The Kids Watching Tom & Jerry

We're visible from the street now!

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Just above the trees (Taken with Instagram)

Design a distracted reading experience, and you’ll have distracted readers. Design for immersion—and, well, don’t be surprised if it works.

"Readers are fickle" by Mandy Brown

A $5 walking taco, with steak and fixin's (Taken with instagram)

Tall Ship Challenge in Greenport (Unicorn & Bounty) (Taken with instagram)

A view of the yard and street. Around a foot, I'd guess.

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activeminds 1000/suicide backpack awareness (Taken with instagram)

Reading up on WebSockets

I've been reading more about the new APIs that are part of HTML5, or are at least lumped into the HTML5 buzz. Today's reading is from Google's HTML5Rocks site, Introducing WebSockets: Bringing Sockets to the Web. I can see that this has a lot of potential. I think there are a couple of products I've worked on recently that do a lot of low-level asynchronous polling. Sadly, WebSockets will be disabled in Firefox 4 starting with beta 8. Let's hope that spec can be amended quickly to solve the proxy server issue that seems to be at the heart of this issue.

What's this giant phone doing outside? (Taken with instagram)

Modernizr: code for success or failure? - part 1

I'm getting my feet wet with the Modernizr feature detection library . This has led to a new dilemma in implementing the design: should you test for success or failure?

In other words, what are you assuming about your users? Are you assuming that most of your users have advanced browsers that are capable of immediately rendering advanced features and you need to provide alternatives only to the older browsers? Or, do most of your users have older browsers that will need a more traditional default state with overrides in place for a smaller percentage of advanced users?

For this project, the user base is split almost 50/50 between different versions of IE and a combination of Safari and Chrome (and almost no Firefox, which I find odd). So one half of users are capable of seeing almost any of Webkit's bleeding edge advances. The other half of users has the worst support for emerging standards amongst the major browsers. It was definitely new ground for me.

In the end, I opted to progressively enhance the user experience and tested for success. I assumed that most users will not have bleeding edge support for CSS gradients, RGBa, border radius, or multiple backgrounds. Modernizr's success-state classes on the html element provide hooks to add these features. Let me know if you've found compelling reasons to offer fallbacks for older user agents.

I'm thinking of creating a part 2 that plays devil's advocate for the opposite point of view. I need to do some tests, but I can definitely see potential performance by cutting backwards compatible images and their additional requests.