that. Chris Coyier explains – in depth as always – how they work and more. You should read this.

I *absolutely love* this "How to Lie With Design Thinking" - from @odannyboy

Obvious reminder: gzip knocks ~50% off the size of all your js, css, html, svg, ttf, xml.. Check

LogoLounge's annual Logo Trends post:

These are always an interesting read.

As tablets get smaller, use of the Web drops. Why?

"Find unexplored territory and make it yours." @LeaVerou On The Pastry Box via @thepastrybox

Harry Roberts explains the single responsibility principle applied to CSS, a must read for people who build big web sites.

Finally: Rod Farmer's awesome MobX 2011 presentation: "Multi-Device Experience Strategy" (MobX 2011) @rodfarmer

The structural hierarchy of a page is not always the same as the visual hierarchy. The visual hierarchy can change on different screen sizes while the structural hierarchy stays the same. Here's a nice example by Jordan Moore which uses flexbox to achieve that, a lot of this trickery can be done with positioning too.

"Beatbar": Playback controls, state + VU in the address bar - - fun hack, via @jaipandya

there, i added my EUR 0.02

Chris Coyier explains how to prevent CSS transitions to fire on page load.

Look at/export the images used to create iOS apps:

Five responsive web design pitfalls to avoid, by @brad_frost:

List of -webkit- prefixes that Opera will alias, an FAQ (thanks to all whose Qs went into it) and a build to test

Here's some excellent research by Jeremy Keith and others to find a way of detecting from JavaScript whether media queries have been executed in CSS without duplicating my breakpoints. Absolutely usable.

How designers of BBC news site do x-browser, #rwd, browser grade strategy etc (haven't read it all yet, not endorsing)

Slides from my #fronttrends talk are here:

excellent! @philhawksworth shows off #devup12

An excellent, rather eclectic list of links by Bruce Lawson with zombies, localStorage and a children's song.

"An MVC framework for JavaScript browser applications. The real MVC. The Smalltalk MVC. The Gang of Four MVC."

Books with pages were better than book rolls on many fronts but that doesn't mean that paging works better than scrolling. I've always been surprised by the fact that all ebook-readers use pages (and I'm flabbergasted by the fact that Opera is experimenting with some paging techniques in CSS). Here's an excellent article by Mike Swartz about this subject. Everybody (and especially ebook-people and Opera-people) should read it. (This study actually says that the card model works better on novels. Grmpf. Be sure to read it all though before you decide to build sites that look like books)

Mobile accessibility tip: don’t suppress pinch zoom: by @iheni

.net posted an interview I did with @brucel today on @filamentgroup's Boston Globe work. A few months old now, but hey.

Drag and drop is a common interaction. It's actually pretty hard to do with a mouse or a trackpad but it's even harder to implement in a web app. But that's about to change and Mike Taylor explains.

more on the performance of local storage

Added @paulrobertlloyd's patterns from his responsive tutorial on .net to the style guide stash

Style guides should be the core of every serious site. If you don't know what they should look like, here's some help: Anna Debenham collects style guides.

+1. “@KuraFire: Opera Confirms WebKit Prefix Usage, And Why That’s Not The Right Thing To Do ”

Great User Experiences Require Great Front-End Development :: UXmatters

Google published a HTML and CSS Style Guide with some assumed best practices. Zoompf took a critical look at the tips that Google gives from a preformance prespective. A very good read this is! Good to see that Zoompf and Google disagree on some things (I disagree on others, of course).

You might think that linking to a separate print stylesheet would be a good idea from a performance point of view. Stoyan Stefanov did a little bit of research and yes, you guessed right, linking to a separate print stylesheet is very bad for performance. This does not mean you should not create a print stylesheet, you should just not link to it separately.

Once again, making me a little jealous of native performance. “@hakimel: CSS3 scroll effects ported to iOS. ”

A non-responsive approach to building cross-device webapps -

Polyfills For The Pragmatist - a great slide deck by the creator of @css3pie

An epic post from @owltastic with techniques for using novelty fonts (plus bonus ampersand roundup):

“Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out:

Github2 Theme for Mou @chenluois @github

A great article by Johan Ronsse about productivity and hierarchy in an office environment. I have to agree: when I'm at the office I can only be productive if I listen to music on my headphones but when I'm at home – especially when I'm working in my hammock – I get things done in a fraction of the time. If I lived in Antwerp I would definitely be talking to Johan right now.

RT @edent: The OAuth / App Anti-Pattern

The ‘/ App’ bit is redundant. This abuse exists due to core UX bug in oAuth.

Git Manual Page on GitHub