Snippets

Bebas Neue is a sans serif font family based on the original Bebas Neue free font by Ryoichi Tsunekawa. It has grown in popularity and become something like the “Helvetica of the free fonts”.
Now the family has four new members – Thin, Light, Book, and Regular – added by Fontfabric Type Foundry.

The new weights stay true to the style and grace of Bebas with the familiar clean lines, elegant shapes, a blend of technical straightforwardness and simple warmth which make it uniformly proper for web, print, commerce and art.

Originally designed by Ryoichi Tsunekawa, Flat-It Type Foundry.

Available under the Open Font License.

I needed a simple queue system for a project I’m working on and realized that jQuery already exposed its own:

Queues in jQuery are used for animations. You can use them for any purpose you like. They are an array of functions stored on a per element basis, using jQuery.data(). They are First-In-First-Out (FIFO). You can add a function to the queue by calling .queue(), and you remove (by calling) the functions using .dequeue().

To understand the internal jQuery queue functions, reading the source and looking at examples helps me out tremendously. One of the best examples of a queue function I’ve seen is .delay():

The default queue - fx

The default queue in jQuery is fx. The default queue has some special properties that are not shared with other queues.

1. Auto Start: When calling $(elem).queue(function(){}); the fx queue will automatically dequeue the next function and run it if the queue hasn’t started.
2. ‘inprogress’ sentinel: Whenever you dequeue() a function from the fx queue, it will unshift() (push into the first location of the array) the string "inprogress" - which flags that the queue is currently being run.
3. It’s the default! The fx queue is used by .animate() and all functions that call it by default.

NOTE: If you are using a custom queue, you must manually .dequeue() the functions, they will not auto start!

Retrieving/Setting the queue

You can retrieve a reference to a jQuery queue by calling .queue() without a function argument. You can use the method if you want to see how many items are in the queue. You can use push, pop, unshift, shift to manipulate the queue in place. You can replace the entire queue by passing an array to the .queue() function.

Quick Examples:

[…]

[C]ustom queue example

Run example on jsFiddle

This looks like an excellent, accessible starting point for the priority navigation pattern:

Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.

There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve. At design and development agency Kollegorna we were debating on the most appropriate UX technique for tabs for our client’s website…

We agreed it should be a one-liner because the amount of tab items is unknown and narrowed our options down to two: horizontal scroll and adaptive with “more” button. Firstly, the problem with the former one is that horizontal scroll as a feature is not always visually obvious for users (especially for narrow elements like tabs) whereas what else can be more obvious than a button (“more”), right? Secondly, scrolling horizontally using a mouse-controlled device isn’t a very comfortable thing to do, so we might need to make our UI more complex with additional arrow buttons. All considered, we ended up choosing the later option[.]

JavaScript can be pretty brittle, so having a way to exclude browsers that don’t cut the mustard via CSS can be really useful, especially if you don’t want to serve them large amounts of CSS that they won’t properly understand. Since we can’t prevent loading a stylesheet via feature queries, the media attribute on a <link> element seems the next best thing. Andy Kirk has come up with a few combinations:

Since we’re still stuck with a small percentage of users still on various versions of Internet Explorer and other older browsers, a good way to deal with those seems to be to only serve most or all of our JavaScript and CSS to browsers that cut the mustard, leaving the older set with a basic but functional experience, without risk that our newer, shiny stuff will inevitably break, or the need for polyfills that may or may not work.

See also: Cutting the mustard with only CSS

More evidence that we don’t fully control our web pages and that a non-zero number of page views don’t execute JavaScript fully or correctly, despite it being enabled.

Says @ianfeather at #AllDayHey — “our monitoring tells us that around 1% of requests for JavaScript on BuzzFeed timeout. That’s around 13 million requests per month.” A reminder if one were needed that we should design for resilience

This excellent video by Physics Girl breaks down some of the misconceptions about what we programmers actually do and why we do what we do, with a focus on women and femme people in the field. I could relate especially to the discussion about it being very much about enjoying problem solving.