At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Jeremy Keith shared his thoughts on new HTML5 features to be using as well as how he likes to build for short and long timescales.
Here are my take-aways:
- Treat navigation as second. On mobile, you can decide to only place navigation at the bottom of your site. The nav icon can just be an anchor link (#nav) to the bottom of the website, where the navigation resides. Alternatively, the navigation icon could link out to a separate page that only has nav on it – has same experience for user, but different approach for designer/developer.
- Why do we make password fields display as dots? This is just faux-security and doesn’t add any extra security, except from someone looking over your shoulder?
- Jeremy Keith challenges us to make the password field real text by default and give the option for hiding it with the click of a button. This approach would increase the success-rate of logging in – which increases usability.
- “Every user is a non-Javascript user while the website is still loading” —Jeremy Keith
- Because of this, our progressive enhancements should include both CSS and Javascript. Javascript failing should not stop your website from loading fully.
- Try conditional loading for 3rd party services like social buttons and embedded content.
- Think in terms of performance load time as well as in terms of the many years your website will be used for. Short vs long time scales.
- In the long-term, image formats may not stick around, but text formats will.
- “The cloud – what a bullsh*t word” —Jeremy Keith
- I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I found a blog post where he describes further about how the term, ‘the cloud’ just encourages ignorance about where things reside on the web. He compares it to Miasma theory which said that some diseases were caused by ‘bad air’, but the theory was later replaced when germs were discovered.
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