Responsive web design has turned out to be somewhat of a case study in the law of unintended consequences, with one of them being breakpoint paranoia. But even without the undue influence that media queries exerts on your selection of these breakpoints, these might not be the droids we’re looking for. In this article, Obinwanne Hill will look at breakpoints beyond screen size and explore different possibilities and practical approaches to using them to create truly adaptive experiences on the web.
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In this article, Maksim Chemerisuk describes his approach with better-dom to solve the internationalization problem. Since the last article about this, “Writing a Better JavaScript Library for the DOM,” he has revisited the concept to solve the issues raised through feedback. The solution was originally intended to be a set of internationalization APIs for plugins, extensions, etc. It doesn’t rely heavily on the better-dom library, so it could be adapted to any existing JavaScript library.
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In this article Julian Shapiro will demonstrate that websites can benefit from the same level of interactive and performant motion design found on mobile apps. In the following examples, he’ll be using Velocity JS — a popular animation engine that drastically improves the speed of UI animation. In particular, Velocity.js’ UI pack, which allows you to quickly inject motion design into your pages.
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Z-index is an inherently tricky thing, and maintaining z-index order in a complex layout is notoriously difficult. With different stacking orders and contexts, keeping track of them as their numbers increase can be hard — and once they start to spread across CSS files, forget about it! Because z-index can make or break a UI element’s visibility and usability, keeping your website’s UI in working order can be a delicate balance.
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We’ve seen many permutations of images in responsive design and spent a lot of time spinning our wheels, banging our heads and screaming at the wall. But our tireless journey is coming to a close. The W3C and browser makers got the hint. We’ve come a long way with responsive images. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but a lot of work still has to be done.
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You are about to experience truly hair-raising excitement as you get to grips with the intricacies of the hugely interesting CSS timing function, which is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to CSS animation, and you could well be surprised by just how much you can do with it. For example, they define where an animation accelerates and decelerates, you can break an animation into any number of steps, rather than tweened motion, and much more!
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The way we access the Web has changed a lot in the last couple of years. We no longer rely solely on our desktop computers to navigate the Web. Rather, we use a wide and quickly growing array of devices to get our daily dose of information. With the device landscape going all fuzzy, the time of building fixed width desktop sites has definitely come to an end. ConditionerJS will help you combine all of this contextual information to pinpoint the right moment to load the functionality you need. It tells your JavaScript when to act up and when to tune down a bit, and it will help you combine all of this contextual information to pinpoint the right moment to load the functionality you need.
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Responsive SVG icons can be used in a lot of ways. In this article, Ilya Pukhalski digs deeper into Joe Harrison’s responsive icons technique and explores what can be done with SVGs.
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After Marcotte defined the technique, responsive design frameworks began to emerge that incorporated these principles. Many of these frameworks are open-source, free to download and quickly customizable, and in this article, Jen Kramer will focus on the most popular ones: Bootstrap and Foundation. A responsive design framework might be a helpful tool in your arsenal, for quick prototyping, testing or even production code — one that expands your range of products and makes clients happy.
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Lately, Maksim Chemerisuk has started to see more and more problems with jQuery’s core and can’t be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. He, like many others, continued using the library for a while, navigating all of the pesky quirks every day. Then, Daniel Buchner created SelectorListener, and he started to think about creating a set of functions that would enable the possibility of building unobtrusive DOM components using a better approach.
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