This post will cover the two sessions I attended on responsive design and HTML5 / CSS3 features for cross platform development.
The Point, Click, Tap, Touch session presented touchevent events (touchstart, touchmove, touchend, touchcancel) for tactile devices and how they differ with mouse events when selecting or dragging an element. The touchevent API is supported by all major browsers. Google released a mobile emulation tools for developers to emulate touchevent, viewport and other mobile device specific functionality.
For cross device development the main recommendations was to
- Design bigger targets and button to take into account touch screen device (phone, tablet and now touch screen laptop) or to enlarge your button when you detect a touch event on the page.
- Stop using hover events as on a touch screen device a single tap both activate the hover event and the link event in the same time, the link event “over riding” the hover one.
Coming back from the conference and testing the pixel chromebook (a touch screen laptop) on Netflix has been a great experience on what NOT to do. On Netflix when you hover over the cover of a movie a short synopsis and link to related items are displayed, while a click will start the movie. Not being able to see description of the item totally killed my user experience and forced me to get back to my mouse.
An other consideration to keep in mind with the new touch screen laptop is to not disable the mouse if a touch is detected (I’m glad Netflix haven’t done that!) and have your page to listen to both mouse and touch event. You can use event.preventdefault() to manage exceptions.
The second the session, a more awsome web, introduced more experimental features currently supported by a limited amount of browser. Nevertheless, some of them are promising when widely supported and I noticed the following interesting features:
- Using the css @-viewport feature you can define size of your page elements, image and font based on the screen resolution of the device, which is perfect for a responsive design page.
- The introduction of CSS variables using -var- (only in beta in chrome for now) will help for sure front end developers.
- The position sticky to manage sticky element that roll or disappear based on certain conditions (for example keep an header at the top of the screen or replacing H2 elements when scrolling down) and css clip-path let you crop and clip any image based on certain conditions looks promising to develop nice and fun web application.
- The clip-path option will also help for responsive design when combine with the viewport feature.
- The web audio and speech api (only in chrome) let you to records and transform sounds directly in the user browser, so you can offer google voice / siri like features to control your application.
Watch the presentation for the full list of feature introduced (or check the presentation)
In the meanwhile you can go on chromestatus.com to see which browser support which features and use the CSS supports to test if the browser support a specific feature and return true and false statement so you can defined fall back event accordingly.
