Each platform has its own limitations and proprietary publishing mechanism. Creating interactive content that works across all of these environments is a real challenge. Publishing content to so many media without lots of extra development overhead can be difficult. In this article, Chris Ashton explains how they’ve approached the problem in BBC’s Visual Journalism department.
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It’s incredible to see how far web standards have come. Flash was one of the reasons a lot of folks started building websites. Flash was one of the reasons Simon Owen started building websites. It pioneered in a lot of areas, and this led to people creating amazing things with it. Over the years, it’s pushed the web forward a great deal. Adobe’s official announcement of dropping support of Flash, though, does raise concerns. Here are some of the groundbreaking things Flash could do back then, and how we can go about doing them today.
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Even if you don’t use any client-side JavaScript at all to build a site, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea of building with components. Learn how to build a static site with the help of an HTML preprocessor. In this article, Chris Coyier will take a walk through a site he built recently using this technique. He used CodePen Projects to build it, which offers Nunjucks as a preprocessor, which was perfectly up for the job.
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When creating free or premium WordPress themes, you’re bound to make mistakes. WordPress has its own coding and theming standards. While you can write PHP the way you want to in your template files, it’s best to actually stick to “the WordPress way,” even if it’s not necessarily “the best way.” In this article, Nauris Pūķis will show you how you can avoid them in order to save yourself time and focus on actually creating themes people will enjoy using!
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React and D3.js are great tools to help us deal with the DOM and its challenges. They can surely work together, and we are empowered to choose where to draw the line between them. Both take control of user interface elements, and they do so in different ways. How can we make them work together while optimizing for their distinct advantages according to your current project? In this article, Marcos Iglesias will see how we can approach building React projects that need the powerful charting goodness of D3.
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Did you know that you can incorporate Vue into your project the same way that you would incorporate jQuery — with no build step necessary? Let’s cover some common use cases in jQuery and how we can switch them over to Vue, and why we’d even want to do so. In this article Sarah Drasner shows you that Vue is also a pretty nice abstraction for small sites that don’t need a lot of overhead. Due to Vue’s flexibility, it’s also easy to transition this code to a build step and component structures if you’d like to adopt a more complex structure over time. It’s actually pretty fun to try it out!
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JavaScript is essential to any advanced web app, so a strong debugger is a key part of the toolset. In this article, Dustin Driver and Jason Laster find out how the new Firefox JavaScript debugger can help you write fast, bug-free code. They will crack open a very simple to-do app with Debugger divided into three panes: the source list pane, the source pane, and the tool pane.. Here’s how it works!
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GraphQL’s features are not a revolution, but what makes GraphQL powerful is that the level of polish, integration, and ease-of-use make it more than the sum of its parts. Many of the things GraphQL accomplishes can, with effort and discipline, be achieved using REST or RPC, but GraphQL brings state of the art APIs to the enormous number of projects that may not have the time, resources or tools to do this themselves. In this article, Eric Baer focuses almost entirely on why GraphQL exists and the problems it solves.
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Manually clicking through different browsers as they run your development code, either locally or remotely, is a quick way to validate that code. However, it’s not a solution for testing the full breadth of your site’s code base on the assortment of browsers and device types available to your customers. That’s where automated testing really comes into its own. In this article, Jason McConnell provides an overview of the concepts, technologies and coding techniques involved with running test scripts against browsers automatically using WebDriverJS on Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge.
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One of the toughest challenges Harris Schneiderman came across is the reorderable drag-and-drop list. While a reorderable list is a somewhat commonly used widget with intuitive conventions for mouse users, it’s not clear how keyboard-only assistive technology users can perform this simple task. Dragon Drop seeks to fill this gap by providing means for all users to perform this somewhat common task. Due to the absence of supported ARIA attributes, Dragon Drop utilizes live regions to convey the information needed for all users to reorder a list.
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