Michelle Barker notes that it’s been a heck of a week for us CSS layout nerds.

1. Firefox has long had the best DevTools for CSS Grid, but Chrome is about to catch up and go one bit better by visualizing grid line numbers and names.
2. Firefox supports gap for display: flex, which is great, and now Chrome is getting that too.
3. Firefox is trying out an idea for masonry layout.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read article “Exciting Things on the Horizon For CSS Layout”

The post Exciting Things on the Horizon For CSS Layout appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Compared to the past, modern browsers have become really efficient at rendering the tangled web of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code a typical webpage provides. It takes a mere milliseconds to render the code we give it into something people can use.

What could we, as front-end developers, do to actually help the browser be even faster at rendering? There are the usual best practices that are so easy to forget with our modern tooling — especially in cases where … Read article “Let’s Take a Deep Dive Into the CSS Contain Property”

The post Let’s Take a Deep Dive Into the CSS Contain Property appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Ganguly had earlier announced a donation of Rs 50 lakh worth rice for the sufferers of COVID-19, which has left the world in disarray.

India's cricket captain Virat Kohli and his actor wife Anusha Sharma are keeping themselves busy during lockdown by playing monopoly and by taking adorable selfies.

One of the objectives of a value-added tax system is to simplify the administration of taxes, and this is accomplished by taxing almost everything and everyone, but allowing input tax credits (ITCs) for those who are not considered to be the final consumer of supplies. While many accounting and finance professionals understand the basic rules for claiming ITCs for GST/HST paid on property and services acquired in relation to an organization’s commercial activities, few have the time to explore some of the more complex issues associated with ITCs.  

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1711, March 04, 2015

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1525, January 28, 2015

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1644, January 20, 2015

The 2014 T1 season is almost upon us, so it's time for tax return preparers to get updated again on all the current issues that may impact their clients' tax returns. This webinar will get you in position to prepare your clients' 2014 personal tax returns, and will review some of the more commonly experienced issues faced by tax preparers.

Join Erin Swint, a tax partner with Squire and Company, for a thorough overview of the key changes from the past year that will impact personal tax return filing including the 2013 Federal Budget, CRA announcements and relevant court cases. Erin will also discuss some other tax matters that are integral to personal taxation as well as administrative issues related to filing returns.

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1708, January 20, 2015

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

, December 17, 2014

Our Best Practices consultation session is structured as a 2-day course.
 
Designed to ensure a smooth implementation, a knowledgeable consultant will guide your firm's implementation leaders through important decisions within the software.

Through the first day of this course, new customers gain a head start on using the software to its full potential while existing customers benefit from a detailed
review of their current use of ProSystem fx Practice Management.  Both new and existing customers learn how to implement CCH's recommended best practices.

Day two provides a more detailed look at the Implementation Checklist resulting in a customize Best Practices document that will suit your firm's workflow
and organizational structure. Additional time will also be available to discuss more complex technical, procedural and functional implementation issues.

Topics

    - Assess implementation goals
    - Discuss setup items you need to complete for a successful conversion
    - Use the implementation checklist to create a to-do list for conversion and implementation
    - Make assignments and set due dates in the implementation checklist
    - Begin updating the Best Practices guide to build best practices specific to your company
    - Ensuring an in-depth understanding of the implementation checklist and related best practices documents
    - Customizing a "Policies and Procedures Guide"
    - Working through complete multi-office or large-scale implementations

Attendees

Practice Management Champions Team, which should include representation from each department that will use the program.

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1334, December 16, 2014

Available Sessions for this Seminar:

ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, December 15, 2014
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, December 15, 2014
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 05, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 05, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 06, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 07, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 07, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 20, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 27, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 27, 2015
ipwebinar.aspx?tab=1&smid=1635, January 29, 2015

When it comes to side projects, micro-sites and one-off experiments, you don't need much to get started.

