Responding to questions and requests from clients can be a full-time job. In fact, on some days I feel like all I’ve done is answer emails. Managers want to be able to offload some communication responsibilities to others on the team — but they need to know that the communication will not suffer from a lack of skill.

Whether you are answering questions from clients, presenting design concepts in a meeting or brainstorming with colleagues, communicating your ideas in a way that meets your company’s expectations is important. This skill will increase your value to the team and set you up to take on more responsibility.

Join The Community

The Web community is amazing, and you can participate in it in a number of ways. Depending on where you live, you might have access to meetups, networking events, conferences and other gatherings. We all have opportunities to share our experience, knowledge and passion for this industry.

Participating in these events will make you feel like a part of the Web community, help you make connections with peers and reflect well on your company. With limited time to attend such events, leaders appreciate when other team members take the initiative to get out in the community and represent the company.

Stay Positive

This tip might sound easy to follow, but keeping a positive attitude and demeanor is more challenging than it seems.

As a new team member, you will undoubtedly have times when you are unsure of what to work on next or of how you are performing. This uncertainly can be stressful, and stress can eventually lead to a negative attitude. Fight the urge to give into that negativity — stay positive.

Saying that everything is easier with a positive attitude might sound like an oversimplification, but it’s not. A positive attitude makes challenges easier to face, and it encourages others to come to your aid. After all, no one is excited to work with someone with a negative attitude.

The server is also the appropriate place to segment your content to avoid sending unnecessary data over the network and to improve performance. Lastly, you can update the server transformation engine and keep it consistent, instead of dealing with potentially different quirks and levels of XSLT support among browsers. (For example, while XSLT 1.0 is supported in most browsers, XSLT 2.0 is not supported in any, although Saxon-CE is one attempt to add it via JavaScript.)

Second, XSLT’s roots in functional programming make it inaccessible to the average Web developer. It isn’t simply a matter of learning a new syntax. The recursive processing model of XSLT requires a new way of thinking that is unfamiliar to developers of imperative languages, especially developers from a design background who do not have formal training in computer science.

Finally, a larger challenge is that this technique works only for Web pages that are in XHTML (a flavor of HTML that is XML-compliant), because XSLT can transform only XML, not HTML. According to W3Techs, 55% of websites are in XHTML. While this is a majority, it still leaves out a large number of websites. In fact, for this retrofitting example, I worked around this limitation by running Hacker News’ HTML code through an HTML to XHTML converter.

In the next section, we’ll explore how the Tritium transformation language was built to address these issues.

In the example above, we’ve used transformations in the browser to create a responsive experience for an existing website, but conceptually the two approaches overlap. Because responsive Web design is itself about changing presentation across multiple screen sizes, transformations can help in that process as well. Instead of simply pairing different CSS styles to the same fixed HTML as in typical responsive design, we can leverage transformations to change the HTML across devices.

As we explored earlier, the ability to manipulate the HTML (which is missing from CSS alone) not only creates flexibility but actually improves the separation between presentation and content. As a result, maintainability becomes easier because the content is more semantic and less tied to layout. In essence, think of this as moving the breakpoints in responsive design to the transformation layer.

At Moovweb, we’ve leveraged these insights about transformations to implement a technique called responsive delivery, which draws inspiration from responsive Web design, RESS and adaptive design. With responsive delivery, transformations are used to adapt an existing website to different touch points, such as smartphones and tablets.