Author
Mat Marquis
Mat “Wilto” Marquis is a designer-slash-developer working at Filament Group in Boston. Mat is a member of the jQuery Mobile team, an active member of the open source community, and enjoys a complicated relationship with the HTML5 “dialog” tag. He’s probably flipping out about something on Twitter as we speak.
Entries by Mat Marquis
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Paul Irish on Chrome Moving to Blink
The dust has begun to settle after Google’s announcement that Chrome would soon be using their own divergent fork of WebKit as a rendering engine. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I’ve asked Paul Irish to share some of the Chrome team’s plans for the near future.
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Embeddable Comments? Yes, Please.
Just like tweets, you can now embed ALA comments anywhere you like. This is one of those features that we’ve been wanting for our own purposes, and then we figured: as long as we’re building it, let’s give everyone the ability to embed comments.
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Bruce Lawson on Opera’s Move to WebKit
This morning’s announcement that Opera intends to abandon its Presto rendering engine has left designers and developers with a number of questions. I sent a few over to Opera’s Bruce Lawson to shed a little light on the situation.
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Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point
Responsible responsive design demands responsive images, images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users. Then a few months ago, in response to an article here, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed, and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of serving responsive images. The group even delivered picture functionality to older browsers via two polyfills: namely, Scott Jehl's Picturefill and Abban Dunne's jQuery Picture. The WHATWG has responded by ignoring the community's work on the picture element, and proposing a more complicated img set element. Which proposed standard is better, and for whom? Which will win? And what can you do to help avert an "us versus them" crisis that could hurt end-users and turn developers off to the standards process? ALA's own Mat Marquis explains the ins and outs of responsive images and web standards at the turning point.
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Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need
With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that may have limited bandwidth. But with several newer browsers implementing an "image prefetching" feature that allows images to be fetched before parsing the document's body, some of the web's brightest developers are abandoning responsive images in favor of user agent detection, at least as a temporary solution. For us standardistas, UA detection leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More importantly, as the number and kinds of devices continue to grow, UA detection will quickly become untenable—just as browser detection did back in the bad old days before web standards. What's really needed, argues Mat Marquis, is a new markup element that works the way the HTML5 video element works. Sound crazy? So crazy it just might work.