A key part of my job for the past year has been contributing to design systems. To benefit from those contributions though, users need to be able to find them. That’s why it’s not only the content of a design system that’s important but also its usability. Design systems should be easy to navigate, especially […]

The responsive images spec is fantastic and covers a lot of use cases, but most of the time you’ll only need one: resolution switching using the `srcset` and `sizes` attributes.

In The Design Systems We Swim In, Ethan Marcotte asked a thoughtful question about design systems: Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow? Ethan makes the case that many design systems […]

Why we're changing up our pattern library UI after four years of rolling our own bespoke solution.

Location Circulation Collection

Call No. BQ4570.S6 A23 2016

As the number of asymptomatic Covid-19 patients is increasing across the country, two professors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Goa, are in the process of devising a rapid test to detect such cases.

The first Shramik special express train from Goa will leave on Friday carrying nearly a thousand passengers to Madhya Pradesh. The Konkan Railway has provided the coaches for the train which will have Gwalior as its destination station.

The revised terms for the new academic year 2019-20 issued by Goa University on May 5 will also be applicable for the bachelor of education, bachelor of physical education, bachelor of performing art, bachelor of social work, master of education and master of performing art programmes.

To ensure social distancing during the Class X and XII public exams, the Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education on Thursday said there will be only12 students in each exam hall as against the earlier 25. This has led to an increase in the number of exam sub-centres.

Faced with acute funds crunch and a 90% drop in tax mop up due to the lockdown in April, the state government has been left with no choice but to stagger payments. From maintenance grants for aided schools to payments to contractors, temporary workers and non-essential disbursements, have all been put on hold.

While many other parts of the country are bracing for a heatwave, India Meteorological Department (IMD), Goa, has said the state may be spared of the phenomenon and may only face a slight increase in temperature.

Health minister Vishwajit Rane on Friday directed all 26 OPDs to be operational at the new south Goa district hospital from Monday. After inspecting the infrastructure and facilities at the 500-bedded hospital, Rane said that though the hospital is not complete, whatever parts have been handed over to the health services would be put to maximum use.

The Corporation of the City of Panaji has restarted pay-parking in the state capital after a hiatus of six weeks.

Over a thousand migrant workers heaved a collective sigh of relief as the first Shramik special train rolled out of Thivim railway station on Friday. The train, with 1,196 labourers and stranded tourists, is headed for Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh.

I was supposed to be in Plymouth yesterday, giving the opening talk at this year’s Future Sync conference. Obviously, that train journey never happened, but the conference did.

The organisers gave us speakers the option of pre-recording our talks, which I jumped on. It meant that I wouldn’t be reliant on a good internet connection at the crucial moment. It also meant that I was available to provide additional context—mostly in the form of a deluge of hyperlinks—in the chat window that accompanied the livestream.

The whole thing went very smoothly indeed. Here’s the video of my talk. It was The Layers Of The Web, which I’ve only given once before, at Beyond Tellerrand Berlin last November (in the Before Times).

As well as answering questions in the chat room, people were also asking questions in Sli.do. But rather than answering those questions there, I was supposed to respond in a social medium of my choosing. I chose my own website, with copies syndicated to Twitter.

Here are those questions and answers…

The first few questions were about last years’s CERN project, which opens the talk:

Based on what you now know from the CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild project—what would you have done differently if you had been part of the original 1989 Team?

I responded:

Actually, I think the original WWW project got things mostly right. If anything, I’d correct what came later: cookies and JavaScript—those two technologies (which didn’t exist on the web originally) are the source of tracking & surveillance.

The one thing I wish had been done differently is I wish that JavaScript were a same-origin technology from day one:

https://adactio.com/journal/16099

Next question:

How excited were you when you initially got the call for such an amazing project?

My predictable response:

It was an unbelievable privilege! I was so excited the whole time—I still can hardly believe it really happened!

https://adactio.com/journal/14803

https://adactio.com/journal/14821

Later in the presentation, I talked about service workers and progressive web apps. I got a technical question about that:

Is there a limit to the amount of local storage a PWA can use?

