Three great examples of HTML web components:
What I hope is that you now have the same sort of epiphany that I had when reading Jeremy Keith’s post: HTML Web Components are an HTML-first feature.
I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.
Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:
I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.
The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:
Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.
We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.
Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.
Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).
Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.
I think about 90% of the JavaScript I’ve ever written was some DOM scripting to handle the situation of “when the user triggers an event on this element, do something to this other element.” Toggles, lightboxes, accordions, tabs, tooltips …they’re all basically following the same underlying pattern. So it makes sense to me to see this pattern abstracted into a little library.
A lovely new service from Adrian that allows you to sync up guitar tabs with videos. It’s a very impressive in-browser app.
Amazon is AB testing their next design iteration. Bye, bye tabs (yay!), hello fly-out menus (boo!).