I thought CSS variables were still not fully supported enough to use in production. I know you can use a polyfill, but that seems to detract from the minimalist approach of these basic CSS frameworks: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables

Based on your link, unless you support IE11, you should be fine with variables.

Good point. I just checked our company's web analytics and IE makes up about 2% of web traffic. So it's not dead yet, but I guess you can make a case for not supporting it.

Not exactly the same--but NASA has a pretty cool dashboard for the Deep Space Network: http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

If you guys like this NOAA app, you'll probably like NASA Worldview too: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/

It's more focused on Earth sensing data products, but it has great satellite imagery and overlays.

...and don't forget Nasa's Java SDK, World Wind, which is specifically designed for this type of data. One of the first projecs I worked on, in order to learn Java, was a simple project using world wind. It's a really fun tool.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hey very cool! I work as a contractor within the NASA Earthdata team and I'm always finding interesting things like this as I learn more about the program. NASA is a great steward of what I think is some of the most important data we have about our planet. Much of it is publicly available, but not many people know about it.

I'm sitting here reading this after spending the last two days at Goddard Space Flight Center in MD and I can pretty much assure you that the engineering talent there would run circles around the folks building social apps in the Bay Area. Have to agree with @drpancake here, this attitude is the primary reason I stay away from SF.

l9.

Tables are for tabular data--designing with HTML/CSS isn't perfect, but using tables for layout is an even less-elegant solution. It leads to a markup soup of nested tags and tables and difficult-to-maintain codebase. Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand and often you need to strike a balance between flashy visual design and solid underlying structure. This is also why visual designers should understand how their designs get implemented in HTML and CSS--it will create a restraint and limit the amount of "hacks" you have to do to make a design work.

Also remember that not everyone views the web in a browser. Having well structured markup helps those that use screen readers or alternate methods of browsing the web.

"Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand"

I don't think this is true any more than "good print design and good postscript go hand-in-hand".

I don't think tables are the right way either, but they're too often the pragmatic way until CSS gets dramatically more expressive.

The "restraint" you're talking about is not something designers should have to accept —- not least because CSS appears to be being developed with insufficient concern for what designers would actually like to be able to do. If it wasn't, vertical alignment would have arrived long ago.

This. If your company clears one million in yearly sales and spends $980,000 to make that happen--you are running a $20,000 per year company. There is nothing wrong with this, but I hate when these metrics get thrown around without context. There are $1M companies that make less profit than a hot dog cart (which subsequently, in the right location is a damn good business).

On the other hand, low-margin businesses are often low-risk, stable businesses. A grocery store has crappy margins, but excellent stability.

This is unlikely which is why $!M companies are significant because most likely their margins aren't that low.

I agree completely, but I also teach non-CS students mostly in design. If version control is a foreign concept to some CS students, it's not even on the radar of most of my design group.

This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.

Why not assign something like http://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1 as homework instead?

I agree that there are more important concepts that need to be covered in freshman/intro level CS courses, but some of the graduates I was meeting and interviewing had not even heard of version control or source code management, let alone spent any time collaborating with a team of developers. They were not getting any exposure to it at any level within their program. It didn't even seem like something they had been introduced to. IMO, source control management should be as essential as ssh-ing into a remote server or running/compiling a program in the shell.