Hysteresis + path prediction = slick UX.

Drop-down menus and submenus are a necessary evil of graphical user interfaces. For a site like Amazon, which forces the customer to manipulate an endless number of Matryoshka-doll-like text labels, it’s absolutely crucial to make this hierarchical navigation as easy and fluid as possible. How can you screw up a simple submenu? Oh, trust me, there are ways. If you’ve ever encountered what engineer Ben Kamens calls the “whack-a-mole” menu, you’ll know what I mean. Here’s his example:

I'm speaking at a few things coming up:

• TXJS - April 15, 2013 - Austin, Texas
• ConvergeSE - April 25-27, 2013 - Columbia, South Carolina
• Front End Design Conference - June 21-22, 2013 - St. Petersburg, Florida

And before that I'll be at LessConf just hanging out.

You may have noticed I stopped cross-posting new episodes of ShopTalk over here. Hopefully nobody thought it was dead because it's going as strong as ever with lots of great episodes lately. I just thought it might have been annoying if you subscribe to both. If you don't — follow @ShopTalkShow on Twitter and/or subscribe in iTunes and you're all set.

The U.S. post office changed their shipping rates this year. So we updated The Store's shipping prices. We charge exactly what it costs us to ship. To the U.S. = $4.90 — Canada is $5.75 — the rest of the world is $11.90.

That goes for the CSS-Tricks store, the CodePen store, and the ShopTalk store.

I'm about half-way through a new series on The Lodge about designing an artist's website from scratch, mobile first, using WordPress as a customized CMS. I'm going to do my dangdest to get it done in March.

Also: the Kickstarter six month subscriptions have expired. I really should have sent out reminders that was coming up, but I didn't. If that was sudden and surprising for you and need a short extension to finish up watching/downloading, please send a note. You can also re-subscribe anytime by logging in and going to the signup page.

I recently attended the second day of W3Conf, and if you didn't notice the flood of blog posts, I liveblogged it. It was a pretty fun way to attend a conference because I had to pay hyper-attention and thus got a lot more out of it than I might have otherwise. Exhausting, though.

We got quite a bit of attention lately for human-readable-izing our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on CodePen. It's not a totally original idea. I first saw it on 500px. Editorally has a nice one too without the split.

The Almanac has been a long-time not-quite-finished project around here. Most of the pages are done, but there are plenty that are not. I've been plugging away at it still and Estelle Weyl has helped me with some. An offer: if you have any interest in writing up any of the missing pages, get in touch. I'll pay you on a per-page basis to help.

The CSS-Tricks feed is sponsored by Wufoo, the best online form builder there is. I use it on every project I've done as long as I've been a web worker. Quickly build any type of form you need, from the humble contact form to the epic multi-page, logic-riddled, mobile-friendly, custom-designed, spam-protected, payment-taking super form. Try Wufoo for free today!

CSS-Tricks Chronicle XI is a post from CSS-Tricks

Google released the Wikilinks Corpus, a collection of 40M disambiguated mentions from 10M web pages to 3M Wikipedia pages. This data can be used to train systems that do entity linking and cross-document co-reference, problems that Google researchers attacked with an earlier version of this data (see Large-Scale Cross-Document Coreference Using Distributed Inference and Hierarchical Models).

You can download the data as ten 175MB files from and some addional tools from UMASS.

This is yet another example of the important role that Wikipedia continues to play in building a common, machine useable semantic substrate for human conceptualizations.