Web Standards, and the documentation to support them, provide huge insight into ‘the why’ and ‘the what’ of the world wide web. They are a fantastic resource for any web developer and help people build stuff for the web that is functional, accessible and cross-compatible. In this article, we take a look at the history of Web Standards, how to use them in your work and ways you can get involved in making them. In this article, Amy Dickens will give you an introduction to web standards, as well as ways you can get involved in contributing to new and existing standards. Let’s begin!
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Rendering and interaction have become a lot more consistent across browsers in recent years. It’s still not perfectly uniform, however, and a lot of small issues can trip you up. Add on top of these issues the variables of different screen sizes, language preferences and plain human error, and we find a lot of small things to trip up a developer. When implementing a user interface in a browser, it’s good to minimize those differences and issues wherever you can, so that the UI is predictable. In this article, Ahmad Shadeed has put together a list of common issues, with their solutions, as a handy reference guide for when you’re working on a new project. Let’s begin.
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An old cliché says that “may you get everything you wish for” makes for a particularly insidious curse. As all the other browsers got easier and easier to deal with, Mat Marquis attempted to convince himself that there was at least still a challenge to quirky old IE. That even became something of a point of pride: he had gotten so good at fixing obscure IE issues that he’d learned to dodge them during the course of my everyday development, leaving nothing to dread come the big “open it up in IE and see what broke” phase. With Edge soon making the switch to Chrome’s rendering engine — well, for better or worse, a bitter wish is coming true.
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The aim of Feature Policy is for us, as web developers, to be able to state our usage of a web platform feature, explicitly to the browser. By doing so, we make an agreement about our use, or non-use of this particular feature. Based on this the browser can act to block certain features, or report back to us that a feature it did not expect to see is being used. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how Feature Policy can help protect your site from third parties using APIs that have security and privacy implications, and also from your own team adding outdated APIs or poorly optimized images.
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While effective bundling of resources on the web has received a great deal of mindshare in recent times, how we ship front-end resources to our users has remained pretty much the same. The average weight of JavaScript and style resources that a website ships with is rising — even though build tooling to optimize the website has never been better. With the marketshare of evergreen browsers rising fast and browsers launching support for new features in lockstep, is it time we rethink asset delivery for the modern web? Today, Shubham Kanodia will give you some answers.
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CSS Grid Level 2 is already in the process of being specified, and the main feature of this level of the spec is to bring us subgrid. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to explain what is currently part of the Working and Editor’s Draft of that spec. Note that everything here is subject to change, and none of it currently works in browsers. Take this as a peek into the process!
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The placeholder attribute contains a surprising amount of issues that prevent it from delivering on what it promises. The presence of a placeholder attribute won’t be flagged by automated accessibility checking software. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s usable. Ultimately, accessibility is about people, not standards, so it is important to think about your interface in terms beyond running through a checklist. In this article, Eric Bailey will clarify why you need to stop using it.
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If you haven’t contributed to an open source project before, MDN is a brilliant place to start. MDN has been documenting the web platform for over 12 years and is a go-to resource for many. Its strength is the fact that it is a very straightforward, and an excellent way to give back to the community if you have ever found these docs useful. And the best part is that anyone can contribute and help to improve it. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains how.
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Printing pages directly from the browser is an experience that can lead to frustration with enormous images being printed out. We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine, but in this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. She will show you how you should include print styles in your web pages, and look at the specifications that really come into their own once printing.
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In some ways, we are all still so new to CSS Grid Layout. A lot of folks keep asking about best practices that are available out there. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to try and cover some of the things that either could be described as best practices, and some things that you probably don’t need to worry about. She will ran a survey and share the results as well as her personal thoughts.
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