From a design perspective font icons are a very good solution when compared to sprite sheets or SVG. They are scalable, they load a single time, and contain nearly every iconic type of symbol you could want in a UI. That's not an anti-pattern.
Emoji are almost exclusively used embedded in regular text. Emoji work similar to our regular alphabet, only that they are typically used to express emotions and abstract concepts that are harder to express in regular words. Since we have regular text and emojis used in the same context (and often as part of the same sentence) it makes sense for unicode to support both.
This is fundamentally different from icon fonts. twitter icon or mailbox icon are not meant to be used inside of text, so they have no business in fonts.
Web Fonts abuse HTML: they take text and give it a different meaning. The letter 'a' does not indicate a daisy with pink petals; it is the letter 'a,' the English word 'a' and so forth.
Think for a moment about what Web Font users do: sprinkle garbage throughout their pages; run JavaScript to dynamically load stuff (and possible destroy the privacy and/or security of the client); dynamically update the page — all when a simple, semantic image could have done the trick.
It's kinda insane, like rendering a page by loading JavaScript to slowly append characters to the DOM.
That's just inaccurate – AFAIK all modern icon fonts make use of the Unicode PUA, which is specifically intended for this sort of application. The characters used have no semantic meaning beyond what the application, including its fonts, intend.
A lot of it is semantics. A bunch of HTML5 is semantic vs. actually having different behavior. <header> behaves no differently than <div id="header"> but is more semantically correct.
A simpler way to say "more semantically correct" is "correct." Please don't trivialize the importance of semantics. Proper semantic representation makes documents more accessible.
I don't find the header, article, section, etc tags to be sufficiently clear that they are always used in the same way by different people. But maybe I'm missing something -- how do they improve accessibility?
Take a look at http://accessiblehtmlheadings.com/ for a pretty solid introduction. The tl;dr: is that, used properly, they enable screen readers and similar to identify document structure and make it more easily navigable.
For a considerably more detailed treatment with special attention to concerns around accessibility and some information on other document elements with similar significance, take a look at http://accessiblehtmlheadings.com/ .
I'd been using this article for a couple years when I was a Linux server neophyte and now some of these things seem obvious to me. A good article for total noobs.
I think the sole exception to this might be a full-blow library for Material Design since it's the only open standard we have right now, and it's very, very good.
It's sad really. Table-based layouts have been considered bad practice for years but CSS is only just now becoming a superset. That is if you're lucky enough to be free of old browsers. If you want everything to "just work" tables are still the practical choice to this day. Kudos to PG for sticking to what he learned in the 90's when he built HN.
Yes! It's sad that table-based layouts became "bad practice". Generally they're a lot simpler to understand than the mess of CSS and bizarrely named divs we have today.
An important reason that table based layouts became obsolete in HTML is because the way table cells are rendered is not the same as how `div`s are rendered. It's shockingly difficult to get a table cell to keep a consistent size. This makes some sense if you're using it as a simple data container, but doesn't work at all if you're trying to use it as a generic content container the way we use `div`s
Also, if by "bizarrely named divs" you mean things like "section", "article", "header", "footer", etc., I have to disagree; I think these are a huge improvement in terms of readability and allowing a developer to communicate the intended purpose and structure of the code, and they offer significant advantages in accessibility as well. You ask me, the semantic web is a wonderful thing
I think part of the reason tables became considered "bad" was that back at that time most web pages were built by interspersed HTML and ASP or PHP code and getting all the TR and TD tags balanced especially with rowspans or colspans thrown in quickly became a mess. Every page was a standalone thing also, it was much less common to see templating systems used to establish the overall structure of the site. So if you ever got the assignment to "reskin" a website, it was a huge amount of very tedious work making repeated similar changes to all the tables and other markup on every page.
Today we have much better ways to create an overall layout and separate markup from content. Using tables today would be a lot less of a problem than it was when they were decreed to be "bad."
From what I could tell, it is because HTML tables have a specific structural meaning, which is among other things used by screen readers. So if used properly, a person who needs a screen reader could reliably have the contents of a table read to them, but if it's used for layout the result is useless. There seems to be enough people conscious of this that use of tables for layout has always been frowned on. Now there are better hints for screen readers, ,but tables are still useful for screen readers "out of the box."
In any case, tables are not nearly as flexible as a true responsive layout.
Yeah a huge part of this too was, for whatever reason, old search engines not being able to index what was inside of tables. I imagine it's not even like that anymore.
It will never not be faster to roll your own based on the project needs. Aside from knowing how to use Bootstrap, I can appreciate the work on these CSS grid systems and frameworks but I don't see any need for most of them. Do people use Blueprint anymore?
Disassociatives have been used for a while in the treatment of opiate addiction, including the usage of higher doses of dextromethorphan to treat heroin addicts. To me it comes with little surprise that this could also be an effective treatment for depression, despite the fact that depression isn't necessarily something that can just be treated away. I've personally done more than my fair share of recreational ketamine and it seemed to aid my coping with some major life issues I've had, though I suppose this could also be placebo. Regardless, I'm glad these types of studies are being done and hope to see some more concrete evidence of positive effect.
