An increasingly large number of publicly available APIs provide powerful services to expand the functionality of our applications. WordPress is an incredibly dynamic and flexible CMS that powers everything from small personal blogs to major e-commerce websites and everything in between. Part of what makes WordPress so versatile is its powerful plugin system, which makes it incredibly easy to... Read More
Web accessibility is about people. Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information, empathizing with them and their sense of what is convenient and what frustratingly unnecessary barriers you could help them to avoid.
Armed with this understanding,... Read More
We’re all resigned to it: launching a browser reloads every tab you previously had open, blasting a cacophonous mix of sound and video. While browsers have made it easier to control this experience with tab icons and extensions like MuteTab, for most people this behavior presents a confusing and disorienting experience. As developers and designers it’s our job to make the web welcoming, not... Read More
AJAX calls have moved user interaction on the Web a huge step forward: We no longer need to reload the page in response to each user input. Using AJAX, we can call specific procedures on the server and update the page based on the returned values, giving our applications fast interactivity.
What AJAX calls do not cover are updates from the server, which are needed for the modern... Read More
It’s an exciting time for web APIs, and one to watch out for is the Web Speech API. It enables websites and web apps not only to speak to you, but to listen, too. It’s still early days, but this functionality is set to open a whole array of use cases. I’d say that’s pretty awesome.
In this article, we’ll look at the technology and its proposed usage, as well as some great examples of how... Read More
The post-Flash era is hardly free of animation. CSS animation is quickly becoming a cornerstone of user-friendly interfaces on mobile and desktop, and JavaScript libraries already exist to handle complex interactive animations. In the wake of so much “CSS versus JavaScript animation” infighting, a new API specifically for web animation is coming out that might just unite both camps.
It’s... Read More
Like most web developers, I spend my days giving instructions to computers. These instructions generally involve some input (a request for a web page), some logic (get the right content from a database) and some output (send the content to the requesting browser). This process of telling a computer how to perform a task, such as generating a web page, is what we commonly call “programming,”... Read More
The Web has succeeded at interoperability and scale in a way that no other technology has before or since. Still, the Web remains far from “state of the art”, and it is being increasingly threatened by walled gardens. The Web platform often lags competitors in delivering new system and device capabilities to developers.
Worse, it often hobbles new capabilities behind either high- or... Read More
Are you fascinated by dynamic data? Do you go green with envy when you see tweets pulled magically into websites? Trust me, I’ve been there.
The goal of today’s tutorial is to create a simple Web app for grabbing movie posters from TMDb. We’ll use jQuery and the user’s input to query a JSON-based API and deal with the returned data appropriately. Read More
