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We have lots and lots of good stuff here for your weekend reading pleasure in the Smashing Daily, like some thoughts about the first transatlantic communication cable, and some thoughts about brands (and if you can actually care about them). We have a good article about expectations when doing business, and an idea to serve images that are acceptable to the retina. There’s news about jQuery, a post about browser update policies, and much more. Enjoy!
The Brands I Care About Are All Yelling At Me
Are there any brands that you care about? If there are, you should probably read this article by Ben Werdmuller. And if you think the idea that people could care about a brand is ridiculous, you’ll probably enjoy reading this article too. I definitely did.
Cables
There are no real great distances anymore in our world. If we wanted to (and we had the money) we could be anywhere in the world by tomorrow—probably. Traveling still takes time, but communicating is instantaneous, from wherever you are. Communication is mostly done through cables, and a long time ago the very first transatlantic cable was realized. Jeremy Keith went to the landing site in North America and wrote down his thoughts about it, including lots of great links and movies.
A List Apart: Articles: Agreements = Expectations
Since Mike Monteiro wrote his excellent book Design Is A Job (yes, you should definitely read it), the business side of design seems to be getting more attention, and that’s good. For too long we’ve been playing the artist who doesn’t want to know about money. Here’s another great article by Greg Hoy about legal agreements you sign with your clients, and what they mean.
Acceptable Retina Images
A while ago I was wondering if we really need to quadruple all images in size in order to keep our visitors with a retina display happy. I thought that maybe a smaller increase in size might actually be good enough, so I wrote a little draft about this idea (with a half-assed example… I didn’t really have the time to do proper research and to test it on various devices).
The Skinny On IE’s Update Policy
If we wait for people to update their ancient browsers, how long will it take before we can build the things we really want to build? Paul Irish takes a look at the new IE update policy and shows us some charts. I think the results don’t look too good, so maybe it’s time we lower the support for browsers that are not up to date. And by lowering them I mean something like removing all styles. Maybe people will upgrade if the Web looks broken?
UX Is Simple
If you just follow these 25 simple rules by Alex Morris then UX is simple. There are some excellent points made, well worth living by.
jQuery Core: Version 1.9 And Beyond
One of the problems many developers have with jQuery is that it’s enormous. One of the reasons why it is this big is because it supports some ancient browsers. The big news is that support for these old browsers will stop in version 2.0, and that jQuery will be available as a bunch of optional components (although this is not mentioned in the article). This will probably decrease the file-size dramatically. Good news for people with good browsers on flaky connections.
Reading List
Do you need more to read? Here’s a great reading list by Bruce Lawson about Web standards, the Web industry and more.
Last Click
Regu.la Blog Network
If you like small facts, interesting numbers or quotes, then this small network of blogs by Kai Brach is for you. It looks absolutely beautiful and the small articles are an unobtrusive pleasure for our over-filled news feeds.
Previous Issues
For previous Smashing Daily issues, check out the Smashing Daily Archive.
© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.