Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.

Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting.

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why.

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

You may remember when JavaScript was a dark art. It earned that reputation because, in order to do anything with even the teensiest bit of cross-browser consistency, you had to fork your code for various versions of Netscape and IE. Today, thanks to web standards advocacy and diligent JavaScript library authors, our code is relatively fork-free. Alas, in our rush to use some of the features available in CSS3, we’ve fallen off the wagon. Enter Aaron Gustafson’s eCSStender, a JavaScript library that lets you use CSS3 properties and selectors while keeping your code fork- and hack-free.

Years ago, CSS browser support was patchy and buggy, and only daring web designers used CSS for layouts. Today, CSS layouts are commonplace and every browser supports them. But the same can't be said for CSS3 and HTML5. That's where Faruk Ateş’s Modernizr comes in. This open-source JavaScript library makes it easy to support different levels of experiences, based on the capabilities of each visitor’s browser. Learn how to take advantage of everything in HTML5 and CSS3 that is implemented in some browsers, without sacrificing control over the user experience in other browsers.

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps it all up with a how-to on making web fonts work today.

User research doesn’t have to be expensive and time-consuming. With online applications, you can test your designs, wireframes, and prototypes over the phone and your computer with ease and aplomb. Nate Bolt shows the way.

Designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Ethan Marcotte advocates we shift our design thinking to appropriate these constraints: using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, he shows us how to embrace the “ebb and flow of things&#8221 with responsive web design.

We have the power to bestow our abilities onto the things around us. By being conscious of our tools, habits, and spaces, and actively conditioning them to help us behave the way we want to behave, maybe we can more efficiently tap into the thousands of hours of creative genius embedded in our everyday objects. Maybe we’ll be able to maximize the capabilities that new technologies afford us without being overwhelmed by the distractions. And, just maybe, we’ll remember what it feels like to be utterly engrossed in our daily work.

Hot off the presses! In his brand new, brief book for people who make websites, HTML5 For Web Designers, Jeremy Keith cuts through the confusion surrounding the web's new markup language and presents what every accessibility- and standards-focused web designer and developer needs to know about it—from semantics to strategy. Not only is HTML5 For Web Designers a great, fast read, it is also our first A Book Apart publication. To celebrate, A List Apart proudly presents all of "Chapter One: A Brief History of Markup." Enjoy!

Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade. It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, it lets users formulate the equivalent of a sophisticated Boolean query by taking a series of small, simple steps. Learn how it works, why it has become ubiquitous in e-commerce, and why it’s not for every site.

Like CSS, JavaScript works best and hardest when stored in an external file that can be downloaded and cached separately from our site's individual HTML pages. To increase performance, we limit the number of external requests and make our JavaScript as small as possible. JavaScript minification schemes began with JSMin in 2004 and progressed to the YUI Compressor in 2007. Now the inventor of Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI Compressor reveals coding patterns that interfere with compression, and techniques to modify or avoid these coding patterns so as to improve the YUI Compressor's performance. Think small and live large.