Chris is back at it again with the w̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶n̶s̶ “front-end is becoming full-stack”. I love this!
Front-end development is at the intersection of art and logic. A cross of business and expression. Both left and right brain. A cocktail of design and nerdery. I love it.
If you work in this industry, you almost certainly work with people who think black people are naturally not as smart or hard working as white people. You work with people who think trans women aren’t women. Who assume women aren’t as good at coding as men, or who ask, “but what do you really do,” if they introduce themselves as a programmer. Who donate to politicians and causes that hurt society and make us worse. You work with assholes.
Let me show you a way I recently discovered to center a bunch of elements around what I call the pivot. I promise you that funky HTML is out of the question and you won’t need to know any bleeding-edge CSS to get the job done.
I’m big on word games, so I recently re-imagined the main menu of my website as a nod to crossword puzzles, with my name as the vertical word, and the main sections of my website across the horizontals.
The purpose of such traditional footnotes is to allow the reader to rapidly scan both main text and notes, or to even go through the notes first and then find the main text sections they apply to. The crucial part is that both main text and footnotes are on the same page; above the fold, in web terms. By moving their eyes readers can quickly scan both of them.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have been the standard for digital accessibility the world around for two decades. This autumn, the W3C is preparing to publish version 2.2 of WCAG. WCAG 2.2 adds several new success criteria focused on extending requirements for users with low vision, cognitive impairments, and limited fine motor skills.
In the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.
Thanks to Cloud Four for sponsoring this week’s newsletter! If you’d like to help with the costs of running Friday Front-End, you can back our Patreon for as little as a dollar a month.
Tweet
Share