Defensive Design for the Web contains 40 guidelines that basically revolve around three things:
As you might already know, Internet Explorer won’t allow its users to resize a Web Site’s text if its font-size has been defined using pixel units.
To overcome this issue, you need to define your font size using percentages. Percentages define the font size of an element relative to the font size of its parent element, which might be a bit confusing, especially if you’re used to using pixels. But I’ve recently been shown a simple trick that enables you to convert from pixels to percentages :
Most browsers set the font size to the equivalent of 16px by default. To convert the pixel value we need to percentage, we do the following :
The examples should be self-explanatory. We just move the first three digits (from the left) of the results to the left of the floating point to get the percentage value. Note that if the element’s parent’s font-size has been set to 14px (for example), then you need to divide by 14, not 16.
I personally won’t bother with percentages just to support Internet Explorer, but this might be handy in future projects.
This is a technique I’ve been using in the local FAQ at work which, as I’ve been told, makes people find the answers they’re looking pretty fast.
Say we had this simple FAQ about accounts at example.com:
Users will have to read every question in order to find the answer they’re looking for. Some might even skip it if it had a lot of questions, which is besides the point.
Now let’s see what it would look like after emphasizing the key word(s) for each question:
Now that key words are emphasized, users will be able to scan this FAQ much faster; all they need to do is search for the words that are relevant to their question. Some will even be able to spot the question they want at first glance. Try not to emphasize too many key words though, as it will only end up confusing readers.
Of course, this also applies to paragraphs, not just lists , as long as you emphasize key words intelligently.
In this post, I compiled a list of the 10 most annoying things I experience on the web. There are more annoyances out there, but since these 10 annoyances popped up in my mind first, then they probably are the most annoying things on the web for me.
People Who think that:
And a few other things I don’t recall right now.
That’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do in JavaScript - calling a script from within another script, like the @import command in CSS or include in PHP/C/C++. JavaScript doesn’t support this natively. I thought there’s no workaround until today my friend, Egor Kouchnarev, who is web designer, asked me whether it’s possible to do this using document.write to write some <script /> tags/links in a document’s head. It was a pretty good idea, except It’s better implemented by manipulating the DOM.