The web is developing and changing so fast, and we need to acknowledge that we as individual persons can’t know and understand everything. And that’s fine. Choose what you want to do, set your priorities, and, most importantly of all, don’t hesitate to hire someone else for the things you can’t do on your own. In this article, Anselm has summarized the most important happenings in the web community that have taken place over the past few weeks in one handy list for you. Enjoy!
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Making toggle button inclusive is a question of language, visual design, markup, and behavior. In this inaugural post, Heydon Pickering will be exploring what it takes to make toggle buttons inclusive. As with any component, there’s no one way to go about this, especially when such controls are examined under different contexts. However, there’s certainly plenty to forget to do or to otherwise screw up, so let’s try to avoid any of that. You can take the basics explored here and add all sorts of design nuances, including animation. It’s just important to lay a solid foundation first.
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Welcome to this month’s web development update. It’s actually the first one that we publish, and from now on, Anselm will summarize the most important things that happened over the past month in one handy list for you. So that you’re always up-to-date of what’s going on in the web community. Enjoy!
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Sketch has delivered a robust design platform with a refreshing, simple user interface. The open nature of the Sketch plugin system means that anyone can identify a need, write a plugin and share it with the community. A major barrier is stopping those eager to take part: Designers and front-end developers must learn how to write a plugin. What if users could write plugins using technologies they are already familiar with? In this article, Zachary Schuessler covers the usage of WebView technology to create a plugin using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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You might have noticed it already: in the past few weeks you might have missed Anselm’s Web Development Reading List issues here on SmashingMag. No worries, from now on, we’ll switch to collecting the most important news of each month in one handy, monthly summary for you. If you’d like to continue reading Anselm’s weekly reading list (and we encourage you to!), you can still do so via email, on wdrl.info or via RSS. — Editorial Team
Hello again! I’ll continue publishing this resource and am grateful for everyone who supports my ongoing work. And to celebrate the last weekly edition, I found a lot of great articles for you: Biohacking news that sound like science fiction, advances in deep learning with JavaScript, and a lot more. Happy reading!
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As a developer, David Tucker often runs up against one hurdle that can slow down the initial build of a mobile hypothesis: user management. Cognito is a tool for enabling users to sign up for and sign into web and mobile applications that you create. In addition to this functionality, it also allows for storage of user data offline, and it provides synchronization of this data. In this article, David will walk you through the process of configuring a user pool for your needs. Then, he will integrate this user pool with an iOS application and allow a user to log in and fetch the attributes associated with their user account.
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When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table.
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The performance and effectiveness of internal marketing campaigns should be assessed, as this is one of the most powerful instruments for generating more leads, more conversions and more revenue on your website. In many cases, web analysts use Google Analytics’ UTM campaign parameters to track internal advertising. The problem is that UTM parameters are intended to be used in external campaigns. Unfortunately, they are not suitable for tracking internal campaigns. In this article, Christian Ebernickel will explain why you would corrupt your Google Analytics data when using UTM parameters for internal tracking purposes, as well as presenting the solution and including a precise description of all the necessary steps.
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With the current state of web apps, we can rely on various UI elements to interact with users. With the Web Speech API, we can develop rich web applications with natural user interactions and minimal visual interface, using voice commands. In this tutorial, Tomomi Imura will use the API to create an artificial intelligence (AI) voice chat interface in the browser. The app will listen to the user’s voice and reply with a synthetic voice. Because the Web Speech API is still experimental, the app works only in supported browsers. The features used for this article, both speech recognition and speech synthesis, are currently only in the Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome 25+ and Opera 27+, while Firefox, Edge and Safari support only speech synthesis at the moment.
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Take a look on CSS grid layout for making websites with a demo to see different levels of enhancement. You can use the hottest cutting-edge technologies and fancy techniques, as long as you don’t forget who you are making websites for: users. Your users aren’t all the same, nor do they use the same device, OS, browser, Internet provider or input device. By providing a basic experience to begin with, you can get the best out of the modern web without compromising accessibility. In this article, Manuel Matuzović explains how floating, flexbox and grid work inviting to provide an accesible and usable experience for various browsers. Integrate progressive enhancement so you can build resilient websites!
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