I always fancied to write a book that would combine most of my programming experience gathered over two decades. Packtpub gave a chance that I embraced gratefully. And here we are, half a year of efforts paid off and my book is live
While the variety of computer monitor shapes and sizes steadily expands Responsive Web Design (RWD) is rather a matter of survival. Its hardly someone was thinking about RWD when the first specs on HTML and CSS where written. However now a lot of work done to provide a native way of achieving RWD, to bring fast and consistent solutions.
This article presents hands-on examples of generic RWD tasks implemented with such W3C modules as CSS Flexible Box, CSS Grid Layout, CSS Regions, CSS Multi-column Layout. It also demonstrates use of position sticky, srcset attribute and fallbacks on webP.
Few years ago only lazy didn’t say about bringing desktop application experience to the web ones. However in reality, it just meant that user actions didn’t always required page reload, but could change page UI dynamically. As for other application events, as a rule they were not handled dynamically.
Well, now you can find more and more web applications acting really like desktop ones. For example, Facebook and G+ have widgets which update automatically. You can keep the page untouched, but you will see anyway new status updates appear as your friends submitting. The same for notifications. Whenever a new one arrives, the counter changes and the notification list extends.
That seems to me as a trend worth to follow. I’ve been thinking of a solution to vivify widgets on my sites. Now I’m coming up with the following pattern.
Besides, already noted bidirectional communication channel, known as WebSocket, HTML5 propositions include also comet communication pattern by defining Server-Sent Events (SSE). WebSocket widely discussed by now, tons of server implementations are available and you can play already with fluent browser implementation under Chrome. However the second server-push technology of HTML5 yet stays in shadow.