We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away.

URLs have a purpose. We are very cavalier about that purpose. We don’t use canonicals. We’re sloppy about switching back and forth between HTTP and HTTPs. We don’t bother to logically structure our URLs. We rebuild websites and let all the links break. We don’t appreciate that crawlers are dumb and they need more context than humans.

The author goes on to complain about the misuse of HTTP methods and status codes as if he had never heard of REST APIs. Overall, though, he makes some good points.

For years, we’ve known what’s been weighing down our responsive pages: images. Huge ones, specially catered to huge screens, which we’ve been sending to everyone. We’ve known how to fix this problem for a while too: let us send different sources to different clients. New markup allows us to do exactly that. srcset lets us offer multiple versions of an image to browsers, which, with a little help from sizes, pick the most appropriate source to load out of the bunch. picture and source let us step in and exert a bit more control, ensuring that certain sources will be picked based on either media queries or file type support.

We tend to see the web as a reactive model, where every action causes a reaction. Users click, then we take them to a new page. They click again, and we open another page. But we can do better. We can be proactive with prebrowsing.

Welcome to FlatIcon: the Fastest Tool that Converts Fabulous Icons into Web Fonts.

Glyphr Studio is a free, html5 based font editor.

Font design has a high barrier of entry. Professional font design programs are very complex, and quite expensive. Glyphr Studio is accessible, streamlined, and made for font design hobbyists... and it's free!

One of the most powerful features of the CSS preprocessor Sass is the mixin, an abstraction of a common pattern into a semantic and reusable chunk. Think of taking the styles for a button and, instead of needing to remember what all of the properties are, having a selector include the styles for the button instead. The button styles are maintained in a single place, making them easy to update and keep consistent.

As reported by Cameron McCormack, Firefox Nightly (version 29) now supports CSS variables. You can get a quick overview in this short screencast:

As you can see, the tiles overlap and interact to generate new patterns and colors. And as we’re using magical prime numbers, this pattern will not repeat for a long, long time. § Exactly how long? 29px × 37px × 53px… or 56,869px! § Now this was something of a revelation to me. I actually had to triple-check my calculations, but the math is rock solid. Remember these are tiny graphics — less than 7kb in total — yet they are generating an area of original texture of almost 57,000 pixels wide.

Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

While many of us can create something that looks good in Photoshop or attractive when spliced into CSS, but do we actually understand the design theory behind what we create? Theory is the missing link for many un-trained but otherwise talented designers. Here are 50 excellent graphic design theory lessons to help you understand the ‘Whys’, not just the ‘Hows’.