Until now, Picturefill supported span-based HTML markup that mimicked a pattern we hoped would one day become a web standard: namely, the picture element and its associated features. Following the hard work of the Responsive Images Community Group (chaired by Filament Group’s own Mat Marquis), we’re pleased to report that there are native picture implementations in development for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and potentially others!
With this news, this week we released a new version of Picturefill that will make the real picture element work in existing browsers, which means you can start using picture today.
Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves can teach you.
Designers are good people. Some designs exclude people anyway. Alan Dalton offers a practical fix: accessibility personas that help you recognize problems while you're designing, not after. Homework included.
Computing was born in a Viennese café. Between 1928 and 1934, while Hitler plotted and Europe crumbled, a motley crew of mathematicians, philosophers, architects, and economists gathered weekly to puzzle out the limits of reason—and invented Computer Science in the process. What made their collaboration possible wasn't just brilliance (though they had plenty). It was amiability: the careful design of a social space where difficult people could disagree without destroying each other. Longtime Web Dev Notes contributing author Mark Bernstein mines this forgotten history for lessons that might just save today's embattled web from its worst impulses. Spoiler: it involves better coffee service and the looming threat of public humiliation.
Design systems aren't component libraries—they’re living languages. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.
This makes me sad.