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Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugin Development – Follow this guide to learn the basics of building your own WordPress plugins.
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HTML – Simplified Code – A collection of design elements that outputs simplified code for your projects.
jExcel CE – A lightweight Vanilla JavaScript plugin to create amazing web-based interactive HTML tables and spreadsheets.
An Ode to Adobe Flash: How It Helped Move the Web Forward – As Flash fades into the past, its impact can still be felt.
Zettlr – A free Markdown editor aimed at professional writers.
Covid19 Free UI Kit – A free set of UI elements and layouts for Sketch and Adobe XD.
Scroll to text fragment: How to link & highlight any text on a web page – Use this detailed guide to add text fragment highlighting to any page.
The 20 Best Free Outline Fonts – Add some unique style to your projects with these stunning fonts.
Accordion Rows in CSS Grid – Designer Eric Meyer details his use of CSS Grid on his website’s new layout.
1-Line Layouts* – A collection of modern layouts and sizing techniques that demonstrate the power of CSS.
Flexbox Cheatsheet – A guide featuring 12 tips and tricks that every web developer should know.
harmonograph.art – A browser-based tool that lets you draw, download and share a randomized harmonograph.
The Chinese Type Archive – An on-going, collaborative, open-access index of Chinese typographic resources.
Profile Pro – Easily generate avatars with any background and use them with a simple download or a copy-paste.
Dark Ages of the Web – Notes on all the old-school techniques used by web designers back in the day.
The post Weekly News for Designers № 548 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about his Stable Sorting RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 61. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a rather small RFC that he's proposing called stable sorting. Hello Nikita, how are you this morning?
Hey, Derick, I'm great. How are you?
Not too bad myself. Let's jump straight in here. The title of the RFC is stable sorting, what does that mean, what is stable sorting, or what is sorting stability?
Sorting stability refers to the behaviour of the sort when it comes to equal elements. And equal share means that we sort comparison function. For example, the one you pass to usort says the elements are equal, but there is still some way to distinguish them. For example, if you're sorting some objects, to take the example from the RFC, we have an array with users, and users have an age, and we use usort to only sort the users by age. Then according to the comparison callback all users with the same age are equal. But of course, the user also has other fields on which we can distinguish it. And the question is now in what order will equal elements appear. If we have a stable sort, then they will appear in the order they were originally in. So it's something not going to change.
And that is not what PHP sorting mechanism currently does?
Right. PHP currently uses an unstable sort, which means that the order is simply unspecified. It will be deterministic. I mean if you take the same input array and sort it, then every time we will get the same result. But there is no well specified order or relative order of elements. There's just some order. The reason why we have this behaviour is that well there are, I would say, two, the only two sorting algorithms. There is merge sort. Which is a guaranteed n log n sort that the stable, but has the disadvantage that that requires additional memory to perform the merge step. The other side there is a quicksort, which is an average case n log n sorting algorithm and is unstable, but does not require any additional memory. And in practice, everyone uses one of these algorithms, usually with a couple of extensions on sort of merge sort. Nowadays we use timsort, but which is still based on the same underlying principle, and for quicksort, we have sort which is better than quicksort, which tries to avoid some of the bad worst case performance which quicksort can have. PHP currently uses us a quicksort, which means that our sorting results are unstable.
Okay, and this RFC suggesting to change that. How would you do that? How would you modify quicksort to make it stable?
Two ways. One is to just change the sorting algorithm. So as I mentioned, the really popular stable sorting is timsort, which is used by Python by Java and probably lots of other languages at this point. And the other possibility is to stick with an unstable source. So to stick with quicksort, but to artificially enforce that the comparison function does not have, does not report equal elements that a
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 5852 bytes)
Among the top priorities for web designers is in making sure that the websites we build are accessible. Everyone should be able to navigate and consume content – with or without assistive technologies.
But as much time as we spend in discussing the topic and sharpening our skills, we can’t do this alone. It also requires our clients to buy in as well. They’ll need to understand the benefits of accessibility and why it’s important. Not to mention what they could lose by ignoring the issue.
