dogfood / tags / sxsw2012

Tagged with “sxsw2012” (4) activity chart

  1. CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices

    In the early days of CSS the web industry cut its teeth on blogs and small personal sites. Much of the methodology still considered best-practise today originated from the experiences of developers working alone, often on a single small style sheet, with few of the constraints that come from working with large distributed teams on large continually changing web projects.

    The mechanics of CSS are relatively simple. But creating large maintainable systems with it is still an unsolved problem. For larger sites, CSS is a difficult and complex component of the codebase to manage and maintain. It’s difficult to document patterns, and it’s difficult for developers unfamiliar with the code to contribute safely.

    How can we do better? What are the CSS best practises that are letting us down and that we must shake off? How can we take a more precise, structured, engineering-driven approach to writing CSS to keep it bug-free, performant, and most importantly, maintainable?

    http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9410

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by dogfood one year ago

  2. The Nick Denton Interview: The Failure of Comments

    The internet was supposed to allow media outlets not only to display the talent of their writers — but to capture the intelligence of the audience. Remember that rhetoric? We’ve abandoned it; the most that publishers can claim is that their comments are not quite as bad as the competition’s. Trolls and spammers are not the problem. They can be dealt with by brute-force moderation. The real tragedy: the triumph of mediocrity. People with time on their hands drown out more valuable contributors. We’ve all designed discussion systems with the most avid commenters in mind. We’ve given them stars and moderating powers and allowed them to develop cliques and a sense of ownership that shades into entitlement. They are not the only readers. They are not even the smartest of our readers. If we’re truly to capture the intelligence of the audience, we need to design for the most intelligent of the audience.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by dogfood one year ago

  3. Designing for Content Management Systems

    Jared Ponchot Creative Dir, Lullabot

    The job of a web designer these days includes designing for content that changes, is highly dynamic, and often does not yet exist. Gone are the halcyon days of static, 5 page websites that are just as rigid as a printed brochure (let’s be honest, we don’t miss that). This reality has created a great deal of debate within our industry and a fair amount of difficulty in our design processes.

    In this session we’ll cover some basic design concepts and principles that can be applied when designing for CMS-driven websites. We’ll also outline some tips and tricks for your design process, and explore some of the biggest hurdles and potential pitfalls in designing for yet created and ever-changing content.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by dogfood one year ago

  4. Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side

    Are we being seduced by the animation and rich UI capabilities of modern browsers at the expense of the underlying platform of the Web?

    The Web has entered a new phase in its evolution: The proliferation of a JavaScript enabled audience with increased processing grunt in their devices, better and more ambitious JavaScript developers, and users with an appetite for sophisticated experiences, all seem to be helping to move the web in a rich and exciting direction.

    Good developers understand about graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript and the like, so why are we seeing big companies building web offerings with little apparent thought for their impact on the Web?

    We’ll explore this by looking at what the Web was, is now, and might become. We’ll look at examples of exciting user interfaces and sophisticated interactions. We’ll also examine some emerging techniques for providing rich user interactions without hurting the web or killing kittens.

    Phil Hawksworth, Technical Director, R/GA

    Phil began his career building web applications for financial institutions such as Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and the London Stock Exchange in the late nineties. A focus on web architectures and real-time data delivery lead Phil to a variety of web development roles with particular attention to emerging front-end development techniques and JavaScript application development.

    After several years working on web applications and consulting on web best practices at technology companies such as Verisign, VMware and BT, Phil made the move into the agency world where he managed development teams and architected solutions on projects for clients including of eBay, Sony and BP.

    Phil Hawksworth is a Technical Director at R/GA and enjoys talking about himself in the third person.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by dogfood one year ago