"polyfill" entries

Panels and panel sets

Common patterns emerge from a variety of components.

Distribution room power panel

Picture a modern web application. It almost certainly uses interactive controls, perhaps a carousel at the start, probably a set of tabs or an accordion, or maybe it is based on a coverflow or deck. These are common user interface metaphors: if you use these terms, designers know what you mean, and people recognize and know how to use them. At first glance these design patterns seem to have quite different characteristics, but we’d like to convince you that they really aren’t so different after all.

Ok, convince me!

The idea of a panel of content comes from the printing industry. In printing, a panel is a single page of a brochure, or one face of a folded leaflet. A print panel might be visually unique, like the cover of a leaflet, or be like other panels in a set, like the inner faces of the leaflet.

The concept of a panel has been applied to web design multiple times, generally becoming interactive along the way. Panels of content can be expanded or collapsed, removed completely, or presented in collections. Each of these design patterns has a common purpose: display a collection or set of things, generally one at a time to save on screen space. They may cycle vertically or horizontally, or peel off in layers, but these transition effects do not change the fundamental purpose of the thing – to navigate effectively through some pieces of content.

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Proposing CSS input modality

:focus'ing on users.

Image of a camera lens artfully out of focus

Editor’s note: The author would like to acknowledge her co-author, Brian Kardell, who contributed many insights to the ideas presented here, along with a substantial number of the words.

Web developers and web standards authors alike strive to live up to the promise of “universality” — the idea that the web should be available to all. This concept drives many innovations in web technology, as well as being fundamentally built in to the philosophy of the open standards on which the web is based.

In order to achieve this, we frequently find that having some carefully chosen information about how the user intends to view the content (a concept we’ll refer to in this article as “user context”) allows web developers to create more flexible and useful user experiences. In this post, we’ll lay out a case that it’s time to expand our view of user context to include the concept of modality (how the user is interacting with the page), but before we flesh that out, let’s take a look at “user context”.

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Why polyfills matter

The changing landscape of web platform extensibility

From its nascent days, the growth of the web has been marked by the waxing and waning of technologies, frameworks and ideas. Old ideas and technologies expire and fade away, and new ones arise in their place. Much as the cicada molts and leaves behind an old shell as it moves into adulthood, the web has seen countless ideas come and go as it has evolved.

Relics (and Catalysts) of the Web

Remember XHTML? More specifically, do you remember caring deeply about XHTML? You likely do. Do you still care about XHTML? Chances are, the answer is no. The same goes for Flash, DHTML, HTML Components and countless other buzzwords of the web that once felt so alive and important, and now feel like relics of another time.

Occasionally, however, we collectively stumble upon ideas and technologies that stand the test of time. These are ideas that don’t just evolve with the web–they are often a catalyst for the evolution of the web itself. Ideas like Cascading Style Sheets and XMLHTTPRequest, the vendor hack that spurred the AJAX revolution, are two examples among many.

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Web application development is different (and better)

On both front and back end, the Web challenges conventional wisdom

The Web became the most ubiquitous distributed application system because it didn’t have to think of itself as a programming environment. Almost every day I see comments or complaints from programmers (even brilliant programmers) muttering about how many strange and inferior parts they have to deal with, how they’d like to fix a historical accident by ripping out HTML completely and replacing it with Canvas, and how separation of concerns is an inconvenience. Everything should be JavaScript.

(Apologies to Tom Dale, who tweeted a perfect series of counterpoints just as I was writing. He has visions of rebuilding the rendering stack in JavaScript, but those tweets are not unusual opinions.)

The Web is different, and I can see why programmers might have little tolerance for the paths it chose, but this time the programmers are wrong. It’s not that the Web is perfect – it certainly has glitches. It’s not that success means something is better. Many terrible things have found broad audiences, and there are infinite levels to the Worse is Better conversations. And of course, the Web doesn’t solve every programming need. Many problems just don’t fit, and that’s fine.

So why is the Web better?

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MathML forges on

The standard for mathematical content in publishing work flows, technical writing, and math software

20 years into the web, math and science are still second class citizens on the web. While MathML is part of HTML 5, its adoption has seen ups and downs but if you look closely you can see there is more light than shadow and a great opportunity to revolutionize educational, scientific and technical communication.

Printer in 1568-ce

Somebody once compared the first 20 years of the web to the first 100 years of the printing press. It has become my favorite perspective when thinking about web standards, the web platform and in particular browser development. 100 years after Gutenberg the novel had yet to be invented, typesetting quality was crude at best and the main products were illegally copied pamphlets. Still, the printing press had revolutionized communication and enabled social change on a massive scale.

DE-Zeitungsrollenoffsetdruck by Steschke

In the near future, all our current web technology will look like Gutenberg’s original press sitting next to an offset digital printing machine.

With faster and faster release cycles it is sometimes hard to keep in mind what is important in the long run—enabling and revolutionizing human communication.

Since I joined the MathJax team in 2012, I have gained many new perspectives on MathML, the web standard for display of mathematical content, and its role in making scientific content a first class citizen on the web. But it is rather useless to talk about MathML’s potential without knowing about the state of MathML on the web. So let’s tackle that in this post.

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Toward Responsive Web Programming

Creating flexible expectations

“Expect the unexpected” has long been a maxim of web development. New browsers and devices arrive, technologies change, and things break. The lore of web development isn’t just the technology: it addresses the many challenges of dealing with customers who want to lock everything down.

