E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with. We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most [...]

   The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear. The standard buttons [...]

   The Web has become increasingly interactive over the years. This trend is set to continue with the next generation of applications driven by the real-time Web. Adding real-time functionality to an application can result in a more interactive and engaging user experience. However, setting up and maintaining the server-side real-time components can be an unwanted [...]

   Welcome to the first in a new series of interviews called “How I Work”. These interviews revolve around how thinkers and creators in the Web world design, code, and create. The goal is not to get into the specific nuances of their craft (as that information already exists online), but rather step back and learn a bit about their habits, philosophies, [...]

   Thanks to CSS3, we can create effects and animations without using JavaScript, which will facilitate the work of many designers. But we must be careful to avoid abusing CSS3, not only because old browsers do not support all of its properties. In any case, we all see the potential of CSS3, and in this article we’ll discuss how to create an infinitely looping slider [...]

   For years, the Web standards community has talked about the separation of concerns. Separate your CSS from your JavaScript from your HTML. We all do that, right? CSS goes into its own file; JavaScript goes in another; HTML is left by itself, nice and clean. CSS Zen Garden proved that we can alter a design into a myriad of permutations simply by changing the CSS. [...]

   I recently had the pleasure of organizing this year’s Beercamp website. If you’re unfamiliar, Beercamp is a party for designers and developers. It’s also a playground for front-end experimentation. Each year we abandon browser support and throw a “Pshaw” in the face of semantics so that we can play with some emerging features of modern browsers. This [...]

   I recently had the pleasure of organizing this year’s Beercamp website. If you’re unfamiliar, Beercamp is a party for designers and developers. It’s also a playground for front-end experimentation. Each year we abandon browser support and throw a “Pshaw” in the face of semantics so that we can play with some emerging features of modern browsers. This [...]

   This article is the sixth in our new series that introduces the latest, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts, [...]

   I’m pretty confident that I won’t surprise anyone here by saying that CSS sprites have been around for quite a while now, rearing their somewhat controversial heads in the Web development sphere as early as 2003. Still, the CSS sprite hasn’t truly found its way into the everyday toolkit of the common Web developer. While the theory behind CSS sprites is easy [...]