Author

Tim Murtaugh

Tim has been working on the web since 1997, and specializes in developing custom publishing systems with responsive HTML5 interfaces. His eye for design and serious affinity for clean code allow him to painlessly integrate his templates into larger systems without sacrificing user experience or aesthetics. Tim started in the non-profit world, moved on to start-ups, shifted to an agency, upgraded to publishing, and is currently the co-founder of the small NYC shop Monkey Do.

Also from this author

The Latest Flash 0-day is no Joke

The latest Flash exploit is so bad you shouldn't even read this post, just go patch it now. I'm not kidding.

An Excellent Week

A couple of big announcements are making the rounds this week: Google advises progressive enhancement and the W3C publishes an official HTML5 recommendation.

The Runtime Performance Checklist

Looking to improve animation performance? Get your frames-per-second up with this checklist from Paul Lewis.

Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts

What happens when your font doesn’t load? What happens when @font-face isn’t supported in the browser? The Filament Group has the answers.

Ten Years Ago in ALA: Faux Columns and Elastic Design

Ten years ago this week, A List Apart published issue 167. It featured an article on elastic design that now seems slightly prophetic, and an article on faux columns, a technique that, while it has since fallen out of favor, defined the way designs were implemented for years.

Myth.io

Myth is a postprocessor that lets you write pure CSS without having to worry about slow browser support, or even slow spec approval. It's a CSS polyfill.

Responsive Images — End of Year Report

Where do things in the responsive image world stand? Bruce Lawson offers a report, and a concluding mission statement: “Must try harder.”

How to Blog About Code and Give Zero [bleep]s

"I need you to blog more. Little future developers who look or act or dress or think like you need you to blog more. Your slightly confused and defensive developer community needs you to blog more."

Tridiv Launches

Tridiv is a web-based editor for creating 3D shapes in CSS.

Building the New Financial Times Web App

An in-depth look by one of the developers that worked on the project. Includes some useful information about flexbox and how it impacts rendering times (spoiler: negatively).

Progressive Enhancement is Still Important

"One of the best things about the web is it can rival native applications without a hefty initial download, without an install process, and do so across devices old and new. Let's keep it that way."

Working Around a Lack of Element Queries

"We want to build responsive layouts comprised of many modular, independent HTML components that fluidly fill any layout container we drop them into, but CSS3 media queries don't currently offer a way to make content respond to its container's dimensions (as opposed to the overall viewport size)."

Ughck. Images.

In a follow-up to his ALA article Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems, Dave Rupert talks about all the progress we've made toward responsive image solutions — by which he means no progress has been made.

Google Changes Rankings of Smartphone Search Results

Google has started decreasing the ranking of sites with misconfigured mobile content redirects and errors. Highly recommended for any developer who cares about site rankings in Google (i.e. all of them).

Breaking the 1000ms Time to Glass Mobile Barrier

Ilya Grigorik discusses in detail how to construct a mobile website that loads as quickly as possible. A site that not only renders in 1 second, but one that is also visible in 1 second.

One Less JPG

Before you go worrying about how to minify every last library or shave tests out of Modernizr, try and see if you can remove just one photo from your design. It will make a bigger difference.

Scott Berkun Speaking at AEA: The Five Most Dangerous Ideas

In a 60-minute video from An Event Apart, Scott Berkun tackles designer disempowerment. He discusses how power actually works, and why developing salesmanship skills is a must, even if your job isn't public-facing.

Two Tools to Keep Your CSS Clean

A couple resources to manage your styles — csscss helps eliminate redundancies and Helium looks for un-used styles.

URL Design is Important

“People spend 24% of their gaze time looking at the URLs in the search results … If the URL looks like garbage, people are less likely to click on [it].”

Device APIs in the Real World

Following up on his A List Apart article on device APIs, Tim Wright demonstrates ambient light detection using the Nexus 7.

PPK on Blink

Our good friend PPK has some thoughts on the news that Google will be using a new rendering engine for Chromium called Blink. Blink is a fork of WebKit, so there's no fear that major rendering changes are going to take place in the near future, but it's something we should all be paying attention to as Blink starts to forge its own path.

User Inter Faces

Finding sample avatars for interface design can be quite annoying. Use this simple tool to generate a customized swath of avatars.

Microsoft backs away from Flash ban in IE10

Microsoft loosened its Flash policy, this time enabling Flash by default on both Windows 8 and Windows RT. Instead of using a whitelist to enable Flash only where Microsoft permitted it, the company now uses a blacklist to block Flash "in the small number of sites that are still incompatible with the Windows experience for

Hacking the A Tag in 100 Characters

In most browsers it's possible to hijack a link after a user has clicked it, making phishing attempts much harder to detect.

Ian Hickson on HTML5 DRM

“The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.”

IE6 Usage in China Seems to be Collapsing

In a market that has historically been very slow to adapt to browser technology, StatCounter shows a significant drop in IE6 usage, and a more recent (but also significant) uptick in Chrome.

Typekit on the Dangers of Cross-Browser Testing with IE’s Browser Modes

IE9 has a feature called Browser Modes that attempts to simplify cross-browser testing by emulating how a site would render in a real copy of IE7 or IE8. It’s available within IE9’s Developer Tools. While it’s a good idea in theory, in practice these emulated Browser Modes create more trouble than benefit.

Learn CSS Layout

A fantastic new primer on the fundamentals of using CSS for layout.

Google admits its VP8/WebM codec infringes MPEG H.264 patents

Google has admitted that its WebM video code (which they released as a free and open alternative to H.264) infringes on existing patents, meaning they will have to start paying licensing fees, and WebM is therefore by definition neither "free" nor "open."

BLOKK Font

BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin.

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.

Call for Speakers: The Dare Conference

The Dare Conference is all about being brave—and speaking publicly is one of the bravest things you can do. The Dare Conference is looking for breakout sessions (25 minutes long) that tackle difficult topics without pretending to have all the answers.

Responsive Design on a Budget

Discussions about what do or do not belong in a design should be conversations, rather than just a developer constantly having to say "no."

Brad Frost on Carousels

Brad has thoughts on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of carousels.