Tags: fragment

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:

Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.

Are your Anchor Links Accessible? | Amber Wilson

I really like the way that Amber doesn’t go straight to the end solution but instead talks through her thought process when adding a feature to her site.

Fixed Headers and Jump Links? The Solution is scroll-margin-top | CSS-Tricks

I didn’t know about scroll-margin-top! I wonder if you could apply a universal rule …like, say you’ve got a fixed header that’s 2em in height, couldn’t you declare:

:target { scroll-margin-top: 2em; }

WICG/ScrollToTextFragment: Proposal to allow specifying a text snippet in a URL fragment

It looks (a more complex version of) fragmention might be coming to Chrome.

When I was marking up Resilient Web Design I wanted to make sure that people could link to individual sections within a chapter. So I added IDs to all the headings. There’s no UI to expose that though—like the hover pattern that some sites use to show that something is linkable—so unless you know the IDs are there, there’s no way of getting at them other than “view source.”

But if you’re reading a passage in Resilient Web Design and you highlight some text, you’ll notice that the URL updates to include that text after a hash symbol. If that updated URL gets shared, then anyone following it should be sent straight to that string of text within the page. That’s fragmentions in action:

Fragmentions find the first matching word or phrase in a document and focus its closest surrounding element. The match is determined by the case-sensitive string following the # (or ## double-hash)

It’s a similar idea to Eric and Simon’s proposal to use CSS selectors as fragment identifiers, but using plain text instead. You can find out more about the genesis of fragmentions from Kevin. I’m using Jonathon Neal’s script with some handy updates from Matthew.

I’m using the fragmention support to power the index of the book. It relies on JavaScript to work though, so Matthew has come to the rescue again and created a version of the site with IDs for each item linked from the index (I must get around to merging that).

The fragmention functionality is ticking along nicely with one problem…

I’ve tweaked the typography of Resilient Web Design to within an inch of its life, including a crude but effective technique to avoid widowed words at the end of a paragraph. The last two words of every paragraph are separated by a UTF-8 no-break space character instead of a regular space.

That solves the widowed words problem, but it confuses the fragmention script. Any selected text that includes the last two words of a paragraph fails to match. I’ve tried tweaking the script, but I’m stumped. If you fancy having a go, please have at it.

Update: And fixed! Thanks to Lee.

The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth - Eager Blog

Another dive into the archives of the www-talk mailing list. This time there are some gems about the origins of the input element, triggered by the old isindex element.

Marginalia | Parallel Transport

A brilliant idea (and implementation) from Kartik. By combing webmentions and fragmentions, it’s possible to allow a kind of distributed marginalia: you post a comment on your site about a specific passage in a post on my site and a smattering of CSS and JavaScript can display it in the right context.

Inexhaustible - Instapaper Fragmentions by Brian Donohue

Instapaper is going to add support for fragmentions. Seems like a match made in heaven.

Cennydd’s latest piece in A List Apart is the beautifully written Letter to a Junior Designer.

I really like the way that Cennydd emphasises the importance of being able to explain the reasoning behind your design decisions:

If you haven’t already, sometime in your career you’ll meet an awkward sonofabitch who wants to know why every pixel is where you put it. You should be able to articulate an answer for that person—yes, for every pixel.

That reminds me of something I read fourteen(!) years ago that’s always stayed with me. In an interview in Digital Web magazine, Joshua Davis was asked “What would you say is beauty in design?” His answer:

Being able to justify every pixel.

Here’s a link to the direct quote …except that link probably won’t work for you. Not unless you’ve installed this Chrome extension.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, this is something that Kevin Marks has been working on following on from the recent W3C annotation workshop.

It’s called fragmentions and it builds on the work done by Eric and Simon. They proposed using CSS selectors as fragment identifiers. Kevin’s idea is to use the words within the text as anchor points (like an automatic Command+F):

To tell these apart from an id link, I suggest using a double hash - ## for the fragment, and then words that identify the text. For example:

http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_archive.html##annotate+the+web

That link will work in your browser because of this script, which Kevin has added to his site. I may well add that script to this site too.

Fragmentions are a nice idea and—to bring it back to Cennydd’s point—nicely explained.

Android Fragmentation Report July 2013 - OpenSignal

A look at the degree of diversity in Android devices, complete with pretty pictures. The term “fragmentation” is usually used in a negative way, but there are great points here about the positive effects for web developers and customers.

You say fragmentation, I say diversity.

Specializing yourself into a corner by Scott Kellum

I can empathise with Scott’s worries about fragmentation on the front-end with Saas, Styles, LESS, Compass, yada, yada, yada.

I want to share my code with everyone who writes CSS, not a subset of that group.