I answered:

Great question! Yes, there are limits, but we’re generally talking megabytes here. It varies from browser to browser and depends on the available space on the device.

But files stored using the Cache API are less likely to be deleted than files stored in the browser cache.

More worrying is the announcement from Apple to only store files for a week of browser use:

https://adactio.com/journal/16619

Finally, there was a question about the over-arching theme of the talk…

Great talk, Jeremy. Do you encounter push-back when using the term “Progressive Enhancement”?

My response:

Yes! …And that’s why I never once used the phrase “progressive enhancement” in my talk. ????

There’s a lot of misunderstanding of the term. Rather than correct it, I now avoid it:

https://adactio.com/journal/9195

Instead of using the phrase “progressive enhancement”, I now talk about the benefits and effects of the technique: resilience, universality, etc.

I think a lot about Danielle’s talk at Patterns Day last year.

Around about the six minute mark she starts talking about gaps and overlaps.

Gaps are where hidden complexity live. If we don’t have a category to cover it, in effect it becomes invisible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Unidentified gaps cause inconsistency and confusion.

Overlaps occur when two separate categories encompass some of the same areas of responsibility. They cause conflict, duplication of effort, and unnecessary friction.

This is the bit I keep thinking about. It’s such an insightful lens to view things through. On just about any project, tensions are almost due to either gaps (“I thought someone else was doing that”) or overlaps (“Oh, you’re doing that? I thought we were doing that”).

When I was talking to Gerry on his new podcast recently, we were trying to figure out why web performance is in such a woeful state. I mused that there may be a gap. Perhaps designers think it’s a technical problem and developers think it’s a design problem. I guess you could try to bridge this gap by having someone whose job is to focus entirely on performance. But I suspect the better—but harder—solution is to create a shared culture of performance, of the kind Lara wrote about in her book:

Performance is truly everyone’s responsibility. Anyone who affects the user experience of a site has a relationship to how it performs. While it’s possible for you to single-handedly build and maintain an incredibly fast experience, you’d be constantly fighting an uphill battle when other contributors touch the site and make changes, or as the Web continues to evolve.

I suspect there’s a similar ownership gap at play when it comes to the ubiquitous obtrusive overlays that are plastered on so many websites these days.

Kirill Grouchnikov recently published a gallery of screenshots showcasing the beauty of modern mobile websites:

There are two things common between the websites in these screenshots that I took yesterday.

1. They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
2. I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.

The web can be beautiful. Except it’s not right now.

How is this dissonance possible? How can designers and developers who clearly care about the user experience be responsible for unleashing such user-hostile interfaces?

PM/Legal/Marketing made me do it

I get that. But surely the solution can’t be to shrug our shoulders, pass the buck, and say “not my job.” Somebody designed each one of those obtrusive overlays. Somebody coded up each one and pushed them into production.

It’s clear that this is a problem of communication and understanding, rather than a technical problem. As always. We like to talk about how hard and complex our technical work is, but frankly, it’s a lot easier to get a computer to do what you want than to convince a human. Not least because you also need to understand what that other human wants. As Danielle says:

Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.

Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.

So let’s say it is someone in the marketing department who is pushing to have an obtrusive newsletter sign-up form get shoved in the user’s face. Talk to them. Figure out what their goals are—what outcome are they hoping to get to. If they don’t seem to understand the user-experience implications, talk to them about that. But it needs to be a two-way conversation. You need to understand what they need before you start telling them what you want.

I realise that makes it sound patronisingly simple, and I know that in actuality it’s a sisyphean task. It may be that genuine understanding between people is the wickedest of design problems. But even if this problem seems insurmoutable, at least you’d be tackling the right problem.

Because the web can’t survive like this.

McKeever, William, author

Singh, Gurcharan, 1945- author

Seigneur, Christian, 1952- author

Mittelbach, Gary George, author

Sætre, Glenn-Peter, author

Gupta, P. K. (Pawan K.), 1943- author

Amyes, Sebastian G. B., author

Richards, Richard A., author