Designing The Perfect Slider – Smashing Magazine

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:

Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.

Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.

I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:

Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.

Hell, yeah!

Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).

Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine

While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.

Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.

Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:

The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.

Amen!

Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS — Smashing Magazine

Rachel goes into detail on how she uses pattern libraries—built with Fractal to build interfaces. I know it sounds like we paid her to say all the nice things about Fractal, but honestly, we didn’t even know she was writing this article!

After discovering Fractal two years ago, we have moved every new project — large and small — into Fractal.

Don’t Use The Placeholder Attribute — Smashing Magazine

A lot of the issues here are with abuses of the placeholder attribute—using it as a label, using it for additional information, etc.—whereas using it quite literally as a placeholder can be thought of as an enhancement (I almost always preface mine with “e.g.”).

Still, there’s no getting around that terrible colour contrast issue: if the contrast were greater, it would look too much like an actual pre-filled value, and that’s potentially worse.

UX In Contact Forms: Essentials To Turn Leads Into Conversions — Smashing Magazine

The answers to these questions about forms are useful for just about any website:

1. Is It OK To Place A Form In Two Columns?
2. Where Should Labels Be Placed?
3. Can We Use Placeholder Text Instead Of A Label?
4. How To Lessen The Cognitive Load Of A Form?
5. Are Buttons Considered Part Of A Form’s UX?
6. Is It Possible To Ease The Process Of Filling A Form?
7. Does The User’s Location Influence A Form’s UX?