Matt Griffin (and a lot of others) reminded me of these difficulties at Artifact, and his Client Relationships and the Multi-Device Web brings it home for designers.

Is there room for programmers to tell a similar story?

I don’t mean agile. Agile development is difficult enough to explain to clients, but applications that adapt to their circumstances are a separate set of complications. Iterating on adaptable behaviors may be more difficult than iterating on adaptable designs, but it opens new possibilities both for applications and for the evolution of the Web.

Responsive Web Design is (slowly) becoming the new baseline, giving designers a set of tools for building pages that (usually) provide the same functionality while adapting to different circumstances. Programmers sometimes provide different functionality to different users, but it’s more often about cases where users have different privileges than about different devices and contexts.

Adjusting how content displays is complex enough, but modifying application behavior to respond to different circumstances is more unusual. The goal of most web development has been to provide a single experience across a variety of devices, filling in gaps whenever possible to support uniformity. The history of “this page best viewed on my preferred browser” is mostly ugly. Polyfills, which I think have a bright future, emerged to create uniformity where browsers didn’t.

Browsers, though, now provide a huge shared context. Variations exist, of course, and cause headaches, but many HTML5 APIs and CSS3 features can work nicely as supplements to a broader site. Yes, you could build a web app around WebRTC and Media Capture and Streams, and it would only run on Firefox and Chrome right now. But you could also use WebRTC to help users talk about content that’s visible across browsers, and only the users on Firefox and Chrome would have the extra video option. The Web Audio API is also a good candidate for this, as might be some graphics features.

This is harder, of course, with things like WebSockets that provide basic functionality. For those cases, polyfills seem like a better option. Something that seems as complicated and foundational as IndexedDB could be made optional, though, by switching whether data is stored locally or remotely (or both).

HTML5 and CSS3 have re-awakened Web development. I’m hoping that we can develop new practices that let us take advantage of these tools without having to wait for them to work everywhere. In the long run, I hope that will create a more active testing and development process to give browser vendors feedback earlier—but getting there will require changing the expectations of our users and customers as well.

From JavaScript to Declarative Markup

Evolving enhancements for web developers

Web architecture separates structured content (markup), presentation (style), and behavior (JavaScript). As recently as a decade ago, many developers worked in all three, but the years since Ajax arrived have brought more specialization. The rise of JavaScript in particular has led to approaches that have JavaScript carry the load. In the past few weeks, I’ve been delighted to see work that suggests a different path forward, one that takes greater advantage of the flexibility markup offers.

Last week, at the Artifact Conference, I was delighted to return to the world of web designers. The crowd was full of people who know very well what JavaScript can add to their site and how they want to include it, but who don’t focus on it. JavaScript is just a tool, often even a tool wielded later in the process after the basic framing of the site is complete.

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CSS Selectors as Superpowers

You thought CSS was weak? Think again.

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After years of complaints about Cascading Style Sheets, many stemming from their deliberately declarative nature, it’s time to recognize their power. For developers coming from imperative programming styles, it might seem hard to lose the ability to specify more complex logical flow. That loss, though, is discipline leading toward the ability to create vastly more flexible systems, a first step toward the pattern matching model common to functional programming.

Way back when I was writing about styling XML in browsers, I didn’t even have to stop to think about how difficult it would be to repurpose CSS selectors for XML documents. Since they weren’t tightly bound to assumptions about HTML beyond the existence of elements and attributes, they just worked.

The tool that most vividly demonstrated the real power of selectors, though, was jQuery. I may have annoyed some people by referring to jQuery as “that framework that lets you use CSS selectors instead of DOM tree walking” for a while, but Remy Sharp makes clear the power of that:

The ease in which jQuery could be learnt was the appeal to me. All the DOM navigation was done using CSS expression using some insane black box magic that John Resig had come up [with] – saving my limited brain power, and once I had those DOM nodes, I could do what I wanted to them (usually some combinations of showing, hiding, fading and so on).

Over time, as Sharp notes, Web browsers learned from jQuery, building this basic lesson deeper into their tools and making it work more efficiently:

In those 7 years, quite a bit has happened. Probably one of the most important steps forward was the introduction of querySelectorAll.

Being able to give a native function of a browser a CSS expression, and it doing the work to navigate the DOM is a huge (literally) part of jQuery.

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Stop standardizing HTML

It's time for developers to create their own vocabularies

When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it’s time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own markup vocabularies and processing.

When the W3C first formed, it formed around HTML, the core standard of content on the Web, defining the structure, appearance, and behavior of content. Over the next few years, however, it became clear that HTML was doing too much, and the W3C and other groups refactored appearance, behavior, and many semantics into separate specifications:

  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took responsibility for presentation and layout.

  • JavaScript took responsibility for behavior, aided by the Document Object Model (DOM) and a variety of APIs for handling device and multimedia interactions.

  • WAI-ARIA took responsibility for accessibility semantics, ensuring that content remained available to a broad audience even if developers pushed the current boundaries of markup.

It’s not a completely neat separation – some of CSS feels like behavior, and JavaScript can manipulate presentation, for example, but it certainly took a lot of pieces out of HTML. A few aspects of HTML, notably media inclusion, are still mostly handled at the markup level, but most of them aren’t any longer. Forms and linking are both still defined in HTML itself, but aren’t difficult to implement separately.

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