Firefox OS: Making your HTML5 efforts worthwhile

What happened? When did we give up on the idea of nice and responsive web products that use what is available to them? It can not be about the tools we have. Browsers have amazing developer tools built into them these days – all of them, really. Using these tools we have very fine-grained control over what happens in a browser.
— Christian Heilmann


An interesting look at Firefox OS, why it exists and its app ecosystem.

Making your HTML5 efforts worthwhile – notes of the #sotb3 talk

List of Pseudo-Elements to Style Form Controls

Styling form elements is a pain point when developing web applications. Historically, web developers have had to accept the form controls the browser provided with little hope of customization. However, web rendering engines are increasingly adding hooks through pseudo-elements to give authors some control over the display.

— TJ VanToll

A useful list of psuedo-elements available in: Trident, Gecko, WebKit.


Read it.

Accessibility, Front-end Development and User Experience

Front-end development is ultimately a user experience issue, a human issue if you will. We harness technology to build websites for users. We push clients to consider users. We even build code libraries and strive to write elegant code for users. The user in each situation is different yet one thing is sure: without the user we don’t need a website. 

Development and the User

As front-end developers our User varies:

  • Our Clients have to use the site we build.
  • Developers have to use the code we write.
  • Website visitors have to use the site we built.

What does this have to do with a presentation to JavaScript developers?

I love this presentation because Twitter developer @fat frames a critical issue poignantly, humanly and honestly: Accessibility. 

If our code and our websites are all for the user, accessibility matters. This presentation reminds me not only that I still have a lot to learn, but also WHY it’s important. 

Accessibility Resources

Ready to go further down the rabbit hole? There’s quite a few good resources to explore, but these 2 are a great place to start: 

Accessibility and Developers by Paul Irish
This post by Paul Irish links to a large number of really good conversations, viewpoints and resources to get you started. 

HTML5accessibility.com  
HTML5accessibility.com offers an overview of HTML5 feature accessibility support in browsers and points the direction to in-depth resources to help you further on the way.

* Presentation Source