We do more reading on the screen today than we did even a year ago. If we are ever to have a golden age of reading on the screen, this might be the start of it. Tablets, Nooks and Kindles make buying a book or magazine for the screen almost unavoidable. With smartphones, we carry our reading material with us and enjoy instant Web access, enabling the reading experience to flow smoothly from one device to another.

And those devices probably have stunning HD reader-friendly screens. Throw in companion services like Readmill and 24symbols, which allow us to share our reading experiences, and we have perfect screen-based access to all aspects of the written word. So, why isn’t Web and screen typography keeping up?

At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the text-based computer terminals of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s.

Mac, Linux and Windows computers today are mainly controlled through user-friendly feature-rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with menus, scroll bars and drag-and-drop interfaces. But all of the basic stuff can still be accomplished by typing text commands into the terminal or command prompt. Using Finder or Explorer to open a folder is akin to the cd command (for “change directory”). Viewing the contents of a folder is like ls (short for “list,” or dir in Microsoft’s command prompt). And there are hundreds more for moving files, editing files, launching applications, manipulating images, backing up and restoring stuff, and much more.

In this article, we’ll look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), one of the most underused technologies in website development today. Before diving into an example, let’s consider the state of the Web at present and where it is going. Website design has found new vigor in recent years, with the evolving technique of responsive design.

And for good reason: essentially, responsive website design moves us away from the fixed-width pages we’ve grown accustomed to, replacing them with shape-shifting layouts and intelligent reflowing of content. Add to that a thoughtful content strategy and mobile-first approach, and we’re starting to offer an experience that adapts across devices and browsers to suit the user’s context.

Back in 2009, the WebKit development team proposed a new extension to CSS that would allow Web page elements to be displayed and transformed on a three-dimensional plane. This proposal was called 3D Transforms, and it was soon implemented in Safari for Mac and iOS. About a year later, support followed for Chrome, and early in 2011, for Android. Outside of WebKit, however, none of the other browser makers seemed to show much enthusiasm for it, so it’s remained a fairly niche and underused feature.

That’s set to change, though, as the Firefox and Internet Explorer teams have decided to join the party by implementing 3D Transforms in pre-release versions of their browsers. So, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see them in IE 10 and a near-future version of Firefox (possibly 10 or 11, but that’s not confirmed yet), both of which are slated for release sometime this year.

A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. Several articles have been written on finding the holy grail of CSS layouts, but to date, not a single solution works without major caveats.

At the W3Conf, I gave a talk on how the CSS Working Group is attempting to solve the concerns of Web developers with multiple proposals. There are six layout proposals that are relevant to us, all of which I described in the talk. Here is a little more about these proposals and how they will help you in developing websites in the future.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site. From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.

Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas. In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.

Editor’s note: This article is the third in our new series that introduces new, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework that helps you build prototypes and production code. This time, we’re presenting Sisyphus.js, a library developed by Alexander Kaupanin to provide Gmail-like client-side drafts and a bit more.

Have you ever been filling out a long form online or writing an eloquent and spirited comment when suddenly the browser crashes? Or perhaps you closed the browser tab accidentally, or your Internet connection cuts off, or the electricity goes down (and, being ever obedient to Murphy’s Law, you had no backup power supply). If not, then you’re lucky. But no one is protected from such minor catastrophes.

Imagine the storm of emotions felt by a user who had to add just a bit more information before submitting a form and then loses all data. Horrible, huh? Now, if only there was a way to recover that data, rather than undertake a Sisyphean pursuit.

Many of us rely on open source tools, technologies and standards to help improve the work we do on a daily basis. None of this would however be possible without the hard work, commitment and dedication that others, just like you, have invested in giving back to the Web community over the past two decades.

Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate and jQuery are just a few examples of well known projects which were born from a desire to put something out there that could help others on the Web do more. These projects evolved because developers started using them and thought, “Hey, I could do something to help make this better. I bet it could save someone else’s time if I shared this with the world.”

PHP is widely available with inexpensive hosting plans, which makes it a popular choice for developers who write software for the Web. From big platforms, such as WordPress, down to small scripts, such as ones to display image galleries or to send forms to email, thousands of script and products are out there written in PHP that can be installed and used even if you don’t know much about PHP yourself.

I have been a PHP developer for 10 years, and my company has developed a content management system, written in PHP, that is intended to be very simple to install and get started with. So, I spend a lot of time working with designers who are installing a PHP script for the first time. If you are installing a script and something goes wrong, PHP can be incredibly infuriating.

In a time when everyone seems to have a tablet, which makes it possible to consume everything digitally, and the only real paper we use is bathroom tissue, it might seem odd to write about the long-forgotten habit of printing a Web page. Nevertheless, as odd as it might seem to visionaries and tablet manufacturers, we’re still far from the reality of a paperless world.

In fact, tons of paper float out of printers worldwide every day, because not everyone has a tablet yet and a computer isn’t always in reach. Moreover, many of us feel that written text is just better consumed offline. Because I love to cook, sometimes I print recipes at home, or emails and screenshots at work, even though I do so as rarely as possible out of consideration for the environment.