Open source web design (via bump) is an interesting source of free to use html layouts available in four categories for download. Seems like they just need a Pure CSS category. Maybe we can convince them with some submissions.
As a web site bound to discuss design. I am curious to know what people have been doing with SVG. I have been reading up on SVG at XML.com's Graphics Area. While reading through the articles I got the itch to apply some SVG to an XHTML doc I had on the computer. The question that I have right now, is how does one use an svg image for the background of a div? I think it would be awesome to have a gradient background that is does not consume bandwidth.
Does anyone out there have any comments. Also, who out there is currently using SVG to enrich their websites? It appears that the website SVGspider has gone all out and designed a 100 percent SVG site. Are there reasons why you have choosen to not use svg on your site? I will be watching to see what people have to say about this as I find it to be an interesting alternative to Macromedia's Flash technology.
I've been curious for a while about how and where people go to get their news (while) on the web or their computers. For instance, if I had five minutes to sit down at the computer to find out what was going on (in my case, world news, web-dev, and blog-dom), I'd open up MacReporter, a news aggregator Docklet for OS X and a browser to visit SlashDot, the great customizable news aggregator site Daily Rotation, and a select few of my personal favorite blogs (including this one, of course!).
If you had just a moment, where would you go, what would you use to get there, and what in particular would you look for?
Dreamweaver MX & Fireworks MX are out and about with downloadable trial versions.
In a recent XML.com article critical of Google's new SOAP API, Paul Prescod writes :
"Imagine the surprise at Google reviving the service, adding new features, documenting and promoting it. But Google also moved it to an inferior technical platform, SOAP RPC running over HTTP POST. On many mailing lists, weblogs and discussion groups the reaction was mixed. It felt like one step forward and two steps back."
In his piece, Prescod looks at the 3 methods (doGoogleSearch, doSpellingSuggestion, and doGetCachedPage) in Google's new SOAP API with an eye towards how they could be "HTTP-ified" and extolls the advantages of an HTTP API (foremost among them being the addressability of query result information via URIs) over an RPC-style interface.
I've noticed how nearly everyone who leave comments protect their email address with some variant of -nospam. I've been wondering whether we should recommend it on the commenting form, and how effective this method really is. I've also been meaning to read up a bit more on how to protect mailto: links on my sites.
Anyway, on the Webdesign-L list yesterday, Steve Champeon referred to his article on the subject. Mod_rewrite, anyone?
A seemingly little used, but enormously powerful IE (windows?) only feature, css zoom, has some remarkable potential. As much as I love Mozilla, it can't do this (yet).
I can imagine creepy whole page oscillations, live thumbnails, a multiframe browser (ala my craigs list experiment), and handy tools for previewing a page's layout at various resolutions.
I've hacked together a page for that last purpose... view your wbg's favorites or your favorite page at 5 different resolutions in one view.
Sometimes we get email notified of a comment made on a post old enough to be burried in the archives. I wanted to make sure the latest comment to this post was revealed to our readers, so I'm posting it anew.
Quote:
CSS insert bookmarklet generator sam–i–am’s bookmarklet dynamically inserts a link to a CSS file into the head of the current document, and the identical code can be used to add in any CSS file, including one that colors DIVs. To reduce load and allow for the most customization, the CSS file should be on your local machine... therefore I created a little server–side script to generate a bookmarklet (based off of sam–i–am’s “Show Tables” bookmarklet) to link to a specific client–side stylesheet. I’ve included CSS to show nested DIVs – the nesting is all in the CSS and not in the bookmarklet itself. (via Phalen of geke.net)
You may already know that I’m a wanna be mac head, but I strongly believe in scouring information from those who hold opposing viewpoints. These links are regarding the aqua interface in particular:
The Cranky User: Drowning in Aqua (via tremendo)
Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks (why the heck is a professional like TOG referencing a graphic right off of the apple servers? that's not cool! Apple seems to have wisely removed the graphic)
Reader responses to Tog's article (favorite quote: “I just read your article about why the Dock sucks. I agree with most of your points. And none of them matter.”)
Eloquently titled article Mac OSX Still Sucks
A set of suggestions based on initial release of aqua, and proof that apple takes customer feedback seriously.
The Interface Mafia’s Redesigning the OS X Dock
And there is so much more, feel free to add your favorites in comments. I should also probably note that the links above are not very timely, and I don’t yet have the pleasure of owning a mac with osx (one day i hope!).
A recent discussion here has resulted in a very handy script for replacing often used characters with their proper entity equivalents. The concept for the work started out over at Francois’s site, was discussed here, and then Dave created a home for his final product called Entity Replacement as newest entry in his gazingus.org website. Also it should be noted that the seed for these ideas came from the ALA article The Trouble with Em ’n En. Francois also has a downloadable textpad macro, Dreamweaver and Textpad optimization for the use of these entities, and a Numeric Entity browser support table.
Fav Icons are a nice way to introduce a bit of branding in normally generized areas of the browser UI. A well designed icon can be a lot easier to read than a 35 character URL.
That said, default server polling for favicon.ico has been turned off in Mozilla. To get your favicon to show up, you need to use a LINK tag, like so:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
And that's probably as it should be.