With that, we’ve put together this guide that is filled with ways clients can help in the process. Let’s get started!
One of the easiest ways to make a website inaccessible is by going overboard with extras. While additions like special effects, animation and JavaScript UIs are compelling – they’re not always accessible.
Avoiding these bells and whistles isn’t so easy. Both designers and their clients tend to like shiny things – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
However, part of a designer’s role is that of an educator. We need to help clients understand the important stuff – accessibility being one of them. This can be a hard lesson for some.
Among the key points to emphasize is that a website should not sacrifice usability for the sake of aesthetics. Ideally, a balance can be achieved. And, quite often, simplicity is the way to get there.
And simplicity doesn’t have to mean boring. Rather, it entails making sure that the basics are covered. Text is easy to read, colors provide acceptable contrast and the site can be navigated by keyboard. Once those items are established, other goodies can be added in – so long as they don’t make things more difficult for any subset of users.
Guiding your client towards accessibility is only one step in the process. Once they buy into its importance, the real work begins.
Depending on who you’re working with, one of the bigger challenges can be obtaining content in accessible formats. The importance of this is often overlooked. After all, even if the website’s layout is accessible, that doesn’t guarantee anything when it comes to the actual content.
Accessible content includes:
If your client is providing you with text content for the various parts of their website, it should be simple and to-the-point. For consumer-oriented and business-to-business websites, the simpler the better. The main idea is that visitors shouldn’t need a college degree to comprehend a site’s content.
Thus, if a client provides overly long and complicated text, we should work with them to simplify.
Not everything on a website will be straight text and images. Downloadable files such as PDFs and Word documents are also quite common.
Of course, it can be debated whether a specific item should stay in a non-HTML format. A PDF file full of text could just as well be converted into HTML. However, there are items like printable forms where a different file format makes sense.
In that case, those documents should have accessibility features. For example, clients may send you files that were scanned. That can be a big problem, as scanned documents don’t have selectable text. The result is that they won’t be read by screen readers. Plus, the legibility of the document may also be suboptimal.
The ideal solution is asking your client to track down the original, non-scanned version of the file. This would allow it to be converted to say, a PDF, while keeping the content accessible. Otherwise, it may be a matter of using OCR to detect text or recreating the file from scratch.
A big part of keeping a website accessible is in developing good habits. For clients who will be maintaining some or all aspects of their site, they’ll need to create a process. This is an area where designers can help.
While focusing on accessible content (as outlined above) is important, the little details are also worth discussing. Alt attributes on images, for example, can easily get lost in the shuffle. They’re something that has to be added to a client’s standard workflow in order to become habit.
When it comes to typography, designers tend to cringe when we think of clients changing things around. Nobody wants to see their carefully-crafted type settings disrupted by an adventurous content manager. However, avoiding the topic altogether is not a solid plan.
It might be better to assume that some typographic elements will be changed down the line. Knowing this, clients should at least understand the rules of the road. Fonts should be readable, with acceptable sizing and color contrast.
Then there are the potential downsides of installing additional plugins or other software. With the prevalence of free plugins for platforms such as WordPress, there’s a temptation to hit that “Install” button to see what a plugin can do. But it should be noted that some items might negatively impact accessibility – not to mention the website itself.
Beyond the normal client training, there are other ways to help encourage accessible habits. For one, providing an accessibility checklist offers clients a handy reference that they can go back to again and again.
The use of accessible design and development techniques are paramount for all of us. Still, it’s also important to think about the role a client can play. Their contributions can make the difference in just how accessible their website is.
In the end, it’s about sharing knowledge. When people know better, they tend to do better. So, take the time to fill your clients in on best practices. This will empower them to make better decisions regarding accessibility.
The post A Client’s Role in Website Accessibility appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Bored? A new program has been added to the Free Android Emulators page. Android emulators let you play Android games (and potentially also run other types of Android apps) on your computer.
