The Web Ahead

Web designer Steve Fisher joins Jen Simmons to talk about designing content structure, and his process for working with clients to best define the essence of a site's message.

Wonder-developer Jeremy Keith joins Jen Simmons to debate comments on websites, the birth of the web, progressive enhancement, the desire for control, and much more.

What is design research, why is it valuable, and how can you work research into the planning of your project? Erika Hall, author of the new A Book Apart book Just Enough Research, joins Jen Simmons to explain.

After many years of using Content Management Systems that store content in a database, there's a movement to store content in files instead. Jekyll and other tools, including github, are springing up to create a new ecosystem of file-based tools. Young Hahn and Dave Cole join Jen Simmons to explain.

CSS has three powerful specifications that can be used to animate things on the page: CSS Transitions, Transforms, and Animations. Designer and author Val Head joins Jen Simmons to explain how they work.

Electronic book formats are changing. EPUB3 and HTML5 are providing tools to create new forms of books, with richer experiences. Nellie McKesson joins Jen Simmons to explain where digital books have been, and where they are going.

Chrome recently announced they will replacing the webkit rendering engine with a new one, named Blink. What's up with that? To find out, Chris Wilson and Paul Irish join Jen Simmons to explain rendering engines and vendor prefixes.

After years of many independent sites documenting and teaching web development, the W3C and a consortium of browser makers and companies have come together to create a central resource for information about web technologies — Web Platform Docs. Peter Lubbers and Scott Rowe join Jen Simmons to talk about the project.

Page layout on the web has been constrained for many years by the available technologies. But new technologies that are coming in CSS3 — flexbox, grid layout, regions, and more — promise for an interesting future. Rachel Andrew joins Jen Simmons to explain.

Danny Sullivan joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the latest episode in The Web Behind series. Danny reminisces about the early days of web search, directories versus crawlers, the panoply of search engines in the mid-1990s, page counts as serious bragging rights, the brief period when there were search engines that only searched other search engines, the verbing of “Google,” and more.

Jen Robbins joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about the early days of web design, O'Reilly, GNN, wrestling with technology and more.

Tantek Çelik joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about OpenDoc, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, doctype switching, semantic data formats, and much more.

Designer, speaker and author Andy Clarke joins Jen Simmons to talk about the process of web design. Andy starts with a rant about online criticism, and goes on to talk about techniques, tools and more.

Tom Bruce joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the very earliest days of the web, writing the first Windows web browser, inventing 'marquee', and taking a road trip to NCSA with Tim Berners-Lee.

Chris Wilson joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the origins of the Mosaic Browser and his work on Internet Explorer 3 and 4.

Internet Explorer 10 is out. What's new with one of the most popular browsers? How is the support for HTML5, CSS3, and new Javascript APIs? What do people who create the web need to know?

Molly Holzschlag has been working on the web from the very beginning of its invention. She joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about those days, and what it was like to be online in the time of BBSes, Gopher, and the text-only web. They discuss accessibility, the blink tag, the Web Standard Project, how Microsoft started embracing web standards and much more.

The Git version control system has become incredibly popular, with many people using it to collaborate on shared projects. John Albin Wilkins joins Jen Simmons to explain what Git is, how it works and how to use it.

Dave Shea joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the third episode of in The Web Behind series. They talk about the CSS Zen Garden, a website Dave created in 2003 which showed the world how radically-different designs could be with just CSS. Dave also reflects on the origins and lasting effects of the CSS Sprites technique he introduced to the world, and reminisces about the web design community of a decade ago.

People are accessing the web from all kinds of devices these days, and will be from many more in the future. Anna Debenham joins Jen Simmons to talk about game consoles, both portable games and consoles that go with a television set, and the browsers they run. How might you want to adjust your website to work on these devices?