Francois has started creating a character entity filter that is intended to replace various common text entry entities with the entities that are supposed to be used (e.g. "double primes" with “double quotation marks”). We are going to put K10K’s new “matchmaker” service to the test by posting a request for javascript help. If you are, or know of someone who can hack it, please let us know.
I experimented with getting MozBlog to post to MoveableType, but it doesnt seem to support that yet (works with blogger), on the other hand w.bloggar is a windows desktop app that can be used to post to blogger or moveabletype, as well as b2 and nucleus. (via blahblahblog)
I have a question for any readers who speak languages other than english, or multiple languages: Do you read this site through a translation service? If so, which one? Do you have a prefered method of translation that you have seen on other websites? Anyone with thoughts on this should feel free to leave comments or contact me directly. I would like to provide the information from this site in other languages if it can be done so automatically, and if it would be seen as a worthwhile feature.
Alex asks:
“Are there any good Web content management solutions built by small companies or hand-rolled that have a good db connection (specifically oracle) and are stable?”
There are so many cmses out there that I'm not sure how to help out Alex, so perhaps other readers have some tips - please leave any suggestions or links as comments to this post.
Bob Sawyer has created a very handy must save list of CSS tags fully supported by Netscape 4.x/Win. (via glish)
Go Get It!
Hat Tip: Scott
The moveabletype website lists "posting via email" as one of the features currently under development. Milo is apparently having fun with the same feature in his own posting system. The pure simplicity and ease of this seems very promising, I wonder if/how any catagory support could be implemented into such a feature. I also wonder why more applications are not based on input recieved via email from the start - email applications are ready made guis that folks are comfortable with.
Brian Donovan is creating an interesting MySQL and PHP based site management tool called Thundercat. He's using it for his new blog/portfolio lophty (you may know him from Kumo), and it looks to have some neat features, such as, a redirect/http get request to monitor link rot and actually have the chance to do something about it for once, and also auto-publishing of rss feeds by category. Eventually it will be released here under gpl.
Yesterday, on April 16th at 10:40 AM ZDNet released a story noting that CompuServe 7.0 is being shipped with a Netscape browser.
Could this be the start of the browser wars, again?
A quote from the article: "The question is, are they (using Netscape) mostly for negotiating purposes or are they really going to roll it out?" asked David Smith, an analyst for research firm Gartner.
Macromedia is having a contest to promote the introduction of an XML news feed to their Designer and Developer Center. The site that does the best job of integrating this news feed wins a digital camera or MP3 Player.
(Or, the IE Margin Fix.) Now here's an interesting concept. Code standards-compliant CSS without hacks or workarounds, and include one 5k .js to fix any browser implementation bugs.
Via CSS-discuss Here's the thread(members only).
It might be handy to remember how to hide stuff from Opera one day. (via glish) We also learn from this that John does not wish his son to be viewable via Opera.
Overachiever Evan Lenz talks about What's New in XSLT 2.0 over at XML.com. Those of you suffering from insomnia might also be interested in reading the latest working draft from the W3C.
Ordinary-life.net has published an interview with John Weir of IHT and smokinggun.com fame. (via lucdesk)
Things were not broken here per say, but I just Fixed This Site With the Right DOCTYPE thanks to Zeldman and A List Apart.
While reading Content Wire Preview's article on Open Source Content Management Surge I found a link to a very intriguing HTML editor called Xopus. It has been developed by Q42.
This is a interesting concept that could do a lot for helping non-technical people maintain their site. I know this is exactly what my Mom would want. "Why can't I just type on my web page?", "Can I send it an email to change my address?", but check it out and let me know what you think.
glish.com is sporting some new CSS and a nifty little text resizing widget.
Have you ever been to the International Herold Tribune? It is a great news site, and it also has a very innovative layout widget. While browsing one of the articles you will notice that the story's layout can be modified in a couple of different ways. One, is to increase or decrease the font size of the text -- not a super new idea -- the other, allows the reader to select a one or three column layout! The layout even changes without reloading the page!
This great feature was developed by John Wier, of Smoking Gun. John, has released a beta version that has an image column at his site under SG Layout.
I am not sure if there are any obvious design no-nos on this, so any thoughts would be welcomed.
The following post is practically swiped right from Zeldman's site:
Tantek Çelik has released another Favelet, this one called “Multivalidator”. The tool was written to work with ie5 mac, but seems to not be very happy with win2k ie6 when clicked from the links bar, it must be close since it works via in-page link on the same configuration. The concept is a very handy one, it validates HTML, CSS and HREFs for a given page at once via a framed results page. Perhaps someone at w3.org will get excited and provide multiple validation service?
