“As you can see, you can do some pretty bad things with JavaScript that will certainly drive your visitors away (or insane!). So why is this kind of functionality available? Some functions is actually very useful if you’re writing complex HTML5 web applications. By disabling text-selection on interface elements you can make the application easier to use, and you can re-implement the right click menu using your own options.”

Why to make 'Gender' a text box, and why we should struggle against Facebook.

"Ping Brigade is a service that lets you measure how quickly your website loads from around the world. The time it takes to load your web pages has a huge impact on how your visitors perceive you. For example for every 0.5 second delay you may lose 30% of the visitors waiting for your website to load. Additionally, Google has recently announced that it will be taking web server speed into account when determining you website's page rank."

This bookmarklet makes reading things on the web very simple and thus enjoyable by removing all of the often-useless and often-flashing worthlessness surrounding the content.

On the characteristic lack of usability in open source projects, and why. "The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable."

Interesting. "Patt can work on his colors and alignment, and hopefully please his user base with a helpful tool. Meanwhile the rest of us would be wise to work on the quality and value of our criticism."

How might we not even realize we want things? "I guess I'm talking about passive contributions of public behavior information to traditionally-sorted data."

"I'd much rather rely on a subset of trusty old HTML than expend brain cells trying to remember the fake-HTML way to make something bold, or create a hyperlink. HTML isn't perfect, but it's an eminently reasonable humane markup language."

An excellent, diagram-guided overview of Fitt's Law, which declares that the closer and larger something is, the easier it is to access. The relationship is curved: small changes to small items can have a large impact.

Notes on optimizing for speed and the benefits thereof. Note: "If someone completes their task on a site successfully, they will feel the site was faster than it truly was. If they can’t succeed, they will perceive it as being slower."

We were just talking about this useless dialog box/warning/alert the other day.

A fascinating and in-depth look at the design (mostly typographical) of Toronto's subway system. A long read, but if you're into typography, a great one.

Indeed.

"The need for these distinctions becomes moot, of course, when no secondary actions are present. Make sure you really need each secondary action on a form and don’t add them indiscriminately."