A look at the custom tech behind the FT’s HTML5 mobile app

LINK: coding.smashingmagazine.com ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | May 28, 2013

At Smashing Magazine, FT Labs front-end developer Wilson Page details some of the back-end tech behind the Financial Times’ shift from native apps to HTML5 on mobile platforms.

Among the highlights: using flexbox to fill defined vertical space, a JavaScript library called FTEllipsis to manage text flowing in a confined area, icon fonts for retina-ready images, and more natural-feeling scrolling. Much of the new code is open-sourced on the FT Labs GitHub.

We didn’t just want to build a product that fulfilled its current requirements; we wanted to build a foundation that we could innovate on in the future. This meant building with a maintenance-first mentality, writing clean, well-commented code and, at the same time, ensuring that our code could accommodate the demands of an ever-changing feature set.

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