I'm thinking that the time has come to upgrade how things are done here. Currently the use of moveabletype for our weblog is a tad literal, we aren't using the tool for anything other than the actual posts and archive. Sites such as boxesandarrows have really put the moveabletype system to good use. It seems that the aspects of this site which are not integrated into moveabletype are a bit stale, and in some ways silly. Take the resource list on our homepage, that's a static php included list of a handful of sites I thought would be nice to have easy access to; all fine and good, but it could be so much more, as a series of mini-posts in a resource blog with categories. This would be easy to set up in moveabletype, and given help from our authors, the content would benefit tremendously. Perhaps if feature articles were easy for any of the authors to write and post within moveable type, we might have an article a bit fresher than eight months old? And finally, I know it's a bit nutzo to go changing the design every few months, but I'm craving two columns or less, a font treatment that is sure to displease some of the people some of the time, and much like a sugar craving - more pixels (yes I'm giving into the tremendous inertia which is this sites' domain name). This post has been brought to you by daylight savings and four shots of espresso.
“The XML object is impressive and fun, but it lacks two of the most needed methods for traversing an XML document, namely getElementById() and getElementsByTagName()”
scottandrew posted downloadable methods to allow this functionality via simple include in Flash MX.
Based on Todd's note about it, I had some fun and submitted some photos of my animals to orcagirl.com. Check out the The Animals and their Designers.
This may not be news to anyone but me, but CTRL and the scrollwheel resizes the type in Explorer on Win2k. Interesting... not really.
Here is a quick Illustrator tip I have been meaning to post. When you want to use a tint of a certain color in Illustrator, hold down the control key and pull on one of the channel sliders in the color palette. Depending on the direction you pull, the color will lock but will get lighter or darker.
Adaptive Path is heading to Chicago (May), Atlanta (June), Washington DC (August), Dallas (September), and San Francisco (October) for a 2002 tour. Anyone near these cities is lucky enough to attend 3 days of hands on training with the following gurus: Peter Merholz, Jeffery Veen, Lane Becker. Plus there's a local guru stopping by each of the cities. It's not free, but there are several discounts available, and it looks to be well worth a one time investment.
Karen Ingram faces Kevin Cornell. Commentary by Rosecrans Baldwin.
Live today at http://www.coudal.com
3pm Chicago. 4pm NYC. 10pm London. 7am (Sat) Sydney.
A while back I made a couple of tiny icons and shared them here, taking a peek at our referrers, I found a much nicer and more complete set of icons from Michael Angeles.
Francois has been very productive, and for our great benifit, he's cataloging Browser support for extended characters via a comprehensive table listing (200K). Now you can predict with confidence how a particular entity will render on various browsers, and make informed decisions based on your audience, browser stats, site content, and other contextual factors. The especially nice thing about this chart is the ability to cross reference character entity, numeric entity, and a gif rendering. In a coup for web graphics, the gif seems to be correct every time [grin].
Wondering how flexible MoveableType is? Check out what Todd has accomplished for his Library section. He's using MoveableType's built in categories to shuffle a slew of book reviews into a fantastic tiered interface (latest, recent, older). It's a prime showcase of what can be done with MoveableType, or of how crazy Todd is (or perhaps both).
You're probably not wondering about the lack of categories on this site. Well, I'll tell you about it any ways: this site's content is somewhat focused and so there aren't a few major posting “types” that I could think of e.g. personal/coding/music. There are certainly topics we post about here, but most of them crossover so much that pigeon holing a particular post into one category becomes tricky, e.g. a post that covers the topics “php, design, and css” shouldn't be put in just one of those categories. Perhaps one day a logical method for using categories here will make sense, till then the sorting choices are limited to date, author, and simple keyword searching, which can all be conducted via the weblog archive page.
The fine people at The OPAL Group have updated their SelectORacle to support CSS3 selectors. The example input provides a glimpse at the XPath-like functionality we can expect in the future, provided the browser makers get it right.
Liorean has upgraded his “View StyleSheet Sources” bookmarklet
with the following improvements:
Macromedia has an Accessibility for Flash MX section with guidelines, a sample application (which ironically has tiny unresizable text), and even a couple of tables explaining how Flash MX meets 508 guidelines point by point. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm quite hyped about the product, but am also a little discouraged to see that the ALT text criteria can only be met by adding a layer underneath an existing flash piece and giving the layer alt or londesc... seems like some hacks may still be needed. Then again, I'm probably just jealous since I havent grabbed a copy for myself yet.
Evan Williams has posted a link to a hotel reservation application interface that was developed in Macromedia's Flash MX. This got me thinking: how is Flash MX better and/or different from Flash 5 and a heaping helping of ActionScript, and what can it do that previous versions have been unable to? Are there any Flash heads in the house who have used both products that can elaborate on this for us? I'd love to hear your comments.
Francois has compiled all the XHTML modifications for Dreamweaver
into one handy download, and even more relevent to my preferences and on the same page, he's created a textpad clip library with all the HTML entities for en, em, single quote, double quote, etc. With the clip library, one can now simply double click “WRAP double quotes” and any selected text will get the left quote entity and right quote entity surrounding whatever was selected.
While we're on the topic, a tutorial about Creating Aqua Images in Photoshop via evanrose's suggestion. Did you know that evan has a mac osx weblog as well? Be helpful and post your favorite pshop tutorials in comments if ya like.
Graphic Goo is a new online newsletter focusing on Web graphic design. It has a Tutorial Depot with step-by-step instructions to create graphics with Photoshop 5.0. Thanks to Kristine for the information.